Surviving the Show: The Case for an Askesis of Perception

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Author: L. M. Sacasas
Full Title: Surviving the Show: The Case for an Askesis of Perception
Category: #articles
URL: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/surviving-the-show-the-case-for-an

Highlights

Reading Illich’s proposal from 1989, it strikes me as all the more relevant thirty years later. Confronted with the challenges of information superabundance, a plague of misinformation and digital sophistry, the collapse of public trust in traditional institutions, and algorithmically manipulated feeds, the “solutions” proffered, such as increased fact checking, warning labels, or media literacy training, seem altogether inadequate. From Illich’s perspective, we might say that they remain exclusively committed to the habits of the mind or the critical habits. What difference might it make for us to take Illich’s suggestion and consider the ascetic habits or habits of the body, holistically conceived? Might we do better to think about attention not as a resource that we pay or squander at the behest of the attention economy and its weaponized digital tools but rather as a bodily skill that we can cultivate, train, and hone?
He goes on to explain how “until quite recently, the guard of the eyes was not looked upon as a fad, nor written off as internalized repression. Our taste was trained to judge all forms of gazing on the other. Today, things have changed. The shameless gaze is in.” Illich was quick to add that he was not speaking of gazing at pornographic images. He was interested in recovering the idea that seeing was an action and not merely a passive activity on the model of a lens receiving visual data. And, as an action, it had an ethical dimension
He was concerned, too, with the way the gaze was captured or trapped by what he termed “the show.” Illich used show to distinguish the object of perception from the image, which had played such a critical if evolving role in traditional western philosophy and religion. At one point, he puts the question he wants to address this way: “What can I do to survive in the midst of the show?”
Speaking of the emergence of the scopic regime of the show in the early nineteenth century, Illich concluded, “New optical techniques were used to remove the picture of reality from the space within which the fingers can handle, the nose can smell and the tongue can taste it, and show it in a new ‘objective’ isometric space into which no sentient being can enter.”
During the 1980s, as the consequences of the shift from instruments to systems was dawning on Illich, he came to see that one of the harms of modern institutionalized medicine was the implicit displacement of the lived body by the body that is a system apprehended by diagnostic tools. It is the body reduced to one’s chart, health as conformity to statistical averages and patterns. The individual and the particularities of their body are lost. I don’t know that Illich ever puts it this way, but it seems clear to me that this can be understood as medicine in thrall of the show. It is not, of course, that such information is useless, rather it is that something is lost when our vision of the human is thus reduced to data flows, and that loss, difficult or perhaps impossible to quantify, can result in profound consequences. It can, for example, in the case of medicine, generate, paradoxically, greater forms of suffering.
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- Note: Looking at the contraction monitor instead of the mother experiencing the contraction. My dad obsessing over the oximeter numbers.
Illich invites us to consider what it might mean to discipline our vision, and I’m inviting us to consider whether this is not a better way of framing our relationship to the digital media ecosystem. The upshot is recognizing the additional dimensions of what is often framed as a merely intellectual problem and thus met with laughably inadequate techniques. Perceptual askesis would involve our body, our affections, our desires, and our moral character as well as our intellect.
Illich declared that “existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality.” And, what’s more, “it is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception.”
If my vision is trained by the show, will I be able to see the person before me who cannot match the show’s dynamic, mesmerizing quality? And, from Illich’s perspective, it is not only that I would fail to accord my neighbor the honor they are owed but that I would lose myself in the process, too. Eyes trained by the show would be unable “to find joy in the only mirror in which I can discover myself, the pupil of the other.”