james de llis, progress is a life worm — review
at his most depressed, james is at his most beautiful - although he is dragging all of us down with him, metaphorically and sometimes literally
in "societal humiliation fetish", illis' learned helplesness has two slightly hidden contradictory impulses, even if it's fully linear in its presentation. the basic idea that conditioning is about how amplified artifical environments suddenly change the inner expected biological inclinations of a creature is here being taken to amplify a more advanced idea that societal abstractions themselves are the cause of a type of regressive helplesness that originates in a certain higher-order divsion of labour that ultimately parasites on top of significance itself.
this supposed division of labour (supposed because illis seems to believe it it is not a division but a presumption) preceeds a higher-order division of the displacement of significance itself. essentially, societal division causes "genuinely meaningful forms of understanding" to scatter in entropy, as seen in the maurice nicoll reference where the student has a sudden epiphany that nobody is able to answer questions meaningfully or that society as a totality is oriented towards obfuscation, which then has a causal effect on actual social machnications, so that the inability to call for help to fix a basic item is both caused by forward-facing mechanical reasons tied to the organization of space and expected social value or communal capacity or inclination towards labour, and backwards, where a generalized sense of increasing learned helplesness also feeds into cascades that continue this process, where eventually micro helplessness leads to existential helplessness.
the contradiction, not in the narrative but inherent in the idea itself, is that if displacement is a meta-displacement, or in other words, that abstaining from an activity due to symbolic reasons such as it being seen as stagnating the actual ability to reach the zone of significance is the realistic cause of micro helplessness spreading like a contagion and being caught up into broader areas, is that institutional differral is itself a form of social organization that preceeds that of the division of labour but does not bypass the will to summon or maintain it.
sure, socially-imposed forms of governance that cause alienation cannot be fought off or prevented individually by subjects inside a system, and a majority of the cascading effects of such a system is structurally related to the enviornment and the density of any network and its capacity to integrate people into it, but the instrumentalization of daily life itself is at every moment caused by the individual complicity to reduce interactions to efficient movements, reify moments into transitional states, turn entire areas into spaces of transit rather than belonging, and ultimately, the dissatisfaction of the world itself is not caused by the underlying system nor is it totally to structurally blame for all the forms of alienation that result because of it.
illis is well aware of this, because in "progress is a life worm" as well as "on deconversion" he makes this very argument, the idea that internally-religated reification can and does causally preceed impersonal flows and systemic networks. if progress itself is a teleological and gnostic abandonment of a "this-world", it cannot necessarily be said that it only arose because the "that-world" continously disabled all attempts at attaining immediate and lasting signficance in social enviornments, and this thesis directly conflicts with the narrative stated in "learned helplessness" that subjects internalize and reinforce the standards before they become conditioned.
yet, the concept of the will to summon deferral meets one more conceptual cluster, that of posession as a collection of events inherent to objects that work as symbols of a type of "experiental status" that inevitably collapses lived significance. in "you are your possessions", illis tells us that "ownership is fear of intrusion, of turbulence, and ultimately, of death, as everything is." this is the one of the two times he explains why posession occurs, the other one being tied to the idea that maintenace is its own generative ideology. but, the will isn't allowed its own mechanism in this writing, it's simply equated with an orgasmic cleansing that lets go of the items of posession. ever since baudrillard but even all the way back to marx, the sociological and anthropological common standpoint has been that the posession and circulation gives us a map of a broader network of symbolic relations, needs and forms of organization.
mary douglas in the world of goods takes this idea to its limit, arguing that "consumption decisions become the vital source of the culture of the moment", where consumption is neither tied to particular subjects of commerce or the law of economy or its jurispridence. douglas' point is that consumption helps construct an intelligible social world through goods, where abstractions such as time, space, hierarchy, belonging, and public meaning are all constantly in rotation and sequenced through goods, which deliniate their passage, their allowance, their ability to be presented in one way or another, and ultimately govern the meta-decision layer of sociality itself.
the problem with this broader view is that, as james clearly shows us, "each act of thing-possession is simultaneously a grasping out from the very life they seek to bolster, caress, and apparently wish to engage in." consumption clearly sometimes has a deeply anti-social character, one that is unconcerned about the navigation of the individual in space as a free consumer. not only does anthropology vulgarly collapse the distinction between the restraint of the law and the restraint of the inhibitions of the individual, where the unrestrained subject in a free decision space is still bound to a very particular kind of market-logic that itself produces social decisions rather than laws that govern it.
the broader view of consumption also collapses desire into subjectivity, will into imposition vs. position, and by attempting to analyze sociality through forms of exchange, turns sociality itself into the transaction of a particular kind of will, a will that may not exist in the actual process of transaction. this doesn't mean that subjectivity does not interfere with impulse or its propagandistic weaponization, but rather that commercialization and the entire decision-space inherent in transactions may not be able to describe neither the act of the "broader" sense of consumption nor its cause.
on the other hand, the deferral of responsibility and the causes for consumption are seen by illis as related to institutional dependency where active social organization causes deferrance through a type of passive professionalizing proxy that as a base fact enables a foregoing or abstenance from responisbility, and both consumption and conversion serve to facilitate an aid against a wider existential dissatisfaction, with the product being a type of emerging state of transitionality tied to a broader teleological framework where an idea of speculative future or forward movement almost entirely displaces the axiological horizon of the present. in this way, posession and conversion both turn progress itself into an axiological horizon, the "progressive horizon" that works as a social glue that entirely displaces all lived moments into pleasantries, greetings, or inabilities to seek the secret even-more-than-basic existential needs of an entire population.
"however, we have all studied under countless teachers, and yet how many could even recite a poem or a historical date? we have access to doctors and health specialists, and yet everyone is fat, sick, and tired. we have therapists, counsellors, and self-help books in abundance, and yet everyone is miserable and on the verge of tears." what james is doing with this imperative is that through the overgeneralized concept of a widespread passivity, and by apriori inserting a sense of suppressed frustration into the world, the form of indirect communication itself replaces the ability to significate in society. every single social form of organization, when encountering a socially re-orientationalist paradigm, suddenly "meets" everything around it as incapable simply because of the modern imperative to forego and turn-aside every request for "higher" signification.
the natural villian of this imperative is the moment that posited authority meets responsibility as non-transactionality, because then incapacity takes center stage and allows authority to collapse under its own pretenses. in this sense, illis is creating an atmosphere around the world, a sort of bubble where "everyone" is implanted with a type of transcendental direction, a direction-towards-impossibility, where they hold higher and higher sets of pure potentiality and intentionality, but consistently lower sets of acting intervals, so that helplessness itself becomes a virus, a form of universal impotence.
the problem this idea meets head-on is that, if anthropology can't answer why goods and possessions act as a definitive recourse in the present age without turning economy itself into sociality and communication, and if goods aren't ultimately fully caused by the horizon of progress that displaces the spatio-temporal logic of capital into lived bodies where these bodies don't actually gain any of the supposed actual logic of modernity as a direct reward, then not only are social forms of organization not the origin-point of the meta-cause of these same social forms of organization, nor the conditions that perpetuate the future present state of things as a horizon, but since they aren't inherently in charge of the spiral, they aren't actually creating the forms of desire that ultimately cause the world-denial evident in posession as a closing-out of the world.
this means that the anti-social explanation for posession holds posession as the ability to rid yourself of the social significance of the world, which attaches much more cleanly to the idea that helplessness and the "niceness" imperative produce a subject apologetic for its own existence but feeling a sense of dread towards the entire "subject" (not object) of the world, where essentially world-denial is a maintenance of "artifacts" (goods) that prevent anyone from being able to reach you, contrary to the idea that they serve as a basis for constant social cooperation or boundary maintenance. it seems that james may be showing us that the way that modern subjects actually deal with oversaturation is by abusing modernity's horizon by flipping it on its hinges, illis describes it like this: "a grey, horizonless exhaustion that mistakes itself for realism, transforming the person into a grey, inner-less realist, whose entire life is one sludgy day after another"
james frequently describes intermediate phenomena such as fatigue, dependence and scripted interaction by framing them through maximal terms, which is itself a part of the actual conceptual requirement for the condition of symbolic exchange. if every encounter with modernity produces undesirable side effects, then every explanation for them naturally hinges on the idea that they replace an ever-greater truth behind them, rather than that they are the operational modes of the compromise between multiple different sets of messed up realities that aren't naturally predicable or comparable to this one. this creates rhetorical force but reduces analytic precision, because the moment that the generalization moves from a phenomenological observation to a civilization totality ("everyone, "society") the affective load of the text increases as the polemics replace the concepts, but the narrative collapses the more that this replacement removes the nuance naturally contained in the concepts.
illis is writing from the standpoint of immament critique, albeit affective, and the goal is precisely to create an affective surface that is able to relay the disgruntlement of modernity into a more plausibly communicative form, but if he replaced the universalisms with probabilistic models (“many,” “often,” “increasingly”), the observations would appear both narratively imbedded and much more plausible. there are actual editorial problems with this suggestion in the process of writing, one being for example that the motivation of the speaker to lay out the thought process itself depends on the inspiration granted by the affective totality of a universal scaffolding, or that the affective load actually helps the polemic push into a point of relatability on the side of the viewers, but it also turns all of the writings into versions of eachother by collapsing all of their strong points into a metaphor for conversion.
illis most astute observation in "on deconversion", "the problem is the problem", is precisely the most conversive argument possible, because it aligns all future problems he could mention with a universal or existential dissatisfaction, one that aligns with say, a meinlanderian narrative of negative incapacity, and in its polemical structure creates a powerful epistemic frame that can easily misattribute societal abstractions into a broader denial of social dynamics. the immediacy of societal fatigue turned existential suffering essentially replaces the conceptual possibility for an immanent analysis of society because by answering the question of unhappiness it is simultaneously being asked and solved "you are unhappy -> you need to give up this aspect of modernity" always meet at the end of each article and may increase in being convincing the more they are repeated, and may decrease in theoretical value the same way, the more they fail to speculate modes of existence.
illis solution to the problem of posession, which follows his general heuristic just noted earlier, is to do away with all the burdens that accompany our envionrment by increasingly physically dispossing of all our acquired false treasures, and here it actually functions as an accidental transition into modernity rather than its denial. if niceness as a social form serves to support generalized helplessness as a social condition through the idea that transition will eventually liberate all non-confronted and non-confrontable subjects, then the liberation of items gives us a perfect backdrop of alienation. in two different ways this isnt the case, in one way, it helps to dissolve the illusion that these items will somehow lead to socialization rather than stratification, and in another way, it avoids our self-posession (cars as a world-denial, commodities as precisely anti-social forms of non-communication), but cruically, to do away with commodities itself was earlier described by illis as a euphoric process, and is yet another form of conversion, which, in light of modernity's continous useless-ification of all domestic goods that aren't screens or abstracts laws of self-governance, actually works precisely as a transition. this transition mimics the transition that niceness offers us into avoiding the total humilation that helplessness pushes us into.
but in another sense, this helplessness is reflective of posessiveness, because posession itself is in fact a form of social protection, unlike what illis claims, but it is evident in his general sentiment. illis notes "the chain moves from real (i have a sheet over my body) to ideal (there is such a thing as ‘security’). this might appear like a rather radical or even mad way to look at possession ownership, but i would state that such a projection arises from the possessive mindset". this is not actually the common anthropological standpoint that illis is seemingly gesturing towards. rather, it is the contrary, the anti-social form of the idealized commodity is itself a de-transition from modernity. illis is sitting in the middle zone where he's right about to actually posit which part of subjectivity commercialization serves to disgruntle, but he never gets there. his ending notes sound precisely like the opposite, a confusion about the symbolic truth behind subjectivity. "how many more purchases until you admit you have no idea what you want? [...] how much more suffering until you just give it up?".
if illis were to push through, he would have to posit what posession is for. his articles make common use of negative filtering, where examples are chosen almost exclusively to illustrate failure, helplessness, or alienation. if we take an alternate view from illis and say that the anti-social theory of posession actually is about protecting oneself from ones own dissatisfaction rather than the cause of it, suggested by the way in which modernity is more than happy for us if we dispose of our items. then we'd have to act exactly contrary to all of douglas' common examples of limits. this is already what the progressive horizon is doing to social relations, deterritorializing their intrinsic value, allowing the systemic process of transit and exchange to be entirely emptied of the significance behind the character of man. if posession is a defining boundary for us, then to posess many artifacts in one's own house would have to be no different than a command, the ability to impose. this social form of imposition takes a hilarious form in this declaration "through my posessions, i have always had the ability to command you to serve me, but have simply never executed this command".
in this way, we are surfacing the viral spooks behind posession by seeing if it works, if it actually triggers an impasse that allows the exposition of viral imaginaries. the dispossesed would have to react positively to such an announcement, to be attracted by the commodity-form. this is not a negative relation but precisely a positive one, since the anti-social form of organization behind the real use for the commodity actually empties subjects and precisely makes them dispossesed. if illis accidentally says that the dispossesed have the most value in-conversion (in the conversion where it enters a nomadic state of transitionality, facing modernity as a flux of life's internal differences), then the posessive should have the most value as a type of possessed, indicating that the parasitism behind modernity contains the multiplicities of objects as self-identification rituals that surpass not just social symbolism but the entire narrative of world-history itself.
illis should have to define what exactly it is that posession really quantifies in regards to subjectivity. let's try to think of immanent scenarios that can aid us in this discovery. if i have a bunch of small lamps, chairs, tables and other various gadgets in my enviornment, are they really an attempt to seduce anyone? if not, then we can admit that the utility in hogging them still serves a defintional purpose. if not, then why is the seduction not working? the narrative about the life parasite follows the narrative about posession almost entirely for illis, where both of them end up essentially posessing you towards death. in the progress parasite, your refusal to socialize is you transitioning into an accelerated state of dissolution that leads to a negative self-overcoming (death), and in the case of posession, your lack of self-definition through objects points out that you are attempting to bypass self-overcoming by negatively defining yourself in its image. simultaneously, you can only ever truly self-overcome if you manage to "significate" before you ever reach this point.
illis claims that of course it cannot be possibly true that supermarkets are truly stratified only to serve the common good, so that enviornments meant for socialization can truly prosper on their behalf, and so that professional vs. public enviornments have a more efficient divide. this naturally leads us to another confrontation with hopelessness. it is simultaneously true that the direction society takes is the one that is described not as efficient but as a particular orientation towards worldly affairs. it may be that historically we are at a lowpoint when it comes to how much power is given in self-determination or the survival of an agent outside of very particular conditions that enable networks to proliferate and connect any individual subject to a wider support group. since support itself is stratified, it is clear that the idea of significance in aid is quickly segmented away by capital, leaving only either burdensome processes of aid that fatigue the individual, or just a total inability for basic things to function in particular ways. capital itself essentially poses us this question "if you think you care about particular things in consistently diverse ways as much as you do, try to figure out if you can even allow yourself to defend all of them simultaneously without feeling a sense of fatigue, and if you can, tell me if it was worth it".
james simply argues that this prerogative is the transitional state itself basically imbedding itself into the false horizon, that significance has to be built in co-relational and immediate enviornments where difference is already affirmed and this subjective "differential significatory potential" is actually correctly manifested. yet, to question how aid can exist without authority is to question an already disorganized system, one where helplessness is just a metaphor for deterritorialized states of relations, ones that already have instrumental consequences. the question of where help is, in its most immanent sense, is no different from the question of "how much have i helped, how frequently, in what volume, how much have i even actively considered the idea of helping someone else, is my help even necessary or required, who is the systemic arbitrator for this question?".
the examples he chooses where the authority explains why a certain war has happened never truly exist, precisely because the actual mediator for aid itself as a concept is already gone, destroyed somewhere in between the collapse of a certain mediative layer of social roles, in a sense the death of the adult man. when all of these questions are vaguely answerable or require beurocraterialized inquiries or proxies, it is already evidently clear that the field itself may not entirely believe it is post-poning its signfications for a later date, where progress is proven to be less of a prerogative and more of a confirmation for this condition.