Theme of the conference

What is interactive metal fatigue?

For about one generation and a half now, our social, political and personal life has become ever more interactive. Values, norms, and the authority they embody are no longer summarily/readily accepted, as dictated by tradition, government, family, or religion. Nowadays, we only accept norms and values when we ourselves have had the opportunity to participate in the discussion on their importance and validity. We have become used to being interactively involved with the creation, and critical evaluation, of the norms and values that determine our lives.

            This interactive engagement is intimately connected with the process of emancipation that has realised itself in the last half century or so. Initially spurred on by social protest movements like feminism, emancipation has relatively fast been accepted and confirmed as a paramount social value. Every member of society should develop into an autonomous individual capable of thinking and speaking for himself, or herself. This does not imply that anyone can, or should, create his or her own values and norms, like a Nietzschean Übermensch, but rather that anyone should be granted the opportunity to share in the process of thinking and deciding about the norms and values that regulate social life. And even personal life – remember the erstwhile slogan ‘The personal is political!’.

            The process of emancipation has largely been successful, or so one could argue. Much more than before, we ourselves are responsible for the way in which we live our lives. Such self-determination may, and often does, lead to new, ‘alternative’ forms of social and personal life. But even if we, as emancipated beings, do not break with traditional patterns of life – concerning marriage, children, career, religion, &c – our lives will have changed drastically, as such patterns are now no longer established and validated without our involvement or permission. Just like new ways of life, they derive their authority from – the possibility of – interactive involvement by people like us: emancipated beings.

            However, the successful realisation of emancipation has had unforeseen and unintended consequences. The pleasure provided by emancipation is increasingly also experienced as a burden. Because we are now free to interactively co-determine social norms, we barely retain any excuse for not acting according to these norms. The principle of moral self-obligation, as it arose in Western history with the story of Odysseus tying himself to the mast so as not to be seduced by the Sirens, and as it was formulated philosophically by Immanuel Kant as the capacity for autonomy, or self-legislation, is now experienced by us as a compulsion to consistently act in emancipatory fashion. A burden, indeed, that we have placed upon ourselves.

            Always acting in emancipatory ways, however satisfying as a matter of principle, is in fact hard labour, that in time is wearing us out. Increasingly, we feel as if we need a ‘time out’. As it is expressed in the pay-off of more than one television commercial in recent years, we tend to stave off emancipatory challenges by replying: ‘Yes – but not right now, please!’ In such cases, we fail to live up both to our own, and others’ emancipatory expectations.

            In other words, we suffer from fatigue. As such fatigue is a direct consequence of our insistently interactive, emancipatory way of life, we may properly speak of interactive metal fatigue – normative ‘cracks’ caused by continuous emancipatory stress. We feel normatively burdened by our own emancipatory expectations and capabilities. And by failing to consistently live up to these expectations, we show what we might call ‘kantian incapacitation’. This condition is not so much due to personal flaws or failures, as it is produced by social and cultural pressures.

            Interactive metal fatigue can thus also be described as a tragedy of successful emancipation. Precisely the success of the great Enlightenment project of human emancipation, the social realisation of the principle that anyone can and should be involved with shaping the norms that determine social life, now appears to have consequences that run counter to this principle: an inability to consistently act according to emancipatory norms. What appeared to be, and in fact was, a mission of liberation, now issues in a new kind of burden, and a new form of stress. And even worse, we come to realise that we have placed these upon ourselves, so there is no one but ourselves to blame.

            As to the effects of these new and unforeseen effects, these may briefly be diagnosed as follows. In politics, they lead to populism: an emancipated way of longing for a new form of authoritarianism. In matters of law and order, they create an apparently never ending search for security. In personal life, we may surmise that emancipatory stress creates, or stimulates, new forms of narcissism and depression. And finally, regarding our manifestation in public space, it appears that our inability to act according to our own norms leads to a new dependence on objects – by ‘formatting’ public space, objects nudge us so as to make us comply with our own emancipatory norms.

Last change: 12 September 2011