Plague Journal (38): on "epistemic sentimentality"

This is a very long article that I have only skimmed, but it is full of fascinating thought. It is a summary of the thinking of philosopher Ivan Illych, and also an application of those ideas to the present situation. Beginning with Illich, the author questions much about the current regime, the set of ideas and presuppositions that guide our response to this crisis, and even our designation of it as a crisis.  It's Called Questions about the current pandemic from the point of view of Ivan Illich. If you've got the time (and the "headspace"), I think it's worth a close look.

In his late writings Illich introduced, but never really developed, a concept that he called “epistemic sentimentality” – not a catchy phrase, admittedly, but one that I think sheds on light on what is currently going on.  His argument, in brief, was that we live in a world of “fictitious substances” and “management-bred phantoms” – any number of nebulous goods from institutionally-defined education to the “pathogenic pursuit of health” could serve as examples – and that in this “semantic desert full of muddled echoes” we need “some prestigious fetish” to serve as a “Linus blanket.”  In the essay I’ve been quoting “Life” is his primary example.  “Epistemic sentimentality” attaches itself to Life, and Life becomes the banner under which projects of social control and technological overreach acquire warmth and lustre.  Illich calls this  epistemic sentimentality because it involves constructed objects of knowledge that are then naturalized under the kindly aegis of the “prestigious fetish.”  In the present case we are frantically saving lives and protecting our health care system.  These noble objects enable a gush of sentiment which is very hard to resist.  For me it is summed up in the almost unbearably unctuous tone in which our Prime Minister now addresses us daily.  But who is not in an agony of solicitude?  Who has not said that we are avoiding each other because of the depth of our care for one another?  This is epistemic sentimentality not just because it solaces us and makes a ghostly reality seem humane but also because it hides the other things that are going on – like the mass experiment in social control and social compliance, the legitimation of tele-presence as a mode of sociability and of instruction, the increase of surveillance, the normalization of biopolitics, and the reinforcement of risk awareness as a foundation of social life.  

 There is so much of this article that resonates with me, that makes me want to mutter, "yes, so true," at various places, and yet I have this niggling sense that there is something about Illich's thoughts that could, quite against his own inclination, lead to a very dark place. Perhaps a somewhat different "dark place" than the one he is worrying about (which has to do, I take it, with the loss of personal autonomy, the subsuming of the person, the individual, into the system). 

Well, but I only vaguely knew who Ivan Illich was before this article (which I do intend to read rather than skim), so I'm certainly in no position to "argue back." The author of the article concludes that this reaction to the pandemic is only furthering the trend toward a hegemony of systems over the local and personal. And he may be right.

I first found the article referenced at Front Port Republic.