No response.
I tried again. Then it sunk in.
The door-close button does nothing. Not even placebo, because the
delay was so long that I did not get any feeling of agency when the
doors eventually closed. An idiot button. I'd long heard rumours
purporting the existence of these mythical beasts, but to actually
come face to face with one in the field. They say the best part of
being a cryptozoologist is when you can drop the crypto-. Like
that guy who found coelacanth on sale in some African market.
Except I didn't feel that way. Nor did any of the other residents, it
seems. I've been observing all the people who happened to take the
lift at the same time as me. The seasoned residents don't even press
the button any more, operant conditioning having finished its course.
They look muted, resigned. As if there was a sign above the lift,
saying, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter." I examine them
and flinch from jamais vu - they resemble uncanny robots. Now,
robot apocalypses are scary enough, per se. But the true
horror stems from the realisation that humanity may be no more than
that without hope in the shell.
Ironically, this elevator actually depresses. Its subjects have
resigned themselves to temporal oppression. The lift enacts
chronopolitics in the Foucauldian sense, dictating how inhabitants
may spend their time while in its grip. Like Harlan Ellison's
Ticktockman, it deducts time from your life as an apparatus of
control. The daily tithe extorts not just seconds and minutes, but
also autonomy and dignity. Tyranny ripples through spacetime and
warps it, distorting the motion of routines and schedules. Paul
Virilio's dromological critique argues that the more speed increases,
the faster freedom decreases; we have here its opposite: decreased
speed edifies into dungeons. And so we can do nothing but stand and
wait for the doors to close. We are babes in the cradle of insouciant
technology, appetisers in the dumbwaiter.
The infraordinary imposes itself on you only when it is disrupted. As
I await the lift's closure, the passage of time makes itself
conscious to me, and I can almost hear the roar which lies on the
other side of silence, to use a phrase from George Eliot. The dark
waters of time coagulate into tar, oozing into viscous, pendulous
drops. We depart chronos and enter the realm of anti-kairos,
time in which nothing can happen. There is no way to carpe diem,
because carpor dies - I have been seized by the day. Where
nothing moves, there are no clocks. My thoughts alone mark the time,
but how do I know I am not a madman clinging on to the delusion of
time when all else around me screams otherwise?
Yet do we all suffer this durance equally? I feel the time especially
acutely, yet these others seem not to. Of course, subjective time is
not, as Kant supposed, an unadulterated schema for thought and
perception. Experiments have shown that time is a (re)construction in
our minds, with the brain piecing together information streams from
neural subpopulations representing aspects of each sense into a
coherent synchrony. The feeling of time slowing down comes from
increased duration perception due to denser-than-normal memory
formation, without a concomitant increase in temporal resolution of
perception. This usually occurs during emotional events, when the
amygdala increases attention and perception. In this case, it is
probably the reduction in other stimuli and saccadic activity which
channel my attention and perception to what I do see, increasing sensory density and hence creating the illusion of
increased duration.
The lift is a liminal zone that serves as a border between floors.
Yet as long as the doors remain uneasily open, it is as if we are in
a heterotopia which remains umbilically connected to the outside. The
lift three-quarters encloses and one-quarter exposes; one is unsure
whether to feel claustrophobia or agoraphobia. Choice is not
consummated, so we are stuck in limbo between staying and going. The
option of turning back cannot be shut off, like that ex you dumped
who won't stop calling (seriously, stop picking up!).
But
perhaps I am being too harsh, and there is really a valid
justification for the doors remaining indifferent to all efforts to
close it. After all, this allows time for air from the
air-conditioned lobby to fill and cool the lift. It could also delay
claustrophobia by giving us time to adjust to the decrease in space.
Or else, it racks up supplications to Janus.
The doors
will close any time now. The lights continue to glare upon me, cruel
reminders of the firmament to which the lift will never reach. I
should really go speak to the building manager about the button. At
least there exists a higher authority for me to complain to. The same
cannot be said for the victims of totalitarian rule whose prayers
went unanswered.
The lift is
a microcosm of powerlessness. Whether we are waiting for its doors to
close or trusting that it will deliver us to the right floor and not
trap us inside, we are unable to impose our will upon it. Technology
was supposed to give Man power over Nature; it was a Faustian pact in
which Technology also gained some power over Man. But a true,
inextinguishable power persists in our minds. We can always see
things the way we choose in our minds. Several possibilities exist in
this situation. We can find meaning to help us endure any suffering
with nobility, as Viktor Frankl did in the concentration camp. We can
subscribe to the nihil perditi of Seneca and think of that
duration as always-already lost to us. Or we can spend our time in
the inner world, whether utilising the interstices writing as Umberto
Eco does, becoming a chess grandmaster as Natan Sharansky did,
meditating our way to nirvana, or simply living our fantasies like
Walter Mitty. Or explore the outer world by astral projection, if
that's your thing. Also possible is to throw ourselves into Sisyphean
revolt, embracing absurdity and pressing the button each and every
time nonetheless, even knowing that nothing will come of it.
But when
you're pressing the lift's buttons, how do you know the lift isn't
pressing yours? Perhaps an incipient sentience resides within its
steel walls, and people form an integral part of its inner world,
just as with Searle's Chinese room. If so, think of the boredom and
drag the lift must feel in the hours when no one rides! Then, it
becomes our moral duty to engage the lift as best as we can in
those brief minutes we are with it. David
Deutsch suggests that to overcome the barriers of interspecific
communication, we can use universal truths such as objective beauty.
There's no piano, so we can't play it a song, like in Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. A more successful attempt comes
from Peter Watts's The Island, where a Matryoshka-brain-like
organism flashes in decelerando to get a human spaceship to
slow down. Here are a few things you can do the next time you're in a
lift. Transmit a message in Morse code,
write it out in hexadecimal using the floor numbers, tap out an
infectious rhythm on the buttons. At the very least, you entertain
yourself and anyone else inside. And it makes for a good elevator
conversation starter too. Now I can't wait to take the lift again.
No comments:
New comments are not allowed.