Cybernetic Stability
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about her plans for doing independent work. This would see her pivot from an office job to becoming more of a travelling consultant, going from town to town in order to dispense with her professional duties.
Over the course of that conversation, I made the suggestion that she should consider having some kind of online presence as an adjunct to her work. The reason for this, I said, was that given that the change would see her become more mobile in terms of her physical presence, an online presence would become the anchor that ensures a more stable reference point for her profile than her actual presence.
Once I walked away from that presence, I found myself disturbed by the advice that I gave. While there may have been a practical imperative to the advice given, it also was borne of acquiescing to something fundamental to the liquid modernity identified by the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (I touched upon this in my series on Liquid Bodies). This is the notion that living and working in postmodernity dilutes the imperative to commit to something stable. To borrow from Bauman’s words in an interview with Ken Myers on Mars Hill Audio Journal, “till death do us part” has become replaced by “until further notice”.
Among the most fundamental of these diluted commitments is the commitment to a geographical locale, as labour becomes less a working out of one’s personhood as a communal being than a set of mobile resources at the ready to move at a moment’s notice to the next source of work. Looking more personally, I am also fully aware that my presence via this blog is for most people, the most stable point of reference than my own personal presence should there be interest in my work.
In the face of this hypermobility of labour, it would seem that stability comes not from community or geography, but from digital platforms on social media apps and websites. In the face of this shift in postmodernity, we see bodily presence in a geographical locale being sidestepped by a largely textual presence on the internet as the preferred reference point for persons (it is noteworthy that even images that could act as the stand in for one’s body are in the digital age underwritten by coding).
While I have elsewhere spoken of the possibility that this largely written presence can still be a real bodily presence, insofar as it is anchored and underwritten by the Body of Christ, I do wonder of the implications when digital presence is now seen to be the more stable form of personal presence to another. This is especially given that digital presences are highly prone to being either modified or even erased in the space of a few keystrokes.
The Christian tradition does provide one response, which is a call to kenotically give ourselves to another, that participates in Christ’s self-emptying even unto nothingness. In this case, this kenotic act could take the form of giving one’s flesh over to be translated into word. Stability then comes from cleaving one’s flesh to the flesh of Christ who, even as he enters into nothingness, never gives into nothingness.
