The buffered self. This is one of my favourited Taylorisms, suggesting as it does a figure wearing a kind of padded suit...
The buffered self is the self that develops in early modernity in contrast to the 'open and porous and vulnerable' self of the previous epoch. That former individual, living in a world that was held to be 'enchanted', was vulnerable to the world of spirits and powers. The porous self is exposed to the whims of a suprahuman benevolence or malevolence residing in the cosmos. His feelings are bound up with goings on that are external to him - the motions of the stars and so on. He lives in a world not inconceivably that far different from a Bosch painting.
The buffered self, by contrast, is able to take a distance from everything outside the mind. This self can 'see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it'. (The Secular Age, p 38). The buffered self may read a Bosch painting as a code for various inner states, but he has been taken out of the world in which these are thought of as external conditions.
However (and here is Taylor's punchline): despite the appearance of the buffered self there is also a powerful nostalgia for the porous self. Of course, we do this as mere tourists, trying to get an impression of what it must have been like to be really porous by having our stars read - but, as Taylor says, 'Our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane. You can't get a frisson from what is really in fact terrifying you.' (p. 38) Taylor of course goes on to chart the role of Protestantism in producing the buffered self.
I am interested that this powerful nostalgia for the porous self is being played out within Christian theology at present. The Radical Orthodoxy is only its most esoteric and elitist manifestation. But popular spirituality both Catholic and Protestant evinces this yearning to be more porous - more richly metaphysical in its encounter with the phenomena of the material world. I think our 16th century forebears, who were so relieved to be liberated from enslavement to this kind of vulnerability to the world inhabited by ghosts and demons, would have thought this daffy, just as Taylor points out.
5 comments:
An intellectualist view: most people in the West today, for all the veneer of modernity, are porous, not buffered. If anything, people are more "superstitious" now than fifty years ago.
Ah - but are they really? They still buy health insurance and go to doctors and fly about in planes even when the geese go in the wrong direction... They are only, says Taylor, nostalgic for porousity, not really exposing themselves to the full implications of what it is to live life like that. Are they really fearful of the witch down the road? So, a more subtle diagnosis holds that we have a buffered self with a consumerist curiosity for the other life.
I agree that a subtle diagnosis is needed, but (from what you are saying - I haven't read him) Taylor's isn't subtle eno'.
I know people who (tho' admittedly they will still do it) will be utterly terrified when they fly because of the (equivalent of) geese going in the wrong direction. Similarly doctors can be regarded, not in a rational way, but more like witch doctors. Health insurance is an especially good example: it can be bought not for the rational, surface reasons, but in order to feel safe - as a talisman, not a method of managing risk.
Though the objects of (irrational) fear and trust may have changed, there's still an awful lot of fear and trust lurking out there.
I'd suggest that the subtle diagnosis is that "we" are a mixture of porous and buffered selves. The proportions vary from individual to individual: some are almost entirely buffered, others still highly porous. The curious thing is that, whilst there is a general correlation with intellect, education, lifestyle, etc., notable exceptions occur.
(I use rational/irrational here in a conventional sense for the sake of brevity. I don't actually think the distinction is coherent: it is not rational to be rational.)
This leaves me wondering what account Taylor gives of (for example) the excesses of the twentieth century. By my count there have been a lot of collective phenomena that, if not exactly in Bosch's style, would compete with him in distortion.
For one would not need to believe in an enchanted world to find something lacking in the picture you've painted here (following Taylor fairly, I assume). OK: nostalgia for some previous order is probably not worth taking seriously at face value. But this only gets one so far. If the modern self-understanding were deficient, what would one expect to see: would it be, perhaps, a yearning for something different? A yearning that might seize on unworthy or mistaken objects?
Well I think Taylor is agreeing with you. The sense in which 'nostalgia' is used here needn't be trivialised: it can mean indeed a yearning for something different. The buffered self, while enjoying a release from the fear of the porous self, finds buffered selfhood really not quite sufficient.
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