Crisis of faith

on cultural criticism and pain; I don't know the answer to this one

Someone I loved very much died about two years ago. A few months before she died, she sent me a long Facebook message about the fact of her impending death. It was important. It contained, I think, an instruction about how to live my life, about what she needed me to do for her. She said, I think, that the idea of me following this instruction helped her make peace with her own death. I have tried my best to do what I think she asked of me, have sometimes failed, have sometimes done alright.

I’m saying I think because I cannot be entirely sure about the contents of the message. I went to look for it recently, for the first time in a year or so, and couldn’t find it. Her Facebook account has been deleted; all the messages are gone, most of the record of our communication since I was a little girl. In our chat log, her name has been replaced by Unknown user and her profile picture with that blank grey silhouette, formless and genderless. All her messages, which I know often stretched into paragraphs, have been replaced by one line each of time-stamped nothing — not even an empty chat bubble, just a unit of empty space on the screen.

What feels like the cruelest part is that all of my messages are still there, and so the effect is that I’ve been having, for years, a strange and stilted conversation with myself. I can see each time I responded to her characteristically thoughtful and loving messages days or even weeks late, all these awful one-word answers, but I cannot see the messages themselves — I can see myself thanking her for the book recommendation, but I cannot see what book she recommended to me, and now I will never know, I can’t remember, I’m trying and I can’t. The record of her has been hidden somewhere. All that’s left is me.

It may strike you that this could serve as a neat, trite little metaphor for the experience of grieving a death in general. This is one of my most persistent fascinations with the internet: its natural tendency to whittle down all social dynamics to their most offensively obvious first principles (this is also, I think, part of what makes it so difficult to make good art about online life: the medium is inherently resistant to subtlety). The situation is too on-the-nose, like a political cartoon, those dumb blank spaces next to the grey silhouette where her face used to be.

And as political cartoons do, the situation begs for analysis. I’m looking down at myself sobbing on the couch, the message log still open on the phone in my hand, and I can see my brain already whirring into desperate, frenzied motion to find a way to blame tech oligarchy for what’s happened, for the pain that is otherwise too vast and diffuse to be satisfyingly dealt with. Surely modernity can be held to account, I think to myself in an increasingly clinical clip, my face still red and trembling — surely there’s something here about the phones, about trusting the structure of our intimate relationships to profit-driven tech companies, to mediating love through digital space. Baudrillard has something applicable about this, maybe. McLuhan. Or Weil, maybe something in The Need for Roots. I could pick up that book The Right to Oblivion. I remember reading about Pressly’s critique of what he calls the “ideology of information”: the idea that information has a natural existence in human affairs, and that there are no aspects of human life which cannot be translated somehow into data. I wish I could remember that message, I just want to remember what she said to me, I squeeze my eyes shut and try to conjure it in my mind but I can’t, not any of them, any of it. I perk up: could my bad memory be the fault of the apps, the systematized destruction of our attention spans? I should read Amusing Ourselves to Death, I keep meaning to read it.

Here is the most compelling argument I manage to cook up for myself about the reason for my pain: the ideology of information has entrenched in me a belief that relationships are made of data, and that all data ought to be conserved and perpetually accessible; this, combined with the fact that tech companies have a vested interest in selling our communication on their platforms as part of the fundamental fabric of love,¹ has constructed a profit-driven fantasy that human relationships can be and should be stored on a server. It’s comprehensible, then, that my grief has been compounded by the harsh dissolution of this fantasy, by the extra injustice of being forced to realize that I cannot expect to preserve and know everything.

This is a good argument, I think — it might even be true! — but I am still stuck with a persistent, niggling suspicion that death and loss have always been painful, that losing the record of a person’s time on earth with you has always 1. happened and 2. been sad, and that it is hard, simply, to reckon with the fact that someone can be there and then not there and that your attempts to keep them alive via perfect eidetic memory will always fail. I imagine that many people before the invention of the computer have lost letters, notebooks, photographs; that someone has always thrown out the wrong box, that envelopes have always fallen into the fireplace. The criticism at hand isn’t wrong (Big Tech, after all, is different in scope and in evil than Big Stationery), but it fails to do what I want it to do. The pain persists.

Death in the Sickroom, Edvard Munch, 1893

So I find myself trying to square two ideas. The first: that I believe in the value of cultural criticism, in locating systemic roots for individual problems, that the personal is political; I believe that laying rightful blame for suffering on the conditions of the present is important, in part because it activates us to believe that we can make future conditions less painful. I think it’s valuable to channel personal grief and loss into anger at the systems that make their money not only by stripping our lives of intimacy and meaning but also by actually killing us, by killing the people we love. I really, really believe this, I really do. But, at the same time, I have this suspicion that my personal itch to seek a neat explanation and a hypermodern culpable actor for every existential pain can in some cases be a kind of palliative, a self-deluding mechanism that keeps me away from the real. Turning experience into cultural criticism is my definitive way of living in the world, my way of seeing and being. But I wonder, while watching myself search for academic citations to justify why a loss has hurt me before I am even finished feeling the wave of hurt itself, if it can also in certain cases be a desperate attempt to mechanize the incomprehensible into a series of factors relatively within my control. I remind myself that iPhones are evil, and I remind myself concurrently that they did not originate the experience of pain.

I read Love’s Work last month, and am reminded of Gillian Rose’s repeated return to St. Silouan’s mantra keep your mind in hell and despair not. If one “refuses to dwell in hell,” Rose writes, they will “live, therefore, in the most static despair.” It is through the compulsive avoidance of deepest pain, the need to deny it or suppress it or rationalize it away, that our lives become truly unbearable. I wonder if I can, at times, use cultural criticism to this end: to stay constantly in despair and yet keep my mind away from hell. To know myself as part of a long human lineage of shattering loss and unending grief is painful in a different way than it is painful to hate Facebook; it might even be more painful, not least because it is far more frustrating, far less cathartic. I can always hold onto the fantasy that I might one day lob a pipe bomb into a server farm. I cannot convince myself, no matter how hard I try, that I might smuggle my loved ones away from death.

Fred Jameson says to always historicize. I’ve been struggling my way through Postmodernism over the past few months, googling semiotic squares and Adorno quotes, and it’s hard, this work, I can feel the limits of my ability pushing up against me like a too-small shirt, the shoulders too tight to lift my arms up all the way. I remember, in my effort to historicize, that lots of people throughout history have tried to make their brains into machines that could understand everything, and it did not stop the people they loved from getting sick and dying.

1. Zoe Hitzig’s piece in The Drift on surveillance-as-love-language analyses this idea further — it’s great. “…Tech culture now ascribes its own virtues to the forfeiture of privacy: realness and connection. Where we once guarded our control over personal information, we now give up control not just freely but even tenderly, monitoring and being monitored by loved ones through social media platforms like BeReal and location-sharing apps. It’s a strange form of Stockholm syndrome for the surveillance age — we love, and love with, the tools of our captors. Resigned to the Big Tech companies recording our every move, we’ve invited friends, family, and partners to join them in watching us. We’ve begun to celebrate surveillance as a form of intimacy.”