Datafication Redux II: Evgeny Morosov

Evgeny Morosov is a Luddite with a Luddite’s true nostalgia for a way of life that has passed. The way of life is what is known as the mitteleuropaishe esthetic of Kafka and Max Weber, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. In the past, this Belarusian writer, has railed against the depredations of the information age and in a recent New Yorker essay “Only Disconnect: Two Cheers for Boredom,” (The New Yorker,  10/28/13) which tips it’s hat to E.M. Forster’s famous line “only connect,” he goes on the attack against the attack on boredom by social media. However though Morosov is arguing for boredom, he is never boring. In trying to describe the plight of socially mediated man buffeted by an “information overload” that is boring in the wrong way since it “doesn’t provide time to think; it just produces a craving for more information in order to suppress it,” he cites the German cultural critic, Siegfied Kracauer, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and the German sociologist George Simmel whose l903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” describes the Faustian bargain cosmopolitan man makes in his rejection of simpler ways of life. He also makes reference to a character named Mercer in David Eggers recent released novel The Circle, about a Google like campus, who “compares social media, with their constant prompts for more interaction and feedback, to snack foods that are packed with precisely determined amounts of salt and fat in order to keep us wanting (and eating) more and more.” However, the kind of old-fashioned unadorned boredom Morosov is arguing for is a little like cursive handwriting, a talent that is slowly diminishing due to atrophy. It, in fact, may be something that has totally vanished from the palette of human emotion by a certain time in the future. Congenitally blind people whose retinal damage has been repaired aren't always able to see since their neurogenic pathways are not acclimated to sight. Similarly, the problem with the kind of cleansing and potentially creative boredom that Morosov is arguing for is that there are those of us who might not even be able to recognize it, in the unlikely event we far enough away from our smart phones and Google glasses to experience it. In fact, if the flood of stimulation and datafication continues, the old-fashioned boredom that Dr. Seuss talks about in The Cat in the Hat, when he says “The sun didn’t shine and it was too wet to play so we stayed in the house all that cold, cold wet day," may someday be banished from the nightmarish universe some now call “the internet of everything."

Is Kafka Overrated?

Joseph Epstein, a usually pithy and insightful critic and pundit, has concluded that Kafka’s reputation is undeserved and hinges totally on Freud. “The spread of Freudianism and the rise of Kafka’s reputation ran, not without good reason, in parallel. Kafka reads like Freud fictionalized.” He concludes his essay “Is Franz Kafka Overrated?” in The Atlantic Monthly (June, 2013) by saying, “Great writers are impressed by the mystery of life; poor Franz Kafka was crushed by them.” Besides the somewhat erroneous assertion that Freud’s reputation "is in radical decline"—Freud was to human nature like Marx  to economics—while both proposed impractical programs, their analyses respectively of man and society are still hugely influential—Epstein is confusing the man and his work. Proust wrote a famous essay entitled Contre Saint-Beuve in which he inveighed against autobiographical interpretation. Just because Kafka suffered from a  horrible relationship with his father, two failed relationships and the TB which ended his life at 40, doesn’t mean that the jigsaw universe his characters occupy is lacking artistic purpose. If we make the argument that conundrums and riddles don’t comprise the makings of great art, then we’d have to eliminate Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex with its sphinx. Epstein makes the point  that none of the prominent Kafka scholars whose work he cites in his piece (amongst them Erich Heller and Saul Friedlander) explain why Kafka’s work is great. But Epstein neither defines what makes a work of literature great nor explains how how masterpieces like The Metamorphosis or The Trial fail to qualify?

Vagina: A New Biography

Photograph of Naomi Wolf by David Shankbone

Katha Pollitt is adding her name to the list of “conscientious objectors” to Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography. In a review in The Nation (“No Carnations Please, We’re Goddesses," October 1, 2012), she writes, “The vagina may be built to withstand multiple childbirths, but apparently even a joke at its expense can shut women down: Wolf says she couldn’t write for six months after a male friend celebrated her book deal with a festive dinner featuring vagina-shaped pasta (‘cuntini’) followed by salmon. It was the salmon that really did her in. Well, at least it wasn’t fish tacos. Or clams.” Pollitt also goes after Wolf on the facile equating of “female confidence”(deriving from a well orgasmed vagina) and “creativity.” “I dunno,” Pollitt says,”—the virgins- and-celebates team has some pretty heavy hitters: Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, the Brontes, Forence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf…There’s something to be said for sublimation, as Freud observed.” Pollitt has her fingers, as it were, on the role of hyperbole in dehumanizing sexuality. It’s as if Woolf had picked up the virus hosted by macho male intellectuals that equates the encounters of famous philanderers like Pushkin, Hugo and Updike with their productivity. In her critique of Wolf, Pollitt is inadvertently championing the solitary males counterparts of the woman writers she cites, Proust and Kafka. And then there is the question of the vagina itself. Is Wolf a dualist? By writing a book entitled Vagina: A New Biography, she undermines neuroscience’s hard won mind/body connection.

A Message from the Emperor

The Emperor is dying and calls a messenger to his deathbed. The message is sent “to you, the one apart, the wretched subject, the tiny shadow that fled far, far from the imperial sun….” So begins Kafka’s A Message from the Emperor, which appears in a new translation by Mark Harman in The New York Review of Books (9/29/11). Harman writes in a brief introduction that the composer Martin Bresnick had asked him to produce a new translation “that could…evoke the at-first unimpeded progress of the emperor’s messenger and then the obstacles that begin to clog his path.” A Message from the Emperor is the kind of parable that presents a series of paradigms. In its most basic form, the message is Sisyphean, since the messenger never gets to where he is going, meaning that the wisdom contained in the message never arrives. Like the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, ideal forms always elude the perception of human consciousness. In psychological terms, the unrevealed message is the unconscious: that which, by definition, we are not conscious of. In religious terms, the emperor is the ultimate authority figure, the divine Father. The parable sets the stage for the Judeo-Christian concept of faith, since it closes out the possibility of actual connection, replacing it with the notion of the leap. The divine Word will never be successfully passed from God to man. Such is the predicament of both God and man.

When Bad Things Happen to People

How do people deal with bad experiences? If you are an artist or writer, such events may have a subsidiary value to the extent that they can be turned into art. No one likes to experience loss. But for the writer, destruction may turn into the next “Tintern Abbey,” despair into The Sorrows of Young Werther, a failed relationship with a parent into Kafka’s Dearest Father, madness and insanity and failure into the next Tender is the Night, political repression into Doctor Zhivago. If Dostoevsky had not had a near-death experience in front of a firing squad, would he have written The Grand Inquisitor chapter?  But what do people do who can’t turn the bad hands they’ve been dealt into creative activities? How do they deal with the myriad ills that are part of life—loneliness, unfulfilled desire, loss of health, loss of loved ones? The bible says “the last shall be first,” and religion has always provided an anodyne, teaching us to love our enemy, to turn the other cheek. But what about the mass of men, the ones who lead lives of quiet desperation without art or belief? How do they get through it all? The one pitfall of the writer, artist or poet is that he or she, always one step removed, is too busy expropriating reality to fully avail him or herself of it. When all of existence becomes a palette, a certain immediacy and unselfconscious love of the present can be lost. However, the question remains, what do good people, who are not  artists, writers or poets, do when bad things happen to them?

Kafka at GTMO

“(H)e realized at once that he shouldn’t have spoken out loud and that by doing so he had, in a sense, acknowledge the stranger’s right to oversee his actions.” This quote from The Trial epitomizes the catch-22 that counsel for GTMO detainees now find themselves in with respect to WikiLeaks documents. “Anyone surfing the Internet this week is free to read leaked documents about the prisoners held by the American military at Guantánamo…. Except, that is, for the lawyers who represent the prisoners,” reads Scott Shane’s front-page Times piece (“Detainees’ Lawyers Can’t Click on Leaked Documents,” NYT, 4/26/11). Kafka couldn’t have written a better line in his famed novel, in which The Law itself is both a pervasive, unseen force and the main element of the parable “Before the Law,” a significant element of the novel. But before we jump up and down with self-congratulatory outrage at the absurdities of “the system,” we might consider another point raised in the penultimate graph of the Times piece, which lays out the problems that the Justice Department is faced with. Summarizing the thinking of Peter Spiro, a law professor at Temple, Shane notes, “The law is clear: only a document that is properly declassified loses its protections. And if the government ruled that classified documents disclosed to the public were automatically declassified, that would simply create a more powerful incentive for disgruntled employees to leak.” Even Kafka might have thrown up hand hands in the face of this anti-parable.