Once again, I would like to share my latest guest post written for the Hannah Arendt Center blog's Quote of the Week feature. This post is called Hiatus, Discontinuity, and Change, originally posted on April 14th, and the discussion has some relationship to our recently concluded Passover holiday.
"The end of the old is not necessarily the beginning of the new."
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
This is a simple enough statement, and yet it masks a profound truth,
one that we often overlook out of the very human tendency to seek
consistency and connection, to make order out of the chaos of reality,
and to ignore the anomalous nature of that which lies in between
whatever phenomena we are attending to.
Perhaps the clearest example of this has been what proved to be the
unfounded optimism that greeted the overthrow of autocratic regimes
through American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the
native-born movements known collectively as the Arab Spring. It is one
thing to disrupt the status quo, to overthrow an unpopular and
undemocratic regime. But that end does not necessarily lead to the
establishment of a new, beneficent and participatory political
structure. We see this time and time again, now in Putin's Russia, a
century ago with the Russian Revolution, and over two centuries ago with
the French Revolution.
Of course, it has long been understood that oftentimes, to begin
something new, we first have to put an end to something old. The popular
saying that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs
reflects this understanding, although it is certainly not the case that
breaking eggs will inevitably and automatically lead to the creation of
an omelet. Breaking eggs is a necessary but not sufficient cause of
omelets, and while this is not an example of the classic chicken and egg
problem, I think we can imagine that the chicken might have something
to say on the matter of breaking eggs. Certainly, the chicken would have
a different view on what is signified or ought to be signified by the
end of the old, meaning the end of the egg shell, insofar as you can't
make a chicken without it first breaking out of the egg that it took
form within.
So, whether you take the chicken's point of view, or adopt the
perspective of the omelet, looking backwards, reverse engineering the
current situation, it is only natural to view the beginning of the new
as an effect brought into being by the end of the old, to assume or make
an inference based on sequencing in time, to posit a causal
relationship and commit the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc,
if for no other reason that by force of narrative logic that compels us
to create a coherent storyline. In this respect, Arendt points to the
foundation tales of ancient Israel and Rome:
We have the Biblical story of the exodus
of Israeli tribes from Egypt, which preceded the Mosaic legislation
constituting the Hebrew people, and Virgil's story of the wanderings of
Aeneas, which led to the foundation of Rome—"dum conderet urbem,"
as Virgil defines the content of his great poem even in its first
lines. Both legends begin with an act of liberation, the flight from
oppression and slavery in Egypt and the flight from burning Troy (that
is, from annihilation); and in both instances this act is told from the
perspective of a new freedom, the conquest of a new "promised land" that
offers more than Egypt's fleshpots and the foundation of a new City
that is prepared for by a war destined to undo the Trojan war, so that
the order of events as laid down by Homer could be reversed.
Fast forward to the American Revolution, and we find that the
founders of the republic, mindful of the uniqueness of their
undertaking, searched for archetypes in the ancient world. And what they
found in the narratives of Exodus and the Aeneid was that the act of
liberation, and the establishment of a new freedom are two events, not
one, and in effect subject to Alfred Korzybski's non-Aristotelian
Principle of Non-Identity. The success of the formation of the American
republic can be attributed to the awareness on their part of the chasm
that exists between the closing of one era and the opening of a new age,
of their separation in time and space:
No doubt if we read these legends as
tales, there is a world of difference between the aimless desperate
wanderings of the Israeli tribes in the desert after the Exodus and the
marvelously colorful tales of the adventures of Aeneas and his fellow
Trojans; but to the men of action of later generations who ransacked the
archives of antiquity for paradigms to guide their own intentions, this
was not decisive. What was decisive was that there was a hiatus between
disaster and salvation, between liberation from the old order and the
new freedom, embodied in a novus ordo saeclorum, a "new world order of the ages" with whose rise the world had structurally changed.
I find Arendt's use of the term hiatus interesting, given that
in contemporary American culture it has largely been appropriated by
the television industry to refer to a series that has been taken off the
air for a period of time, but not cancelled. The typical phrase is on hiatus, meaning on a break or on vacation. But Arendt reminds us that such connotations only scratch the surface of the word's broader meanings. The Latin word hiatus
refers to an opening or rupture, a physical break or missing part or
link in a concrete material object. As such, it becomes a spatial
metaphor when applied to an interruption or break in time, a usage
introduced in the 17th century. Interestingly, this coincides with the
period in English history known as the Interregnum, which began
in 1649 with the execution of King Charles I, led to Oliver Cromwell's
installation as Lord Protector, and ended after Cromwell's death with
the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, son of Charles I.
While in some ways anticipating the American Revolution, the English
Civil War followed an older pattern, one that Mircea Eliade referred to
as the myth of eternal return, a circular movement rather than the linear progression of history and cause-effect relations.
The idea of moving forward, of progress, requires a
future-orientation that only comes into being in the modern age, by
which I mean the era that followed the printing revolution associated
with Johannes Gutenberg (I discuss this in my book, On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology).
But that same print culture also gave rise to modern science, and with
it the monopoly granted to efficient causality, cause-effect relations,
to the exclusion in particular of final and formal cause (see Marshall
and Eric McLuhan's Media and Formal Cause). This is the basis of
the Newtonian universe in which every action has an equal and opposite
reaction, and every effect can be linked back in a causal chain to
another event that preceded it and brought it into being. The view of
time as continuous and connected can be traced back to the introduction
of the mechanical clock in the 13th century, but was solidified through
the printing of calendars and time lines, and the same effect was
created in spatial terms by the reproduction of maps, and the use of
spatial grids, e.g., the Mercator projection.
And while the invention of history, as a written narrative concerning
the linear progression over time can be traced back to the ancient
Israelites, and the story of the exodus, the story incorporates the idea
of a hiatus in overlapping structures:
A1. Joseph is the golden boy, the son favored by his father Jacob, earning him the enmity of his brothers
A2. he is sold into slavery by them, winds up in Egypt as a slave and then is falsely accused and imprisoned
A3. by virtue of his ability to interpret dreams he gains his freedom and rises to the position of Pharaoh's prime minister
B1. Joseph welcomes his brothers and father, and the House of Israel
goes down to Egypt to sojourn due to famine in the land of Canaan
B2. their descendants are enslaved, oppressed, and persecuted
B3. Moses is chosen to confront Pharaoh, liberate the Israelites, and lead them on their journey through the desert
C1. the Israelites are freed from bondage and escape from Egypt
C2. the revelation at Sinai fully establishes their covenant with God
C3. after many trials, they return to the Promised Land
It can be clearly seen in these narrative structures that the role of
the hiatus, in ritual terms, is that of the rite of passage, the
initiation period that marks, in symbolic fashion, the change in status,
the transformation from one social role or state of being to another
(e.g., child to adult, outsider to member of the group). This is not to
discount the role that actual trials, tests, and other hardships may
play in the transition, as they serve to establish or reinforce,
psychologically and sometimes physically, the value and reality of the
transformation.
In mythic terms, this structure has become known as the hero's journey or hero's adventure, made famous by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
and also known as the monomyth, because he claimed that the same basic
structure is universal to all cultures. The basis structure he
identified consists of three main elements: separation (e.g., the hero
leaves home), initiation (e.g., the hero enters another realm,
experiences tests and trials, leading to the bestowing of gifts,
abilities, and/or a new status), and return (the hero returns to utilize
what he has gained from the initiation and save the day, restoring the
status quo or establishing a new status quo).
Understanding the mythic, non-rational element of initiation is the
key to recognizing the role of the hiatus, and in the modern era this
meant using rationality to realize the limits of rationality. With this
in mind, let me return to the quote I began this essay with, but now
provide the larger context of the entire paragraph:
The legendary hiatus between a no-more
and a not-yet clearly indicated that freedom would not be the automatic
result of liberation, that the end of the old is not necessarily the
beginning of the new, that the notion of an all-powerful time continuum
is an illusion. Tales of a transitory period—from bondage to freedom,
from disaster to salvation—were all the more appealing because the
legends chiefly concerned the deeds of great leaders, persons of
world-historic significance who appeared on the stage of history
precisely during such gaps of historical time. All those who pressed by
exterior circumstances or motivated by radical utopian thought-trains,
were not satisfied to change the world by the gradual reform of an old
order (and this rejection of the gradual was precisely what transformed
the men of action of the eighteenth century, the first century of a
fully secularized intellectual elite, into the men of the revolutions)
were almost logically forced to accept the possibility of a hiatus in
the continuous flow of temporal sequence.
Note that concept of gaps in historical time, which brings to mind
Eliade's distinction between the sacred and the profane. Historical time
is a form of profane time, and sacred time represents a gap or break in
that linear progression, one that takes us outside of history,
connecting us instead in an eternal return to the time associated with a
moment of creation or foundation. The revelation in Sinai is an example
of such a time, and accordingly Deuteronomy states that all of the
members of the House of Israel were present at that event, not just
those alive at that time, but those not present, the generations of the
future. This statement is included in the liturgy of the Passover Seder,
which is a ritual reenactment of the exodus and revelation, which in
turn becomes part of the reenactment of the Passion in Christianity, one
of the primary examples of Campbell's monomyth.
Arendt's hiatus, then represents a rupture between two different
states or stages, an interruption, a disruption linked to an eruption.
In the parlance of chaos and complexity theory, it is a bifurcation
point. Arendt's contemporary, Peter Drucker, a philosopher who pioneered
the scholarly study of business and management, characterized the
contemporary zeitgeist in the title of his 1969 book: The Age of Discontinuity. It is an age in which Newtonian physics was replaced by Einstein's relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty, the phrase quantum leap
becoming a metaphor drawn from subatomic physics for all forms of
discontinuity. It is an age in which the fixed point of view that
yielded perspective in art and the essay and novel in literature yielded
to Cubism and subsequent forms of modern art, and stream of
consciousness in writing.
Beginning in the 19th century, photography gave us the frozen,
discontinuous moment, and the technique of montage in the motion picture
gave us a series of shots and scenes whose connections have to be
filled in by the audience. Telegraphy gave us the instantaneous
transmission of messages that took them out of their natural context,
the subject of the famous comment by Henry David Thoreau that connecting
Maine and Texas to one another will not guarantee that they have
anything sensible to share with each other. The wire services gave us
the nonlinear, inverted pyramid style of newspaper reporting, which also
was associated with the nonlinear look of the newspaper front page, a
form that Marshall McLuhan referred to as a mosaic. Neil Postman
criticized television's role in decontextualizing public discourse in Amusing Ourselves to Death,
where he used the phrase, "in the context of no context," and I discuss
this as well in my recently published follow-up to his work, Amazing Ourselves to Death.
The concept of the hiatus comes naturally to the premodern mind,
schooled by myth and ritual within the context of oral culture. That
same concept is repressed, in turn, by the modern mind, shaped by the
linearity and rationality of literacy and typography.
As the modern mind
yields to a new, postmodern alternative, one that emerges out of the
electronic media environment, we see the return of the repressed in the
idea of the jump cut writ large.
There is psychological satisfaction in the deterministic view of
history as the inevitable result of cause-effect relations in the
Newtonian sense, as this provides a sense of closure and coherence
consistent with the typographic mindset. And there is similar
satisfaction in the view of history as entirely consisting of human
decisions that are the product of free will, of human agency unfettered
by outside constraints, which is also consistent with the individualism
that emerges out of the literate mindset and print culture, and with a
social rather that physical version of efficient causality. What we are
only beginning to come to terms with is the understanding of formal
causality, as discussed by Marshall and Eric McLuhan in Media and Formal Cause.
What formal causality suggests is that history has a tendency to follow
certain patterns, patterns that connect one state or stage to another,
patterns that repeat again and again over time. This is the notion that
history repeats itself, meaning that historical events tend to fall into
certain patterns (repetition being the precondition for the existence
of patterns), and that the goal, as McLuhan articulated in Understanding Media,
is pattern recognition. This helps to clarify the famous remark by
George Santayana, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it." In other words, those who are blind to patterns will find it
difficult to break out of them.
Campbell engages in pattern recognition in his identification of the
heroic monomyth, as Arendt does in her discussion of the historical
hiatus. Recognizing the patterns are the first step in escaping them,
and may even allow for the possibility of taking control and influencing
them. This also means understanding that the tendency for phenomena to
fall into patterns is a powerful one. It is a force akin to entropy, and
perhaps a result of that very statistical tendency that is expressed by
the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as Terrence Deacon argues in Incomplete Nature.
It follows that there are only certain points in history, certain
moments, certain bifurcation points, when it is possible to make a
difference, or to make a difference that makes a difference, to use
Gregory Bateson's formulation, and change the course of history. The
moment of transition, of initiation, the hiatus, represents such a
moment.
McLuhan's concept of medium goes far beyond the ordinary sense of the word, as he relates it to the idea of gaps and intervals, the ground that surrounds the figure, and explains that his philosophy of media is not about transportation (of information), but transformation. The medium is the hiatus.
The particular pattern that has come to the fore in our time is that
of the network, whether it's the decentralized computer network and the
internet as the network of networks, or the highly centralized and
hierarchical broadcast network, or the interpersonal network associated
with Stanley Milgram's research (popularly known as six degrees of separation),
or the neural networks that define brain structure and function, or
social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, etc. And it is not
the nodes, which may be considered the content of the network, that
defines the network, but the links that connect them, which function as
the network medium, and which, in the systems view favored by Bateson,
provide the structure for the network system, the interaction or
relationship between the nodes. What matters is not the nodes, it's the
modes.
Hiatus and link may seem like polar opposites, the break and the
bridge, but they are two sides of the same coin, the medium that goes
between, simultaneously separating and connecting. The boundary divides
the system from its environment, allowing the system to maintain its
identity as separate and distinct from the environment, keeping it from
being absorbed by the environment. But the membrane also serves as a
filter, engaged in the process of abstracting, to use Korzybski's
favored term, letting through or bringing material, energy, and
information from the environment into the system so that the system can
maintain itself and survive. The boundary keeps the system in touch with
its situation, keeps it contextualized within its environment.
The systems view emphasizes space over time, as does ecology, but the
concept of the hiatus as a temporal interruption suggests an
association with evolution as well. Darwin's view of evolution as
continuous was consistent with Newtonian physics. The more recent
modification of evolutionary theory put forth by Stephen Jay Gould,
known as punctuated equilibrium, suggests that evolution occurs in fits
and starts, in relatively rare and isolated periods of major change,
surrounded by long periods of relative stability and stasis. Not
surprisingly, this particular conception of discontinuity was introduced
during the television era, in the early 1970s, just a few years after
the publication of Peter Drucker's The Age of Discontinuity.
When you consider the extraordinary changes that we are experiencing
in our time, technologically and ecologically, the latter underlined by
the recent news concerning the United Nations' latest report on global
warming, what we need is an understanding of the concept of change, a
way to study the patterns of change, patterns that exist and persist
across different levels, the micro and the macro, the physical,
chemical, biological, psychological, and social, what Bateson referred
to as metapatterns, the subject of further elaboration by
biologist Tyler Volk in his book on the subject. Paul Watzlawick argued
for the need to study change in and of itself in a little book
co-authored by John H. Weakland and Richard Fisch, entitled Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution,
which considers the problem from the point of view of psychotherapy.
Arendt gives us a philosophical entrée into the problem by introducing
the pattern of the hiatus, the moment of discontinuity that leads to
change, and possibly a moment in which we, as human agents, can have an
influence on the direction of that change.
To have such an influence, we do need to have that break, to find a
space and more importantly a time to pause and reflect, to evaluate and
formulate. Arendt famously emphasizes the importance of thinking in and
of itself, the importance not of the content of thought alone, but of
the act of thinking, the medium of thinking, which requires an
opening, a time out, a respite from the onslaught of 24/7/365. This
underscores the value of sacred time, and it follows that it is no
accident that during that period of initiation in the story of the
exodus, there is the revelation at Sinai and the gift of divine law, the
Torah or Law, and chief among them the Ten Commandments, which includes
the fourth of the commandments, and the one presented in greatest
detail, to observe the Sabbath day. This premodern ritual requires us to
make the hiatus a regular part of our lives, to break the continuity of
profane time on a weekly basis. From that foundation, other
commandments establish the idea of the sabbatical year, and the
sabbatical of sabbaticals, or jubilee year. Whether it's a Sabbath
mandated by religious observance, or a new movement to engage in a
Technology Sabbath, the hiatus functions as the response to the
homogenization of time that was associated with efficient causality and
literate linearity, and that continues to intensify in conjunction with
the technological imperative of efficiency über alles.
To return one last time to the quote that I began with, the end of
the old is not necessarily the beginning of the new because there may
not be a new beginning at all, there may not be anything new to take the
place of the old. The end of the old may be just that, the end, period,
the end of it all. The presence of a hiatus to follow the end of the
old serves as a promise that something new will begin to take its place
after the hiatus is over. And the presence of a hiatus in our lives,
individually and collectively, may also serve as a promise that we will
not inevitably rush towards an end of the old that will also be an end
of it all, that we will be able to find the opening to begin something
new, that we will be able to make the transition to something better,
that both survival and progress are possible, through an understanding
of the processes of continuity and change.
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