Why are things as bad as they are, and what if anything can we do to improve things? If there is an area where philosophy, political thinking, social theory, artistic imperatives, and ethical reflection meet, surely it is in asking these questions. Different people with different concerns and interests will conceive of ‘things’ in different ways, with diagnoses of what is ‘bad’, and consider different kinds of potentially ameliorative actions. The questions are, if not perennial, certainly deeply entrenched and durable in Western thought; without great strain or ingenuity one could view Plato, Augustine, and Dante as offering comprehensive answers to both questions. The political philosopher Michael Rosen has reconstructed and analyzed a relevant strain in modern European thought, beginning with Étienne de la Boétie’s Discourse of Involuntary Servitude in the sixteenth-century and continuing into the twentieth-century with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, that focuses on the question ‘Why do people (seem to) consent to their own subordination, existential misery, and unfreedom?’, the force of which presupposes a particular answer to the first general question.
The philosopher Raymond Geuss’s The Idea of a Critical Theory gives the classic exposition and evaluation of the sorts of claims that provide the scaffolding for Adorno’s and also Jürgen Habermas’s diagnoses and proposals. On Geuss’s reconstruction, an Adorno-Habermas-type ‘critical theory’ would start from the diagnosis that we are in some self-imposed initial state of false consciousness, error, and unfreedom, and that if we come to recognize both that our current condition is flawed and that it is self-imposed, we can be both enlightened, i.e. free from error, and emancipated, i.e. freed from self-imposed coercion. (Geuss, p. 58) Geuss goes on to distinguish sharply between Adorno’s and Habermas’s version of what criteria an agent might appeal to in order to gain the requisite self-understanding: for Adorno the relevant criteria are inevitably historical and specific to the agents’ social context; for Habermas the criteria are transcendental and so available to any rational human being who reflects upon the conditions of successful communication. (pp. 63-8)
Although as reconstructed by Geuss critical theory has a sophisticated account of the conceptual framework and claims surrounding the two questions, it has no monopoly on diagnoses and proposals for progress. One of the most prominent of alternative lines of thinking involves anthropological research and reflection, where an anthropologist considers some small-scale societies or groups and offers their manner of life as an attractive alternative to the political, social, economic, environmental, artistic, and/or existential problems that plague capitalist modernity. One quick way of dismissing such anthropological reflection comes from the philosopher Bernard Williams, who noted that the manner of life of small-scale societies is not really something we can imagine as a liveable alternative for those who live in large-scale industrialized societies. But one might further think that Williams’s dismissal is too quick in begging the question as to how extensive, deep, and/or urgent our problems are, and accordingly great the changes we might make after reflection, enlightenment, and emancipation; the fact that, say, the massive use of fossil fuels is deeply engrained in contemporary life is no argument against a rapid, planned global abandonment of such fuel.
Over the past three decades, in a publishing career that began in the 1970s, the anthropologist Tim Ingold has been to my mind the most interesting and challenging figure pursuing an anthropological response to the two questions. In his most recent book, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now, he turns his attention to the peculiar phenomenon of ‘generations’, that is, social reality that across a broad range of Western societies for the past couple of hundred years people tend to think of themselves as part of a ‘generation’ that shares certain kinds of experiences, points of orientation, sensibilities, defining collective events, and sense of which phenomena are salient and important. Sociologists since the late nineteenth-century have investigated and tried to conceptualize ‘generations’, most prominently Karl Mannheim in his canonical essay of the late 1920’s ‘The Problem of Generations’. There Mannheim characterized a generation as (a) a ’concrete group’, that is, a number of individuals unified through naturally developed or consciously willed ties; who are further (b) socially located; so that (c) given basic facts about human life and its rhythms (life and death, limited life span, ageing); are (d) predisposed to certain characteristic kinds of thought, experience, and action. Finally, within any generation there are (e) units that are united by a common destiny (so Mannheim says, following Heidegger), but which adopt differing and opposed attitudes, for example the way that groups after the French Revolution adopted Romantic-conservative vs. Rationalist-liberal attitudes towards that complex event. So far, so good. Ingold’s distinctive diagnostic thought is recent generations conceptualize themselves as what he calls ‘Generation Now’; that this assumes or entails a further set up supporting images, metaphors, and conceptualizations of very basic aspects of human life, such as attitudes to the past and future, a shared sense of the shape of a worthwhile human life and associated sense of purpose, and a particular conceptualization of the proper interaction between generations, especially with regard to education; and that this set of conceptualizations is wholly malign.
Ingold proposes that Generation Now’s most fundamental self-conceptualizations relate to time, temporal succession, and the relationships among past, present, and future, and all this both of the macro-level of societies and on the micro-level of individuals’ courses of life. Generation Now’s model is stratigraphic: each generation is like a thin layer laid on top of an indeterminately large pile of previous layers of generations, and the future is qualitatively distinct only in being in different, though unknowably so. Each generation is as it were on its own, with its own distinctive problems, concerns, and sensibilities. There is no interaction among the layers, other than the availability of the results of previous generations for the later generations. For any generation, previous generations can be nothing other than a deposit of resources (p. 9). At the level of the individual, the pressure of the stratigraphic model imposes the shape of a tri-partite bell-curve on the course of life: life is a short period of education in preparation for work, then centrally a long period of active work, then a short retirement with its purposeless waiting for the end. Ingold considers the imposition of the stratigraphic model a disaster, especially because on this model young people and old people have nothing to say or to do with each other: “[y]oung and old now find themselves irrevocably divided on opposite sides. For the young, the present holds up their coming; for the old, it recasts their passing as a retreat. This separation of young and old, I believe, is one of the great tragedies of the modern age.” (p. 26)
As an alternative to the stratigraphic model, Ingold proposes an image of a rope, and then point-by-point gives contrasting conceptualizations of time and temporalization. Like a stack, a rope is made of individual finite elements in determinate relations. But the rope gains an integrity and tensile strength by virtue of the intertwining of its overlapping elements. The key feature of the contrasting images is their implied conceptualization of a new element to the pre-existing structure. Whereas there is a fundamental discontinuity between any new layer and the pre-existing strata upon which it is laid and superimposed, any new strand introduced into a rope takes up, models itself upon, and extends a pre-existing pattern of striations. Extensions of a rope are fundamentally continuous with its prior elements. In a rope, the past is active; it is in Faulkner’s phrase, not even past. So the project of the book is to diagnose the ways that the metaphor and image of strata in modern life has impoverished fundamental existential concerns--tradition and heritage, conservation and extinction, sustainability and progress, and art and science--, and to show how reconceptualizing these concerns with the metaphor and image of the rope might re-orient human life in more sustainable and meaningful ways.
Given Ingold’s claim about the separation of the young and the old in modern times, one can readily imagine that his proposals for explicating the existential dimensions and social transformations implicit in the rope metaphor turn on the idea of the collaboration of generations. Like so many who have been struck by the Australian Aboriginal conception of Dreamtime, Ingold notes that in the Dreaming of the Pintupi, there is no sharp separation among past, present, and future. Instead, in the Dreaming there is only existence, where every thing is everywhere and everywhen, and there is only “pure possibility. Thus, every actual creature, as the incarnation of the ancestral power from which its vitality is derived, effectively finds itself on the inside of an eternal moment of world-creation.” (p. 53) This contrasts with the modern sense of the stratigraphic person as a creature of potential, ultimately fulfilled or not, and if fulfilled something with “nowhere further to go. That’s it; life’s up.” (ibid) In a striking corollary Ingold contrasts the relevant conceptions of the natural world and its denizens: instead of them embodying the active ancestral powers of the Dreaming, for moderns it’s something set apart for oneself, either available as a resource or ‘preserved’ as an item in the catalog of biodiversity.
The book’s concluding discussion of education offers Ingold’s most sustained and also most pointed contrast of metaphors. The diagnostic target is the recent re-orientation of higher education towards the so-called ‘STEM’ subjects (science, technology, engineering, math). Ingold skips the standard humanistic lament of the alleged recent loss of centrality of humanities in higher education, and instead notes the loss of the disciplines of science, engineering, and mathematics. In each of these disciplines “is a lineage of begetting, wound like a rope from the overlapping scholarly lives of its numerous practitioners. And, as a student, your task is to carry it on.” (pp. 112-13) By contrast, STEM is first of all an acronym, and as such it “rouses no passions, no memories, no sense of longing. It betokens nothing but sterile, detached instrumentality,” one which is “an index of [traditional disciplines’] wholesale takeover, in the name of research and development, and their subordination to the logic and interests of Generation Now.” (p. 113) Ingold notes an especially malign development wherein a major art school, the Rhode Island School of Design, added an ‘A’ for arts and initiated the hyper-Generation Now proposal of an arts education that “aims to prepare future generations to compete in today’s innovation economy” (p. 114).
Ingold’s proposed alternative for the arts is that they “recover the sense of correspondence, of going along with things and learning from them.” (for an explication of Ingold’s conception of correspondence, see my review of his recent book of that title (noted in the references below)). This invocation of ‘going along with things and learning from them’ refers back to an earlier section of the book where Ingold presents what seems to me the philosophical core of his thought. He starts by noting the progressivist self-understanding of Generation Now: on its (stratigraphic) understanding, a Generation Now views itself as it were as a planner and problem-solver, and thereby projects a sense of the future as the time and space of a problem solved, or a plan realized. Against this conception, Ingold recalls John Dewey’s account of experience as an undergoing: in doing something, one not only experiences something but also transforms oneself. The self prior to the experience and the ‘same’ self after the experience are not in every way identical. Further, following the psychologist J. J. Gibson, Ingold changes the focus from of a human being’s primary involvement in the world from intention and action to attention, which involves exposure and attunement to some situation. (p. 56) Exposure, Ingold urges, involves a sense of fundamental vulnerability, a being-affected by a situation, while attunement implies a kind of skillful or at least achieved knowing-one’s-way-about. So the undergoing which is part of every experience is also a ceaseless passage from vulnerability to achievement. Generation Now’s self-conception of agency is not just culturally disastrous, but a kind of philosophical mistake.
There’s much more in this short book. I have neglected two major motifs: Ingold’s constant invocation of a ‘longitudinal’ understanding, where concerns cut across the conceptualization of time as a series of points or uni-directional paths and trajectories; and his use of Walter Benjamin’s famous conceptualization of the ‘angelus novus’ or Angel of History, which he re-interprets against Benjamin as a way of thinking about movement in time that “gazes towards ancestral ways” and “longs to regain the path of tradition, with its promise of renewal for a future everlasting.” (pp. 24-25, and then throughout the book). It seems to me that Ingold’s basic claims can be readily grasped without these motifs, both of which are articulations and elaborations of the attempt to conceptualize ways in which previous generations might be thought of as part of a continuous, collective project undertaken with a current generation. I offer only one comment: Ingold’s conceptualizations here are immensely attractive, indeed self-evidently so; some offer a basic conceptual re-orientation, and others, particularly the remarks about education, suggest certain readily implemented practical proposals, all of which touch on the diagnosis of a distinctively modern malaise of as it were generational loneliness. I wonder, though, whether Ingold hasn’t made too much of the claim that progressivism is a central feature of Generation Now’s self-conceptualization. It seems to me that progressivism has passed (recall Jean-Francois Lyotard’s once-influential conception of the so-called Postmodern Condition); what remains is rather an aimless and unhinged drive of change qua change. Does anyone imagine that it’s for the better?
References:
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), in Illuminations (1968)
Étienne de la Boétie, Discourse of Involuntary Servitude (1577)
John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934)
Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (1981)
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)
Tim Ingold, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (2024)
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)
Karl Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’ (1927-28), in Karl Mannheim: Essays (1952)
John Rapko, ‘Review of Tim Ingold’s Correspondences’, at https://www.academia.edu/65136814/Critical_Review_Tim_Ingolds_Correspondences_2021_
Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: On False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (1996)
Bernard Williams, ‘The Truth in Relativism’, in Moral Luck (1981)