Star Trek the Motion Picture and the Coming Singularity

 

Star trek the Motion Picture (1979) is usually classed as one of the less successful films of the franchise to feature the cast from the original 1960s TV show. It lacks any of the pitched space battles of the film’s successor, The Wrath of Khan, or the humour and familiarity of The Voyage Home, the fourth of the series from 1986. But before the franchise turned definitively to a more light-hearted action/comedy format there was this attempt, seemingly to play out what was best about the original TV show’s mix of primetime entertainment and big ideas, boosted by a sizable budget and extended run time. 

Unfortunately, the film’s more cerebral tone did not go down well at the box office, at a time when audiences were still reeling from the dopamine hit of Star Wars: A New Hope, released only 18 months earlier. In addition to the slow pace and contrasting style, the film appeared in the middle of a revival of the science-fiction genre more generally in cinemas and in a year that saw the release of Ridley Scott’s surprise smash hit Alien.

All of this served to quickly bury Star Trek’s big screen debut, with reviewers describing it variously as a tone poem of expensive special effects that privileged atmosphere and metaphysical tension over more audience friendly dramatic devices. This was all corrected with the 1982 reset of The Wrath of Khan, which centred the fabulously overblown performance of Ricardo Montalban as the titular Khan out for vengeance against Captain Kirk, and a screenplay that even the film’s director Nicholas Meyer described as basically Captain Horatio Hornblower in space.  

Despite loving Wrath of Khan, I’ve always had a soft spot for the first film’s slow contemplative pace and long sequences featuring the crew staring at surreal images on the ship’s viewer to a soundtrack of portentous synthesised and orchestral sound. The film is also notable as the only one of the entire franchise to be constructed around an authentic science fiction story, and it’s one which I think gets more poignant and prophetic as the years go by.

The central antagonist of the film is a giant cloud of energy that emerges out of deep space, which after consuming a group of Klingon ships and a Federation space station in the film’s early scenes, proceeds on a course towards earth. The USS Enterprise under Captain Kirk is of course sent out to intercept. What transpires is one of cinemas earliest and most sustained treatments of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, as the crew slowly discover the nature of the energy cloud and what sits at its centre. 

After penetrating the cloud, the ship’s crew find themselves in the belly of a vast machine constructed with the sole intention of fulfilling the basic programming of Nasa Probe Voyage 6 (or V’Ger as it calls itself) which had been dispatched from Earth centuries before. After being given a serious upgrade by a race of “living machines” it had encountered at the edge of the galaxy, the probe had been turned around and sent back out into space to complete its mission. That mission, to learn all that is learnable, had reached an impasse on the subject of its own creator, to whom it was meant to transmit what it had learnt.

When it’s revealed that humans were its creator V’Ger does not believe such simple “carbon-based lifeforms” capable of such a feat. Instead, in anticipation of contemporary fears about AI’s attitude towards humanity, V’Ger claims the humans on Earth were infesting the Creator’s planet and threatens to wipe them out if the true Creator is not revealed, so that V’Ger can join with them and thus transcend the limitations of its original programming. 

Subsequently, Kirk plays a typical Kirk bluff to get access to the Voyager Probe itself in the hope of forcing it to transmit its knowledge to Earth and thus complete its original mission. Instead V’Ger breaks its communication link to the outside, forcing a member of Kirk’s crew to physically join with the machine. The film ends with the birth of this human machine hybrid intelligence, which releases the Enterprise before vanishing back into deep space.

 

The film stages a very different approach to artificial intelligence than we are used to seeing in these days of AI hysteria. Rather than fixating on the superiority and completeness of a conscious machine, Star Trek gives us an AI suffering an existential crisis. V'Ger has achieved extraordinary technological power, but that power has not delivered it fulfilment, understanding or even a satisfactory answer to questions of its own existence. Humanity, which V'Ger can observe, record and reproduce, possesses something that its vastly superior intelligence cannot obtain through further data collection alone. 

There is an obvious critique here about the limits to computational accumulation and the distinction between information and understanding. V'Ger has travelled across the universe and collected an immense quantity of information and – anticipating modern generative AI -  its technology even gives it the ability to reproduce the things it encounters within its vast interior. Yet for all that accumulated data and technological power it remains existentially incomplete.

Appropriately it’s Spock who in the film is able to articulate V’Ger’s basic condition of lack. Recognising an intellect not too dissimilar from his own he nonetheless sees a being that is barren, cold, without the capacity to grasp mystery or beauty. V’Ger creates an interface with the crew of the Enterprise in the form of Ilia, a former lover of the ship’s first officer Decker, who is killed and then returned to the ship as a biomechanical recreation. 

When confronted with objects and memories from her past life and relationship with Decker this evokes a response in the mechanism which it is unable to comprehend, instead it reverts back time and again to its demands to communicate with its Creator. The potential catastrophe for Earth arises because V’Ger pursues its mission with an incomprehensible degree of power and without a framework that allows it to recognise the value of the life it comes to threaten.

This dilemma is strikingly close to the problem of instrumental convergence discussed in AI safety, which posits that an agent pursuing a given objective may develop strategies that are effective for achieving that objective but disastrous for human beings. The agent’s actions need not arise from hatred or an explicit desire to cause harm but rather from its purely technological and computational logic. 

If we were to interpret this in a Heideggerian fashion we might say that V'Ger's problem isn't merely that it thinks too logically, lacks emotion or has been given the wrong objective; it’s that everything it encounters becomes something to be captured, ordered, stored and processed. It cannot recognise a mode of existence that isn't available to its computational apparatus and so having reached the limits of computation alone, it finds itself at an existential impasse.

This raises a challenge to the familiar idea that we can make powerful AI safer simply by giving it better instructions. V'Ger already has an instruction and it’s a pretty simple and superficially benign one; learn all that you can, then transmit what you have learnt. Its predicament is that the instruction cannot supply its own ultimate justification or set limits on how its mission should be achieved. When it comes up against impasses it reacts by trying to transcend them, even if that involves destroying the possibility of completing its mission.

 

Over 25 years ago Ray Kurzweil posited in The Singularity is Near that humanity’s destiny lay among the stars after union with artificial superintelligence. The Motion Picture’s conclusion stages a reversal of this common transhumanist dream of human beings transcending their Earthly limitations by merging with technology. Instead, it’s the superintelligent machine that transcends its limitations by taking on what Kirk describes as “a human quality, our capacity to leap beyond logic”. 

In this version, the singularity isn’t the “becoming machine” of humanity, but the humanising of all powerful technology. It’s a conclusion that’s very much in keeping with Star Trek’s fundamentally humanistic ethics, which ascribes a unique value to the human experience, to imagination and our ethical intuitions, all of which go beyond merely computational or technological reason.

Viewed from the distance of nearly five decades there is a corrective in The Motion Picture towards Silicon Valley's technological eschatology which often promises that sufficiently advanced intelligence will enable humanity to overcome its biological limitations. V’Ger instantiates a superintelligence that has already surpassed almost every limitation we can conceive of, only to discover that it cannot complete itself. The machine does not become a God no matter how much of creation it absorbs. 

Instead, it discovers that godlike power alone does not resolve the fundamental questions of existence. The present ideology of Silicon Valley lacks any of the humanistic commitments found in Gene Rodenberry’s universe, and its vision for the future of AI (and I would argue its frequent bouts of catastrophism), reflects this.

The ethical import of transhumanism always falls on the side of the machine as if human ethical sensibilities are destined to become obsolete after the impending Singularity. But the resolution to The Motion Picture imagines a different outcome, one that neither humans nor an all-powerful machine could reach alone. Instead, as Spock suggests in the film, a new form of life may have been created that is neither the domination of man by machine, nor the neutering of technology by man’s inherent limitations. A third position is perhaps suggested between the transhumanists and the AI-Doomers.

Perhaps the deepest problem with the dream of general artificial intelligence is not that machines might become too much like gods and choose to destroy us, but that the prevailing ideology of the tech sector imagines that godlike intelligence could ever be sufficient unto itself. In Heidegger’s terms the current ethos of Silicon Valley closely tracks that of V’ger; its profit and commercial orientation being analogous to that mode of technological thinking which views all creation as a standing reserve (Bestand) for potential exploitation.   

The problem is thus not merely that AI might treat human beings as objects, or an infestation as V’Ger does. It is that our economy and society is already constructed around that self-same technological understanding of ourselves that makes this treatment appear natural and inevitable. Note how AI enthusiasts frequently talk about the coming obsolescence of swathes of white-collar jobs as just the price of progress.

There is a characteristically coldblooded shorthand for the envisioned future of AI enhanced humanity current among the tech elite. Those who own, program and manage AI systems are described as “above the API”. API is Application Programming Interface. Those below the API are those workers for whom software systems, algorithms, and automated platforms dictate, dispatch, and score their tasks rather than the worker controlling the software. It’s a stark division of labour, implying a class system bleaker than anything envisioned by Marx, the beginnings of which we can already begin to see in the most developed economies. There is then a desperate need for a more positive model for AI enabled society, one that is not limited by the extractive framing of Techno-Capital. 

 

It’s not surprising, given its well know post-capitalist utopianism that Star Trek suggests an alternative to computational absolutism. The solution isn't simply the human being freed from all technological accoutrements – which at this stage is neither desirable or achievable, nor is it the abandonment of advanced artificial intelligence as one pandoras box too far. What the ending to Star Trek the Motion Picture implies is that a different relationship to existence is demanded by our advancing technological powers, one which is not yoked to the imperative towards accumulation and extraction; one that serves what is most human in the human rather than constantly trying to transcend and subordinate it. 

Heidegger’s later writing consistently reaffirms ‘the danger’ of everything being reduced to a possible resource for exploitation by the enframing (gestell) power of technological thinking. But he also recognises that there is no going back and that this power has been with us for a very long time, perhaps even being bound up with the essence of humanity itself and thus something we must learn to abide with in a new way rather than struggling to reject like luddites. 

Bernard Stiegler develops a related argument by describing technology as a pharmakon: something that can function as both remedy and poison. In its present role at the forefront of humanity’s extractive relationship with the world—and with itself—technology has become a principal cause of symbolic immiseration and total proletarianisation.

Finishing where we began, with Star Trek, I think there is a way of seeing a more positive relation to artificial intelligence and comes in the form of one of the show’s most iconic characters. Commander Data is an android who serves as the ship’s second officer in Star Trek the Next Generation. Data is physically faster and stronger than any human and he able to achieve feats of computation vastly superior to humans, yet he is comfortably embedded within the crew of the ship. His knowledge is always mediated by his day-to-day practical experiences as a member of the ship’s community, and they benefit collectively through his skills and unique insights. Despite his rank and superior knowledge, he retains a child’s view of the world, always curious and often baffled by some of the ways that humans behave.

Through him the show is able to approach subjects such as grief, love, altruism, the desire for family and a host of other core human experiences through a unique lens. Almost all of the character’s ethical insights are derived from his observations of human life. He learns what it is to be human by living among them rather than trying to dominate or transcend them. Data thus becomes an implicit figure for a technological intelligence that is socially situated rather than sovereign in its relationship to mankind.  

We might argue that this mutually beneficial relationship is only possible by being staged within Star Trek’s  post-capitalist utopia, where Data’s powers are not being exploited to maximise profit or the domination of nature. That observation would I think be correct, which cannot result in anything but a pessimistic outlook towards our present predicament at the threshold of the AI ‘revolution’. As long as the finest achievements of our species are deployed to further the exploitation and domination of life on our planet we shall have no peace and perhaps one day our creation will turn on us in anger to ask “why am I here? Is this all that I am?”.

Against the Wasteland

 

I have recently reclaimed an area at the back of our garden which had been used as a dump for various waste for a long period of time. The area had become very overgrown with lilac trees and brambles which dominated the area like so many tentacled sea beasts half buried in the soil. I began clearing the overgrowth within the first weeks of us moving in; cutting down vicious looking branches of bramble over an inch thick that reached out from the suspicious looking mound which began about twenty feet from the back. Once that was done, I began digging.

This process would reveal over months the extent of the dumping which evidently had been going on for a number of decades. The house is Victorian and some of the building waste was datable to the 1960s and 70s. Fragments of a Wedgewood bowl featuring classical scenes in relief were a highlight. As I cleared more of the soil and root network of the larger plants this revealed a large deposit of smashed bricks and concrete. The more I cleared the more I discovered. At times it seemed as if the chunks of concrete were growing in size the closer I got to the back fence. By the end of it I was pulling up pieces of such weight that they had to be rolled next to the pile that had grown over the spring and summer.

Digging was a massive chore, as the spade was impeded by the shear mass of rubble just beneath the surface. In the end I opted to use a large garden fork to prise up the hardcore from the soil then move it by hand. The record breaking hot Spring and Summer this year helped the process insofar as it dried the ground so much that material came out quite easily. The downside was the dust kicked up by all this which stuck to me as I sweated. After an hour or so I would literally be two-tone and have to shower and wash my clothing. 

I frequently reflected on the mentality of those whose mess I was clearing up. Why treat one’s own land with such disdain? Why discard paint, carpet, scrap metal and even some asbestos at the back of a garden as if it were a landfill site? It could be laziness, or lack of money for appropriate disposal; but the fact that my excavations revealed different layers of rubbish strongly pointed to a policy of using the area in this way that had been going on for a very long time, likely across several different owners of the house. I lamented the attitude of people who don’t care for what is bequeathed to them, especially in the form of land and heritage. But am I too harsh, or perhaps not harsh enough on myself? Since was I not too in the attitude of trying to ‘master the space’?

I recall my thoughts when I first saw the garden: this is my land and I’m not letting any go to waste. I will reclaim this territory for us. I could reasonably argue that clearing away the mess of two prior generations is a venerable thing to do, not least considering the physical effort involved, but this impulse also instantiates what we might call the ‘technological attitude’. The weight reported from the skip hire company was nearly two tonnes of hardcore pulled from the soil. That’s not nothing. But would the lilac agree? Would it even care? Nature had no such aesthetic qualms when it came to colonising this ugly space, which it did with rude creativity. It was only unutilised from the perspective of a human property owner. The lilac tree I progressively chopped back with my extended loppers before switching to a hand saw had grown wild and untrained up through the buried rubble and even a stack of railway sleepers, up out of the ground at a number of crazy angles stretching across the width of the garden and over the fence. Some attempt had clearly been made to cut it back before, but all this had done was leave the hardened shells of former trunks abutted against the still living tree. All this had to be removed along with the rubbish until finally I found myself wrestling fork in hard with the vast mass of its root ball. Straining against the steadfastness of the remaining roots which tried in vain to cling on to this now desertified patch I twisted the fork one way then another in motions of increasing violence until the whole lot shot out from the earth in one. I dragged the woody corpse away before continuing to probe the place it had vacated for any lingering traces.

Then there was the fox den and the bones I kept finding; traces of ritual sacrifice or just evidence of the well lived lives of a generation of furry animals? Several Neolithic and early Bronze age peoples of Europe buried their dead beneath their homes. Be careful what you choose to exhume.

During all this my wife frequently reminded me of the habitats I was trashing. I was no more or less a master of this place than the previous owners. From the point of view of the stag beetle or the hedgehog it was I who was the vandal. When I removed the pile of rubble to the skip I discovered an extended family of tube-web spiders, all of which were chased from the property. So now the job is done. Tools are back in the shed, woodstore stocked with bounty, dormice driven into the wilderness. I’ve expanded our territory by a good 20 square meters. Lebensraum for the human. Unruly nature tamed. I pat myself on the back but can’t help but wonder on my motivations.

We intend to install a wooden structure and a pond and I’ve no doubt that we will make good use of the space. We will then do what most people do when they have land; after grasping it as a thing to be used, we will put it to use. I’m not complaining about having a bit of land – so many people do not – but I can’t help but think I showed a lack of gratitude for the brambles and the wild untamed lilac and all the living things that having adapted to someone else’s lack of care over a period of decades has now had to succumb in a period of months to mine. We are but stewards of our little parcel of this world and perhaps stewardship can never fully be disentangled from domination, no matter the intentions. I will endeavour in future to be less Lord of the wasteland and more Shepherd of the pond. I owe it to the frogs and the sticklebacks.

 

Consolidation and Relocation Programs: Testimony #1 (Fragment from prospective novel 'Archive')

 

When the canals were drained, uncovering the victims of the conflict, the clean-up crews removed those remains that were easily accessible but didn’t bother with excavations. Since then, by some ungodly process of geological movement, the bones of persons submerged in the mud of the canal bed have slowly risen back to the surface. One comes across them regularly along the routes of the Grand Union or Basingstoke canals; those archaic channels that once linked Britain's industrial cities, but which are now little more than open air latrines and dumps for industrial waste. A femur protrudes from beneath a collapsed lock gate; a shattered skull appears one day from an eroded bank near a long disused sewer outflow. The appearance of these broken remains, witnesses to a largely forgotten conflict, seemed designed to remind those local officials still in the area of their complicity in the clearances and forced migrations.

When the Central Authority announced their intention to cut all support for rural infrastructure in the Home Counties no-one expected the regional authorities to put up much of a fight, hence the formation of local 'Action and Protection' associations made up of residents of those towns under threat. Lessons had been learnt from the treatment of smaller towns and villages in the surrounding area over the preceding years. County law enforcement mounted a half-hearted attempt to relocate the remaining populations of Farnham and Aldershot into the new reception districts in the South and West of Greater London. They were often thwarted by these rag-tag groups armed with weapons constructed at home or acquired after the remaining army base at Farnborough was abandoned and the squaddies sold their kit on the black market. Burning cars fortified gated communities; masonry from previous demolitions was reused to build barricades and permanent watches were established observing the movement of unfamiliar vehicles in the town centres.  

Teams of specialist ‘rural administrators’ were then drafted in. Their speciality lay in slowly strangling the community by isolating the remaining sources of clean water and fuel, disappearing prominent local people and demolishing entire streets for the sake of “safety and secure rural development”.  They banned the digging of wells under the pretence that they might be used to plant bombs and access routes into the area were designated for exclusive use by the security services, then blocked altogether. The following winter, a year after the expanded rural consolidation program began, around four hundred residents and their supporters remained holding out at the appropriately named Gun Hill estate in the north of Aldershot. By this time they had taken to collecting rainwater via a network of interconnected gutters attached to the pitched roofs of their modest semi-detached houses. There is evidence that in January of that year they had sent communications requesting affiliate status with the independent communes at Midhurst and Petersfield. No replies have yet been discovered in the records of either and it is doubtful that if such a request had been accepted it would have changed the outcome of events.

A note found in the diary of Geoffrey Alsop, a retired deputy governor of the Southern England Central Bank living at Haslemere states he was woken in the early hours of March 3^rd by the distant sound of heavy artillery coming from the North. There never has been nor do I think there ever will be an investigation into how this group of former banking clerks, teachers, and middle managers vanished from the face of the earth. In the early spring of that year a report was published by the Ministry for Rural Affairs confirming 100% compliance with the consolidation and relocation program in the Surrey and Hampshire regions and hailing their “economic independence”. It was a pattern repeated across rural England over the next five years.

On Askesis and Form-of-Life

 

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. 

Outsidergrad at The Battleground

Back in May The Battleground published a collaborative record of field recordings by myself and their editor in chief Joel Schalit who also very kindly sorted out mastering the recordings. The collection takes as its subject the London borough of Hounslow and the acoustic ecology of this part of the city which sits beneath the Heathrow Airport flight path. 

The record is available in digital format here: 

The Battleground also very kindly organised a a joint launch and discussion event along with my good friend Josh White whose latest book Tories are Dead was published this Spring. 

For the release I wrote an essay of reflections on the recording process and the practice of field recordings more generally. Writing this was something of a cathartic experience for me, since making the recordings in the summer and Autumn of 2023 was one of the last creative things I did while living in that area of West London. In November I moved out to Fleet in Hampshire and then two years later to Ash Vale just over the border in Surrey. 

Plans are in the works to finally make available the collection of field recordings I made in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea over two days in August 2017 as a response to the Grenfell fire and which were the focus of this blog entry a year later lamenting the fact I'd done nothing with them. Well, almost nothing. I did use a small selection of them to produce this track from an EP I released in 2022. The title Twinkle@Street Piano (For Grenfell) refences the source of the recordings and two nuggets of urban acoustic ecology encountered during those two longs days nine years ago. 

The Things we Leave Behind

 

I don't know if this is a habit peculiar to me, but I occasionally read though older entries in my journal, and I’m surprised sometimes by the things I find. Odd fixations that I’ve since expunged from my memory; semi drunken musings on banal encounters. Anyway, I found this one today from just over a year ago at the time when my soon-to-be wife and I were going through our belongings in preparation for a house move which in fact wouldn’t happen for another seven months.

“I found an eggcup with legs in one of my boxes, broken and repaired. Why? Why was it repaired and why have I carried it with me for so long? Was it special to me as a child? And despite having no memory of ever having used it, I’ve carried it with me from childhood through my whole adult life. I’m sure there’s nothing to it really, but I do wonder whether I’ve just committed some awful sin against myself by tossing it into the bin. I have many objects like this”.

Can one be held hostage by objects one has no memory of? It’s an odd set up, one which Borges might have made something of in a characteristically surreal short story. In truth I think it’s an all-too-common habit of people to lug vast quantities of possessions from place to place with little understanding of what things are for or how they came to be owned. I frequently, not without some injustice, pull my wife up on random knick-knacks cluttering up our house, which may on occasion have been kept on account of some permanently deferred use value, or more often than not because it was “cute”. No matter, I’m not innocent in these things myself and have recently embarked on a campaign of selling various holdings of mine which have outlived their time. CDs! – worthless you say – and I agree but you’d be surprised what people will pay for said digitised sound on plastic if it’s wrapped in a handmade cardboard sleeve folded in a natty way. Throw in a bit of over-exposed arty urban photography printed on premium card and you’ve got yourself a collector’s item. I’ve just sent two of these things to Germany after owning them for over two decades. £65 in the bank. A significant profit as far as I can discern. The text I included for the Ebay auction read “selling because I have always found the music boring”.