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.
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