Aporia

I am a terrible descriptive writer in part because I am not perceptive about the world visually; in addition to being self-absorbed and inattentive, I have never acquired several important vocabularies which help one take note of what one sees. Like many men, I suppose, I’ve neglected color, and still round all blues to blue, from Cornflower to Pantone 292. I have no idea what the plants I see are, how large they’ll grow to be, whether they flower, how often flowers flower, what grasses are capable of, how many generations of men a given tree has endured.

I cannot describe a room, cannot express the spatial relation between an untidy sofa and a chair opposite it on which a man sits, reading a novel he expects relatively little of: a good story, a very mild hint of having seen into a cross-section of life which reveals, in its cutaway clarity, the mechanisms at work in us, in our loves, our capitulations. I cannot describe his pants —I know little about materials or textures, and might write the lovely word houndstooth, and think of my dogs’ teeth and how they might be made into fabric, and I might get lost thinking about the dead men in old offices sorting out textile matters, issues of standards and weights and threads and transportation…

…before I realize that, first, it is not houndstooth at all but corduroy, a material so common that my error is appalling despite being trivial, and second, that houndstooth was originally and perhaps remains typically a pattern made from wools, not cotton, so that Degas’ A Cotton Office in New Orleans was quite the wrong image to have come to mind.

But now I am lost: the particulars of a pair of pants are beyond my creative capacity because they are beyond my perceptive capacity: when I meet you, I am so worried about whether you can tell that I am a fraud that I never notice your pants at all! I remember my awkward turns of phrase, the awful habit I have of making every sentence part of a sitcom duet, but not the color of your eyes. It’s hideous to know that this is how it is for everyone (but it is to this fact that my attention is drawn, rather than to the details from whose configuration this fact is made evident). My memories are of the wrong things, the wrong details; I blame culture and technology for my mind, but I know I am exactly as I’ve chosen to be; as Simone Weil said:

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly.’

I say this to myself twenty times every day; does this mean that I am suffering? I don’t feel that I am; I feel that my suffering stopped long ago, and now I merely grapple with the form of the psyche it sculpted, the effect that form has on what I see, record, recall. And it is better to admit that ‘I’m paying attention to the wrong things’ than to claim that ‘the world has grown meaningless’ or that ‘my phone keeps me from noticing sunsets.’ It is not my phone and it is not Facebook that kept me from the sunset yesterday. It was the everydayness of life that Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling claims is what keeps us from “the search.” But this search seems strange to undertake when there is nowhere undiscovered, no meaning not mediated, no knowledge not within a larger system of knowledge, no boundary past which we do not spill in great crowds, no text immune to annotation, no event which is not subsumed by its live-posted trails of reactions in the cultural agar.

And this idea seems more important and interesting to me than the construction of a character’s pants or even the details of how s/he sees light, hears city sounds, flees love, which is why I cannot surpass the dull didacticism of those who write to express ideas. I love ideas because I fantasize about a skeleton key enlightenment, an idea whose profundity and breadth will transform all that is flat and dead in my life, recast my weaknesses and failures as strengths and victories. I want to be redeemed simply by reading a sentence.

I love such ideas like people love money: in spite of myself, automatically, distractedly. I know that they’re a kind of intoxication; I know that they’re not reality, not the components of vital human experience, not the texture of life or the phenomenology of mind or the beating of the heart; they are competitive meta-maneuvers, dogs circling one another, mechanisms for partializing reality and believing that you stand above it.

We should of course “let facts create” us, and our writing, too, but to be open to my self or my work becoming any happenstance creation requires more courage than I have. I am attached to my self, which I am also eager to transfigure or escape. I think and write with what I imagine is a self-enhancing end in mind too often, but there is no end to inquiries and responses, to the invented universe of ideas: they continue in all directions, along all axes of scale. They subordinate entire civilizations; they concern infinitesimal quanta; they zoom between quarks and quasars; they are quaint and they are contrarian. One can reach the end of a description and think: “Just so.” But an idea demands to be applied ever more-broadly, across vectors of human activity. Ideas are like machines: submit your data to them, receive binary signals in response, operate your device on unprocessed reality and receive nifty schema, and on and on and on.

As typical humans, we share many moral disgraces; we are not saints, but those who have been -that is, those whom we consider qualitatively superior to us in moral reasoning and instantiated moral heroism- do not share one of our more universal, more pathetic failures as creatures of reason: our imbecilic concern for physical beauty.

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows that it is not.

Note that Simone Weil doesn’t say that an ugly woman believes that it is not; she knows, and she is right: we are not our appearances, not at all. We are all aware that whatever physical beauty is, it’s not reflective of internal beauty, persistent beauty, the beauty we putatively seek when we long for another.

(In this sense, the ugly have an advantage: they don’t believe the self is bounded by beauty, while the beautiful often do; the same principle applies to all defects, and is the great leveling countermeasure to fundamental human inequalities).

Physical beauty as we understand it is

• defined nearly entirely by corporations, advertising, the lowest sorts of art, pornography, commerce, and the occasional vestigial evolutionary priority;
• ludicrously ephemeral, certain to decay with age in nearly every case, incompatible with all sorts of natural biological phenomena and inevitably to vanish as we enter senescence;
• outrageously hostile to the typical shapes, sizes, features, and natural configuration of almost every body in the world.

So: what we call physical beauty is arbitrarily defined for us, inherited by us from cultural sources who are neither aesthetically nor morally concerned with beauty as such but mainly with sales, and it tends to be fundamentally irrational in its demands, effects, and uses. 

Even beyond the obvious effects of this stupidity -the body dysmorphia, the self-loathing, the unhealthy beautifying practices, nightmares of high school- is the simple fact that nearly all of us cannot love someone as a partner unless they conform to these standards we didn’t devise and do not respect.

We all value physical beauty; we all long for it, seek it, exclude would-be lovers who lack it -no matter their tenderness, goodness, kindness, humor, generosity!- attempt to exhibit it at great cost. This insane stupidity is shameful; it is a moral lapse; it leads us idiotically astray as we chase what vanishes, what is unimportant, and turn from what ought to be the proper concern of love.

To return to Weil’s beautiful formulation, we might say: not only is the beautiful woman fooled into thinking her appearance is herself, but so are we. Even though we know from history that physical beauty is nothing innate, is as faddish as fashions, we concern ourselves with it precisely as some do with money or social pedigree. And let us be honest: to allot love based in any way on attractiveness is not in any way different from allotting it based on wealth, standing, or fame. We are all gold-diggers.

But if it is not physical beauty we should love -because the book is not its cover, because it is not predictive of anything that matters in a relationship, because it will degrade and, if it was important to our love, so will the love itself- what should we love?

We tend to contrast the superficiality and arbitrarity of appearance with the qualities of the self, as we understand them: moral decency, kindness, humor, dynamism, etc. But, as Tragos noted, it is not difficult to extend the argument against valuing beauty to those qualities as well: to such an extent, all are the happenstance of genetics and environment, even if some are presumably less necessarily transient than beauty. For this, Weil has an answer which is harder to immediately understand:

What is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him… Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin.

What do we love when we love another? What should we love, or is “should” an absurd word to use in this context? Is it as ludicrous to cherish intelligence as beauty? If we value what seems to matter most for a relationship’s longevity, are we merely chasing a different, comparably reductive sort of goal as the one pursued by the gold-digger or the beauty-seeker?

What in a human is both distinct and worth loving in itself?

(See also my extension of this line of inquiry into the problem of American political apathy, which was far more well-received).

WTM loaned me an extraordinary text, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past. Of particular note was the aforementioned essay by Eugene McCarraher, “Me, Myself, and Inc.” The book as a whole is a socio-historical or anthropological examination of how the corporation has dictated the evolution of modern selfhood.

This essay in particular explores the quasi-religious quality of “management theory” as developed and practiced, in all seriousness, by men like Stephen Covey, and it asserts that this framework of values and ideas has an implicitly religious quality: it defines the moral self for the modern American (excluding countercultural groups), and as such should be studied if we are to understand what selfhood means in the consumer capitalist world of the present, when it very obviously doesn’t mean what it once did.

I’ll probably post more from the essay, but this reference to Simone Weil was notable immediately, both for its serious description of what labor means for transcendence (Weil worked in a Renault factory) and because I want to get it emblazoned on a sign at my office, along with two other quotes:

• “Lasciate ogni esperanza voi ch’entrate.”
• “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

[Simone] Weil saw the opportunity for management to conscript the disembodied soul through the mystification of managerial expertise. Because modern science and technical education had become “a corpus of knowledge closed to the working masses,” they comprised an “outstanding mystery” analogous to theology or the occult. The mystification of managerial expertise facilitated the entrusting of management…to “a curious machine, whose parts are men, whose gears consist of regulations, reports and statistics,” and which tried to “imitate the effort of thought to life.” In its fracturing of the laboring self and its construction of a spurious social selfhood, Fordist capitalism constituted a massive desecration of sacramental labor, because of only in the unity of thought and action could work afford “a certain contact with the reality, the truth, and the beauty of the universe and with the eternal wisdom which is the order in it.” This is why Weil could warn that “it is sacrilege to degrade labor in exactly the same sense that it is sacrilege to trample upon the Eucharist.”

This sums up my life in middle management fairly well, and inclines me to feel a rather pronounced sense of guilt. McCarraher is right, too: anyone who is compelled to read such works as The Servant Leader can attest to the corporate humanism which attempts to replace the desecrated values of the pre-corporate era with a new morality and ethics, regrettably being articulated mostly by imbeciles in hotel conference rooms and seminars.

Update: see this fantastic essay by Stuart Willis (blimpsarecool). It offers (1) a concise explanation of the historical development of the corporation and the management class, (2) why the latter functions without meaningful regard for the success or failure of a corporation, and (3) a discussion of how the phenomenon of emergence relates to the problems of corporatism and contemporary society. Totally awesome.