Kierkegaard had an important insight into information technology and its link to ‘publicness’ and anonymity ; the philosopher was thinking about newspapers and not the internet of course, but what he says seems more relevant to our own mediated condition than it was to his. It seems that only now have conditions  caught up with his insights. I suppose that’ll seem true in 2109, too.

There’s another point in question  – that of modernity itself, of speed and distraction as the mode of life now, and the aesthetics of distraction that seem to arise from it. Attention and distraction: the twin poles of modernity.  In so far as Modernism  advocated attention it continued an aesthetic of concentrated experience of the object; late modernity seems to invoke the spirits of distraction. A crucial figure here may be Baudelaire, the flaneur, strolling through a city which had already become a spectacle inviting dispersion of attention – the modern artist who already celebrates the charms of the aleatory, the ‘low’, the quotidian.

Attention: as intensity or contemplation (which can be active or receptive, a ‘wise passiveness’ derived from the romantics) and distraction (discontinuity, jump cuts, hyperlinks, compilations, editing, multi layering, bricolage and – opposite ‘equivalent’ to romantic passivity, the gently immersive pulsations of minimalism and ambient music and light). How can we grasp, let alone evaluate their claims on us? What do they mean for modern life, for art, for politics?

It doesn’t follow from this that texts composed according to the logic of discontinuity and montage  are necessarily the ones that invite the distracted gaze. Those texts may be complex and concentrated – think of Adorno’s  paratactic arrangement of his Aesthetic Theory, Nietzsche’s  ‘aphorisms’, certain musical and film works, where montage and the discontonous are prevalent. Texts don’t simply mirror a preexisting social reality, so I wonder if we can say that these styles are modern because they generate a modern meaning, a way of reading which is necessarily fragmentary?

The task is to attempt  something like Fred Jameson’s ‘cognitive mapping’ – getting a sense of where we are in all this, and how we got here, as a precondition to any meaningful action. Trying to make sense of this, if we can, we turn to Baudelaire, Benjamin  – and Kierkegaard. But in the end that task is ours, mine, yours.

Kierkegaard’s “Mystery Of Unrighteousness” In The Information Age

Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward

“The world’s fundamental misfortune,” the 19^th century Søren Kierkegaard writes, “is …the fact that with each great discovery …the human race is enveloped … in a miasma of thoughts, emotions, moods, even conclusions and intentions, which are nobody’s, which belong to none and yet to all.” [Kierkegaard (1967), #2650] The great discoveries to which Kierkegaard is referring are made possible by the use of technology, and part of his concern is that the use of technology often results in human beings having “destitute” relations to one another. As exemplified for Kierkegaard by the popular press, the uses of technologies not only transform face-to-face relationships, they create masks behind which people hide from one another. It is this latter point that is especially important. For Kierkegaard, what ultimately drives people toward certain technological practices is fear. “What rules the world,” Kierkegaard writes, “is… the fear of humanity. Therefore this fear of being an individual and this proneness to hide under one abstraction or another…. Ultimately an abstraction is related to fantasy, and fantasy becomes an enormous power… [T]he human race became afraid of itself, fosters the fantastic, and then trembles before it.” [Kierkegaard (1967), #2166] The use of technology to mediate communication, claims Kierkegaard, provides people with the means to escape, or at least hide from those aspects of interpersonal relationships they most fear.

This tendency to “hide” behind the impersonal masks provided by technologically mediated communication reflects, for Kierkegaard, a flawed attitude regarding what is most essential to veracious communication practices. The attitude is one that he claims characterizes an age “which reckons as wisdom that which is truly the mystery of unrighteousness, viz. that one need not inquire about the communicator, but only about the communication, the objective only”. [Kierkegaard (1962a), p.44] Such an approach to the communication process, one that displaces the communicator from his or her place of centrality, undermines an appropriate sense of what it means to participate in such processes. Accordingly, an impersonal means of communication transforms the sense of ownership in the information being exchanged – that is, it transforms our sense of authorship. As Kierkegaard writes:

… in our age what is an author? An author is often only an x, even when his name is signed, something quite impersonal, which addresses itself abstractly, by the aid of printing, to thousands and thousands, while remaining itself unseen and unknown, living a life as hidden, as anonymous, as it is possible for a life to be, in order, presumably, not to reveal the too obvious and striking contradiction between the prodigious means of communication employed and the fact that the author is only a single individual – perhaps also for fear of the control which in practical life must always be exercised over everyone who wishes to teach others, to see whether his personal existence comports with his communication…. [Kierkegaard (1962a), p.45]

Although the prose may be somewhat oblique, Kierkegaard is making two important, interrelated points. The first is that traditional face-to-face encounters between individuals structure the dynamics of communication in ways that permit the possibility of genuine human relationships. For instance, face-to-face communications often permit the immediate and dynamic clarification of the appropriateness of a particular piece of information. Moreover, the contexts of face-to-face communications generally impose a stronger concern for the veracity of information and instil in the participants a greater sense of responsibility both for what is communicated and how it is communicated. For Kierkegaard such elements are essential to our most “important” and characteristically human experiences. Kierkegaard’s second point is that humans are often fearful of their own individuality as revealed in such exchanges. For this reason people seek to change the dynamics of such exchanges so as to hide that part of themselves they fear to reveal. Thus, a principal motivation for the development of technology is largely negative; the use of technology to mediate communication permits a kind of interaction in which the participants can hide or mask their individuality. It is in this respect that the use of technology to hide or mask individuality represents, for Kierkegaard, a fear of, and an attempt to flee from what it is that is most important and characteristic of our own humanity. As Kierkegaard writes:

The highest triumph of all errors is to acquire an impersonal means of communication and then anonymity…. [A]ll true communication is personal…. But error is always impersonal…. Without the daily press and without anonymity, there is still always consolation that there will be a definite, flesh-and-blood individual person who voices the error…. But it is frightful that someone who is no one (consequently has no responsibility) can set any error into circulation with no thought of responsibility and with the aid of this dreadful disproportional means of communication…. [Kierkegaard (1967), #2152]

Like other writers after him, Kierkegaard sees in technology an inherent tendency to transform human experience. This is an important observation about technology, but it is not one that, by itself, distinguishes Kierkegaard as a critic of technology. What Kierkegaard understands that most other writers do not, or do so only in an unfocused way, is that the impetus to use technology is driven by an ambivalence in human nature. On the one hand we are driven to interact with other people and to find a kind of identity and validation in our interactions with them. It is this aspect of human nature, and the ability of technology to satisfy this desire, that partly accounts for our willingness to embrace technologies such as the Internet. On the other hand, we are also driven to try to control and hide important aspects of ourselves that, in the act of communication, reveals us to others as the individuals we are. Thus, in the use of technology to mediate our communications with one another, what particularly concerns us is that the use of technology permits the reconstruction of human relationships devoid of the experiences most important to our humanity. In this respect, the use of technology is driven by a fear of, and an attempt to escape from the most important aspects of our own humanity as realised though our face-to-face interactions with others. For these reasons Kierkegaard writes that, “[F]rom fear of the others, one dares not to be an I and therefore strives to become an impersonal something…. This again has led to anonymity.” [Kierkegaard (1967), #3219] The dynamic force behind contemporary technology is, for Kierkegaard, fear, which turns the impersonal, anonymity-enhancing powers of technology into an attraction.

More from Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward:

Kierkegaard’s “Mystery Of Unrighteousness” In The Information Age.

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