1.
Whenever I start a new journal, I always open the first entry
in the same way, with a reflection on the act of journal writing and its
importance. I’ve decided something like that is in order here; firstly, as my
use of this blog has taken a downturn over the last two years and as such is in
need of reviving. But also because some recent AI assisted self-analysis has
pointed out the broader importance of this activity.
My employer recently saw fit to grant me access to the latest
iteration of Claude, no doubt in the hope of accelerating our products to
market, or perhaps at least accelerating myself into redundancy. The long-term
effects remain to be seen, but in the meantime, I’ve also been using it as an
interlocutor for my writing. Perhaps a slight indulgence, but I’ve been
impressed at its ability to synthesise different themes across articles and
essays that cover a range of divergent topics. I suppose if generative AI is
meant to be good at anything then it’s this kind of pattern recognition. But
what was fascinating was that it highlighted several core concerns and
approaches that I was unaware of or had perhaps forgotten. Particularly
interesting was its insistence that the concepts of Askesis – as expressed
through practices of writing, reading and listening - and of Form-of-Life, were the key to pretty
much everything I’ve done. Now, I’m a little suspicious of this ‘revelatory’
function, which has the effect of imposing a unity and purpose to a collection
of writings compiled over many years and produced for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless,
after asking it to speculate as to why the blog is called Askesis, it came up
with this:
A major thread in his work is the erosion of autonomy
under modern regimes of governance. He worries that identity is increasingly
shaped by systems of classification, visibility, recognition and
administration. Against that background, askēsis suggests the cultivation of a self
capable of resisting automatic adaptation to the system. The title may imply
that autonomy is not simply given. It has to be practiced. One has to train
oneself to perceive the forces shaping one’s desires, identities and
assumptions. So, calling the blog Áskēsis may indicate a counter-practice: a
disciplined attempt to resist being passively formed by modern systems.
That’s not bad, though the part that I hadn’t considered was
the function of askesis as a kind of dissident practice, a way to personally
resist the forces in contemporary culture that chip away at our autonomy rather
than just analyse them. In my first post in 2013 I’d made it clear that the
notion of askesis I was invoking was derived from the late work of Michel
Foucault. As I said back then: I’m using the word in its older archaic
meaning which denotes not so much a rejection of worldly pleasures aimed at a
regime of self renunciation, but rather a practice or exercise of self on self;
in this case using writing as its means. I added a little joke regarding
the etymology of the word and what a blog centred on a monkish ascetic life might
consist of: perhaps a litany of temptations refused, or worldly pleasures
forsaken in pursuit of a transcendent holy life or profound inner peace? That
was a joke then, but over time I think my intellectual practice has turned out
to aim at something very much like that, though not in an obvious way.
Another thing Claude did was to claim to have detected a
darkening of my outlook and a sharper ethical focus on technocracy and
‘civilizational issues’ during and in the wake of the pandemic which reflected
a general radicalisation of my worldview, where what was previously analysed at
a distance was now being played out in real time. This is a sound observation,
one also made by my real-life non-AI friends. It’s also significant as the
pandemic was the moment when I couldn’t help but see myself and my future
implicated in what was occurring. I described that moment, when Boris Johnson announced
the second full lockdown in December 2020, in an essay a couple of years later:
…something snapped, and I recall the
apoplexy I felt at the prospect of another interminable period of lockdown and
isolation. Up until that point I had approached the pandemic with as cool and
analytical an eye as possible. Neither weep nor laugh but understand. Spinoza’s
well known encomium to enlightened enquiry was a straightforward response to an
otherwise chaotic and unforeseen situation. But in truth, this rational attempt
to grasp what was happening was always destined to have its limits. When the world
is changed we cannot avoid being changed along with it, and as the Winter
dragged on I found myself turning towards thoughts of a pessimistic and
atavistic kind.
In hindsight I’ve come to realise that evening was the
subjective break which began the process of transition from one form-of-life
towards another; from my life in London, with certain well trodden routines,
honed over at least a decade and a half, to another quite different life
outside the city.
2.
Some clarification is in order when talking about these ideas,
since it’s easy to mistake form-of-life with lifestyle or some other more
obviously chosen aspect of human existence that we create primarily by our own sustained
volition through time. As a starting point it’s worth going back to Giorgio
Agamben’s clearest definition of the term from his short book Means Without
Ends; “By the term form-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that
can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to
isolate something such as naked life.” Within Agamben’s philosophical
project, this basic definition is ranged against its opposite, bare (naked)
life; the administered, visible and governable lowest common denominator of
human existence abstracted from any particular form and which is the object of
sovereign power. In the same passage Agamben emphasises that the specific ways
of a form-of-life are never reducible to a set of facts, but instead are always
possibilities of life, of potentiality itself. A form-of-life is thus not a
life that happens to have a particular set of characteristics; being a father,
being a worker, being gay. Its basic characteristic is precisely that its way
of living remains a possibility. Or, in a line that echoes Heidegger’s famous
description of Dasein as the being for whom Being is in question, Agamben
writes that “a life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for
which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself”.
This idea can on face value appear a little circular. What is
the relationship between form-of-life and ways of life? And how can we ever
attain a stable form-of-life if the potential inherent in all that life’s
characteristics exist as permanent and open possibilities? What is clear is
that for Agamben a form-of-life cannot be chosen or at least chosen in advance.
If it could, the concept wouldn’t have the foundational ontological status that
Agamben affords it. Instead, it would be something like an addendum to our own
volition, which would be the ultimate seat of potential – which is essentially
the notion of freedom articulated by Sartre.
In contrast, for Wittgenstein - from who the concept
originates - form of life (Lebensform) denotes the practical, embodied,
social background within which concepts, language and practices gain their
sense, notably in his example of language games. The idea, as expressed sparingly
in his Philosophical Investigations, is less the kind of ontological-political
concept found in Agamben’s writing than a description of the background
conditions of possibility that allow language to mean anything at all. Hence
his famous comment that if a lion could speak, we wouldn’t be able to
understand him because we do not share the same fundamental experiential
ground.
Nevertheless, form-of-life for both thinkers is a fundamental
mode of existence and as such not something that is easily transformed
(especially so when it comes to being a lion!) One of Wittgenstein’s most
successful interpreters, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, has developed
the concept in a way that plots a course between the other two. For him, form
of life (no hyphens) isn’t just the ground which gives language meaning, but is
also what makes possible shared human responses, attunement to one another and
the ground for acknowledgment (we might say recognition nowadays); these are
things we inherit, participate in and can at least go some way to changing. As
he writes in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome; “The only thing
natural to the human being is its capacity to change its nature, to take on
certain forms of social, linguistic life … as natural and to cast them off in
favour of others, e.g. when they come to seem unnatural, chafing, confining”. I
find the reference here to social forms that appear chafing and confining
especially attractive as it suggests that our form of life can become
burdensome and that a key characteristic of human beings is their willingness
to transcend these burdens to forge something new.
Similarly, Cavell’s emphasis on forms of life constituting
the basis for mutual recognition also resonates for me, as one of the factors ante
pandemic that led me to move out of London was the sense that part of the substance
for functioning social life had been lost there, to be replaced with impersonal
systems, screens and apps. This change, which had been coming for a long time,
was drastically accelerated during the pandemic. As a result, I increasingly
found myself alienated from people and places where I had previously felt at
home. Even innocuous exchanges – or lack thereof – in retail environments had developed
the character of an encounter with indifferent or hostile aliens. And when negotiating
public space, most of all public transport, I couldn’t help but notice how, by
their behaviour, that everyone seemed to occupy their own private social world.
Even the great British pub, once a global symbol of conviviality (I exaggerate)
has been reduced post-pandemic to another overpriced and underwhelming
experience in managed decline, itself a victim of the social atomisation it was
once a bulwark against. One could argue that big cities have always had this
character compared to rural communities and there’s obviously some truth to
that. But from my experience, having lived 42 years in London, the precipitous
collapse of anything like a shared set of social conventions in the past decade
has been jarring. To borrow Cavell’s word for it; living there had really begun
to chafe, so it was clear to me that taking practical steps to change
this situation was needed.
In this impulse, and Cavell’s treatment of it, we can perhaps
glimpse the conceptual link Agamben insists on between form-of-life and a possibility
for living that is never exhausted, and which neatly brings us to Claude’s
unexpected interpretation on the value of askesis for resisting co-option into
modern regimes of governance that diminish autonomy. For without the nurturing
and safeguarding of autonomy, which is nothing more than our capacity to give
oneself the rule - to use a rather Kantian expression - our possibility for
living is greatly diminished.
3.
Glossing these interpretations somewhat, the importance then
of askesis, as a work of self on self, is its relationship to the cultivation
of autonomy in the face of forces which seek to undermine it, thus coopting us
to sovereign power. For me, this practice has been aimed more often than not at
those systems and forms of thought which reduce human beings to profiles,
data-points, consumers, officially recognised identities and consequently into administrable
subjects. This became particularly acute during the pandemic but it’s also what
I was doing earlier by analysing contemporary social phenomena like consent
classes, activist discourse around intersex conditions/DSDs, the problems of modern
personhood and of course bureaucracy. The fruit of this counter-practice (as
Claude called it) is autonomy of thought and action, sufficient perhaps to
open the door to new ways of living and a form-of-life. Or as Agamben puts
it, thought becomes “an experience, an experimentum that has as its object
the potential character of life and of human intelligence.” Thought, thus
conceived, isn’t merely something that happens inside an individual subject; thought
is the experience of one's own potentiality, the awareness that one's life is
not exhausted by its currently actualised form. Experimentum is then the
appropriate term, since like all true experiments, those conducted in thought
and action are a form of test, the ultimate outcome of which is not decided in
advance and the failure of which would not extinguish the possibility of future
experiments.
I would also contend that the aim of askesis is not only to
maintain and build on our intellectual autonomy but also to influence what
Martin Heidegger calls our Alltäglichkeit, usually translated in his
works as ordinary-everydayness. This is the primary, unreflective way that
humans practically inhabit the world. If this pre-reflective dwelling can be
habituated with the character of inextinguishable potentiality then we might be
a little closer to the more difficult ontological understanding of form-of-life
pointed to by Agamben – though at this stage I’m inclined to view his version
of the concept as a regulating ideal of political ontology rather than a design
for life.
If for me the cultivation of autonomy has gone hand in hand
with a critique of bureaucratic systems, that is because they have become the
principle and near exclusive means by which power dominates our lives in late
Modernity. Indeed, that domination is now so pervasive that it has come to
define the language and concepts by which many people seek recognition and find
orientation in society. Worst of all, because bureaucratic power presents
itself as both technically necessary and politically neutral, it is rarely
perceived as oppressive. Bureaucratic rule doesn’t work primarily through
dramatic acts of sovereign power but through becoming part of our everydayness
itself, shaping habits, categories, routines, and expectations until they
appear natural and self-evident. When this insight is set alongside the decline
of civil society which has accompanied successive waves of disenchantment in
the modern West, then we can begin to see how the critique of bureaucratic
rationality is all the more urgent, since there is precious little left outside
that rationality to counter it.
There is therefore an unspoken but nevertheless clear
normative distinction running through my writing between what I consider
healthy and damaged forms-of-life. For instance, a healthy form-of-life must
include practices of mourning and memory, as the act of working through the
past in this fashion helps preserve autonomy against reduction into the abstract
and alienating systems that govern us. en memoria mía is not the
melancholy and demoralised yearning for times lost but a constant process of using
nostalgia as a form of cultural archaeology and potential for renewal. Thus questions
over heritage are always ultimately questions about the possibility of use in
the present rather than fidelity to the past.
This is by design an emotional register that refutes any
cheerful surrender to the so-called Eternal Now of Capitalist Realism,
which is perhaps why I’ve moved away from the ideas of Hauntology towards a
more anthropological understanding of cultural memory. Most recently I’ve been
attracted to the what the German sociology Hartmut Rosa has described as the accelerated
time regime of late modernity, which I agree with him is the seat of so
much modern disaffection and alienation. Resistance to this time regime through
practices of lingering, ritual, deep literacy and memorialising are approaches
to living that open breathing room for possibility.
Conversely, I remain highly critical of those social
movements that seek recognition and affirmation via the never-ending expansion
of administrative, regulatory and procedural dispensations as if they were the
benign hand of an imminent and caring God. It never ceases to amaze me how
otherwise intelligent people surrender their autonomy and adopt the latest set
of approved categories with which they are expected to make sense of their
lives in the dying world. This is perhaps a more complicated story, and I hope
to be able to give a less one-sided account of it at some point in the near
future.
Finaly, if I was going to condense the role of askesis in
shaping our possibilities for living into a simple definition, I might say that
askesis denotes a disciplined practice of thought and action that is both a grounding
and the holding of one’s ground from out of which a form-of-life might
be cultivated. The ‘might be’ is essential here, since if we are talking
about a true experimentum in living, then the possibility towards which
the hypothesis points must also include its opposite, its possibility for
failure. Nevertheless, no failure can extinguish the potential for living which
ultimately defines the human being.
