The Power of Function: Part One
It has been awhile since I last offered one of my “word doodles.” These are largely thought experiments that serve as a basis for my personal belief system, intended in a serious but not necessarily absolute sense. As my experience of life continues, hopefully I learn and ad and/or refine these concepts. It should be noted that what I mean by these words is not necessarily what the “standard” meaning is for them. They are: Karma, Being, Lifeworld, Emptiness, and Flow. A few other terms apply; my “three tenets,” “subtle-arrogance,” and a “sense of wonder” round things out. I have yet to fully express some of these additional concepts in my blog.
Now, I wish to articulate one final word doodle. It is a concept I have wrestled with since long before I started this blog. That word is “Function.” Function, as I mean it, has always been around since humans have formed tribes and societies. There are rules to how society works, rituals and institutions are established to assist with the collective management of human beings. Each of us unavoidably serves as a functional component within our tribe and/or culture. We have a role to play whether you look at us as a part of families or a part of metropolises.
With the Enlightenment these roles became infinitely more rationalized than ever before. Though I have praised the Enlightenment here, I want to discuss an unintended consequence of rational society in this post. To cut to the chase, the rationalization of the world directly affects the Lifeworld. It competes for bodily autonomous human authenticity. It changes what it means to be human.
In my review of Yuval Noah Harari’s excellent Homo Deus I emphasized the wording of two passages. Harari speaks of how “data” is fast becoming the new “religion” of humanity and what that means for the future development of our species. Specifically…
“Dataism adopts a strictly functional approach to humanity, appraising the value of human experiences according to their function in data-processing mechanisms.” (page 394) Also: “Dataism thereby threatens to do to Homo sapiens what Homo sapiens has done to all other animals. Over the course of history humans created a global network and evaluated everything according to its function within that network.” (page 400, my emphasis)
On a basic level, this is what I intend by my use of the word “Function.” Where once we individually functioned within traditional cultural directives, we now live in a world where virtual networks, political/economic systems, cultural forces, whatever you want to call them, have functionalized human beings into roles or schemes that directly affect our Lifeworlds to a degree never previously imagined.
When I go back to the writings of “second stage” minor existentialist philosophers, some 40 - 50 years ago, I find vague notions and a certain naïveté about how the future of “technology” will impact human beings. Yet, also, there is a sharp prescient vision. William Barrett is foremost among them. Consider his musings from 1979…
“The ‘technology of behavior,’ after which behavioral scientists yearn, ascribes the most sweeping powers to technique. It is assumed, or proposed to us as a hypothesis, that the techniques exist that can shape human beings completely for all situations of life. We have only to put them to use and we shall be able to mold mankind in whatever ways we might find desirable – than thus transform the human condition.” (page 112)
“We rail at technology when it gets too noisy, pollutes our air, or is about to drive a new superhighway through our living room. For the rest, we are content to consume its products unquestioningly. So long as we can negotiate the triumph of technology successfully, we are unconcerned to ask what the presuppositions of this technical world are and how they bind us to its framework. Already these presuppositions are so much the invisible medium of our actual life that we have become unconscious of them. We may eventually become so enclosed in them that we cannot even imagine another way of thought but technical thinking. That is the point at which we shall have turned all our questions over to think tanks as problems of human engineering. We seem already on the way there.” (page 223)
“Does the apparatus as a whole have a will of its own? Perhaps we had better call it the framework, keeping Heidegger’s meaning in mind, for the word ‘apparatus’ may be too closely tied down to the sheer mass of physical machinery. To apply Heidegger’s earlier terminology from Being and Time, the framework does not belong to the world of ‘ontic’ fact but of ‘ontological’ possibility. It is a project into which humankind as entered step by step to which it is now committed. It is a design and a possibility for the mastery of the globe and its resources into which mankind is now called strictly as a matter of survival. The actual configurations of peoples, powers, and economic organization take place more and more against the background of this framework. No one therefore strictly controls it. It seems to have a life of its own. And here we begin to encounter something uncanny: The framework is historically the supreme expression of man’s will to power in coping with nature; and yet it is something that begins to elude his will. It seems to live a life of its own, and yet in one way it is nothing but ourselves in our collective life.” (page 229)
My belief is that there is substantial evidence to indicate that not only have human beings become more functionalized by the development of modernity, even more ominously, the system(s), or what Barrett aptly calls, after Heidegger, “the framework” of modernity, has become uncoupled from its human creators and taken on a life of its own, further functionalizing us as subservient to the system(s), which at times seems to be at least as “real” and you and I are.
Examples of this abound, yet virtually all of them are accepted by us today as “normal,” nothing to be concerned about. Money and credit, media (the internet and television), sports and entertainment, the stock market, administrative bureaucracy, marketing, branding, and consumerism, the commodification of ourselves as objects of consumption are all examples of how our lives serve as a Function of the system. The illusion of autonomy created by having hobbies, interests, our passions, and weekends to ourselves is secondary compared with the power that the autonomy of entertainment and consumerism and administrative systems collectively have over the majority of our lives. We Americans get two out of every seven days to ourselves and think we are free. In reality we work within constructs that dictate our lives and even on weekends we tend to behave however marketing and branding tells us to behave.
It is precisely through increasingly autonomous, rationalized systems in the world that our Lifeworlds are experiencing what Jurgen Habermas rightly called “colonization.”
“…a progressively rationalized lifeworld is both uncoupled from and made dependent upon increasingly complex, formally organized domains of action, like the economy and the administrative state. This dependency, resulting from the mediaization of the lifeworld by system imperatives, assumes the sociopathological form of internal colonization when critical disequilibria in material reproduction – that is, systemic crises amenable to systems-theoretical analysis – can be avoided only at the cost of disturbances in the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld – that is, of ‘subjectively’ experienced, identity-threatening crises or pathologies…the institutionalization of purposive-rational economic and administrative action as the anchoring of money and power media in the lifeworld.” (page 305)
To me, Habermas is talking about Function here. Money and Media impact the Lifeworld. They actually “colonize” the traditional symbolic sources within the Lifeworld, changing them significantly. One immense obvious (but unintended) phenomenon of Function is the system of Capitalism. At root, Capitalism disrupts the “everyday practice” of “traditional life-forms” disconnecting them from non-rational “expressive moments.” It objectifies persons as workers and consumers, for example. This is the heart of colonization.
“The paradox, however, is that the rationalization of the lifeworld simultaneously gave rise to both the systemically induced reification of the lifeworld and the utopian perspective from which capitalist modernization has always appeared with the stain of dissolving traditional life-forms without salvaging their communicative substance. Capitalist modernization destroys these forms of life, but does not transform them in such a way that the intermeshing of cognitive-instrumental with moral-practical and expressive moments, which had obtained in everyday practice prior to its rationalization, could be retained at a higher level of differentiation.” (page 329)
Ultimately, Function, like wisteria, working upon the Lifeworld, seeps out into the world, puts out new roots, and begins to develop (via “mediazation”) “irresistible inner dynamics” that serve as a substitute for the traditional influences of “science, morality, art.”
“Neither the secularization of worldviews nor the structural differentiation of society has unavoidable pathological side effects per se. It is not the differentiation and independent development of cultural value spheres that led to the cultural impoverishment of everyday communicative practice, but an elitist splitting-off of expert cultures from contexts of communicative action in daily life. It is not the uncoupling of media steered subsystems and their organizational forms from the lifeworld that leads to the one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice, but only the penetrative forms of economic and administrative rationality into areas that resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing, and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action…media-steered subsystems develop irresistible inner dynamics that bring about both colonization of the lifeworld and its segmentation from science, morality, and art.” (pp. 330-331)
Supporting Habermas, the profound effect of the colonization of the Lifeworld is delineated from a Marxist perspective by Tod S. Sloan here. The functional nature of this colonization is readily apparent in this discussion. Sloan echoes Habermas with regard to “desymbolization” as a mechanistic symptom of Function. It is a primary cause of the “interpsychic” and “interpersonal” conflict experienced by much of humanity today.
“I am almost convinced that the majority of contemporary identity issues and problems in living can be linked fairly directly to this colonization of the lifeworld…the play of power between social order and individual bodies has always been with us, but, in capitalist modernity, that struggle begins to shift from direct control of people through violence and threats of violence to more subtle forms of control related to the defense and expansion of profit-making by the capitalist class. The success of the system in providing for material wants of the large majority deflates most of the resistance that would stem from remaining gross inequalities. Also, as Marcuse argued, institutional sources of alternative visions of society have little chance in the face of the system’s near monopoly on the mass media. Thus, at the individual level, the superego is conflated with the ego -- it feels right to do what is rational and what is rational is defined as that which serves the reproduction of the system. Psyches are colonized and the bodies they inhabit do more or less what the colonial system requires.
“The colonization of the lifeworld proceeds in part by deforming the symbolic process as it relates to individual emotional life. Under the reign of instrumental rationality, the subjective sphere of the lifeworld repeatedly undergoes what the psychoanalyst Alfred Lorenzer (1976) calls desymbolization…this desymbolization is the core psychological moment of the ideological process. In general, desymbolization is a defensive maneuver designed to manage intrapsychic conflict (which of course is always interpersonal as well)…Desymbolization is at the heart of most defensive processes. It sets up a neutralized consciousness to fend off anxiety and other negative emotional states that would arise were complex interpersonal realities to be fully experienced or, to follow the terminology here, fully symbolized. The consequences are serious. Everyday action is impoverished by absence of full symbolization. The interplay of imagination and desire is cut short. Split-off affect emerges in impulsivity or compulsion in times of stress. Interpretation of one’s own needs to others is hindered and the resulting intellectualized train of thought is highly susceptible to external manipulation.”
This manipulation (made possible by the colonizing “split-off” of “impoverished symbolism”) is where marketing and advertising take root, for example. In place of your traditional interpretation of things, these gigantic societal forces functionalize you by guiding you toward whatever they want your pleasure to be. Your consuming behavior will be what they want you to consume, naturally, at a profit. The self conquering will to power contained in how marketing shapes human activity and consumption, how we vote, how we define pleasure, overwhelms us and shuts us off from ourselves to the extent that branding algorithms become the primary guidance for our behavior.
Other examples of this manipulation will be offered in the second part of this word doodle as well as how understanding Function can be an opportunity to live a more relevant and fulfilling life.
Now, I wish to articulate one final word doodle. It is a concept I have wrestled with since long before I started this blog. That word is “Function.” Function, as I mean it, has always been around since humans have formed tribes and societies. There are rules to how society works, rituals and institutions are established to assist with the collective management of human beings. Each of us unavoidably serves as a functional component within our tribe and/or culture. We have a role to play whether you look at us as a part of families or a part of metropolises.
With the Enlightenment these roles became infinitely more rationalized than ever before. Though I have praised the Enlightenment here, I want to discuss an unintended consequence of rational society in this post. To cut to the chase, the rationalization of the world directly affects the Lifeworld. It competes for bodily autonomous human authenticity. It changes what it means to be human.
In my review of Yuval Noah Harari’s excellent Homo Deus I emphasized the wording of two passages. Harari speaks of how “data” is fast becoming the new “religion” of humanity and what that means for the future development of our species. Specifically…
“Dataism adopts a strictly functional approach to humanity, appraising the value of human experiences according to their function in data-processing mechanisms.” (page 394) Also: “Dataism thereby threatens to do to Homo sapiens what Homo sapiens has done to all other animals. Over the course of history humans created a global network and evaluated everything according to its function within that network.” (page 400, my emphasis)
On a basic level, this is what I intend by my use of the word “Function.” Where once we individually functioned within traditional cultural directives, we now live in a world where virtual networks, political/economic systems, cultural forces, whatever you want to call them, have functionalized human beings into roles or schemes that directly affect our Lifeworlds to a degree never previously imagined.
When I go back to the writings of “second stage” minor existentialist philosophers, some 40 - 50 years ago, I find vague notions and a certain naïveté about how the future of “technology” will impact human beings. Yet, also, there is a sharp prescient vision. William Barrett is foremost among them. Consider his musings from 1979…
“The ‘technology of behavior,’ after which behavioral scientists yearn, ascribes the most sweeping powers to technique. It is assumed, or proposed to us as a hypothesis, that the techniques exist that can shape human beings completely for all situations of life. We have only to put them to use and we shall be able to mold mankind in whatever ways we might find desirable – than thus transform the human condition.” (page 112)
“We rail at technology when it gets too noisy, pollutes our air, or is about to drive a new superhighway through our living room. For the rest, we are content to consume its products unquestioningly. So long as we can negotiate the triumph of technology successfully, we are unconcerned to ask what the presuppositions of this technical world are and how they bind us to its framework. Already these presuppositions are so much the invisible medium of our actual life that we have become unconscious of them. We may eventually become so enclosed in them that we cannot even imagine another way of thought but technical thinking. That is the point at which we shall have turned all our questions over to think tanks as problems of human engineering. We seem already on the way there.” (page 223)
“Does the apparatus as a whole have a will of its own? Perhaps we had better call it the framework, keeping Heidegger’s meaning in mind, for the word ‘apparatus’ may be too closely tied down to the sheer mass of physical machinery. To apply Heidegger’s earlier terminology from Being and Time, the framework does not belong to the world of ‘ontic’ fact but of ‘ontological’ possibility. It is a project into which humankind as entered step by step to which it is now committed. It is a design and a possibility for the mastery of the globe and its resources into which mankind is now called strictly as a matter of survival. The actual configurations of peoples, powers, and economic organization take place more and more against the background of this framework. No one therefore strictly controls it. It seems to have a life of its own. And here we begin to encounter something uncanny: The framework is historically the supreme expression of man’s will to power in coping with nature; and yet it is something that begins to elude his will. It seems to live a life of its own, and yet in one way it is nothing but ourselves in our collective life.” (page 229)
My belief is that there is substantial evidence to indicate that not only have human beings become more functionalized by the development of modernity, even more ominously, the system(s), or what Barrett aptly calls, after Heidegger, “the framework” of modernity, has become uncoupled from its human creators and taken on a life of its own, further functionalizing us as subservient to the system(s), which at times seems to be at least as “real” and you and I are.
Examples of this abound, yet virtually all of them are accepted by us today as “normal,” nothing to be concerned about. Money and credit, media (the internet and television), sports and entertainment, the stock market, administrative bureaucracy, marketing, branding, and consumerism, the commodification of ourselves as objects of consumption are all examples of how our lives serve as a Function of the system. The illusion of autonomy created by having hobbies, interests, our passions, and weekends to ourselves is secondary compared with the power that the autonomy of entertainment and consumerism and administrative systems collectively have over the majority of our lives. We Americans get two out of every seven days to ourselves and think we are free. In reality we work within constructs that dictate our lives and even on weekends we tend to behave however marketing and branding tells us to behave.
It is precisely through increasingly autonomous, rationalized systems in the world that our Lifeworlds are experiencing what Jurgen Habermas rightly called “colonization.”
“…a progressively rationalized lifeworld is both uncoupled from and made dependent upon increasingly complex, formally organized domains of action, like the economy and the administrative state. This dependency, resulting from the mediaization of the lifeworld by system imperatives, assumes the sociopathological form of internal colonization when critical disequilibria in material reproduction – that is, systemic crises amenable to systems-theoretical analysis – can be avoided only at the cost of disturbances in the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld – that is, of ‘subjectively’ experienced, identity-threatening crises or pathologies…the institutionalization of purposive-rational economic and administrative action as the anchoring of money and power media in the lifeworld.” (page 305)
To me, Habermas is talking about Function here. Money and Media impact the Lifeworld. They actually “colonize” the traditional symbolic sources within the Lifeworld, changing them significantly. One immense obvious (but unintended) phenomenon of Function is the system of Capitalism. At root, Capitalism disrupts the “everyday practice” of “traditional life-forms” disconnecting them from non-rational “expressive moments.” It objectifies persons as workers and consumers, for example. This is the heart of colonization.
“The paradox, however, is that the rationalization of the lifeworld simultaneously gave rise to both the systemically induced reification of the lifeworld and the utopian perspective from which capitalist modernization has always appeared with the stain of dissolving traditional life-forms without salvaging their communicative substance. Capitalist modernization destroys these forms of life, but does not transform them in such a way that the intermeshing of cognitive-instrumental with moral-practical and expressive moments, which had obtained in everyday practice prior to its rationalization, could be retained at a higher level of differentiation.” (page 329)
Ultimately, Function, like wisteria, working upon the Lifeworld, seeps out into the world, puts out new roots, and begins to develop (via “mediazation”) “irresistible inner dynamics” that serve as a substitute for the traditional influences of “science, morality, art.”
“Neither the secularization of worldviews nor the structural differentiation of society has unavoidable pathological side effects per se. It is not the differentiation and independent development of cultural value spheres that led to the cultural impoverishment of everyday communicative practice, but an elitist splitting-off of expert cultures from contexts of communicative action in daily life. It is not the uncoupling of media steered subsystems and their organizational forms from the lifeworld that leads to the one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice, but only the penetrative forms of economic and administrative rationality into areas that resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing, and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action…media-steered subsystems develop irresistible inner dynamics that bring about both colonization of the lifeworld and its segmentation from science, morality, and art.” (pp. 330-331)
Supporting Habermas, the profound effect of the colonization of the Lifeworld is delineated from a Marxist perspective by Tod S. Sloan here. The functional nature of this colonization is readily apparent in this discussion. Sloan echoes Habermas with regard to “desymbolization” as a mechanistic symptom of Function. It is a primary cause of the “interpsychic” and “interpersonal” conflict experienced by much of humanity today.
“I am almost convinced that the majority of contemporary identity issues and problems in living can be linked fairly directly to this colonization of the lifeworld…the play of power between social order and individual bodies has always been with us, but, in capitalist modernity, that struggle begins to shift from direct control of people through violence and threats of violence to more subtle forms of control related to the defense and expansion of profit-making by the capitalist class. The success of the system in providing for material wants of the large majority deflates most of the resistance that would stem from remaining gross inequalities. Also, as Marcuse argued, institutional sources of alternative visions of society have little chance in the face of the system’s near monopoly on the mass media. Thus, at the individual level, the superego is conflated with the ego -- it feels right to do what is rational and what is rational is defined as that which serves the reproduction of the system. Psyches are colonized and the bodies they inhabit do more or less what the colonial system requires.
“The colonization of the lifeworld proceeds in part by deforming the symbolic process as it relates to individual emotional life. Under the reign of instrumental rationality, the subjective sphere of the lifeworld repeatedly undergoes what the psychoanalyst Alfred Lorenzer (1976) calls desymbolization…this desymbolization is the core psychological moment of the ideological process. In general, desymbolization is a defensive maneuver designed to manage intrapsychic conflict (which of course is always interpersonal as well)…Desymbolization is at the heart of most defensive processes. It sets up a neutralized consciousness to fend off anxiety and other negative emotional states that would arise were complex interpersonal realities to be fully experienced or, to follow the terminology here, fully symbolized. The consequences are serious. Everyday action is impoverished by absence of full symbolization. The interplay of imagination and desire is cut short. Split-off affect emerges in impulsivity or compulsion in times of stress. Interpretation of one’s own needs to others is hindered and the resulting intellectualized train of thought is highly susceptible to external manipulation.”
This manipulation (made possible by the colonizing “split-off” of “impoverished symbolism”) is where marketing and advertising take root, for example. In place of your traditional interpretation of things, these gigantic societal forces functionalize you by guiding you toward whatever they want your pleasure to be. Your consuming behavior will be what they want you to consume, naturally, at a profit. The self conquering will to power contained in how marketing shapes human activity and consumption, how we vote, how we define pleasure, overwhelms us and shuts us off from ourselves to the extent that branding algorithms become the primary guidance for our behavior.
Other examples of this manipulation will be offered in the second part of this word doodle as well as how understanding Function can be an opportunity to live a more relevant and fulfilling life.
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