14th Nov. 2024
annoying things (1)
Everything I do, and everything objects do, in the course of washing the duvet is intentional. But in between, there are factors that exert as much influence as intentional agency—and sometimes even more. They are unintentional, natural elements: sunlight, water quality, static electricity, and the like. Living in an environment made up almost entirely of products, I sometimes forget this, but people are always making efforts to adjust themselves to nature's unintentional actions. And in the process of adjusting ourselves to what is unintentional, we end up experiencing some of the same feelings we have when we adjust ourselves to intentional objects, or when we adjust ourselves to other people's actions. So this time I decided to think about what that more universal feeling is, and whether that feeling might open up any possibility of relating to objects not as use, but as a collaborative relationship.
annoying things (2)
The satisfaction of working together arrives after anger. When I sleep under the duvet, it feels like a place to rest and recharge. In that moment, I don't need to make myself fit the duvet, or make the duvet fit me. I only need to fall asleep, warm beneath it. But when I wash the duvet and put the cover back on, it produces a different kind of resistance, and I place a different kind of demand on it. To get through this unusual situation, I do something like negotiation with the duvet, and friction arises in the process. Friction produces heat and static electricity. The heat and static electricity are registered by me as anger. But when that angry process is over, the renewed comfort the duvet provides comes to me as a sense of achievement, and leaves me remembering the anger as the satisfaction of working together.
Good anger tends to be remembered as the satisfaction of working together. In any process of working together towards a shared goal, it becomes unavoidable to encounter the other person more closely and more often, in ways that differ from before. That is why collaboration requires a kind of adjustment: matching my function to the other person's function in order to reduce friction—rather like wearing Uniqlo and shaping my body to fit the Uniqlo clothes. A few days ago, for instance, someone I know asked me to look after a dog called Lucky. He had very poor social skills. On the first day he bit me, and my hand bled. I scolded him, and whatever faint affection I might have had for him disappeared; I didn't even want to look at him. Even so, I had to live in the same room as him for three weeks, feed him, and take him out for walks every day. For Lucky to make it back to his owner alive, I had to create an environment in which he didn't feel threatened. And it seemed that only then could I live in an environment where I didn't feel threatened either. For the shared goal of survival, Lucky and I had to make up, establish rules, and learn what penalties each of us would face if we failed to keep them. I didn't want to look at him, and I didn't want to do anything for him, but by enduring all that discomfort and anger I made room for his territory, and I had no choice but to fit my schedule around his. After a few days—around the time he and I were starting to adapt to our respective roles and feel a measure of ease—my hand had begun to heal, and he started to show his belly.
Similarly, the reason I felt a sense of comradeship towards the printer was that the anger I experienced when it failed to do its job was that intense. And perhaps the reason I thought of showering as a form of collaboration was that it was just as uncomfortable to use a bathroom where someone else could hear the sound of me showering. Because the more anger and discomfort there was, the more I had to do—and later that effort remained, in equal measure, as the satisfaction of working together.
Anger exists in collaboration between people in exactly the same way. The act of making a call for the sake of collaboration, reconciling differences, aligning schedules, and settling for a result that is only about eighty per cent satisfactory—every negotiation and every adjustment made for a shared purpose, or more modestly for each other's convenience, produces friction. And in that friction, even if it is only a very small anger, there is never a case where anger is absent. There is no collaboration without anger. If a collaboration ends without even the smallest trace of anger, it is probably because one side swallowed, alone, the portion of anger the other did not have to experience, or because—after repeated collaborations—there has been a decision to remain in a relationship in which feelings are no longer taken into account. And if the question arises of whether neither side truly felt any anger at all, and the answer can be given from the bottom of the heart, then it may be more accurate to see it not as collaboration but as two subjects having been placed, briefly, in parallel directions by chance.
Even if every meeting ended in a fight and the relationship was severed completely after the final presentation, if the anger was good anger then the process, looked back on alongside the outcome, can remain in memory as good collaboration, regardless of the relationship now. But if the anger was not of that quality, then no matter how well it was swallowed in silence, and no matter how brightly the parting was staged—with smiles, and even a promise to meet for drinks the following week—there will be no working together again. Whether putting a duvet cover on can be considered collaboration is something to think through later. But if the satisfaction of working together that I felt while putting the duvet cover on was a real sensation, then it is possible to say that my anger towards the duvet was not appropriate. The fact that the intervals between washes have grown longer is evidence of that. No matter how soft and comfortable the freshly washed duvet may be, the irritation of putting the cover back on was greater, and so the anger in the washing never fully converted into the satisfaction of working together. Instead, it was left behind in memory as fragmented anger (static electricity) and fragmented cooperation (flailing). Perhaps this is why the duvet-washing cycle has grown longer.
stirring cornflakes into
Collaboration, arriving alongside anger, has provided an environment in which I can sit in a warm home, have Corn Flakes and coffee, and write on my laptop—writing that no one may ever read—even though I still haven't found suitable work.
From the moment sexual reproduction first began hundreds of millions of years ago, or from the moment mitochondria first entered a proto-eukaryotic cell billions of years ago, or from much earlier still, when cyanobacteria began to form colonies, collaboration on Earth had already begun. Billions of years later, fungi connected themselves to plant roots and laid the foundations of terrestrial ecosystems. Terrestrial plants, through collaboration with a range of living beings, became organisms capable of forming shared interests with animals. Some angiosperms, among them, brought about high-density cooperative societies among bees and ants. Bees helped plants set fruit, ants helped seeds disperse, and plants that spread through interspecies collaboration then collaborated with fungi again, forming yet another large network between plants.
And on top of that, the ancestors of humans began to form cooperative groups for one another's safety. As time passed, humans also built cooperative relationships with nature by raising dogs and cultivating plants. At that time, when humans were not the dominant species on Earth, fear of those outside their cooperative bonds may have made them want to entrust themselves to a cooperative order larger than their immediate alliances. Having built a cooperative relationship larger than they had imagined, they may, at some point, have begun to feel its instability—along with the anger and discomfort within it—more strongly than the sense of security that cooperation had once provided. In order to ease those feelings, they may have needed a new collaborator: larger and stronger than the group they belonged to, but still capable of entering into a symbiotic relationship. However, their group had already grown beyond the limits of their imagination. So perhaps they began to collaborate with an even larger imagined being—namely, a god.
They could be confident that the group they belonged to was a collaborative relationship with one powerful shared purpose: devotion to a god. Their god offered them security, and in turn depended on them for its existence. In this way, they were able to build relationships on a scale that could be recognised as a society. Through that society, humans could carry out construction on a scale that an individual—or even a family—could not manage alone, and they could expand the scale of human collaboration, as well as their collaboration with plants and animals.
This collective consciousness was so solid that it led them to the idea that collaboration existed only under a form of trust mediated by a god. Within their worldview, only those positioned on the "inside" of the structure would have counted as subjects—subjects able to communicate with the world's supra-subject. Those outside—an individual or group, or even a phenomenon—may have been an enemy, or else something that was not an enemy but resembled one in that it could not be communicated with. Perhaps this separation between groups is what gave the group its subjectivity. The subjectivity formed in this way would have made it difficult to recognise collaboration with beings outside the structure as collaboration at all, and they would have needed some other means of defining their relations with what lay outside. And perhaps that means was control. Control would have redefined collaboration with other people as labour, collaboration with animals as livestock farming, collaboration with plants as agriculture, and collaboration with objects as use.
Regardless of how they regarded collaboration with others, collaboration with humans, animals, plants, and objects expanded the range of what they could do exponentially. And it made it possible for them to meet—and negotiate with—other groups of humans in distant regions who possessed a similar level of subjectivity. When two groups served different gods, they would, in order to collaborate, seize the other group's god, or absorb it. Before long, however, they realised that this method was unstable. In order to build a more peaceful cooperative relationship, they may have created another imagined being—something that could function as a shared purpose. Perhaps that was currency. Currency was practical, and may have been less entangled in norms; it could have felt accessible, easier to grasp, and freer to handle. And these qualities may have made it possible to form a shared purpose and trust in the form of ideology. Much like the exclusivity of a society mediated by a god, ideological cohesion may have become firmer by treating groups that did not use the same currency, or did not share the same ideology, as uncivilised. A community mediated by a god still possessed, at least, a kind of compassion towards outsiders. But in an ideology simpler than faith, compassion was absent, and outsiders became, more readily, a means—or an object. In that way, it became easier to sort those with whom collaboration was possible from those who could simply be used.
Because ideology was so easy to understand, it made possible forms of integration between states that exceeded geographical limits. In that way, humans were able to build a planetary network on a scale that neither trees nor ants have ever built. States under the same ideology needed broader and faster communications networks, both to strengthen their relations with one another and to keep other ideological groups in check. The development of those networks smoothed communication not only between states but also between individuals under the same ideology, tightening ideological cohesion more firmly than expected. And, as a secondary effect, it also made it possible to collaborate with the knowledge of those who had died within the group. So now, on top of the results of collaboration on a planetary scale stretching over billions of years, I am sitting in a warm home, eating Corn Flakes and drinking coffee, and writing on a laptop.
All ancestors have endured anger and discomfort, and carried on with bargaining and negotiation. Those who first began to form colonies would have had to overcome anger born of physical and chemical friction. And those who first began sexual reproduction would have had to endure the anger of friction itself, and the anger that came from the uncertainty of reproduction. Those who began to collaborate with other species, or with other clans, would have had to live with distrust and anxiety towards the other. Their efforts to discover a better shared purpose would only have been possible through much anger, and the sacrifices that followed from it. The result of their having endured anger remains in the desk, the cup on the desk, the coffee in the cup, the bowl, and the Corn Flakes on it. It remains, too, in the various pens, the books, the Post-its, the laptop, the iPad, the phone, the phone stand, the headphones, and the plug socket. Everything I come into contact with—including these objects—is, like me, both an outcome and a descendant of collaboration. And so, just as I carry the will to collaborate, they (these) also carry the will to collaborate, and are ready to become angry for the sake of collaboration.
