by Mark Greif
This meant not only not giving credence to impressions, but, in a sense, never aestheticizing them, never enjoying them as more than accidental facts or conjunctures, never investing them with any aura beyond their material constitution and fate, never giving them a place in a drama to be remembered or dwelt upon emotionally. Hence the hostility of Epictetus to the tragic drama and the epic of strong feelings. What sort of person complains and lets passion and experience get the better of him, saying, “Woe is me”?
Do you suppose I will mention to you some mean and despicable person? Does not Priam say such things [in the Iliad]? Does not Oedipus?…For what else is tragedy but a portrayal in tragic verse of the sufferings of men who have devoted their admiration to external things?…If one had to be taught by fictions, I, for my part, should wish for such a fiction as would enable me to live henceforth in peace of mind and free from perturbation.
Then, typically, Epictetus washes his hands of the question of drama, to return his followers to their choice: “What you on your part wish for is for you yourselves to consider.”
Epicureanism and Stoicism survived, even predominated, for centuries—centuries in which Platonism and Aristotelianism had gone into relative eclipse. (These latter were revived in the first century BC.) The anaesthetic doctrines’ memories now sit under a layer of dust. They are neglected by us, and their masters sit among the unrecognizables in the hundred forgotten generations between classical and modern.
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In the last essay, I spoke of some specific means of collecting the most important experiences: drugs and alcohol, sex, and travel. I suggested they are unreliable by themselves and contribute to dissatisfaction with existence by creating the need always to be searching for more.
Outside the disciplines of full anaesthetic ideologies—what we can find among Epicureans and Stoics, as life philosophies—I begin to wonder if our banal searches for experience today don’t often contain a shot of anaesthetic; something that allows these activities to serve the moderation of experience as well as its collection. What’s more, modern solutions to the intolerability of experience have a way of flipping back and forth between reactions to the too-painful experience of late-modern economy and adjustments to it as extensions of its reach.
With drugs and alcohol, the anaesthetic effect may seem just too obvious. Drowning your sorrows in drink is recognized to be the first and cheapest means of escaping experience. Whiskey continues to be a fine painkiller even if it is no longer used medicinally. You start drinking to look for fun, for experience. You end in another place. Alcohol is a means to collect experiences, and then, too, alcohol is abusive as well as abused, the cause of troubles with experience as well as a reaction to trouble with experience. If drinking fails us, which ideal is it failing—the life of fun, on a high, or the life of anaesthetization, shut off and protected?
Sometimes I find myself thinking about those high-school and collegiate and postcollegiate figures the “stoners.” What were their futures? They might have had their only natural social existence, without penalties, while still in school. But it seemed a plausible existence, like that of a creature who had found the right ecological niche. This penaltyless stoner was someone who would rise in the morning and take a hit from the bong, smoke through the day, take all experience (classes, social interactions) with a hazy anaesthesia that made it not quite experience, yet not quite anything so positive as “fun”—then finish off a bowl before going to sleep, to start the next day in the same way. It seemed a life of anti-experience, different from physical addiction. No doubt there is something myopic in a nostalgia for what the stoner proved was possible, if only for a few short years. No one thinks it ends well. But there was something about his manner, wreathed in smoke, that made him seem not like an adventurer but a symbol of a bizarre but real reaction to something we can’t name.
For the small group of people who insist on the legalization of marijuana, who can even become marijuana “activists,” the logic of their movement has become ever more oriented to the wedge issue of medically recognizable anaesthetization, the anaesthesia of cancer patients and the terminally ill. That is because it is the only way to make marijuana legible to our world, a world of experience and not anti-experience: by the recognized evil of interior bodily pain rather than the wish for a life less acute, or the acknowledgment of a healthy physiology that could prefer, somehow, haze in experience to our supposed clarity.
Sex and the search for sex hold out the acquisition of experience, much praised and discussed in our culture, against the unspoken moderation of experience by sex as a reassuring and intimate repetition. We speak of an alternative only in marriage: conjugality, the repetition of sexual experience as an act of love, but also as a kind of interpersonal comforting. Conjugality repeats, it does not much change, and it never needs to change unless its participants decide on change, since it is not ever done with anyone else. It is not precisely anaesthetic, but anti-experience. The larger culture of experience, of course, suggests that sex, in some sense, should always be done with someone else, in a new way. Your spouse or helpmate must become continually somebody new, somebody unknown, to share new experiences with. Our culture has become pornographic at all levels of its narrative structure: it always seeks a further experience beyond the last one, with more reach and extremity, even where the human mind seems limited to repetition, and human habit seems to prefer it. It is probably the case even in the carnival of dating, switching of partners, anonymous intimacy, that in the act of seeking and acquiring the sheer bodily presence of another person, whoever he or she may be, there is self-reassurance and even near self-anaesthesis: what matters in the moment will be not only the recountable events but silent, forgettable, forgotten-in-the-moment acts of mutual oblivion.
There are, of course, better-organized ways of seeking some relief from experience—non-naive ways, modern ideologies. The “voluntary simplicity” movement of the last decade was a self-conscious plan for the reduction of possessions in order to unclot experience, to find out which experiences, of so many options, were really needful. Simplicity would limit the acquisitive instinct in favor of the retention of a small number of indispensable items. You would learn first to get rid of a closet of clothes, for the most useful; get rid of many friends, for fewer; stop attending to much foreign news, for news closer to home; eventually, in the “advanced” techniques, have one car instead of two, then no car at all, a smaller house, an easier job, and a diminished but possibly more manageable or more vivid experience. The ideology was not always precisely anaesthetic; sometimes it was purifying of experience.
But wherever it did not acknowledge its own real opposition to experience of the dramatic kind, and could be co-opted by aesthetics of more vivid, purified, and improved experience, simplicity had the capacity to flip. It could become a matter not just of fewer clothes but of more perfect, ideal clothes, even new clothes. It furnished the basis for its own lifestyle magazine, Real Simple, a glossy for those who wanted to organize and vary, to switch between simplicities, or to stylize their environments in “simpler” hues of eggshell and porcelain and light pastel, rather than to reduce objects or even learn to accept the old, ugly, and easy, which exist already and therefore might be less spiritually intrusive.
I think the organized spiritual system of the greatest anaesthetic use to the largest number of people in America today must be Buddhism. And yet this still recruits only a tiny minority of seekers. Buddhism is the genuine article, an ancient system, however complicatedly it makes its way to us for modern purposes. Contemporary “nonattachment,” as it is sometimes described to me, sounds a good deal like Epicurean imperturbability and, in some formulations, Stoic apathy. The more I hear of “mindfulness,” the more I hear traces of aestheticism and perfectionism, though in mindfulness they are removed at last from the limiting requirements of artistry or moral self-scrutiny and are made instead a function of permanent biological habits (breathing, attention, basi
c sensation) in a kind of hybrid aestheticism-imperturbability. The Buddhist would protest, justifiably, that his practices came first and should be judged on their own. (I am not a Buddhist myself and therefore a bad judge.) What is striking in the Americanization of Buddhism, however, as it appears in books and pamphlets and tapes and talks, is the mixture of different methods and aims. We may just be seeing a diversity of sects and practices, or we may be seeing the perennial Janus-faced quality of American autotherapeutics. Something like mindfulness will be a way to moderate experience for some and to collect and intensify it for others; a way to drop out for some and to get ahead for others; a system at odds with convention for some and an adjustment to conventional life, reducing friction, for others. We knew already that yoga could be imported to this country and, for some, retained as an interlocking series of total systems of practice, knowledge, and devotion—while it was made a form of gym exercise to slim down and improve muscle tone for others.
Then there is the promise of the New Age. It is surprising how often New Age solutions come to us from aliens: interplanetary beings, men of the fifth dimension, and oceanic tribes preserving ancient wisdom lit by the glassy filtered blues of their bubbled Atlantis. I suppose these fantasy archaisms and interstellar revelations are no different finally from our worship elsewhere of the Orient against the Occident—our idea that truth must come from our morning rather than our eve. No different, probably, from my own desire to rediscover anaesthesis in the heart of the West, among sandal-wearing Epicureans or Stoics, while I willfully reinterpret their complex doctrine. We cannot take advice from ourselves, and so we take it from men and women with very strange ways. The stranger the better, so estranged are we from our fellow citizens, who can see no problem.
Certainly, all these systems, however practiced, are better than depression—perhaps the major arena for involuntary anaesthesis in our time (with its attendant losses of pleasure, will, and caring). What is often enough said by the mildly depressed—though we suspect them of magnifying their own problems into social problems—is that their depression is a logical and reasonable response to an environment of experiences and demands that are too intrusive. From the opposite perspective, and with much more authority, the severely depressed are inclined to say that their death in life cannot be a logical or reasonable response to anything, for their sense of the negation of experience goes beyond what any human being could want or will as self-protection. Depression does not save the self, it tells it to die. This seems so extreme as to be outside the reach of cultural analysis, even though anaesthesis, in its many other organized forms, is often a way of learning to “die” without dying. One wants to say something about depression, still stopping short of the point at which generalization encroaches on the individual malady. If there is a cultural world shared between the rise of “experience,” searched for as the only means to furnish happiness, and the steady creep of depression as a frequent, dominant affect for people who expected that their lives might be deserving of full happiness, then maybe there is also some causal connection. Maybe it is a sign that when experience has become intolerable, for whatever specific reasons, the mind and the body will unideologically attempt to solve what could only be solved with a practice, a system, and an ideology.
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We do not live in an age of the arts. The novel, theatrical play, and piece of symphonic music don’t matter very much. Art forms that seemed like the fruit of long lines of development, including opera, ballet, painting, and poetry, are now of interest to very few people.
We do, however, live in an aesthetic age, in an unprecedented era of total “design.” The look and feel of things, designed once, is redesigned and redesigned again for our aesthetic satisfaction and interest. Design, which can reach the whole world, has superseded art, whose individual objects were supposed to differ from one another and hold a sphere apart from the everyday.
But the particular aesthetic manifestations that interest me here are dramatic. It interests me that there is no end of fictions, and facts made over in the forms of fictions. Because we class them under so many different rubrics, and media, and means of delivery, we don’t recognize the sheer proliferation and seamlessness of them. I think at some level of scale or perspective, the police drama in which a criminal is shot, the hospital drama in which the doctors massage a heart back to life, the news video in which jihadists behead a hostage, and the human-interest story of a child who gets his fondest wish (a tourist trip somewhere) become the same sorts of drama. They are representations of strong experience, which, as they multiply, begin to de-differentiate in our uptake of them, despite our names and categories and distinctions.
We often say we watch the filmed dramas of strong experience for the sake of excitement or interest. This is true for any representation in the singular case. The large dramas of TV and movies, presumably, reflect back on our own small dramas. I, like the ER surgeons, have urgent tasks; I, like the detectives, try to solve things. If one watched, say, a single one-hour show once a month, the depicted experience might come across as a genuinely strong experience. If one watched (or carefully read) the news once a month, it might be a remarkably strong and probably an anguishing experience.
But since the spread of television, people have not, by and large, watched dramatic events singly, one a month or week. They’ve read more than one newspaper and magazine for longer than that. The newspaper itself was always a frame for diverse, incommensurable disasters. We watch and read in multiples. The media of the dissemination of dramas have not been substitutive, either; they have been additive. Not newspaper, then film, then radio, then TV, then the Internet, but all of the above exist today, all the time, in more places, with more common personalities and more crossover of tone, character, content, than before. The claims that fictional dramas exist to “excite,” “thrill,” or “entertain,” like the claims that news exists to “teach,” or to “let us know” or “be responsible,” have become increasingly incoherent or irrelevant, modeled as they are on viewings of single, focused events. In the era of the total aesthetic environment, the individual case is not as significant as is the effect of scale. While a single drama on television may be thrilling—as it renders the strongest experiences, of life, death, blood, conflict—the aggregate of all dramas on television can hardly be said to be thrilling, since the total effect of television upon a regular viewer is above all calming, as any viewer-in-bulk can testify.
This is the paradox. Watching enough represented strong experience is associated with states of relaxation and leisure, the extreme loosening and mellowness in which we find a person deliberately “vegetating” in front of the TV—while the walls are painted with criminals’ spattered blood, the muscle is pulsating between the doctors’ hands, and the hostage is beheaded, and beheaded again, and again, on several competing twenty-four-hour news channels, which no longer promise “up-to-the-minute” but “up-to-the-second” coverage, and show precisely the same events. Over a lifetime, you will also see the same events and scenarios acted out with different faces, sometimes in different genres, some real and some fictional—but “excitement” will very rarely be the reason you turn on the TV.
It used to seem that the news existed as a special case. I think people would agree, at first, if I said that prime time exists for relaxation but the news exists for rigor and truth. Yet what has the news ever been if not also, in some way, calming—or why would one watch the eleven o’clock news before going to bed, as other people take sleeping pills or sip warm milk; why would one watch the six o’clock news, which is even more brutal, more “serious,” while eating dinner—when we know in human life that the desire to eat and the ability to sleep are two activities that vanish with genuine disquiet?
With the rise of twenty-four-hour channels, news has become the core and most general case of the total aesthetic environment, because twenty-four-hour news does not play the old game of pretending you can choose to turn it off. Rather, it use
s the conceit that there is always something “happening,” an experience—though somebody else’s—that you must also know about, and the TV is only connecting you transparently to phenomena that should be linked to you anyway. This lie is predicated on notions of virtue, citizenship, responsibility.
I say I watch the news to “know.” But I don’t really know anything. Certainly I can’t do anything. I know that there is a war in Iraq, but I knew that already. I know that there are fires and car accidents in my state and in my country, but that, too, I knew already. With each particular piece of footage, I know nothing more than I did before. I feel something, or I don’t feel something. One way I am likely to feel is virtuous and “responsible” for knowing more of these things that I can do nothing about. Surely this feeling is wrong, even contemptible. I am not sure anymore what I feel.
What is it like to watch a human being’s beheading? The first showing of the video is bad. The second, fifth, tenth, hundredth are—like one’s own experiences—retained, recountable, real, and yet dreamlike. Some describe the repetition as “numbing.” “Numbing” is very imprecise. I think the feeling, finally, is of something like envelopment and even satisfaction at having endured the worst without quite caring or being tormented. It is the paradoxically calm satisfaction of having been enveloped in a weak or placid “real” that another person endured as the worst experience imaginable, in his personal frenzy, fear, and desperation, which we view from outside as the simple occurrence of a death.
