Celebrating Embodied Life
The aspect of the trade I want to consider today is embodied life for virtual life.
Talk of ’embodied life’, in the sense I am using, would probably have been thought redundant in the extreme only a few short years ago. What other life is possible? Whether or not you believe in the existence of soul or spirit, in the case of human beings (at least) the soul still must inhabit a body, or else the body is dead! In other words, as far as most men and women of the past were concerned, there was no life but the embodied kind.
What is embodied life? Here’s a minimal set of answers:
- It’s the life of person-to-person, face-to-face relationships. To be in the body is to be involved in interactions, short- and long-term, with other people, which have no ‘off’ switch and which are not entirely under our control.
- It’s the life of physical matter that must be reckoned with. Life in a body means, among other things, life in this body, and not another – and this body may be ill, overweight, malnourished, short, tall, freckled, pock-marked; it may be clumsy with things, unable to pluck strings in rhythm, winded easily when running or lifting, and burned rather than tanned; it may spill the coffee, blacken the eggs, break the screen, foul the water, or be late for an interview.
- It’s the life of dependence upon the natural world and its governing principles. Embodied life means coming to terms with gravity, entropy, magnetism, finite resources for food, energy, and shelter, the need for sleep, and the pace at which living things grow, flower and bear fruit.
- It’s life connected to a particular place in space and time. In a body, you can be here, or there, but not both. The place where you are affects you, and you have an effect on the place – high altitude, low humidity, soil composition, cool or warm, wet or dry, mountain or plain. Not only place, but the simple fact that we are temporal – that we live in time – has an effect on the kind of creatures we are in the body and what we are capable of doing, experiencing, and loving.
- Embodied life is, in other words, the life of limits (more on that in a later post in this series).
Now what I’ve just said is that we’re trading embodied life in exchange for virtual life. What is virtual life, and how are we ‘trading’ one for the other? Here, again, are a minimal set of categories describing what I call virtual life:
- It’s the life of networked, on-screen, mediated relationships. Virtual friendship (via social networking sites, for example) is a superficial simulation of embodied friendship, if I can even stretch the definition that far. Virtual communication requires little accountability or responsibility (just read a forum or a page of YouTube comments); we are free to create our networks (setting ourselves up for the experiences we want), and we are equally free to disengage from those networks at a moment’s notice and create new ones. Anonymity factors into the virtual equation in a way that can not be duplicated in embodied life.
- It’s the life of bits and voltage – mountains of data moving continuously and almost invisibly. Because everything from your voice to a feature-length film to a fast-food menu can be stored and transported as zeroes and ones, all of the music recorded in the last century could be stored in several boxes in a room of your house; we can ‘talk’ with people next door and on the other side of the earth simultaneously; we have a kind of access to the inner workings of human intestines and the far reaches of space, twenty-four hours a day, a few clicks away.
- It’s the life of dependence upon a fragile network of technological innovations, including petroleum, plastics, electricity, electromagnetics, and fiber optics, working in tandem to produce sounds, images and experiences which are completely impossible or inaccessible in the natural world. The pace of our experience gets faster all the time while the things we experience become bolder, louder, and more fragmented. This makes the embodied world of objects, ideas and experiences seem quite slow (and often boring).
- It’s life detached from geographic place, and in many respects, from time. We have the sense that we can be anywhere, at any time – and in many places at one time, if only through the virtual extension of our identities in browser tabs and various apps simultaneously connected to people and information from incredibly diverse places and sources.
- Virtual life is, in other words, (theoretically) the unlimited life.
The Trade
You can probably see that there are a number of areas where embodied life and virtual life mutually exclude one another. Both are telling us a story about ourselves – where we are, what is best for us to engage in, what we are made for – but the stories are often incompatible with one another.
Each time we adopt a new device or technology into our lives these days, we surrender time to both learning it and using it; we surrender memory and brainpower to understand it; with each ‘advance’, we think less and less about how it will alter our minds, relationships, and schedules. Generally speaking, we attenuate, ignore, or give up aspects of embodied life to embrace another element of the power of virtual life.
For instance: IM and phone texting allow us to communicate with people almost anywhere at almost anytime, but in the process we lose shades of meaning, inflection, tone, nuance, and subtlety. In the process language itself degenerates, and as we use those means of communication more and more often (adopting text in favor of face-to-face), we lose the art of conversation itself and our person-to-person relations become more awkward and stifled.
And again: GPS devices are incredibly useful, but the service they provide has the effect (along with other developments like interstate highways and hotel chains) of detaching us from geographic place. When we were forced to interact with maps and give a lot more visual attention to what surrounded us in a place we had never visited, we got a much better sense of where we were, and sometimes got a better idea of how a place might historically have developed.
I don’t doubt that you can come up with a hundred more examples. Because technologies have the general effect of detaching us from embodied life, of making us more ‘independent’ (or at least giving us that illusion), they typically have a preference for the virtual baked into the cake from the beginning. As we use these gadgets and apps without reflecting on how they are transforming us, we are more rapidly transformed in mind and body into their image, and we come to prefer the virtual life to the real, or the embodied life.
I’m writing this blog to celebrate the embodied life. A primary goal of mine is to convince you (and help remind myself) that life in the body, in the real world, in space and time, face-to-face, is worth preserving, is more truly human, is what we were made for, and is where we function at our highest levels of possibility, responsibility, creativity, and love.
So close your browser (after you bookmark this site), go outside, take deep breaths, and begin to consider how you have traded some essential human qualities in exchange for a power that may be using you more than you are using it.
Reflect on your day-to-day experience of screens and persons, and the priority you place on interactions with both.
Finally, consider how you might be able to begin to reverse the trade in meaningful ways: time set aside for conversation uninterrupted by devices; time set aside for silence; games face-to-face with people instead of on-screen; attention to meals as you eat, where they come from, and what they taste like; quiet walks in the woods or at the seaside without earbuds in; there are thousands of other possibilities. Think about one or two things you can do today or this week that favor embodied life over virtual.
You will be more human, and you will be more happy.
What do you do to reverse the trade? Let us know in the comments. Maybe you’ll give someone an idea!
Love the depth of thought given to this. The virtual world has become the “real” world for so many of us – without our consent. We have simply given in to it. That we must fight against the gravitational pull of virtual reality is something we needed to be reminded of and Michael has done an excellent job of it. thanks!
You’re welcome! Virtual life exerts its force on me just as much as anyone else, but writing helps to focus my thoughts on what I’m really after and remind me how my time and thought should be occupied.
Must we not start by acknowledging the irony that such a topic be discussed here online, rather than in person? It reminds of culture’s knowledge of Socrates, who taught a small school of young men in a singular location, and who advocated the discussion of ideas, but not their recording in written form; yet we know of Socrates perhaps solely because of the writings of his student Plato.
Educational philosophy and social psychology teem with benefits of limitation, such that students, particularly in youth when they are less able to establish their own necessary constraints, are commonly unable to learn in a school environment until the restrictions upon them are clearly established. In art as in other fields, only within the comfort of restraint can genius flourish.
Excellent point. It’s (admittedly) a biting irony, and that’s one of the reasons I have wavered for quite some time on the question of even writing this blog. One of the ways I try to put these principles into practice is by getting to know my neighbors, near the house and at the church, and starting conversations about this sort of thing, and just generally trying to spend more time physically together with those around me.
Unfortunately, the communal culture that used to exist in the neighborhoods of this country (where the big front porch was the standard architectural feature of the house) has given way almost entirely to the ubiquitous screen (and the house that prominently features a garage outdoors, little-to-no porch, and a gadget center in many of the rooms). Folks tend to be suspicious of those around them and trustful of those across the magic LCD barrier. Many people now take in the highest percentage of ‘information’ (so called) from sources like this one rather than from one another these days, so I ultimately came to the conclusion that a blog like this might help – ironically, as you point out – to nudge someone toward closing the browser they’re reading it in.
If I knew a better way to reach people, I’d certainly give it a shot. But the noise around us all is ceaseless; we walk around with blinders on in the attempt to filter out everything but the needful and very interesting or entertaining. An idea I kept returning to was that a ‘quiet’ website, monochromatic, minimal and reasonably tasteful in design, would be in keeping with the worldview I am trying to promote, and might help folks to settle in to the frame of mind I am putting forward. The fact that it forces the discussion of embodied life to take place across the electronic divide could bring about a helpful ‘aha’ moment and spur change for those who are coming to that very realization.
On your other point, limitation, particularly for students (and teachers / professors), is a necessary tonic in this age of overload. Can a student possibly digest the contents of four to twelve heavy volumes of dense writing every semester? Even if it were the only thing on his schedule for four months? The thought is absurd. As I’m sure you know, even a barrier-breaker like Stravinsky would be the first to give hearty assent to your statement: “only within the comfort of restraint can genius flourish.”
You may be interested to note that Derek Webb’s recent work (his new album Ctrl, and new concept-band Sola-Mi album Nexus) focuses on this theme.
(I can e-mail product if you’d like to hear it, the band album pretty electronic, the solo album more of a nylon-string guitar/hip-hop/Sacred Harp hybrid.)
I heard a couple of tracks from Ctrl a week ago or so and thought it sounded like an interesting creative step for him. I’d certainly be interested in whatever you want to send my way. 🙂