Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

The absence of God becomes the silence between two notes, the empty space that gave resonance to the music

I’m slightly haunted by this line from Guy Stagg’s The World Within (pg 245) describing Simone Weil’s account of the “supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others” which characterises human affliction. It’s in our suffering, the distance it embodies between our finitude and God’s plenitude, that we encounter the reality of the absence. We encounter what is through what is not, with what’s missing providing a deeper meaning to what is:

This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration. When human music in its greatest purity pierces our soul, this is what we hear through it. When we have learned to hear the silence, this is what we grasp more distinctly through it.

It immediately made me think of the closing lines of Wallace Stephen’s poem The Snowman: 

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

A couple of months ago I was walking through a forest in the snow, off the path in an area I rarely encounter people even in the summer. In such circumstances “the nothing that is” feels palpable. It’s not an absence of people but a presence of solitude, a positive state in which something fundamentally shifts in your mode of being. In a sense you’re being-with the nothing that is in a manner which almost feels companiable. Is this a secularised version of what Weil describes? Or is it an individualised response which shuts down the possibility of something deeper?

Coming to this after a few years of Lacan I immediately thought void. Indeed I then discovered Weil’s papers were edited into a book with the title Love in the Void: Where God Finds us. From that perspective Weil’s sensitivity to the absence feels more like an escape from absence. In the incompleteness of the world, we dimly sense the presence of something which is not incomplete. If we encounter the shards with sufficient intensity, we intuit there are shards of what was or could be some kind of totality. There’s something which strikes me as almost aspirational about this, a sense that through love and devotion we might move beyond the fractures.

I respect it. Indeed some small part of me envies it. I wish I could respond in that way. But I also think I can see intellectually the psychodynamics of it. The challenge becomes then how to recognise it as a psychic process without explaining it away. That’s not a solid foundation upon which to challenge the experience. The better foundation would be to suggest what such a response misses on a spiritual level. For example does this metaphysical treatment of suffering remove the space in which we might seek to repair the world? If it’s a route to the divine rather than an affront to it then it has implications for what we do here on earth, even if Weil was clearly not a political quietist. Does it undermine our spiritual (and aesthetic) capacity to simply be-with the void in the way Stephens hints at? Does it erode our sensitivity to the challenges which others face in moving through their affliction and our inclination to help them with this?

My instinct is that we need to be able to look the brokenness of the world in the face. To sit with the fact that it isn’t more than it is. To accept that we can’t do but continually seek to expand the boundaries of what we can. I’m inclined to say there’s a dark beauty in the chaotic incompleteness of the world but I’m now substituting an aesthetic response for the metaphysical one I’m criticising in Weil. Is there some possibility to just sit with the incompleteness as the grounds of action, without seeking to make it more than it is? The aspect of this I feel clearest about is that this incompleteness is the engine of change: the gap between what is and what could be in, in our selves and others, is what makes it possible to change. indeed makes it necessary. So I’m sceptical of attempts to evade that gap spiritually, metaphysically or aesthetically.

The incompleteness is not a problem to be solved. It’s the condition for solving problems. Or at least trying to. In our personal lives, in our communities, in the wider world. We need to grapple with that incompleteness but we need to be deeply careful about how we do it. We can’t tackle it head on but rather through the engagements with the world which emerge from our relations of care. This is where the practical stoic ethic which I guess I still fundamentally subscribe to (e.g. “what’s the most good I can do in this situation I did not choose?”) meets something deeper and slightly darker. There’s something beautiful but utterly fragile about our reparative ambitions towards the world. The impulse to respond to something destructive by trying to overcome it. To see deterioration and to try and work together to make it better. It works through the brokenness and it brings us together in the process. Through fidelity to our moral ambition we obliquely struggle with what Weil characterises in the metaphysical terms I’m trying to reject.

Which immediately makes me think of the closing lines to a song I’ve loved since I was 16 years old:

Hope, perseverance, a vision (some doubt).
Green ink, a 26 oz., a bad case of big-mouth.
A sum of our parts and I’ve never laughed harder.
A song in our hearts and I’ve never laughed harder.
It don’t really matter ’cause nothing’s ever felt as right as this.
(by the way, I stole this riff)

I’m realising this is a misreading of Weil’s position. Indeed what she says here is much closer to what I was trying to outline in response to my misreading:

We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality. The belief in the utility of sin: etiam peccata. The belief in the providential ordering of events – in short the consolations which are ordinarily sought in religion.

I might go back and read Gravity and Grace properly having occasionally flicked through it for years. It seems clear to me there is a metaphysics of suffering in Weil’s worldview but not one I realise that provides consolation.

, , , , , ,
, ,