papo cabeça A Sociedade do Cansaço

[Leho.]

On 3/9/2020 at 6:06 PM, Lowko é Powko said:

Bom vídeo, tirando as tentativas de humor.

As piadinhas são fracas, mas o conteúdo é bem interessante. Vale o play.

[Lowko é Powko]

Li o livro. É bem curto, dá pra ler em uma hora, sem parar para matutar muito o que está sendo dito. Aprovado, porém tenho algumas ressalvas.

Os pontos positivos do livro e suas ideias principais são bem conhecidas: sociedade movida pelo desempenho, pela coerção auto aplicada, por padrões massificados, pelo excesso de individualização que gera massificação e isolamento do indivíduo, nefim, pelo cansaço. Como poucas pessoas trataram dos pontos negativos, vou me ater a eles.

A primeira é que ele usa termos incomuns que parecem criados para estabelecer conceitos que já existem. Pode ser problema da tradução, ou pode ser que o autor tenha entendido que só esses conceitos poderiam expressar exatamente o que ele queria dizer. Isso torna o começo do livro meio complicado.

A segunda é que a introdução é um pouco confusa e difícil, por conta do conceito de "infecção" e como isso vai desembocar mais a frente na oposição entre negatividade e positividade. Essa infecção é em parte uma alegoria, em parte uma reação inconsciente do indivíduo em relação ao que pode atingi-lo, de fora pra dentro, seja uma infecção propriamente dita, um perigo físico, uma ameaça física específica vinda de outro indivíduo ou mesmo o controle social ao qual estamos sujeitos.

A terceira é que me parece que há uma avaliação negativa em relação ao novo e positiva em relação ao velho. Esse é um problema da maioria dos movimentos anticapitalistas à esquerda que terão que ser encarados uma hora ou outra: uma reação ao novo vai sempre descambar para alguma forma de conservadorismo, por definição. E isso vem desde o ludismo. Quando esse momento chegar, haverão conflitos ideológicos internos por questões de definição. Não à toa, a galera que reclama das mazelas do "futebol moderno", mesmo dentro da esquerda, esquece das mazelas do "futebol antigo", incluindo aí a homofobia, o machismo e o racismo que sempre foram característicos do meio.

Indico uma análise no Goodreads sobre o livro, pra quem tiver interesse:

Spoiler

Feb 15, 2018
Trevor (rated it it was amazing)

This is a seriously interesting book, but I'm not sure I completely agree with him. His argument is that we now live in a world where we are so self-monitoring that we have moved beyond the notion of a discipline society. That is, we no longer require external modes of discipline, but rather our desire to be high-achievers fulfils this function much more effectively than external compulsion ever could.

I'm going to tell you why I think this might be overstating the case and then I'm going to ignore my own criticism. I think for most people in society external observation and punishments based on those observations has become all-consuming. To say we have moved beyond the panoptic society seems to fly in the face of the everyday experience of most people who have to live with employer set KPIs, Apple watches that tell them if they have reached their move goals or how poorly they are maintaining their sleep ones, and they are filmed by surveillance cameras even while strolling down a street. That is, I struggle to see how we can say we have moved beyond the surveillance society.

However, there is no doubt that we have become much more self-monitoring and that we are even prepared to forgo privacy to gain the pleasure that comes from confirming we are optimising our life projects - whether those be losing weight, reading more books (book challenge, anyone?), reaching our KPIs, exceeding our PBs, or whatever the latest sports derived metaphor might be. 'Calm, fitter, healthier and more productive. A pig in a cage on antibiotics'.

At one point he says something that felt like being hit across the face with a cold towel. That we shouldn't be quite so pleased with ourselves just because we can 'multi-task'. In fact, mulita-tasking is really a return to an animal state, rather than reaching the peak of human achievement. Animals must multi-task - there's always another animal trying to have sex with their partner, eat them, eat one of their children, take the food out of their mouth, shift them down the pecking order. In fact, the one thing an animal cannot be is 'in the present' or 'lost in the moment'. That is, they are condemned to multi-task.

What is human, then, is the ability to be profoundly bored - to be still and to contemplate and to think one's way to a kind of conclusion. He makes a beautiful point here that God made the Sabbath as a day of rest - that we are closest to God when we are resting, rather than when we are busy going about the mundane inanities of everyday life.

The problem is that the modern world is conspiring to make us less than human and more animal like. We are being forced to multi-task and our post-post-Fordist world also means we generally never have anything to point to so as to be able to say, "see that there, I finished that, that is the product of my labour, that is the best that I'm capable of creating". We are busy, so busy we are exhausted, but that busyness never amounts to an externalised manifestation of our efforts and so we collapse into ourselves in unhealthy ways - ways that don't produce self-love, but rather narcissism.

And this brings us to where he begins - if much of the 20th century was obsessed with infection (antibiotics, vaccines and so on) today our globalised world means we can't reject the other in quite the same way - that is, kill or be killed no longer is an optimum strategy - instead we have to find ways to hybridise with the other and to welcome in what had otherwise been kept out. I struggle with this idea too - you just look at how Australia treats asylum seekers to see what I mean - but if one limits their view to the wealthy few to whom borders no longer exist, rather than the poor many that Bauman maintains are held in place, then this interpretation has some merit.

Today the illness we confront is not something that can be cured by antibodies or by vaccines. Today's illnesses are self-inflicted and they are inflicted not by negativity (overcoming the other to assert your own primacy) but rather mental illnesses related to stress, and ultimately the stress that comes from over-achievement. This is insanely interesting. Here we are being killed not by negativity - things actively seeking to kill us, but by positivity - by our desire to be good, and then better, and then the best. I like this, because I've long had a distrust of the 'positive psychology' movement, 'no, I will not bloody well whistle while I work'.

Although this book owes more to Nietzsche than it does to Marx, I kept thinking of a book I reviewed recently called 'Labour and Monopoly Capitalism' - and the idea that we are human due to human labour, but not any sort of labour, rather only that kind that allows us to see the completed product of our labour. This book fits more within Nietzsche's ideas of the importance of the work of art in producing the truly human - or even Kant's purposiveness without a purpose, the idea of art as a kind of contemplation on the world that then allows for a depth of perception otherwise unavailable to those of us who are busy multi-tasking. He quotes Cezanne as saying he could visualise the fragrance of things merely from contemplating them. This level of focus, of contemplation, of losing one's self in an object other than one's self is increasingly being denied us, even in our similarly busy leisure. And this is reflected in the kind of tiredness we are confronted with - we are tired to the depths of our souls, rather than tired in the way that is one of life's most pleasurable feelings, tired from having done.

So, with caveats - this is a seriously interesting book.