01/21/2026. The Aesthetics of Progress

Extracting Utopia, Wayfinder Treadmills, Emergence and Limits

There are tendencies, certainly in America, to conflate freedom with liberation from limit. The promise of a limitless future is laced through advice columns and campaign slogans, celebrity interviews and how-to listicles detailing all that’s required to live your best life, hit your new personal best, optimize your health, optimize your focus, speak your truth and set your ‘you’ free. I’m not generally inclined towards cynicism, but the sheer volume, force, and aggressive cheerfulness of all of this smacks of industry, which makes me suspicious and a bit jumpy. Describing limit as irrelevant and unnecessary is a profitable business model. 

It’s worth noting that ours is a society of staggering affluence, a condition that shortens the distance between wanting and having, between idea and action. As such, it is the accelerator of impulse, of plan, and of program. We take this removal of frictions to be freedom, the wind in our hair while we race after dreams brilliant and noble. Of course, the removal of friction is also the removal of traction, and my exultant chase soon becomes a headlong hurtle without hope of stopping or changing direction. There is no time to think about what is being trampled. 

From – Taxonomy

As with most words, ‘progress’ has multiple meanings. The most basic sense is “getting to the place where you are not currently at.” But what I will hereafter refer to as captial-P ‘Progress’ is that optimistic technological advance toward a bright capital-T ‘Tomorrow’. 

This is the Progress of Steve Jobs’ empty stage and smart black turtleneck holding in his hand the small silver rectangle that will unlock, finally and in an instant, the storehouses of human innovation and learning through the ages (an added bonus: neck problems for whole generations of human beings.) Or the development of artificial intelligence technologies promising efficient and easy problem-solving, from the management of the stock market to regulating missile-defense systems or the temperature of your house, to planning your vacation, your dating life, or your childcare scheduling. As artists we should be relieved to know that technologists are working hard to help us with our work too – AI tools to compose our music, write our books, paint our paintings.

Elon Musk promises that AI will eventually lead to the eradication of work, or as he quickly qualified, the eradication of the need to work. The implication being that for most, work is in some real sense a humiliation, that we are all being kept from realizing our full potential and our full humanity because of work.

As understood and metabolized in our technocratic milieu, Progress is an unquestioned good that is at once vague, undefined, and unrelentingly optimistic. What’s less clear is where, exactly, we’re going. Or how, exactly, we’re getting there. The important thing is that we’re moving. ‘Move fast and break things’ is the motto of our reigning technologists. That’s a guarantee.

Of course, our current tech-titans are easy punching bags. it’s not hard to point to the Zuckerbergs and Cooks and Altmans and Bezos(es?) and Musks as drivers of society and the natural world to the brink. The indictments certainly land – appropriately. But it’s important to note that the technocrats don’t exist apart from staggering demand for their services. They, and we, exist in a particular environment and aesthetic, the contours of which cultivate and reward persons committed to a particular set of sociological priorities. One of these priorities is Progress.

---

There are three things that Progress touches on that germane to our discussion: time, suffering, and hope.

Time

One of the principal priorities of the Enlightenment was liberation from contingency, to get out from under the tyrannical thumb of unpredictable irrationality and chaos, and to protect our hopes and aspirations from chance. To do this, it is necessary to “understand, and preferably control, the future.”

There are two important implications of modernism on our understanding of time.

1. To create real protections against the forces of entropy, chaos, and chance, human beings must be coordinated. This can only happen if time is universalized, if we’re all operating according to the ‘same’ time. This is made possible through technology, i.e. clocks that were accurate and dependable and able to be regulated globally. So, activities in Paris and New York, Beijing and Sydney all now have the possibility of being synchronized and coordinated.

The effect though is not just geographical coordination. Public time and private time are now also synchronized, and the boundary between work time and leisure time, and with it, between home and the workplace, begins to erode. Even our own psychology is impacted. Subjective time, or the slowing down or speeding up of our sense of time at any given moment, is now subservient to a standardized temporal framework. The world becomes fast and efficient.

2. These various modes of synchronization and coordination means that our experience of time speeds-up. Or, the future is pulled into the present. Instantaneous interaction between everyone is now possible and desirable, and now expected. We must be available everywhere and at all times to everybody. Further, our response to any request made of us must be immediate, which our technologies make possible and encourage. An important implication of this fact is that time to reflect is edged out of the normal activity of a day. Reflection requires slowing down, which is, according to the modernist project, an unacceptable interruption.

Obviously, this has no small effect on our understanding of ourselves and what it means to be human…

Suffering

Progress promises the great frontier, the Utopia of Enlightenment, where human contingencies are finally vanquished and mastery is accomplished.

The problem, clearly, is that we are contingent creatures. What do we do with present limits, with present constraints, with our contingency? What do we do with suffering?

This vanquishment (as it’s metabolized on the individual personal level) is often predicated on a self-on-self antagonism, a gunslinger show-down between will and body — “force of will” is an apt phrase — a disintegration. We think we are on a road leading to a bright future, but find we are on treadmills going nowhere.

Along with putting on practices that cultivate a deeper understanding of my bodily limits (“the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places”), the facilitate a tactile awareness of where my body ends and something else begins, it is also necessary to put off habits that blunt my awareness of limit. It’s important that my appetites (for food, information, stimuli) and my capacities (stomach walls, hours in a day, fatigue) come into alignment.

Hope

Progress represents a vision of the future that is as virgin snow. Ripe for the taking, an undiscovered country. Untold promise. A utopia.

Tellingly, Utopia, first coined in Sir Thomas More’s book of the same name, is derived from the Greek οὔ (“not” or “no”) and topos (“place”). In other words, “no place”. The horizon we never reach. Ever out of our grasp.

Here, utopia comes into focus as the extractor: robbing us, through our own addiction to the nebulous hope of a brighter tomorrow, from the here and now where life is actually situated.

“Lions roar over him, lift up their cry, and they have made his land a desolation, his towns are ravaged with no dweller there.” – Jer. 2:15

No place / no dweller. The strain towards utopia is an abandonment of the place one is. Utopia ravages place. Forsaking the living waters of God’s provision today for the still, brackish water in the cistern of utopia.

Furthermore, while Progress is understood and metabolized in our technocratic milieu as an unquestioned good (that is at once vague, undefined, and unrelentingly optimistic), it is also, notably, the great generator of the world’s waste.

Obsolescence is, in large part, manufactured: Nylon, for example, was heralded as a wonder-product when it was invented. The problem was that it was too durable and long-lasting, thereby working at cross-purposes with market interests: better to make a product that can snag and run to maintain demand…

Obsolescence necessarily cheapens and devalues the “material now”, but also, helpfully for the cause of Progress, generates the illusion that we are in fact moving forward. (The life cycles of computers and phones, for example, could be longer. But they are manufactured to fail at just the point where new innovations are being unveiled. Obsolescence is good for business.)

We accept these degradations as unfortunate but necessary byproducts of a larger cause : the advancement of the human project, the ushering in of a new dawn of human flourishing.

If everything is moving backwards, it creates the illusion that one is moving forwards. The backward flow of yesterday’s technology feels like forward movement.

“In the whole vast expanse of human history there is only one point of contact with the Lord of this history: the present moment. It is through the door of the present moment that God enters into your life, and it is through you that he enters into the life of the world.” – Michel Quoist

Questions:

1. 5 markers of non-shalom oriented aesthetic systems. How does the Modernist project of Progress meet these?
   • Dominative
   • Extractive
   • Sanctimonious
   • Displacive
   • Hierarchical
2. How do we experience the implications of the Utopian project on our understanding of time in our own lives, our work, our relationships?
3. What would an aesthetic of resistance look like? Resistance to “Capital-P Progress”. How do we build it?
4. What does it mean to engage our own artistic practice as the means of resistance?
5. What is Progress’ relationship to contingency? To limit? To suffering?
6. What is Progress’ relationship to work?
7. What is Progress’ relationship to the here and now?
8. What’s the difference between utopia and hope?

---

Leaving behind Progress to embrace the world as it is (which is to say, enchanted), J.R.R. Tolkein’s ‘On Fairy Stories’:

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.

[ . . . ]

The “fantastic” elements in verse and prose of other kinds, even when only decorative or occasional, help in this release. But not so thoroughly as a fairy-story, a thing built on or about Fantasy, of which Fantasy is the core. Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.”