The Interruption That We Are: The Health of the Lived Body, Narrative, and Public Moral Argument

Introduction

Interrupting Interruption

Interruption is typically conceived as a bothersome and irritating event. This downside of interruption is suggested by dictionary definitions that emphasize how it constitutes a breaking in on the uniformity or continuity of some thought or action. Here a negative connotation (breaking in as a sort of misdemeanor) trumps a positive connotation (the praiseworthiness of consistency). Some interruptions warrant little, if any, concern. While opening the front door to your house, you drop your keys. No big thing. The momentary event doesn’t even register as an annoyance, but it certainly is an interruption. The continuity of an action has been delayed. Other interruptions can be more bothersome. If when walking straight to work you trip over a stone and fall and the fall results in a serious injury requiring immediate medical attention, the significance of interruption becomes more remarkable. Then there are interruptions whose presence is a saving grace. Having a friend call you out of a room where you are having a conversation with a person who is boring you to death is a welcomed interruption. Continuity does not always serve us well.

Still, interruptions have a reputation for getting in the way of our thoughts and actions. Studies have shown, for example, that in workplace environments and conversational transactions, interruptions can lower a person’s self-confidence, induce stress and anxiety, be employed as a power strategy to dominate, control, and manipulate interpersonal behavior, and violate a speaker’s right to voice his or her opinions and arguments. But then again, there is a positive side to interruption. When seen by a speaker as an attempt to keep a dialogue going about the speaker’s point of view, overlapping interruptions can enhance cooperative and supportive behavior between the involved parties.¹

Dialogue, in fact, owes its existence to interruption. Even in a friendly flowing dialogue, the continuity of the conversation is made possible by a turn-taking exchange of talk, and the exchange marks the moment of interruption. Without this moment, we have a soliloquy, not a dialogue. Yet, the person who enjoys being too much of an interruption during a dialogue risks being characterized as a nuisance. Socrates, the self-proclaimed gadfly, fits the bill. Samuel Beckett’s classic tragicomedy Waiting for Godot, with its mind-bending dialogue, is filled with interruptions that depict the characters of the play as being nuisances. So, for example, we have this exchange between Estragon, Pozoo, and Vladimir:

Estragon—I’m going.

Pozoo—What was it exactly you wanted to know?

Vladimir—Why he—

Pozoo [angrily]—Don’t interrupt me! [Pause. Calmer.] If we all speak at once we’ll never get anywhere. [Pause.] What was I saying? [Pause. Louder.] What was I saying?"²

Waiting for Godot is its own interruption. Who is Godot? The waiting for whoever this being is interrupts the continuity of whatever else the characters would be doing in their everyday lives. The play also interrupts the audience’s conditioned expectations of what a play should be. The play writer Becket is a nuisance.

However, as in the cases of Socrates and Beckett, committed as they are to teaching about the worthiness of seeking the truth and humankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning, a nuisance can have good intentions in interrupting a given state of affairs. Another example: In her essay The Point of the Long and Winding Sentence, Pico Iyer tells us that when she began writing for a living, my feeling was that my job was to give the reader something vivid, quick and concrete that she couldn’t get in any other form; a writer was an information-gathering machine, I thought, and especially as a journalist, my job was to go out into the world and gather details, moments, impressions as visual and immediate as TV. She continues by explaining how No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances—the ‘gaps’ that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker. Iyer’s reaction to this disrespectful way of treating reality and its witnesses is to become a nuisance by composing long sentences that interrupt readers’ illconditioned ways of processing and appreciating the written word. I was taken with her effort as I read the following sentences from her essay:

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions—or that at least is the hope—and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying Open wider so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).³

These sentences make me think of such other advocates of Iyer’s prose style as Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, who I suspect might find her interruptive endeavor laudable. On the other hand, those who lost their breath and attention span reading the sentences are likely to be annoyed by Iyer’s redeeming compositional practice. Then, again, there are others who would see the wisdom of her intention. For example, the scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has the beneficial potential of interruption in mind when he notes: To jolt the individual out of his natural laziness and the rut of habit, and also from time to time to break up the collective frameworks in which he is imprisoned, it is indispensable that he should be shaken and prodded from outside.⁴ The philosopher Michel Foucault also speaks favorably of the phenomenon in aligning it with the role of the intellectual: to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions and on the basis of this re-problematization … to participate in the formation of a political will.⁵ The physicist, historian, and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn attests to the power of interruption when he tells us that scientific revolutions presuppose a sense of malfunction in a given scientific paradigm.⁶ The rhetorical theorist and critic Thomas Farrell aligns this power with the orator’s art: Rhetoric, despite its traditional and quite justifiable association with the preservation of cultural truisms, may also perform an act of critical interruption where the taken-for-granted practices of culture are concerned. With the goal of improvement and progress in mind, [t]he phenomenon of rhetorical interruption juxtaposes the assumptions, norms, and practices of a people so as to prompt a reappraisal of where they are culturally, what they are doing, and where they are going.⁷

These four authors associate interruption with social, political, scientific, and cultural progress. The novelist, poet, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, and Christian Apologist C. S. Lewis speaks of neither the benefits nor the burdens of interruption but would have us elevate the phenomenon to holy heights: The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day.⁸ I neither affirm nor deny the validity of this last metaphysical claim, although my eventual assessment of the inextricable relation between interruptions and one’s real life does encourage such speculation.

Be they appreciated or not, interruptions are here to stay. Our lives begin with an interruption (a sperm fertilizing an egg and a slap on the butt) and end with one, too. In between this beginning and ending, interruptions abound, so much so, in fact, that as a way of coping with their irritating presence we organize them into well-conditioned and taken-for-granted behavioral norms whereby the interruptions lose their disruptive and questioning function as they become ever more a part of our daily routines. But interruption has the last say. The prevalence of text messaging in what the literary theorist David Hillman and the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips term today’s culture of interruption is a case in point. People have made this one-time interruptive and communicative practice so much a part of their everyday existence that not receiving and sending a text message for too long a time is itself an interruption of the normality of interruptions that are no longer exhibiting a disruptive function. Hillman and Phillips have it right: Clearly, the whole notion of interruption shows us something about the nature of our commitment to continuity, to sequence, to pattern, to order.⁹ This commitment is undeniable. Interruptions make sure of that.

The more one realizes how necessary interruption is to our everyday existence, the more the following counterintuitive contention should make sense: Nothing happens without the force of interruption operating in our lives; the phenomenon must be at work if anything in the world is to be distinguishable and meaningful. For example, angered somewhat by his ten-year-old son’s behavior and dismissive attitude toward his parents, a father, seeking more community with his son, desperately pleads with the boy: Listen to me! I need your undivided attention! Before the command, the father’s identity is made possible by the many other things that interrupt his presence and make his identity distinguishable and meaningful. After the command, if it is heeded, the interruptive force of the father’s identity is greatly enhanced, so much so that the interruptive force of other things, although still operative, becomes negligible, disappearing under the influence of an angered father whose interruptive force is now all that matters. If these interruptions were not present, there would be nothing requiring the son’s undivided attention, nothing for him to listen to without interruption. It is not mere difference but rather the force of interruption that makes a difference in the circumstances of everyday life. Identity without difference does not make sense; nor does difference without identity and the force of interruption that brings them together and spreads them apart. The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy offers a relevant insight related to this point: Interruption occurs at the edge, or rather it constitutes the edge where beings touch each other, expose themselves to each other and separate from one another, thus communicating and propagating their community.¹⁰

Here is another way to think about the necessity of interruption: In order for you to read the sentences that I am writing here, you must be able to distinguish words, letters, and punctuation marks from one another. The spaces between all of these figures mark the places that separate and thus interrupt the figures’ presence so that they have an identity that is recognized by how it differs from the identity of other letters, words, sentences, and punctuation marks. Without all of these interruptions, there would be nothing to read. Solid black lines and white spaces that separate them would be all that there is to the pages inside a book now void of meaningful content. The philosopher Jacques Derrida agrees: The caesura [break or interruption of signs in a text] makes meaning emerge … without interruption—between letters, words, sentences, books—no significance could be awakened.¹¹

My employment of Derrida warrants further comment. Derrida’s claim is based on his notion of "the play of differance" that lies at the heart of his philosophy of deconstruction. The play of differance, as the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure first emphasized, defines the basic economy of language: the way in which language functions not only as a semiotic system of differences, of arbitrary and conventionalized signifier/signified relationships and oppositions, but also as a temporizing (or deferring) movement of significations whereby any given semiotic system of meaning, as it takes form, always enters into an intertextual relationship with some other (different) system of meaning.¹² Derrida thus claims that "There are only everywhere differences and traces of traces.… Nothing—no present and in-different being—thus precedes differance and spacing."¹³ When Derrida, as noted, refers to the necessary interruption between letters, words, sentences, and books, he is speaking about their being separated and thus different from one another. So what is the difference between interruption and differance? Is it fair to say that nothing precedes interruption?

Derrida grants differance a primordial status. I am suggesting that interruption has a role to play in making sense of differance. For the purposes of this project, however, the fundamental relationship of differance and interruption is not a guiding concern. Rather, my story about interruption favors an existential appreciation of its nature, scope, and function. The following short story offers some initial guidance to what my longer story entails. The story is based on an actual event that took place during the early stages of writing this book. This story has an unbelievable element to it. But the story is factual.

The call came at 6:30 Sunday morning. I was working at my computer and get quite annoyed by interruptions when I am really into my writing. But the phone displayed a number that I couldn’t refuse. It was my dear friend Bo. We go back a long way. He is always there for me. I am always there for him. We’re close, tight, brothers in arms.

Bo is brilliant: a B.S. and M.A. in Industrial Administration; rigorous training in electrical engineering, industrial engineering, econometrics; a C.P.A.; a financial analyst; Chief Financial Officer at one of the largest private real estate development agencies in the United States; and a statistician second to none. Being rational is for him all about science, statistics, equations, and spreadsheets. That’s a perfect way to be.

The first minute of our conversation was devoted to traditional banter: Hey, how are you doing? and things like that. But then he said he had to share an experience he had had the previous night that was freaking him out. He sounded excited and a bit anxious. I was about to hear a story about my friend having to deal with a fundamental interruption of existence.

Bo’s wife, children, and grandchildren were gathered at his house to celebrate the first night of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah. Bo does not practice the religion. He describes himself as a Jewish agnostic, whatever that means. Religion is too metaphysical, too irrational. My heritage is Jewish, but I do not practice that or any other organized religion. As an academic, however, I do draw insights from the Bible that I find fitting for my teaching and research projects. When I once was trying to make a point during a past conversation and quoted a sentence from the existential and Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, Bo’s immediate and unfriendly response was Don’t give me that academic bullshit.

The only reason Bo was celebrating Hanukkah was for his grandchildren, one of whom was eight years old and wanted to play the holiday-related game dreidel. A dreidel is a four-sided spinning toy. Each side bears a letter of the Hebrew alphabet: Nun, Gimel, He, and Shin. Together these letters form the acronym Nes Gadol Hayah Sham: A great miracle happened there (referring to the Land of Israel). Each player spins the dreidel once during each turn. Depending on which letter appears after a spin, the player wins or loses a game piece associated with the playful activity.

The game began. Bo’s spins produced various results. His grandchild’s spins produced otherwise, all in a row: I Gimel, then 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 38. Bo stopped the game, not believing what he was seeing. He hurried to his computer and calculated the probability of spinning thirty-eight successive gimels. Here is the answer: 00000000000000000000132348898008484 percent (one chance in 1.324 sextillion). Bo yelled for the rest of the family to gather around the game and watch what was happening. The spins began again, and the mind-boggling event continued as the child took his turns: 39, 40, 45, 50, 53. Bo couldn’t take it anymore. The game stopped. Bo calculated. The probability of spinning fifty-three gimels in a row is 0000000000000000000000000000123260 percent (one chance in 1.233 nonillian).

Bo first described what had happened as impossible. Then, being the rational person that he is, he corrected himself and admitted that it was "highly improbable. But he was emphatic as he swore, I witnessed the spins. I have the numbers. I am telling the truth. But how could this happen? Bo’s world of know-how could not accommodate what he was experiencing. Simply put for now, a world of know-how is a realm of understanding and meaning; it defines a narrative domain of common sense, habits, routines, rules, beliefs, and stories that are well known for prescribing how we should think and act in appropriate and fulfilling ways. The world of know-how grants structure, order, and direction to what I term the health of the lived body’s everyday existence. The lived body is a person having been conditioned by past and present experiences and involvements to know how to think about personal and communal existence and the possibilities for acting in the world. The lived body inhabits a world of know-how and embodies its prescribed ways of managing everyday existence. A person’s world of know-how is a place, a habitat, where the person can commune with others who, owing to their worldviews, can think and act like (or at least tolerate) the person. A world of know-how also is an interruption, since this habitat is what it is because its presence interrupts the presence of other worlds of know-how. This interruptive habitat eventually goes unnoticed by its inhabitants once its ways and means of operation become the common sense of everyday life and are taken for granted. The health of the lived body is a function of how well one is faring in a world of know-how. This definition of health involves more than the lived body’s state of physical well-being."¹⁴ Rather, the definition favors the holistic conception of health offered by the World Health Organization (WHO): a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.¹⁵ Another word for complete is perfect. The health of the lived body is influenced by how perfect it finds its world of know-how to be.

I reminded Bo that the letters on the dreidel form the acronym for A great miracle happened there [in Israel] and that the letter Gimel means a benefactor or someone who gives to others. He was adamant as he emphasized that he believed not in miracles but only in the natural laws of the universe. Nevertheless, his world of know-how had been interrupted, and the health of his lived body was not as perfect as he wanted it to be. He called me because he was all dressed up with numbers and had nowhere to go. His unwavering way of seeing and understanding the world was being interrupted by what he termed the irrationality of the symbols (numbers) that made possible his rationale way of seeing and comprehending reality. With his trusted world of know-how in disarray, he nevertheless sounded like he was enjoying himself. The conversation continued as we expressed our amazement over the fifty-four consecutive spins and tried to identify what intervening variables might have influenced the miraculous event. It was rewarding. Bo is not a great listener, but his mood provided an opening for me to join him in saying more about this event. The words of the philosopher Karl Jaspers are especially fitting here: What is not realized in communication is not yet, what is not ultimately grounded in it is without adequate foundation. The truth begins with two.¹⁶

Wanting to maintain and perhaps expand this opening, I decided to quote Jaspers without telling him that I was doing so. It was a strategic rhetorical maneuver, a minuscule attempt to be eloquent. You know, Bo, ‘Because of the uncertainty of temporal existence life is always an experiment.’¹⁷ Uncertainty and experiment are god terms for a person like Bo. Scientists and statisticians make their living by designing experiments to deal with uncertainty and eliminate it as much as possible. We interest a man by dealing with his interests, writes Kenneth Burke.¹⁸ The maneuver worked. A perfect choice of words. We started to compare the probability of the consecutive spins with cosmological measurements of the universe and, on a more philosophical note, how uncertainty plays such a significant role in our everyday existence. With my book project in mind, I noted that, owing to uncertainty, to the temporal opening we call the future, our self-assured beliefs regarding what we claim to know about ourselves, others, and the world in general are always being called into question. What can happen tomorrow? Who can say for sure? Bo agreed. I then pointed out that a question is an interruption. Again he agreed. It follows then, I said, that human existence is fundamentally an interruption; it never stops putting you and your beliefs to the test, it never ceases bringing to mind the issue of contingency. The interruption that we are is a question always being asked: Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? The questioning function of our existence is a reality check: It challenges us to perfect our capacity to know and express the truth of matters of concern. The interruption that we are calls us to be open-minded, virtuous, dignified, and skilled in having a truthful way with words. It is as if we have been given a gift to be good. The gift is a given, an a priori condition of existence. Bo remained silent, which worried me a bit. But I continued, noting that Kierkegaard had coined an oxymoron to describe our interruptive nature when formulating his religious beliefs: objective uncertainty. Bo chuckled, but he didn’t call it academic bullshit. Rather, he was taken with the use of an interruptive figure of speech to disclose the interruption that we are. I then said something like this: When the spins interrupted your world of know-how, Bo, you were exposed to this interruption. The exposure has good and bad consequences, depending on how well you deal with it. The interruption that we are exhibits a perfective function. It calls for concerned thought and action that enables you to deal with and perhaps improve and perfect as much as possible the health of your lived body. Our conversation is a case in point.

We continued to say a few more words about uncertainty and, now with Kierkegaard in mind, religion, too, and we eventually got to a point where the spins came up again and Bo admitted that while witnessing the event he felt like Moses looking at the burning bush. Now this admission was not as improbable as one chance in 1.233 nonillian, but it still was stunning. We recalled the actor Charlton Heston’s role in the famous movie The Ten Commandments, and I asked Bo if his face turned a shade of grey as he listened to what the burning spins had to say. It was a good laugh for both of us.

The narrative had changed: statistics, science, philosophy, cosmology, and now religion. Bo asked me whether I thought something spiritual had been going on with his grandchild and his witnessing of the spins. That wasn’t for me to say. The decision was his to make. Our conversation was not meant to persuade; rather, it was intended to enhance a communal bond between friends who put their egos aside in favor of trying to disclose as much as possible the truth of the matter at hand. We were engaged in the rhetorical construction of a narrative that had a variety of components and whose final structure had yet to be determined.

Bo and I had been talking for nearly two hours. It was time to say adieu. Before hanging up the phone, however, I asked him to do me one favor: You need not abandon your long-standing world of know-how, but please try to stay open to what you witnessed. Take time to ponder it some more. Open-mindedness is the key. The uncertainty of existence calls you to do so. Be true to that call. Science does it. The ethic of science requires its practitioners to stay open to the data in the name of truth. The same ethic lies at the heart of religion. In order to witness God’s presence (whatever or whomever that is), one must stay open to how that presence is showing itself in the happenings of life. Both science and religion value perfection. The next time we talk, educate me. I will not bring up the topic again unless you initiate the discussion.

Bo remains a brilliant statistician housed in the world of high finance. I am convinced that, like me, he will never forget our conversation and the event that initiated it. Interrupting narratives had emerged to deal with the interruption that we are. How much of them he took to heart remains a question. The health of his lived body will be a determining factor. Having to confront the interruption that we are can be as disconcerting as it is rewarding. It’s a matter of how well you can handle a question that comes not from the mouth of another human being. We did not create the spatial-temporal structure of existence that opens us to the future and with its uncertainty calls us into question. Sometimes you need help in dealing with this uncertainty. Sometimes you don’t.

An interruption that interrupted an interruptive domain of know-how started this whole process. A third and more fundamental interruption—the interruption that we are—then showed itself. A fourth interruption was needed as a possible way of handling the narrative wreckage at hand.¹⁹ This fourth interruption involved the rhetorical construction of a narrative that interrupted the third interruption so to reestablish the interruptive domain of a world of know-how where the lived body could regain a sense of feeling secure and at home with itself, others, and its immediate surroundings. My experience with Bo consisted of five interruptions. The relevance of worlds of know-how—statistics, science, philosophy, cosmology, and religion—was on the line, as was the health of his lived body. The philosopher William Earle associates this state of being of the lived body with the nostalgia for something final and absolute, something as complete and perfect as possible.²⁰ This description is especially appropriate for my purposes in that the desire being identified—nostalgia, from the Greek nostos: to return home—speaks of that existential condition where one feels homeless and is thus homesick. It is an unhealthy and imperfect way to be. That’s why Bo called me. That’s why he was open to the narratives of worlds of know-how other than his own. That’s why he was willing to become engaged in the rhetorical construction of a narrative that could help him contend with his being exposed to the interruption that we are. It was a matter of reinstating a degree of completeness and perfection to the health of a lived body. Indeed, the interruption that we are is a gift to be good. We are fortunate creatures, and pitiful, too, given how often throughout history this gift has been put to disgraceful use.

For the fun of it, I imagined Bo, after much deliberation, going back to his high-finance world of know-how, sharing our narrative with his colleagues, and employing his way with words to make clear that he was convinced that what he had witnessed with his grandson’s spinning of the dreidel was a spiritual event, a sign of something much greater than anything that went on every day in his technical business environment. As he stood his ground against those who thought he was out of his mind, the communicative transaction would qualify as a well-worth-seeing instance of public moral argument.²¹

My assessment of interruption deals with all that I have said about my experience with Bo. If there had been more time to talk and if I had thought Bo were willing to listen, I would have said more about the nature, scope, and function of our interruptive nature. Now, however, is the appropriate time to do so. Some additional introductory remarks about this matter will be helpful in orienting the reader to the narrative structure of my story.

Our well-being and survival are dependent on our ability to respond to the dynamics of our interruptive nature with concerned thought and decisive action. Sometimes lived bodies don’t make it. I have stood face to face with the interruption that we are a time or two. Uncertainty is the source of anxiety, and this emotion can be crushing. I learned what it takes to survive. The wounds never completely go away. I know a number of people who would agree. I suspect there are many more. If you can construct some narrative that can start rebuilding a world of know-how, then, indeed, more power to you. Nietzsche is right: What does not kill me makes me stronger.²² If you have somebody willing to help you construct the narrative, count your blessings.

In order to be as truthful as possible, the rhetorical construction of narratives must make use of what the cultural critic and rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke describes as the perfectionist impulse of language. According to Burke, The principle of perfection is central to the nature of language as motive. The mere desire to name something by its ‘proper’ name, or to speak a language in its distinctive ways is intrinsically ‘perfectionist.’ What is more ‘perfectionist’ in essence than the impulse, when one is in dire need of something, to so state this need that one in effect ‘defines’ the situation?²³ We are creatures who would enhance and better (perfect) our understanding of the world in order to live wise and fulfilling lives. To define what something is, is to engage in an act of truth