‘Keep yourself alive’

A glimpse into one of the many Box Photoism shops in Seoul

There’s a trend in Korea amongst young people to take sets of four passport-like photographic ‘selfies’ in shops that are  sprouting all over Seoul. One chain is called Photoism Box. The picture at the beginning of this post shows one such outlet near Anguk station. Apparently, this trend is yet to invade the west and is a specifically Korean phenomenon.

It began in 2017 with a company called Life4Cut. Here is what Lee Da-Eun of Korea JoongAng Daily says: ‘This analog manner of taking photos grew immensely popular with young Koreans, and numerous studios such as Photogray, Photoism, Harufilm, Selfix and more hopped on the photo strip trend, known in Korea as four-cut photos. Although there are distinct features for each type of photo booth, there are some common characteristics. All of these booths offer natural photoshop features, special seasonal photo frames, unique photo props to enhance the experience and QR codes that provide a digital copy of the photos taken. ‘

The writer suggests three reasons for the growing trend: first, it offers a relatively cheap way to capture lasting memories with friends and loved ones; second, it’s an optimal self-promotion tool to be used on social media.   The third reason is especially thought-provoking: ‘The photo booths also reflect Generation Z’s pursuit of a more “analog atmosphere” in contrast to their very digital lives. Gen Z, or people born between the mid-to-late 1990s to the early 2010s, are most likely immersed in digital culture and less familiar with analog photography. In Korea, however, the younger generation is increasingly interested in a more analog culture and atmosphere, as they pursue film photography and instant self-photo booths.’

Note the text on the window on the Photoism ‘Box’, at the bottom left of my photograph: “Keep yourself alive” (also note that it’s written in English, not Korean).  Interesting! The phrase made me wonder about what is really at stake not just in relation to selfies but in photography in general. What the slogan obviously means is that a photo print is a more tangible memory than a digital file. It’s something you can hold in your hands. And even though you will probably post them online! This is the analogue experience that young Koreans are apparently craving. But let’s dig a little deeper.

In English we say ‘to capture’ something when we take a photograph. We also say, ‘to take’ a photograph, which on the face of it seems less violent than ‘capture’. But etymologically, the two verbs are closely related. The Online Etymology Dictionary says for ‘to take’:  ‘"act of taking or seizing," 1540s, from French capture "a taking," from Latin captura "a taking" (especially of animals), from captus, past participle of capere "to take, hold, seize".’ In relation to ‘to take’ , the dictionary says the verb comes from ‘late Old English tacan "to take, seize," from a Scandinavian source (such as Old Norse taka "take, grasp, lay hold”)’.

These are very aggressive and predatory verbs being employed in relation to the act of using a mechanical optical imaging device to produce a representation of something.  I wondered if it’s the same in Korean. Do they also conceptualize this activity using belligerent metaphors?

It seems the normal way to say ‘take a photograph’ in Korean is  사진을 찍다 (sajin-eul jjigda). The word jikgda relates to the way of describing stamping something, like a document, or printing a book or picture.  The Korean is distantly related to the Chinese for a ‘seal’ on a document. But jikgda can also mean ‘hew’, ‘strike’, ‘chop’. So, there is also an albiet more attentuated belligerent connotation lurking in the Korean language.. But the verb also preserves a more overt link to the idea that a photograph is a stamp or print, that it is something tangible. This link is not necessarily carried over in the English convention of using the verbs  ‘take’ or ‘capture’, which rather imply that we have actually possessed the something we represent,  not just made a lasting impression of it.

In English we  in part employ the same vocabulary in relation to photographs as was used previously to talk about handmade image-making, such as painting. We say, the artist ‘captured a likeness of someone’ in their portrait. But we don’t  say to ‘take’ a painting. Rather, we say ‘make’, ‘produce’, or ‘create’. The choice of ‘take’ implies that the intermediary visualizing technology  provides a directly indexical copy of the source (the subject to be photographed), and suggests the absence of active intervention or proactive work by the one taking the photograph.  But either way, what is at stake is the underlying idea that an image somehow seizes its referent. It is not a gentle action. 

The idea of ‘keeping alive’ brings to mind the possibility that preserving memories like this really is a kind of capture or enslavement, and that the problem then is how to keep what one has photographed ‘alive’, how not to ‘kill’ it.. So, it really is a question of ‘keeping alive’, although, strictly speaking, it’s already too late. The image is already a corpse. For what we do when we document the world in images is simultaneously lose it. This is because reality is process,  and an image inevitably cuts into the process. It freezes, ‘enslaves’, or ‘kills’ it. In other words, if making an image is violent, then the likelihood is that, despite our best intentions, what we ‘capture’ is being enslaved and also in danger of dying.

*

A consideration of the conditions experienced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors is helpful here, because evolutionary biologists have shown the extent to which we are 'haunted' by 'ghosts' of past evolutionary adaptions, that is, are hardwired to negotiate the world as it was experienced over tens of thousands of years, not just the mere hundreds of centuries of historical time. Hunter-gatherer societies are characterized by the  absence of direct human control over the reproduction of the species they exploit, and have little or no control over the behaviour and distribution of food resources within their environments. Foraging for food was a fundamental survival skill, and the basic need for food played a fundamental role in the progressive evolution of cognitive structures and functions that would make food available on a more reliable basis. Under such conditions, humans explored their environments with the purpose of discovering resources of sometimes limited availability. The term ‘epistemic foraging’ is used in cognitive neuroscience to describe goal-directed search processes that respond to the state of uncertainty, and describes human behaviour considered not only in relation to specific task-dependent goals, like foraging for food, but also wider responses to the environment. This context-dependent behavior applied not only to the physical space in which humans existed but also to the abstract context of thoughts and decision making that helped humans to deal with uncertainty.. Foraging for information was as vital as foraging for food, as exploration resolved uncertainty about a scene. This ‘epistemic foraging’ supplied the core abstract thinking that humans developed, and gave them an evolutionary edge.

We are primarily geared towards the reduction of uncertainty through increasing our control over the environment, and we use epistemological tools to ensure this. But as Hartmut Rosa writes in his excellent book 'The Uncontrollability of the World’,  human relationships to the world can be divided between on the one hand a stance of violent and aggressive action motivated by the will to mastery and control, to ‘capture’ and ‘take’,  and on the other, one of erotic desire or libidinal interplay which requires a more open and accepting attitude to the uncontrollability of the world.  Hunter-gatherer societies are characterised by the latter relationship, but within the culture of modernity, as Rosa writes, 'We are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things – segments of world – within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controlled.'  Rosa sees four dimensions to the modern obsession with guaranteeing maximum control: making the world visible and therefore knowable: expanding our knowledge of what is there, and making it physically reachable or accessible,  making it manageable, and making it useful. But this sense of mastery comes at a high price because it lead to alienation from the world - to a loss of what Rosa calls 'resonance', which 'ultimately cannot be reconciled with the idea of intellectual, technological, moral, and economic mastery of the world.' As a result, we exist mostly in a condition of profound alienation, inwardly disconnected from other people and the world. As Rosa writes: 'Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself.'

*

Image-making is closely linked to the need to encode the results of epistemic foraging. But when seen in this light, a dual origin of image-making suggests itself. It  began as way of encoding a  libidinous and reciprocal relationship to the world,  but gradually shifted to become a way of encoding  the desire to enhance mastery and control.  This could be described as image-making as as a system of engendering versus image-making as a system of production.  This distinction is intended to contrasts two basic ways of being in the world: one in which representation encodes a world in in which we see the world as our dwelling place, and the other in which we are set apart in a position of aspiring (but inevitably futile) omnipotence. But image-making as engendering slowing gave way to image-making as production as we moved towards ‘modernity.’

What we humans fear most is uncertainty – being uncomfortably surprised. What we want most is to be in control.  But in what does ‘control’ lie? Metaphors of ‘taking/capturing’ that dominate European languages in relation to making images, and those prevalent in Korean, suggest a common  root in the idea of separation and aggressive domination and are infused with the aspiration towards control. But the western metaphors imply a far more aggressive relationship to the world than the Korea.  The desire for control, which os a primary means of reducing uncertainty through closure  is matched elsewhere by more open relationships to uncertainty.

The west seems especially inclined to the former. This can be seen in a very tangible way if we consider the evolution of  the European artist’s’ self-image. From the sixteenth century onwards, their posture in their studios was made to look like this:

The preference for this stance, recorded here in a late sixteenth century  Flemish print now in the British Museum, had much to do with the new social role-model then being adopted by artists, which was moving away from anonymous artisan or craftsman to being more like people on the next rank up in society: the knights.  But this stance can also be understood to reflect the emerging idea central to modernity, which is that humanity is primarily characterized by the ability to assert aggressive control over the world. It is interesting to consider that this physical stance coincides with the start of belligerent European colonising of the world. It is also interesting to note that it is not seen anywhere else in relation to the self-representation of the artist. It  certainly contrasts markedly with the self-image of the East Asian artist, who worked seated, poised over a horizontally oriented surface. This seems much more closely aligned metaphorically with someone sowing seeds in the earth - a farmer - that is, someone much more inclined to consider the world a dwelling place,  not as a place for violent conquest.

NOTES

The Korea JoongAng Daily article can be found at: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2023/01/03/national/kcampus/korea-photobooth-photodrink/20230103190906442.html 

Hartmut Rosa’s book, ‘The Uncontrollability of the World’ was published by Polity in 2020.

The illustrated print is an etching after Johannes Stradanus’ painting of van Eyck in his Studio, c.1590. It’s screen grab from the British Museum’s website.

MBTI. Some more thoughts

A screen-grab from the website ‘16Personalities’ - one of the most popular in South Korea for learning about MBTI.

In the previous post I discussed young Korean people’s enthusiasm for MBTI personality profiling and argued that one of the reasons why MBTI has become so popular here is that it provides the possibility of organizing the messy reality of human identity in an efficient manner that draws attention only to positive character traits.

In this post I want to dwell on the word ‘efficiency’ and its role in Korean society.  I think there’s no doubt that visitors to the Republic of Korea are likely to be struck by the feeling that this country is highly efficient. I don’t think I’ve ever waited for a subway or mainline train because it’s late. The country has the fastest broadband internet connection.  When Koreans decide to emulate something foreign they always seem to do it with greater efficiency.

The contrast between the contemporary inefficiency of Western European societies (the ‘Wild West’, as I like to call it nowadays) and the ROK’s obvious efficiency was especially striking during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the recognition has stayed with me even after things are moving back to some kind of ‘normal’.

This ‘efficiency’ is all the more striking because in the early days of  contact with the West and the initiation of modernization first under the Japanese, and then under the watchful eyes of the military government between the 1960s and 1980s, it was precisely the nation’s inefficiency that was criticized – both by foreigners and by Korean modernizers. Ahn Sang-ho (1878 – 1938), a prominent politician and independence activist under Japanese colonial rule, one of the first Koreans to emigrate to the United States who then in 1926 returned to Korea and engaged in anti-Japanese activism for which he was imprisoned - an experience that led to the ill health that caused his death - deplored Koreans’ parochialism, depravity, laziness, and dependence.

Ahn called for a radical reform of social behaviour through education and self-cultivation, but the spirit of modernization he admired in the West, which had led to the exponential expansion of the West’s wealth, power and influence, and the establishment of a democratic political system, was also fundamentally driven by what the German sociologist Max Weber (1864 – 1920) termed ‘bureaucratization’.  This  involved the organization of Western society around functional, formal, rational systems with well-defined rules and procedures. It required hierarchy, specialization, training, impartiality and managerial loyalty. A society moved through rationalization towards greater efficiency and effectiveness, and this in its turn meant that the citizens would reap the benefits in terms of greater security and wealth. But Weber warned that excessive reliance on and adherence to rules and regulations also inhibited initiative and growth. The tendency is for a managerial-bureaucratic society to treat people as machines rather than individuals. In other words, the system is de-humanizing. There is the danger that emotions and feelings are not incorporated into the way a bureaucratic society is run. The impersonal approach to the organization of a society shunts these dimensions of human existence to the margins, dismissing them as obstacles to social efficiency. For Weber, the systematic ‘dis-enchantment’ of the world was the price of rationalization. Technological expertise  replaced priestly vision, and rationality and efficiency replaced mystery and magic.

Is it too much to say that in its avid desire to join the ranks of modernized nations, the ROK adopted a version of the Western  bureaucratic model, one that from the 1970s onwards proved to meld very effectively with elements of pre-modern Confucianism, such as social hierarchy and the sense of the community as a collective rather than made up of individuals? Is it too much to suggest that young Korean’s weakness for MBTI today is a side-effect of the excessively bureaucratic version of capitalist modernization adopted by the ROK, manifested on the level of questions pertaining to personal identity?

Another screen-grab from 16Personalities.

*

In the previous post I mentioned the cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, members of the so-called Frankfurt School and exponents of ‘critical theory’ – critical’ being the key word. For these left-leaning German Jews, writing in the wake of Hitler’s rise in Germany and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, its seemed that modernization in general was fundamentally unhinged. They believed the seemingly ‘open’ and democratic United States was simply more insidiously ‘fascistic’ than the obvious culprits. Capitalist modernity was synonymous with the degradation of human life to a level where the experience of alienation from the world and from each other was pervasive. Building on the social theory of Weber and others, they diagnosed modern society as having shrugged off one metaphysical system for another – religion for rationality. 

In the more recent writings of the Frankfurt School sociologist Hartmut Rosa, which I  have also mentioned in an earlier post, the uncompromisingly bleak prognosis of Adorno and Horkheimer cedes to a more nuanced perspective on the price of modernization. Alienation is still the norm, but Rosa stresses that modernization is also unique in seeking multiple remedies for alienation. One such remedy is art. Others include pop music and getting drunk or high -  anything that can perhaps deliver the antithesis of alienation, which Rosa calls the experience of  ‘resonance’. This benign world-relating to which Rosa refers is fugitive, structureless, and inherently invisible. “[R]esonance is not an echo, but a responsive relationship, requiring that both sides speak with their own voice”, Rosa writes in Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019). It is precisely because of the anti-structural properties of resonance that it is so highly valued and desired, because ultimately what is at stake is our profound yearning for a relationship to the world that is without hierarchy, divisions, and boundaries,  in which we feel a deep sense of sharing, intimacy and harmony, and where all people and things are equal.  Rosa’s choice of the term ‘resonance’ is largely determined by its anti-structural nature, and indicates that benign relationships with the world involve responsiveness on both sides – of the subject and the world. For Rosa argues that “resonance appears not as something that first develops between a self-conscious subject and a ‘premade’ world, but as the event through which both commence”.  The experience of resonance can therefore only potentially occur when there is “a relation between two bodies that are at once open enough for a relationship while at the same time remaining sufficiently stable and closed so as to ‘sound’ at their own frequency or ‘speak with their own voice’.”  

Rosa sees all people in developed countries as living lives mainly of alienation, and considers this to be primarily because modernity is inherently about aggressive control. As Rosa puts it in his most recent work to be translated into English,  The Uncontrollability of the World (2020): “Modernity has lost its ability to be called, to be reached” becausewithin in it “[w]e are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things – segments of world – within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controlled.”  Rosa sees four dimensions to modernity’s obsession with guaranteeing maximum control which thwart the possibility of achieving resonance: the world is made visible and therefore knowable by “expanding our knowledge of what is there”, the world is made physically reachable or accessible, manageable, and the world is made useful. As a result, the price of achieving a historically unprecedented degree of control is that the modern subject exists mostly in a condition of profound alienation, inwardly disconnected from other people and from the world.  

It seems to me that the contemporary Republic of Korea is especially prone to this rage for control, and that the craze for MBTI is one manifestation of this overwhelming tendency which is an intrinsic part of the modernization process through which the ROK has gone at breakneck speed. As Rosa writes: “Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself.”  

In a future post I will consider how MBTI can also be understood within a broader Korean historical and cultural context that predates Westernization. I  will also explore how in the West the alientation of which Rosa writes plays out in terms of a lack of the very secure identity sign-posts that MBTI provides Koreans, and  is causing so much trouble. Perhaps the South Koreans may be recognizing something important we in the West are not…...

References

The image at the beginning of today’s blog is from: https://www.16personalities.com/country-profiles/republic-of-korea 

Max Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy was described in Economy and Society, published in 1921. 

Hartmut Rosa’s books are Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, translated by  James C. Wagner, and published by Polity Press in 2019, and The Uncontrollability of the World, also translated by  James C. Wagner, and published by Polity Press in 2020..

Resonance in the Cave

A negative hand-stencil on the wall in Grotte Chauvet, France, made about 30,000 years ago.

In the last Post, I discussed resonance and alienation as the two poles of our relationship to the world. I drew on the fascinating theory of the contemporary German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, and used the Seoul subway as a paradigm of modernity as alienation. In this Post I want to take the long view. I want too go back to the beginning: the Upper-Paleolithic cave-painting.

The capacity for having resonant and alienating relationships to the world was born with modern humanity, or what prehistorians (who take the long view) mean when they say ‘modern’:  humans who are anatomically and cerebrally identical to us.  One could say people living today  are the descendants of the most resonance-oriented ‘modern’ humans. While Rosa stresses that modernity is characterized by a crisis of resonance, and an excessive levels of alienation, he also stresses that both resonance and alienation both have clear benefits in terms of the survival of our species. They are ways to adaptively transform the world. Both require a certain cognitive ability, one that we share with the Upper Palaeolithic cave-painters of 30,000 years ago, who like us, were humans with the capacity to feel resonantly attached to the world but also to feel alienated. For it would be naive and dangerously misleading to assume that these people - like hunter-gatherers of today - lived in a permanently resonant relationship to the world. This was and is impossible for any humans. As Rosa writes, resonance and alienation exist in dialectical relationship:

At the root of resonant experience lies the shout of the unreconciled and the pain of the alienated. At its centre is not the denial of repression of that which resists us, but the momentary, only vaguely perceptible certainty of a transcending ‘nevertheless.’ Alienation born of indifference and repulsion must first become palpable before resonant relationships to the world can be developed. Capacity for resonance and sensitivity to alienation thus mutually generate and reinforce each other, such that the depth of the indifference or repulsion one experiences seem also to define the potential depth of one’s resonant relationships. [emphasis in the orginal]

These two kinds of adaptive responses to the world could not have been made without a significant development in human evolution, an abrupt transition towards the recognizably ‘modern’ mentality, a cognitive ‘explosion’ that produced not only the cave-painters’ consciousness but also ours, and that made alienation and resonance intrinsic parts of the human story. How ‘explosive’ this transformation actually was is hotly debated, however, and new archaeological discoveries are continuously extending backwards in time the point of ‘ignition’ or attenuating it, so it looks less and less like an ‘explosion’ and more like an extended ‘blooming.’ For example, it was announced in early 2021 that the world’s currently oldest known painting - of a life-size wild pig - had been discovered in Indonesia and dated to 45,500 BP. This find is significant not only because it pushes the ‘beginning’ back yet again, but also because it is in Indonesia not Europe, suggesting also a far greater geographical distribution of early ‘modern’ humans with the inclination, for whatever reason, to paint caves. But the important point is that there was a major transformation in the human mind for some still, as yet, unknown reason – perhaps climatic, demographic, or, if we are to believe the more ‘far out’ theories, an alien visitation.

This amazing transformation in the structure of the human mind was vital for the emergence of the capacity for adaptive relationships to the world. In The Pre-History of the Mind (1996) the ancient historian Stephen Mithen argues that in the earlier stages of the evolution of the mind, which he dubs Phase 1, the mind was dominated by ‘general intelligence’, that is, by “a suite of general-purpose learning and decision-making rules.” In this primordial state we can hypothesize that neither hope nor despair troubled the human mind. In the next stage, Phase 2, the mind evolved so that general intelligence was supplemented by multiple specialized intelligences each devoted to a specific domain of behaviour, such as linguistic intelligence, social intelligence, technical intelligence, and natural history intelligence (knowing about the environment on which life depended), but they worked in isolation from each other.  In Phase 2 hope and despair would also not have existed, at least not in any recognizable sense. Finally in Phase 3, the ‘modern’ mind evolves. Now, minds have multiple specialized intelligences that work together, and there is a flow of knowledge and ideas between various behavioural domains.  This phase archaeologists date to the Aurignacian period (45-30,00 BP), the earliest phase of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, when the first figurative art appeared, including the first of the paintings in Chauvet Cave. 

In Phase 3 the capacity of our ancestors to adaptively respond to the world, was greatly enhanced, because the mind was now characterized by ‘cognitive fluidity’. As Mithen writes, this meant that “[e]xperience gained in one behavioural domain can now influence that in another. Indeed, distinct behavioural domains no longer exist. And brand-new ways of thinking, subjects to think about and ways to behave arise. The mind acquires not only the ability but a positive passion for metaphor and analogy.”  Humans acquired the capacity for complex social performance and ritual, for vicarious and imaginal experiences, for verbal, visual, and gestural persuasion, and distinct physiological and emotional states. It is Phase 3 that provided humans with the resources for resonance, but also, of course, for alienation.  We became truly human once we could reflect on our earthly existence and see the pervasiveness of suffering and hardship, the sheer capriciousness of fate. As soon as we were able to remember good and bad experiences, and to imagine them happening again, we were made aware of uncertainty, and it is in this sense that resonance and alienation and not polarities, but rather interdependent parts of the complex whole of human consciousness.

People of the present share with their cave-painting ancestors of 30,000 years ago the same core emotions of desire, fear, happiness, and sadness. We still live our lives very like them, by shunting erratically between positive and negative states of mind. Psychologists have pinpoint five bundles of personality traits which all humans universally possess in differing degrees, and despite the obvious differences between the lives of Upper Palaeolithic cave-painters and us, we nevertheless share these same basic traits, which predispose us to approach the world in recognizably similar but also the inevitably divergent ways determined by culture.

First, there is our  degree of extroversion. This refers to how stimulating or straining we find interactions, and so will have a fundamental influence on how we relate to both the human and non-human world. Second is neuroticism, or the tendency to get nervous, anxious, worried, and unstable in relation to the world. This trait influences how rational choices are made, and inclines us towards excessively idealized or irrational thoughts and actions, which we erroneously believe can reduce feelings of insecurity. Neuroticism is a key driver of alienation. Third is agreeableness, or how helpful, optimistic, kind, and empathetic we are. Agreeableness greatly affects what and how we engage with the world in both positive and negative ways - positively, by making us incline to align personal interests with those of others, and negatively, by making us conformist and too eager to align our own beliefs and goals with those of a peer group or leader.. The agreeableness trait can lead us in both directions - to more resonance and more alienation. Fourth, is conscientiousness. This refers to how self-disciplined and prepared we are, and will determine how resolute we are in pursuing goals in spite  of perceived obstacles. Because of this, conscientiousness is a vital prerequisite for experiencing resonance, as it is inevitably experienced within uncontrollable and often difficult and threatening circumstances. Then again, too much conscientiousness can shut down resonant relations through enforcing too much control. Finally, there is openness, or the extent to which we are curious, inquisitive, take risks, and are creative. Where the capacity for resonance is concerned, this psychological trait is probably the most important of all, because it has a major impact on how controlling or uncontrolling we are in relation to experience, making us more or less inclined to conform and willing to accept novelty and uncertainty.

All these aspects of the spectrum of human personality would have impacted on Upper Paleolithic humans’ capacity to experience resonance and alientation, determining what kind of goals they set themselves, and how successful they were at achieving them. But just like for us, conscientiousness and openness would have been the most salient.  Which means we are the descendants of the more conscientious and open human beings.

But psychologists have also shown that we are hardwired with a ‘negativity bias’. Instinctively, we are more pessimistic than optimistic, and  pay much more attention to prophets of doom and gloom than prophets of liberation and light - as world religions and modern news coverage demonstrate. However, this makes very good sense in terms of optimizing chances of survival. One can say we are also the ancestors of those humans who thought a cave up ahead concealed a dangerous predator, not of those who assumed it was a safe and comfortable place to spend the night.  For our ‘negativity bias’ has been honed over tens of thousands of years to make us better at confronting the volatility, capriciousness, and inconstancy of situations. A feedback loop makes this tendency a self-fulfilling prophecy: because most of our attention is directed at information that brings confirmation of our prior predisposition to be pessimistic, so we assume we have a reasonable attitude.  That we prefer our current affairs media to traffic in overwhelmingly bad news, which we also believe is the actual and important news, is symptomatic of this  bias running rampant in modern times. Inevitably, this ‘negativity bias’ inclines us toward an alienating relationship to the world. But we obviously also share with the cave-painters the capacity to override our ‘negative bias’ - otherwise resonance would be impossible. Psychologists call this mental trick the ‘Pollyanna Principle’ (named after the cheerful and optimistic girl of the children’s book). In some circumstances humans have an in-built tendency to selectively favour the positive, to look on the bright side, to recall more positive memories than negative ones. People who supplement their ‘negativity bias’ in this way tend to experience more vivid and positive future-oriented thoughts. Those who don’t, can become depressed or suffer from chronic low moods.  This ability to imagine positive mental imagery in relation to future events or situations also serves an important evolutionary function: it allowed humans to plan and make decisions that are more goal-directed, and thereby to overcome obstacles that may otherwise have led to crippling doubt and alienation, leading to endless delays in decision making or outright retreat. 

Recent research also shows that in the genetic lottery some humans are born with a natural predisposition to see the ‘cup’ as always half full, while the less fortunate tend to see it as habitually half empty. Life experiences, within normal limits, will do little to change this inherent proclivity. People also tend to look for confirmation of their innate predisposition by embracing ideas or intellectual tendencies that mirror them. But evidence of genetic predisposition also means we should acknowledge that the ‘losers’ in the gene lottery will inevitably also be biased, and may fail to make a fully reasoned assessment of a present situation and the outlook for the future. Consequently, they will be unable to be open to the possibility of resonance when it is feasible to be so. But does that mean those who win in the gene lottery and are inherently Pollyanna-optimists will also be more truly resonance experiencing? Hardly.  Optimism is a strategy for protecting ourselves from the reality of negative outcome, not coming to terms with the uncertainties of life - its inevitable obstacles and failures. To experience resonance we must be able to trust that nature is somehow on our side, despite all the evidence to the contrary. If our goals are chosen intelligently, and the interest of the community and nature are borne in mind, hopefulness will allow us to find meaning individually and collectively in the present moment, no matter how troubled that moment may be. The cave-painters would also have been hapless victims of the gene lottery. Perhaps the person who made the hand-stencil in Grotte Chauvet thought their metaphorical cup was always half empty, and he or she painted it to cheer themselves up.

Because they were human, Upper-Paleolithic humans also thought in terms of pathways. Even new-born humans are pathway-thinkers immediately after birth, and during childhood early lessons are refined. At approximately 1 year old a baby already realizes it is separate from other entities and can cause chains of events to happen. Children quickly understand the process of causation, that events are not unrelated in time and that one event elicits another event through cause and effect.  So, by this early stage all healthy humans have a sense of personal agency.   With awareness of causation and agency come awareness of pathways and goals, and the acquisition of goal-directed hopeful thoughts. These are crucial for a child’s survival and thriving, which are greatly improved by the routine anticipation of future well-being. It is obvious why positive expectations - pathways and goals – would have benefited the survival of the cave-painters: people with higher levels of resonance have higher levels of psychological health than those who experience greater levels fo alienation. Being resonant would have yielded higher confidence and protected them against future sources of fear and anxiety, and obstacles to personal and group flourishing. A resonance experiencing cave-painter would therefore be better at adapting to the unforeseen and coping with it than an alientated one.  Those ancestors with high levels of collective confidence in the possibility of resonance would have been able to think more effectively about the future, while those with lower levels would have catastrophized about the future. Upper-Paleolithic humans with faith in and experience of resonance would also have been more likely to actively engage the others in their group, when compared to  those shadowed by alienation. They would have more consistently felt a strong sense of mutuality with others in their group, on whom they knew they could call for support.  For we humans are ‘ultrasocial’, that is, have adapted to be superbly cooperative. The cave-painters would have known how to profit from kin altruism, a deep social bond based on close familial connections. But this bond would also have extended to wider forms of altruism that involved non-kin reciprocity, for example, during seasonal hunts, and, probably, while painting caves. The capacity for positive, hopeful, motivational - resonant - states functioned as a highly efficient method of muffling or cloaking volatility and uncertainty under the safe canopy of a higher, positive, purpose. Resonance-filled conviction established the grounds upon which sacrifice and suffering in the present were recognized as necessary preliminary stages on the way towards beneficial, pleasurable, or happy results in the future.  Being resonant therefore has its roots in an age-old survival strategy honed by humanity over millennia, one with which the cave-painters were already intimately familiar.

Image source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Detail-du-panneau-des-Mains-negatives-salle-des-Panneaux-rouges-de-la-grotte_fig3_285598204

Alienation and Resonance on the Seoul Subway

The Seoul subway. Paradigm of alienation?

When I look at my fellow Seoul subway passengers, the word that comes to mind is ‘alienation.’ In the photo above everyone’s eyes are downcast to their smartphones, and their mouths are masked.  Isn’t this almost a caricature  of what being alienated is like?

But its not quite so simple. These people may be alienated from their immediate physical environment, but they are massively compensating for this sad situation by transferring their attention to the world within their smartphones where they can get some kind of resonance – the antidote to alienation.  When I surreptitiously glance at what they’re looking at, it seems to be mostly social media feeds, shopping feeds, on-line games,  webtoons   - online comic strips, YouTube pop videos (mostly K-Pop), and  tv shows.  These days, there are many places for your mind to be rather than on a horrible subway train deep underground in the company of total strangers.

The lure of the smartphone is obviously in part compensatory, and it works, insofar as people obviously find a modicum of sustenance from whatever it is they are attending to. But there’s a vicious cycle at work, because the more alienating the immediate environment, the more people  need  to, and can, escape to a digital one. Since facemasks became mandatory in public spaces, the conditions for generating social contexts of acute alienation have skyrocketed. As many sociologists and psychologists have pointed out, it is via the expressions conveyed by the mouth - especially the smile - that many resonant social cues are communicated. Hide the mouth, and you hide a vital source of empathetic communication. The other locus of empathy is the eyes, and as these are now downcast, the alienating effect is much exacerbated.. But into this affective desert of the three-dmeinsional world in which are bodies are located flows the sustaining river of the internet.

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but its hard not to think that the ‘rulers’ of the internet have a vested interest in maintaining and even enhancing alienation in the real world so that we will seek out some kind of resonance in a virtual one.

These terms, ‘alienation’ and ‘resonance’ derive from  the writings of the contemporary German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, and what he says helps us understand the dynamics of an especially alienating environment like the subway, but also much more generally, the alienating dynamics of modernity as a whole. Rosa’s thesis is presented in depth in Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Polity, 2019), where he employs the physio-musical metaphor of ‘resonance’ to describe the most cherished relationship desired by humans across time and space, which, he says,  is to feel that the world is somehow benignly responsive.  We all want to live in an oasis, but we fear that the world is a desert – mute, arid……alienating.  Rosa emphasises that these two poles of our relationship to the world are enacted through socially learned systems of belief and rituals that serve to define our basic hopes and fears in specific ways. Thus, he emphasizes, a “key question is then in what contexts, under what conditions, and through what praxes a subject has experienced being borne up in life, where they search for oases – and in what other contexts they have experienced the desert.”  In this sense: “Resonance can be understood as both descriptive and a normative concept, one that helps us to understand social reality on two levels at once. First, the human subject and human consciousness necessarily evolve in and from resonant relationships between and experiencing centre and something that it encounters…..Second, because this is the case, human activity can also be understood as being motivated, in its deep structure, by the longing and quest for resonance as well as the fear of being exposed to a cold, hostile world.”

Crucial to Rosa’s argument is the fact that in order for resonance to occur it is necessary to be in a state of consciousness that combines control and lack of control, a fluid sense of both separation from and fusion with the world. Resonance is only possible when there is “a relation between two bodies that are at once open enough for a relationship while at the same time remaining sufficiently stable and closed so as to ‘sound’ at their own frequency or ‘speak with their own voice’.” This means “resonance is possible only by accepting, or rather affirming, an inaccessible, irreducible Other that can never be completely adaptively transformed and always contains within itself the possibility of contradiction.”

Following earlier theorists of modernity, Rosa argues that modernity in toto – but especially late modernity -  is culturally oriented toward alienation because it is structurally driven toward controlling the world through appropriation and domination, making existence seem manageable, calculable, and predictable.  In The Uncontrollability of the World (Polity, 2020), Rosa writes: “We are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things – segments of world – within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controlled.”  But resonance “ultimately cannot be reconciled with the idea of intellectual, technological, moral, and economic mastery of the world.”  As a result, we exist in a condition of profound alienation, inwardly disconnected from each other and the world” “Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself.”

In the pessimistic prognoses of the Left, Rosa notes, “The catastrophe of resonance in the sense of the world falling permanently mute……appears to be not an unfortunate accident, but the very telos of the process of modernization”, and while Rosa concurs with this recognition of the systemically rooted tendency of modernity to drive people toward greater alienation, he also distances himself from earlier theories by incorporating the lessons of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology.Specifically, he draws on the idea central to phenomenology that human relationships with the world involve responsive relationship on both sides, and Rosa’s theory is ultimately founded on the conviction that there is “a fundamental relatedness that precedes the division of subject and object and serves as the very basis both of the presence of the world and of subjective experience.” This means that human relationship to the world “are first established existentially and corporeally, and that the world, as the always already present other side of said relationship, necessarily concerns us in some way  as subjects, that it has significance for us and that we find ourselves intentionally oriented toward it.” As a result, “resonance appears not as something that first develops between a self-conscious subject and a ‘premade’ world, but as the event through which both commence’. It is therefore in relation to a world not of inert things but of ‘affordances’  that the subject negotiates the world. Here, it is recognized that our relations to the world are generated outside the representational regime of any given culture, and emerge very directly from the body

Rosa’s deepening of the basis for social analysis and critique leads him to conclude that “a history of modernity as that of a catastrophe of resonance is one-sided and overly simplistic.”  A situation of total socio-cultural alienation or total control is impossible. Thus, he casts his theory as part of a counter-history “which makes it clear that modernity is both at once: tremendous sensitivity to resonance and catastrophe of resonance simultaneously.” The diagnosis of modernity as only mute and cold fails to adequately gasp the essential paradox that modernity both starves people of resonance while at the same time nurturing the great desire for such resonance, and that it organizes social structures within which genuine forms of resonant relationship to the world can be explored.

In sum, Rosa argues that meaningful human existence requires responsive openness to being affected by the world – being touched, moved, or ‘called’ –  and this in its turn, depends on a culture in which  the world is in some sense capable of  ‘responding’ to our desirous approach.  But while resonant relationships are severely constrained within modernity, this same modernity also contains the outlines of visions of better, more resonant, worlds. For the escalation of the appropriation of the world during the modern period has also produced an escalation of longing for resonance. Modern culture is therefore characterized by the presence of social spaces dedicated to creating the conditions that allow people to temporarily experience visions of better worlds - of oases - and to preserving memories of them.

In this ultimately hopeful prognosis of the fate of modern existence, society is understood to contain social structures aimed at facilitating the goal of recalling, creating, and preserving resonant relationships to the world. We are reminded that a better world is  possible, w a world where  relationships to the world are truly resonant. In turning to the social structures designed to facilitate such relations, Rosa writes: “What drives modern subjects to visit museums and movie theaters, concert halls and opera houses, and to read novels, poems, and plays as if their lives depended on it is the fact that these activities allow them, at last at a pathic level, to test out and rehearse in a playful, exploratory way widely different modes of relating to the world – solitude  and abandonment, melancholy, attachment, exuberance, anger and rage, hate and love – and thereby moderate and modify their own relationships to the world.”

The problem, as Rosa acknowledges, is that the deep craving for resonance has become increasingly commercialized. This is obvious in relation to much popular culture, and the potential for monetizing resonance has been greatly expanded by the internet. Isn’t it in the interests of those in control of social media, for example, to maintain feelings of alienation in the real world so as to maximize the need for resonance in the commercialized digital one?

Which leads me back to the  Seoul subway.  I wouldn’t say the ‘alieneation-effect’ has been masterminded my some malign cabal, but it does seem as though the society in which we are living is becoming more an more alienated ‘off-line’, and as a result, the ‘on-line’ world is gaining ever increasing shares of our deep craving for the resonant oasis through offering us compensatory, but ultimately, all to often trivial, commercialized, exploitative, and fake forms of resonances. But, as Rosa emphasizes, alongside all these manufactured and commercialized forms of ‘resonance at a price’ or ‘resonance-light’  there also exist genuine possibilities of resonance within modernity. But maybe not on the Seoul subway system. And maybe not through your smartphone. After all, one of the main obstacles to having real resonance via the digital is that it leaves your body out, leaves it frozen in real space while you mind roams far away. Another, is that a compelling attraction of the smartphone is the degree of control it confers on the user, and as Rosa emphasizes, seeking and exerting control makes resonance very difficult to experience.

Image sources:

Photo of Seoul subway: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/world/asia/south-korea-coronavirus-shincheonji.html

Hartmut’s Rosa’s Books are available at:

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Resonance%3A+A+Sociology+of+Our+Relationship+to+the+World-p-9781509519927

https://www.wiley.com/en-kr/The+Uncontrollability+of+the+World-p-9781509543175