A BRIEF HISTORY OF MANUFACTURED NONCHALANCE

A friend sent me this article in the New Yorker today by Rachel Monroe about "the bohemian social media movement" #vanlife, yet another glamour-based aspirational lifestyle turned carefully-curated visual product. The foundational abstract idea of this particular strain is "freedom," but the exterior narrative follows the same inevitable trajectory as every other such phenomenon, ending in manufactured nonchalance. Monroe describes the #vanlife photo shoot process towards the end of the piece:

“Smith had a particular image in mind: King sprawled in the back of the van, reading a book about Ayurveda with Penny nestled next to her, and an “Outsiders” decal featured prominently on her laptop. As Smith shot from the front seat, King tried a few different positions—knees bent; legs propped up against the window—and pretended to read the book. “Sometimes it’s more spontaneous,” she said apologetically.

“It’s about storytelling, and when you’re telling a story it’s not always spontaneous,” Smith said. “Lift your head up a little bit more, look like you’re reading.””

Our cultural obsession with nonchalance and this particular breed of mythmaking long predates Instagram, as does the desire to manufacture it. You can trace the seeds of the idea back to the tale of Pygmalion in Ovid's Metamorphoses ("The best art, they say, / Is that which conceals art"), but the first explicit reference I'm aware of is in Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, where it goes by the name sprezzatura. His is still perhaps the best definition of manufactured nonchalance out there:

“I have found quite a universal rule which in this matter seems to me valid above all other, and in all human affairs whether in word or deed: and that is to avoid affectation in every way possible as though it were some rough and dangerous reef; and (to pronounce a new word perhaps) to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”

Virginia Postrel refers to this same passage in The Power of Glamour and returns often to the impression of "effortlessness" as a central manifestation of glamorous visual communication. Building on Castiglione, she argues:

“Sprezzatura makes its possessor seem like a superior being and the observer feel momentarily transformed, enveloped in that aura of confidence and competence. Like the glamorously streamlined surfaces of the Chrysler Building, however, sprezzatura is a facade—a form of artifice that demands care to create and maintain.”

Manufactured nonchalance appears frequently in fiction as well. A neat little example from Anna Karenina:

“Anna had changed into a very simple cambric dress. Dolly looked attentively at this simple dress. She knew what such simplicity meant and what money was paid for it.”

In Ian McEwan's Atonement, Cecilia Tallis even more explicitly seeks the same effect:

“Relaxed was how she wanted to feel, and at the same time, self-contained. Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not give the matter a moment’s thought, and that would take time.”

Again and again, nonchalance is something we want to build with images but tear down with words. On some level we all understand it is an illusion, so why do we keep falling for it? 

Social media has created a more robust strain. Sprezzatura is no longer just for courtiers; the art which conceals art has been democratized and demographized, with a feed for whatever your subjective tastes require. It is a glamorous distraction, but it's also a personal expectation.

Check out this no-holds-barred exposé from Rachel Cusk's 2014 novel, Outline:

“He was, in effect, manufacturing an illusion, no matter what he did, the gap between illusion and reality could never be closed. Gradually, he said, this gap, this distance between how things were and how I wanted them to be, began to undermine me. I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.”

#vanlife is a metonymy of our culture, of our very world right now; we are all increasingly defined by our roles in this simulacra-based digital ecosystem. Disillusionment with it, the realization that "freedom," or whatever else you fetishize, is staged--this is the crisis of our time for people who aren't stuck in Syria.

RECURSION: THE REMIX TO COGNITION

The power of recursion, almost by definition, boggles the mind. Its reach transcends academic disciplines, unites art and nature, and may be the fundamental linguistic and even cognitive function that differentiates human from animal existence. Its propensity toward complexity and infinity quickly defies comprehension, with the highest-IQ humans able to process only 6-7 embedded layers. A single infinite loop can crash the most powerful supercomputers, and there's certainly no escape from infinite self-referential nerd jokes.

Broadly, I define recursion as "self-similar embedded repetition." I'm not going to try to rewrite Wikipedia on recursion's many discipline-specific applications and examples, but this list includes:

The Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal

• The Droste Effect and Matryoshka dolls in art
• Mis en abyme in art and literature
• Frame stories and stories within stories in literature
• Fractals in natural phenomenal and mathematics
• Fibonacci numbers, factorials, and the golden ratio in mathematics
• Infinite loops and circular references in computer science

The first chapter of Michael Corballis's book The Recursive Mind provides an excellent extended introduction to recursion, including several choice humorous examples. Building on Chomskyan universal grammar, Corballis holds recursion as not only the distinguishing attribute of human language, but of human thought, the foundational function of not just linguistics, but philosophy.* (He also nicely distinguishes recursion from its cousin simple repetition, and sister iteration.)

It's worth noting that frame stories and stories within stories pervade Classical mythology; Ovid's Metamorphoses, the gold standard, is woven together almost entirely in this way, with multiple layers of embedding. The story of Echo, for example, is embedded within the tale of Narcissus, which is in turn embedded in the that of Tiresias. This example is particularly rich, as the stories each individually contain recursive elements--Narcissus, for example, falls in love with his own self-similar reflection, embedded in a pool. So, here we have 1) textual recursion, 2) metatextual recursion (stories within stories), and 3. recursion of recursion--between levels 1) and 2). 

John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903

Recursion is all over the business world, even though the word itself isn't part of our vocabulary. We do financial analysis on financial analysis, make a plan for the plan, and innovate on innovation. Especially as operations standardize and scale, recursion often pops up in organizational hierarchies and operational algorithms as well.

And then there's the underlying function of human existence, which I'm very surprised is not mentioned more in connection with the word recursion: mammalian reproductive biology. What is gestation but embedded self-similar repetition? 

Is the cultural ubiquity of recursion--in art, literature, business, technology--a subliminal cognitive response to our physical and biological nature? Is our underlying obsession with recursion, like sex, a natural instinct in the quest for survival? 

I think so. But the more I think about it, the more I think about it.

*There have been some interesting recent challenges to Chomsky, universal grammar, and recursion as a fundamental law of language.