Contemplation as Rebellion

Contemplation as Rebellion

Metadata

• Author: Nicholas Carr from New Cartographies
• Full Title: Contemplation as Rebellion
• Category: #articles

Highlights

• The implied contrast between the sixteenth-century media technology of paint and panel — a technology of “stillness” — and our own twenty-first century media technology of computer and screen — a technology of busyness — is sharp. The much-applauded interactivity of today’s media is an illusion, a trick and a trap. In pushing us to assume a harried, impatient posture of perception, reflexive rather than reflective, the screen is really a means of avoiding the kind of deep intellectual and emotional engagement that Heaney and Muñoz experience. We might today be quick to characterize their posture of calm, steady observation as “passive,” but as Muñoz makes clear, it’s anything but. It’s only through the contemplative gaze that we activate our sensory, imaginative, and interpretive faculties to the fullest, that we become most in touch with the world.
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• The issue I take with Sacasas’s essay is not a matter of sense — I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the same perceptual phenomenon —but of wording. When he suggests that “enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention,” he’s muddying the waters. When we look at the quality of attention demonstrated by Heaney, Muñoz, and Hawthorne, we’re not seeing enchantment. We’re seeing an exquisite openness to the real. A sense of wonder does not require a world infused with spirit. The world as it is is sufficient. The reason the wording matters here is simple. What bedevils our perceptions today isn’t a lack of enchantment. It’s a lack of reality.
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• The desire to re-enchant the world may seem like an act of humility, a way of paying tribute to the world’s unseen powers, but really it’s the opposite, an act of hubris. In demanding that the world hold greater meaning for us, that it be a reservoir for the fulfillment of our own spiritual yearnings, we are attempting yet again to impose our will on the world, to turn its myriad material forms to our own purposes, to make it our mirror. Whatever enchantment may once have been, re-enchantment is a power play.
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