Waldemar Fink, Evening Atmosphere, 1912
I’ve moved into my dream home, long blonde hairs stuck to the walls, grease splattered behind the stove, shit-encrusted plunger beside the commode. Views in every direction: dumpsters, cars, chainlink fencing, other people’s windows. Set to the country ambiance of revving diesel engines, barking dogs, cacophonous wind chimes. All this for the low, low price of my entire salary.
But this is not a daytime house. At night, snow falling, flames dancing in the propane stove, eating a tangerine in the little vaulted loft, cats kneading their sheepskin—it’s a sanctuary.
Nevertheless, I’ve fallen into all the old traps. I crawl out of consumerism and tumble into “pernicious New Age nonsense,” hoist myself out of technologies of self-development and crash into dissociative addiction. “We die in our own arms!” my friend intones, his ritual summation of this society’s prisoner’s dilemma of self-reliance. Though I see no way out, I live for a way out—even if it means being lobotomized, eviscerated by increasingly surreal hardships.
Jonathan Crary writes, “the form that innovation takes within capitalism is as the continual simulation of the new, while existing relations of power and control remain effectively the same.” I read and write and work and strive, ponder and converse—even scream and cry—and ineluctably return to trading my time for a few dollars and relinquishing those dollars to a landlord.
It feels like potentially bad magic to commit to writing any of the ways in which I like my job. But here’s one: I prefer the challenge of balancing a heavy stack of plates to the challenge of pretending to be deferential. Here’s another: I prefer steam, grease, slopwater, and the carnival of kitchen jokes and affairs to sitting frozen before a screen. This is how it caught my attention that one of my favorite authors, Byung-Chul Han, had written a book called, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld.
“The terrestrial order, the order of the earth, consists of things that take on a permanent form and provide a stable environment for dwelling.…We are today experiencing the transition from the age of things to the age of non-things. Information, rather than things, determines the lifeworld. We no longer dwell on the earth and under the sky but on Google Earth and in the Cloud.”
I once started a blog called Thingliness, but never got around to writing it, and have had a much-used personal expression my whole adult life, “the menace of everyday objects.” For years I thought the phrase came from Kafka, but extensive searching with no results seems to indicate I attributed it to Kafka after a dream—it arose from my own subconscious. Never before this book have I read an account of objects that fully elucidates their power to ground and resist us, or an explanation of how digital technologies strip the world and culture of the friction, immanence, and devotional nature of things. Of course those of us who miss maps, records, letters, etc.—and the mysterious world that required a map for navigating, the hidden lives of others only divulged through the intimacy of letters—feel this desacralization, though we minimize our mourning as nostalgic or unrealistic. After all, the digital world is so much more convenient.
“The world consists of things as objects. The word ‘object’ is derived from the Latin verb obicere, which means ‘set against,’ ‘throw against’ or ‘oppose.’ The negativity of resistance is inherent in it. An object is something that turns against me, that opposes and resists me. Digital objects lack the negativity of obicere. I do not experience them as resistance. The smartphone is smart because it deprives reality of its character as resistant. Even the smooth surface of the smartphone conveys the sense of a lack of resistance. On its smooth touchscreen, everything seems tame [handzahm] and obliging.…Digital media may be effective in overcoming the resistance of space and time, but it is precisely the negativity of resistance that constitutes experience. The smart environment of digital non-resistance impoverishes world and experience.”
Perhaps Professor Han hasn’t had the trouble with passwords, servers, loading, and rendering that I’ve had. My digital entities put up a pretty good fight. In any case, I spent years making 16mm films only to arrive at graduate school and find the editing equipment moved to the basement. The film splicers and viewers had been replaced by computers. I made one film after that, then left film school entirely. Even though this was a defining moment in my life, I never talk about it or even think about it because I felt my reaction was exaggerated and possibly unrelated. It wasn’t. Film is light and video is math; the feeling-tone of one doesn’t replace the feeling-tone of the other. You wouldn’t call a rug woven by a painter a painting even if it had painterly qualities.
“Artificial intelligence learns from the past.…Intelligence means choosing between (inter-legere). All it does is make a choice between options that are given in advance, ultimately between ‘one’ and ‘zero.’ Genuine thinking brings forth a new world. It is on the way towards the altogether other, towards somewhere else.…Machine intelligence does not advance to this darker depth of a riddle. Information and data have no depth. Human thinking is more than computing and problem solving. It brightens and clears the world. It brings forth an altogether other world. The main danger that arises from machine intelligence is that human thinking will adapt to it and itself become mechanical.”
Besides the movement and interface with material objects, there’s another fundamental difference between my old office job and new scullery job. We kitchen wenches, despite the repetitive nature of the work, are never mechanical. At times we care about speed, but never efficiency. Efficiency would deprive us of gossip, singing, practical jokes, historical anecdotes, conducting with tongs, deriding our superiors, bawdy remarks, tickling.
“According to Deleuze, philosophy begins with a faire l’idiot—with ‘making oneself an idiot.’ Thinking is characterized not by intelligence but by idiocy. Every philosopher who creates a new idiom, a new thinking, a new language, is an idiot. The philosopher bids farewell to all that went before...artificial intelligence cannot think because it is incapable of faire l’idiot. It is too intelligent for becoming an idiot.”
This is not a dream home, it’s an earth home—shabby, flawed, filled with a jumble of mismatched objects. I’m sitting beside a windowsill with a corner chewed off like the witch’s gingerbread house. I myself am an idiot, bumbling into one doomed adventure after another. And now I’m off to wrangle sense amongst the maleficent objects of the darkest, coldest, meanest room of the house. The next chapter of Non-things is so good it could destroy our minds, so I’ll save it for next week.
I try to remember as I long for this house to order itself, to be smooth, tidy, sterile and perfect, that God and the devil are in the details, and life is more than functioning: it’s conflict, narrative, theater, tomfoolery, divinity.
“The decorative and the ornamental are characteristic of things. They are life’s way of telling us that life is about more than mere functioning. In the baroque age, the ornamental was theatrum dei, the theatre of the gods. If we submit life fully to functionality and information, we drive the divine out of life.”
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