The Reenchanted World

Whether or not you’ve read his six-volume opus My Struggle (I haven’t), you likely have some expectations when you see Karl Ove Knausgaard’s byline. Here, the Norwegian author doesn’t disappoint: He takes on Technology with a capital T, tracing the arc of alienation from childhood to our current moment in which, he argues, experience itself has vaporized. Hypnotic and plainspoken in exactly the way you hope—and for all its angst, not without hope.

In the Nineties, for example, I studied literature, art history, and aesthetics, completely convinced that what I studied was about human nature, life, and the true fabric of existence, while the poor souls over at the natural-science department were instrumentalists fiddling with dead matter and numbers. Back then, much of literary studies was about structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism. In many instances, this meant that texts were understood to be isolated objects, with all ties to the world around them severed, including those to the author. They were a kind of closed system of signs whose meaning arose in the differences between them, rather than in the extratextual reality they pointed to. It was fantastic. Signifier and signified, signifying and signification, phenotext and genotext, denotation and connotation! But it was signs that we sat hunched over, it was signs we related to, so that what we were doing was basically a kind of encoding and decoding, while it was the poor souls at the natural-science department who were out at sea or in the woods or out in the fields, learning about biotopes and ecosystems, about blood and nerves, galaxies and flower meadows. They were the ones who cut into bodies, programmed machines, scanned brains, researched dreams and trees’ symbiosis with fungi. Their approach toward nature may have been reductive, but at least they were looking at it. How did I not realize this back then? How could I have been living under the illusion that I was the one in touch with nature, with human nature, when in fact I was just messing around with signs and abstractions?