The Tyranny of the Measurable

 

‘For it is well that the years should not seem to wear us away and disperse us like a handful of sand; rather they should fulfil us.’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 

The final pose at the end of a yoga practice is savasana (corpse pose) where a practitioner assumes a supine position; closes/softens her eyes; relaxes her mind and dissolves all the tension in her body. This pose integrates the benefits of her asana practice. It has a reputation of being ‘the hardest yoga pose’ because people have a difficult time lying still after moving through an asana practice; and overcoming the restlessness of needing to move on to the next thing. Regardless, savasana is still a part of the practice and when a practitioner skips this part of her practice, her practice is incomplete. Interestingly, in the Learn Skills Faster episode, Andrew Huberman of the Huberman Lab podcast describes a neurological process that bears the verisimilitude of savasana. ‘There are also data showing that after any kind of motor movement provided, you’re not bringing a lot more additional new sensory stimuli, there’s a replay of the motor sequence that you performed correctly and there’s an elimination of the motor sequences that you performed incorrectly, and they are run backwards in time.’ This process differs from sleep in that in sleep the correct sequence is performed forwards in time. This process happens necessarily within the same session as the actual motor movement. It is a critical part of the learning process. It is both indispensable and unmeasurable. This is where the restlessness comes in. In a society where ‘time is money’ and productivity is valued above most if not all things; this ‘doing nothing’ can be quickly labelled as sloth. Novice practitioners can easily come up with a list of things they could be doing instead of savasana and they do, to the detriment of all the work they just put in. This brings me to the relationship between the symbolism of ‘coherence’ and ‘completion’.

 

Jonathan Pageau of The Symbolic World in a podcast episode titled ‘The Apple CEO, 666, and The Garden of Eden’ explicates on the relationship between the symbolism of the numbers 6 and 7. The easiest illustration is how they are connected in The Creation Myth. The work of creation was finished on the 6^th day and the 7^th day was the Sabbath, the day of rest. In Biblical symbolism, 6 is the number of coherence (the ‘consistency’ of the work week) and 7 is the number of completion. Essentially there are 6 days which are measurable in terms of productivity and then there is the 7^th day which is not. The cadence of the first 6 days is the same and it changes dramatically on the 7^th day. The 7^th day is a day set apart. Slowly, however, this day’s difference and essence has been lost to society, and the day has been changed into just another day to serve the means of production. In his book, The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han writes ‘God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. Thus, when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine… Rest is not merely recovery from work nor is it a preparation for further work. Rather, it transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work… If rest becomes a form of recovery from work, as is the case today; it loses its specific ontological value. It no longer represents an independent, higher form of existence and degenerates into a derivative of work.’ When we fail to set aside rest, we become beasts of burden living mundane lives, reduced to servomechanisms of production. ‘Rest is made to serve production and is degraded into leisure and recreational time’(Han).

Han writes, ‘Most importantly, during the Sabbath man rests his tongue from the everyday chit-chat & learns silence and listening. The sabbath demands silence; the mouth must be closed.’ Most of the communication that takes place today is serving the means of production. There is on one hand the endless chatter of social media: posts, lives, boomerangs, comments, DMs, likes etc. which is mostly meaningless and on the other hand, businesses are becoming more and more dependent on WhatsApp for e.g., to achieve their productive ends. This, no doubt, makes it quicker to communicate but it also increases the endlessness of it all. Communication has become more about quantity than quality and we end up saying a lot about nothing or even worse, using our mental bandwidth in attempts to stay on top of unread emails or messages which themselves have an exponential life of their own. This has created a lot of dread; of missing important communication and of missing out on other important things in life. Production spills over and seeps into every crevice of our lives. And any silence from our side (unread and unanswered correspondence) is ill received and we are labelled as rude, and impolite. An app like WhatsApp has increased the accessibility of people beyond belief. For people who have had the same phone number since time immemorial; all the people they would have met over the years, in all those different seasons have access to them today, now, in this season. This hyper-accessibility may serve production, but the psyche takes a pounding. There is also a hyper-surveillance where people’s movements on the app. are tracked and timestamped. There is an expectation and entitlement, socio-normatively, that if people are online they imperatively have to acknowledge and read all the messages that come in.  

 

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, in their book Metaphors We Live By write ‘Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish- a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought of action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do everyday is very much a matter of metaphor.’ Communication, of the nature discussed above, is promoted and endorsed because it is highly measurable and can therefore be used productively. The content is largely insignificant because it is largely bullshit. Harry Frankfurt in Bullshit writes, ‘One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit’. However, this communication is measurable and measured. It is the bits/s that make this communication valued and the ringing bell that makes tech companies salivate like Pavlovian dogs is data. As Lakoff & Johnson put it; we live by metaphors and they can provide perspective on how we see things and their affordances to us. In general, living in the information age, this movement of information is described as the ‘flow’ of information. When we are on the internet; we are said to be ‘surfing’ the net. We ‘stream’ when we watch or listen to something online. There are data ‘lakes’ where raw data is stored. Our language depicts how we see data in relation to ourselves. This means we metaphorically see and experience data as water, and this itself is a harbinger of things to come. As fun as surfing is, human beings can’t ride waves indefinitely. You have to, eventually, get out the water or risk drowning. With the omnipresence of information and communication, drowning presents itself as a large and looming possibility. Also, is Big Data akin to a Big Wave of the Nazará proportion?  or is it like Meta Data and it represents a Meta Cosmic Reality named The Great Deluge and its mass extinction implications? Things to think about.

I would like to colligate this with another metaphor we live by. The word ‘understand’ etymologically means ‘stand in the midst of’. When we have grasped something than we are standing in it. It’s ok to stand in water up to your knees but what happens if the data is quantitatively large (as is its nature) or moving so quickly, it knocks you off your feet? How and when does understanding take place and become knowledge. Nicholas Carr beffitingly named his book, on our inability to ‘dive deep’ to understand and know ‘The Shallows’. Han writes: ‘processors are faster than a human being precisely because they neither think nor understand, they only calculate… the proponents of dataism would argue that humans invented thinking because they cannot calculate fast enough, and that the age of thinking will prove to be a short historical interlude.’ Homo Sapiens’ big claim to fame is this ‘thinking’. What then to become of the thinking man in the times of calculation and algorithm? If we are still standing then we are likely, sinking.

With our limited understanding and knowledge, one would assume we would have less to say and yet the means of production, press upon us more ardently; insisting that we continue speaking and increasing the speed at which we do this. Less to say. More communication. The proliferation of Bullshit. Frankfurt writes ‘Bullshit is unavoidable when circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus, the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled- whether by their own propensities of by the demands of others- to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.’

 

‘Work, work, work, work, work, work’ Our Barbados-born princess sings in her not-so-surprisingly named song, ‘Work’. The hard work Rihanna is singing about is not traditional work but a labour for love, or rather a labour for a connection beyond sex. Dare I say a ‘relationship’. We are at least comforted that Rihanna only repeats ‘work’ 6 times and not 7. On the 7^th day, she can rest from the need to keep that particular ‘relation-ship’ afloat in these tumultuous seas that is modern day dating. Hook-up culture is one of the insidious ways which illustrate how far we’ve embraced the measurable; even in our so called private spaces. How many matches? right swipes? followers? subscribers? Frankly, How much? Interactions between people are fixated on sex. With sex off the table, the table itself ceases to exist. Sex sells now more than ever but now we are willingly pimping ourselves out productively. We have reduced one another into succubae and incubi where the sexual act and its finality is prioritized above all else. We consume each other to the point of disgust, if not physically then virtually. Han writes, ‘the sexual act in today’s porn films seems mechanical. The principle of performance has also taken hold of sex, giving the body, the function of a sexual machine.’ In the spirit of performance and sensationalism, we are continuously stretching the boundaries of sex and sex which is just one dimension of existence permeates all the other dimensions. Coprophilia and Bestiality are becoming commonplace. A few weeks ago, a sex scene from The Wife went viral and it was heralded as a first of its kind in the South African context. Not only was this inevitable, the general trajectory of broadcasting lends to an increase in gratuitous salacious content to garner more views. ‘What the Immanuelle is going on here?’ commented a viewer because there was a time when sex had a time and a place, it was contained, it wasn’t broadcast when children were wide awake. The broadcasting of sex in the first place has been a very slippery slope. And now it’s everywhere. How do we call it sexual liberation when we are clearly enslaved to sexuality and can hardly move in any direction without being bombarded by it? We’ve also violently reduced each other to faces and genitals which we use and discard. And why would a phenomenon such as ‘Ghosting’ surprise us? What justification or explanation would we need to provide to a face and genitals? And besides lengthy explanations would require time that the means of productions do not encourage; it’s simply on to the next one. ’Porn kills off sexuality and eroticism more effectively than moral repression ever could have hoped to… the pathology of today’s society is the excess of positivity. It’s a too much not a too little that is making us sick’(Han).

 

In one of the Thinking Ape episodes, Stardusk speaks about an old duffel bag that was given to him by his father that lasted for more than a decade in good working order. And he laments how things are just not made to last for a long time anymore. Things have no durability. Which is precisely how a society of production would want it to be. Things are made, not mainly for the utility they provide, but to be sold. The sell is the bottom-line and there’d be just enough product substance to entice people to buy. There are times when there is insufficient product substance to warrant a purchase but once the hedonic treadmill has got people running on it like gerbil on spinning wheels; not much convincing is needed to have them spending money needlessly. We’ve fetishized the new and we are constantly upgrading and updating. We, as Han puts it, don’t use things but use them up. Even novelty is lost on us. Novelty is the new against the background of the old. When new is foregrounded against the new, it is not novel; it is just the sameness of the new; the coherence of production. Han, ‘the new quickly deteriorates into routine. It is a commodity that is used up and arouses the need for the new again. The compulsion of production as the compulsion to seek the new, only gets us deeper into the quagmire of routine in order to escape emptiness, we consume ever more new things, new stimuli and experiences. It is precisely the feeling of emptiness which spurs communication of emptiness which spurs communication and consumption.’ Our identities become as fickle as the ever-changing things around us. Nothing grounds us, and there is nothing to stand under (understand) either. Life is an ever-changing morass of insecurity and uncertainty. We are stabilized as every morning we wake up to new ceilings. We are unhomed, perpetually.

 

We’ve also lost the capacity to play and laugh. Play for the sake of play does not serve the means of production. It is merely unmeasurable in economic terms. It is the expenditure of energy that doesn’t translate into money. Han describes how poetry is becoming ever so rate because poetry is linguistic play. Haiku and Limerick are games with specific rules and the value of the game lies in successfully adhering to the rules of the game. On Monday afternoon at 3pm CAT, Chillers the world over gather to laugh while watching McGee, Sol Phenduka, and Ghost Lady play with language. A form of resistance against the tyranny of the measurable. Sure, the number of subscribers is a measurable metric, but that was the form that followed the function. And chillers aren’t mere spectators, they participate in following along and sharing in the laughter when Sol the PUNisher drops a pun. And there is no sophistry, no theatrics, no ‘TV personality’ paraphernalia, simple guys and girl, simply dressed, playing to their heart’s content. And it’s on productivity’s main day, Monday, during the actual workday. What was a Blue Monday?

 

Speaking of blue. There is a rhyme that goes: ‘something olde, something new, something borrowed and something blue, a sixpence in your shoe.’ This is a tradition that the bride incorporated when she married to ward off evil spirits and bring forth a good and happy marriage. Marriages themselves are falling apart quicker than they happened in the first place. There is a plethora of reasons why this is the case, (Rollo Tomassi has a comprehensive list) but my focus will be on one where productivity rears its head once again. In modern marriages, the marriage which has become an event (as opposed to a ceremony) of elaborate expenditure and consumption is disproportionality emphasized more than the everyday rituals of marriage. Even beyond the wedding, material acquisition (productivity) becomes the mainstay of the marriage or the online performance and parade of carefully curated consumption. Most of marriage is daily bread. The actual wedding is meant to be a ritualistic crossing of a threshold where a transformation takes place in the individuals who are about to start a life together. And yet this is not what takes place at weddings, the people in the advent of the marriage are the same as they were before the wedding and that marriage becomes like a house build on sand. Han, ‘The daily bread provides no stimuli. Stimuli quickly pale. Repetition discovers intensity in what provides no stimuli, in the unprepossessing, in the bland. The person who expects something new and exciting all the time, by contrast, overlooks what is already there [or simply loses interest in it].’ Marriages are frail because the objective unifying purpose of a marriage is lost to the subjective states of individuals within the marriage; the bond was flimsy to begin with.

 

In Gabor Maté’s, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he writes, ‘Boredom rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states.’ Tom Bilyeu says what usually gets people is boredom; it’s the taedium vitae that is part and parcel of any goal pursuit; long stretches of burden punctuated by the short excitement of a milestone reached. The measurable would want us to frame boredom in a negative light so we are compelled to seek out new stimuli. A friend of mine Katlego Letlonkane says, ‘there are no boring things; just uninterested people.’ Our relationship to the objects around us is discursive and dismissive and objects are viewed through a lens of disposability. This contemptuous ‘been there, done that’ attitude makes it very difficult to move away from our solipsism to see things as daily bread, to bear witness to them, to experience intensity and not tedium, to form relationships with the everyday things around us and the everyday duties required of us as to experience being homed and subsequently a homing. ‘Men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same desk and the same chair’(Han).

 

In a preceding paragraph I mentioned how porn as a machine of productivity has reduced people to genitals and faces. The process of legal identification has done the same thing. People are reduced to a face, a unique number and two or so more particulars. IDs, driver’s licences, student cards, employee access cards, passports etc. This is something we have generally accepted and relegated to that particular sphere of life. This process of reduction may be more pernicious than we think. Zoom, Skype and Teams are ways where only the face matters productively. Apple has Facetime because it is time with your face, only. Michael Phillip in his Third Eye Drop podcast once said that we have become heads moving way faster than our bodies and we have left our bodies behind. We live in our heads and because we live in the information age, prepositional knowledge is valued above everything else. Our bodies take up space and they are slower than our brain’s processing speed, embodiment requires time, deliberate action requires time, enacting requires time, rituals require time. But time is money. Intercourse is ignored for unrelenting discourse. As prized as prepositional knowledge is, it falls short in offering us what we need to live fulfilling lives.  Wisdom is rare while depression, alienation, formlessness and meaninglessness are rife. We are burnt out and our bodies have become landfills of pathologies. The hyper-exposure of the day denies the arcane and art, it also denies an agency that is unifying and complete. We are dispersed. We lack the situational awareness to fully participate in life because we are not situated.

 

And on the 7^th day God rested. He participated fully in his creation. He observed it. Observing the sabbath is a ritual. The disappearance of rituals has been a marker of the days where only the measurable matters and is attended to. Like all tyrants, productivity does not have limits. Its avarice requires all our lives.

And on the 7^th day God rested. He recognised his creation. He communed with it. Han writes, ‘But what is recognition? It is surely not merely a question of seeing something for the second time. Nor does it imply a whole series of encounters. Recognition means knowing something as that with which man makes himself at home in the world, to use a Hegelian phrase, is constituted by the fact that every act of recognition of something has already been liberated from our first contingent apprehensions of it, and is then raised into ideality. This is something that we are all familiar with. Recognition always implies that we have come to know something more authentically than we were able to do when caught up in our first encounter with it. Recognition elicits the permanent from the transient.’ 

And on the 7^th day God rested. Productive time became transformative durable time. John Vervaeke, ‘Ritual situates us in imaginal time in order to afford imaginally augmented cognition and perception to discern real patterns; to enter into right relationship with our future selves; to empower our self-correction and our self-regulation and to enact the serious play needed to self-transcend and aspire.’