Joe Saunders

In this paper I wish to challenge certain positions arguing that the human integration with contemporary technology results in a condition of alienation, either: (1) alienation from nature, or (2) alienation in the domain of labour. To this end I will engage in a productive dialogue with various eco-phenomenologists, Gilbert Simondon, Steven Vogel, Roland Kayn, and music theorist Thomas Patteson. Thinking the compositional praxis of Kayn in concert with Simondon and Vogel, as I will show, furnishes us with an exciting example of how alienation in both senses may be creatively overcome. Kayn’s work, I argue, is emblematic of Simondon’s vision for the harmonious integration of mankind, nature, and machine, revealing the “wildness” at the heart of machine reality whilst offering a possibility for how human life may reorient itself in an era of automation and artificial intelligence.

Silence has been a relatively neglected phenomenon despite its significance in psychiatric research. Acknowledging this oversight, there has been a recent move towards systematically describing the first-personal experience of silence in mental disorders within the field of philosophy of psychiatry. This paper contributes to this research effort by highlighting the underexplored interpersonal aspect of silence crucial for both psychopathological and therapeutic research. More specifically, I develop the interpersonal aspect of distressing silence associated with depression, recently coined as ‘empty silence’. Complementing its original analysis, I argue that this distressing silence not only involves the loss of linguistic agency but also the loss of social agency. Having established this claim, I situate it within the wider research context and open an ethical dimension to the current analysis. I explore this by identifying a therapeutic silence others can establish for an individual undergoing a severe depressive episode. I provisionally term it ‘undemanding silence’ and argue that this form of silence can help restore the loss of social agency by providing a distinct form of social affordance that depressed individuals can easily realise at their own pace.