So, question six:

Needless to say, both questions are rhetorical — and can we not acknowledge, dear reader, that rhetorical questions are in general the mark of an aggressive, uncoy, failure to simply state what one means, perhaps especially when such questions are framed in the negative? Yes; yes, reader, I think we can go that far, turning a blind and casual eye, I hope, to our own proclivities in order more caustically to remark the venalities of others.

The rhetorical quality of the questions means that the first question, which seems initially to ask us only to “consider” that email and cell phones are making us less human, actually asserts that they are making us less human. The followup then implies that our humanity resides in having important things to say, and that those in turn originate in silence and contemplation.

Hard to disagree, I suppose, with someone who's plumping for contemplation. But the trick is this: the “lost art of shutting up” (let us translate what feels like an especially patriarchal nastiness here, turning the latter into “the lost art of silent contemplation”) is only recognizable as lost, first of all, once it's gone, and only becomes an art, second of all, once's it's lost. What I mean is that before email and cell phones silence was a nature. The hours spent alone in an automobile, walking home, on a bus or in line at the post office: all these were enforced occasions for a contemplation mitigated by, at best, a general sonic field established by radio wave or the conversation of strangers. Either of these could function just as well as white noise — establishing a penumbra of solitude conducive to thought — or as a series of intellectual or haptic provocations, prompting singalongs or sociological observations.

(All of these solitary: think of the embarrassed person caught singing along in the car, or the long wait to tell a friend about the two people you heard talking while in line: in both cases the entire experience is driven by the interruption of solitude (desirable or not).)

In any case all this was just the way things were. Now, riding along in the car, I think, this is a good time to call someone, partly I presume because I'm bored, partly because it feels like a good “use” of my time — it doesn't, that is, interrupt my time with my friends, or time working, and so on. Transit has now become a space of connectivity rather than a space of solitude. Based on the number of people I see on the phone on the street or in the bus, this seems true for everyone.

Point being, only from the perspective of the possibilty of connection and interaction does the enforced silence of the prior life reveal itself as anything other than “the way things are,” that is, as silence. To imagine that this silence was an “art” is to perform upon silence something like what the Romantics perform upon craft labor: only in the light of a new technologically produced norm does the hand-carved wooden chair acquire the auratic charm that allows us to appreciate the “art” that opposes it to technology. But of course the chair's artfulness did not exist before industrialization; then it was just a chair. (I am, by the way, channeling Kojin Karatani on Walter Benjamin).

Point being: there was no “art” to silence before, say, 1995; what's more, there was no real separation of “silence” (of this type) from “being.” What would be retrieved by a return to its practice would not be the original silence (which we never had) but a silence defined by its difference from the current nature.

Whether such a silence would do us humans any good — whether, for instance, the world is getting less contemplative, and this silence would restore some contemplation, which would in turn give us more “important” things to say, is a hard question. Part of what Mallon is getting at here is the age-old critique of technology as a “distraction” from the real, a point of view that unites the tradionalists and the Frankfurt School without for all that being wrong because of that unity. I have to say that I don't know. I don't know, that is, if silence is better, or if the thoughts produced in a singular contemplative mode are necessarily more important than those produced by a series of networked interchanges operating at a “shallower” level.

Perhaps we could elaborate here two models of the production of “important” social knowledge. The first, call it the hermetic model, believes that knowledge is produced out of singular, “deep” contemplation, usually undertaken by a male figure whose social status allows him adequate time for thought. These thoughts, brought to the agora, face the test of the thoughts of other men, and through the clash of a small number of singular importances, further importances are made. Let us note that the entire epistemological mode here is very much caught up with the theory of the human that comes out of the Enlightenment.

The second model — let's call it networked — models the production of knowledge at a social level on such non-human processes as the workings of the brain. A very large number of individually unimportant interactions, operating along the dual axes of recursion and disconnection, produces via a series of random jumps and self-corrections a kind of knowledge that exceeds by far the capabilities of any of the units in the system to master. Like the evolutionary process, changes in such a network can be more or less random, with the assumption that “effective” changes will eventually dominate, through recursion, ineffective ones. You don't actually need any driving consciousness for things to move forward; from this large-scale perspective, the anthropos operates at the level of the species, not at the level of the individual.

Which one of these models is true? I have no idea. I am actually not sure that the difference between them operates in the field of the true, since it could only do so in relation to “important” knowledge, and it's clear that depending upon which epistemological model you choose, you end up with a quite different sense of what knowledge is to begin with.

We seem to have arrived, then, at a different set of questions than the ones with which Mallon allowed us to begin, with the difference that these questions are, for me at least, not especially rhetorical. They thus produce the exciting encounter with my own ignorance: