If humans survive another hundred years, another thousand years, we will survive in ways very different from whatever we are used to now. Our mental habits and our common ways of understanding them will be very different. I’m convinced that technologies, and media as special forms of technologies, play a major role in our adaptations to the environment. Our descendants will use fragments of the technologies and media that came before them, but we can’t predict how this will look. I do think the twentieth century will be an important reference point; it’s the heady, heavy transition period from the regime of literacy, with all its virtues and vices, into something else, something newer and older. ‘Postliteracy’ is as adequate a placeholder name as any other for the brave new world.
What’s the point of writing, then, in an environment where writing is Content, easy filler, meant to align with an algorithmically sanctioned grouping? Think about this: how often do you click on a link to an essay and know before you’ve really started reading it what the gist of the argument will be, and the “voice” with which it will be crafted? Like magnetized iron filings, the inevitable task of each piece of Content in the post-literacy age is to drift into its place in a certain formation. Think of it as the mass ornament 2.0.
The “point” of writing, if it stands out at all, is often to reinforce these formations and to do so, I think, through the appeal of novelty and status. These are key values of our horrifying and disordered times. Why, then, do any people continue to write in ways that do not seek novelty and status first? I think it is in hope of alternatives to what we have. I also think it is in anticipation of a post-novelty future, in which we’ll have to keep salvaging and repurposing things, and, more to the point, we’ll have to learn to make do with the old stuff that’s already available. As for the future of status, well, this will never go away, but it might be scaled back down to some more human dimensions. Real-time global celebrity (or infamy) is unusual in the broad history of humanity.
Myself, I write partly to understand myself and to make sense of my experience, and partly to connect with other people, now or in the future, who might be able to latch on to some of that experience, because it may be meaningful for one or two or ten people, regardless of whether it “does numbers.” I appreciate when readers look at anything I write, and I really appreciate if it’s ever useful or generative to thinking and conversation, but I grow less interested over time with demanding a spotlight, or receiving little dopamine hits from a “like” and “share.” I suppose I am always learning to write for those who are there to read it, who might take something from whatever they find in it. This includes the dimensions of myself still hidden. Writing—textuality—is constitutive of selfhood as I know it, and its ecological functions are in radical transformation in the world as I know it.
From an essay in Sven Birkerts’ Changing the Subject:
“In front of a screen, I experience myself as dissolved, distributed, because this is the way that my mind, my psyche, reacts to the technology, the information space. I can’t control it. But when I hear people who claim to have always been readers complain how they now find it ever harder to stay with a book—these confessions constitute a whole subgenre of dinner party conversation—I take it as evidence. Exposure to the intransitive structure of cyberspace does begin to affect our responses, our cognition, when we are not online. We are being neurally modified. This modification is not what I want for myself. For whatever reason, I put the highest subjective value on attention to focus, on the ability to prolong a thought, to hold a perception until its resonances come clear to me. I prize a sense of inhabiting my self-defined boundaries as a distinct “I.” I want nothing more than to seize the uniqueness and consequentiality of my experience. And yes, I fear that the steady centrifugal pull of the Internet blurs me, makes this subjectivity harder to achieve.”
In my anecdotal experience, it is true that many people experience their relation to text this way. Once avid readers, they find it harder to stay engaged with anything of real length or semantic complexity. This has been true for me, too, and only through some practice have I been able to recover some of that endurance—in this way the brain really does seem to work like a muscle, as they say.
The inaugural entry in Katherine Boyle’s Substack, The Rambler, from last December, has these resonant lines:
Even as a child, the act of writing felt embarrassing and shameful; something that I should hide from the outside world or stop doing altogether. That a child can intuit the artist’s curse so early in life is an indication that it’s a cultural condition, passed down by generations that ostracized poets and philosophers who could have had more productive jobs as salesmen.
I have a lot of similar feelings. From childhood, creative and intellectual endeavors, which felt and continue to feel absolutely necessary to my well-being, also have felt shameful—the kind of thing you don’t readily let other people see you making or consuming. I’ve always envied the ability some people have to write in front of anyone, or to share drafts or drawings or music freely, without embarrassment. The voice in my head, always, tells me that what I’m doing is not worth doing, it’s frivolous even if it feels essential, and it’s of low quality anyway.
Writing can feel productive and unproductive at the same time. I am trying to think about what exactly one is producing or failing to produce, when one writes different types of things, in different circumstances.
I was perusing some personal recollections about the poet Charles Olson recently, and this parenthetical note struck me:
“Earlier that year I’d had my first ride in [the Chevy wagon] as Charles drove me and others down Main. The back of the wagon was full of manuscripts, and when we opened the door pages of the Maximus went swirling into the street. I was horrified, but Charles, smoking and talking and laughing, couldn’t have cared less. I thought of those legendary Chinese poets who scattered poems on streams.”
Olson doesn’t care because there’s more where that came from; it’s not scarce. When writing is Content, it too is not scarce—not really. These approaches to words-on-the-page embrace impermanence and they contrast with the archival and juridical aspects of writing: words-written-in-stone, a record that is meant to be referred to, and more or less permanent. But I think that Olson’s nonchalance about instances of writing contrasts also with the cheapness of postliterate Content writing, because Olson was still coming from a verbal framework, with a huge array of important textual references, whereas the framework of Content is a visual and aural one first, textual second.
You don’t lament a little spilled water when you live next to a creek, and you don’t lament a little spilled water when you have a faucet. But if you live next to a creek, and especially if that’s a primary water source, that running water is a significant part of the experience of your surroundings. If you live in a place where water comes only from faucets, as I imagine is true for anyone reading this, then water is a necessary part of your life but probably not something you think about frequently. It aids you in doing what you really want to do. Text, I suspect, works in much the same way in a postliterate environment. (Olson, though, “lived next to a creek.”)
I’d like to step from the faucet to the creek as much as I am able. This appears to be a step backwards, judged from the perspective of relevance, but also a step to a better vantage point—I think. I hope.
Nadia Eghbal’s note on ‘being basic as a virtue’ is really interesting. Part of the gist:
“…if producing ideas becomes a symbol of work (having to think about stuff all day), rather than leisure (freedom to think about stuff all day), I wonder whether basic behavior will start to become covetable. Instead of signaling how much we’re thinking, maybe we’ll start to signal how much we’re not thinking. Rather than a private coping mechanism or a way to unwind, basic behavior would become a way to display total unawareness of those who toil in the idea mines all day; a blissful unfamiliarity with the social signal factory.”
I likened Content writing to magnetized iron filings and suggested that pieces really exist to find their place in a larger formation, almost like a new expression of Kracauer’s idea of mass ornament. (Maybe what we mockingly call ‘the Discourse’ is a synonym. Maybe also Debord’s idea of the spectacle.) Eghbal’s insight makes me wonder if the postliterate intellectual’s function is to tend to the operation of that ornament. That is, the social function of the intellectual is to think, constantly, about the significance of the ornament—the Discourse—and their own place in it, and others’ places in it, and to make sure it keeps churning in a way that reproduces the same horrible structures. One doesn’t attend to the text as much as the meta-text, because the meta-text is where the real action appears to be.
The intellectual is more aware of the mass ornament than the normie (or the person who is “basic,” which Eghbal shrewdly hypothesizes might become a new status symbol), but not aware of it in a way that makes them turn away, rejecting the ornament altogether. Functionally speaking, today, the intellectual is part of the clergy in the religion of the ornament.
But—there are monks, hermits, and heretics. Remember, attendance is optional.
Online addiction to "the Discourse" has become it's own meta-text to be memed and passed over: "touch grass, terminally online, take the grill-pill, return to monke (invoking Ted and the primitivists)." It's impulsive to say these things before delving into a trending topic. Even alt-right appeals to "trad life" try to replace The Ornament - or, more accurately, The Spectacle - with the old way of living, pre-internet. Like Fischer's Capitalist-Realism, there is no alternative to online-Realism, unless you are literally a monk, hermit, or heretic.
It's a massive victory if I don't look at Reddit or Twitter for a day. Opening a book or going somewhere my built-GPS can't predict or just doing nothing - that's freedom, and it feels like freedom.
I dunno, I still feel that it's possible to tame the Internet. That does involve a lot of refusal, muting, etc. And there's still the issue of whether a helpful Internet is worth the time that it takes out of one's novel-reading budget...