Monday, November 21, 2011

Isaacson's "Steve Jobs," Skimmming, Skipping, not Seeing

This will not be a negative review of Isaacson's book. I promise. I offer staunch, if stingy, praise.  Steve Jobs is an able and well-mannered, well written and easily read accounting, a counting up, of Jobs' life.  It ably and fairly juxtaposes plusses and minuses, and properly ending up with the unavoidable conclusion:  who are we to judge someone who is so touched and has so touched us.  Unlike that moronic reductionist popularizer, Malcolm Gladwell, with his blinks and tipping points, Isaacson senses, honors and leaves in tact Jobs' fearsome love of what has to be created in order to be.  (I refer to Gladwell's article in the November 14, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, in which he called Jobs a "tweaker."  This is far closer to what Gladwell can comprehend than having anything to do with Jobs.)
Isaacson harkens back to certain themes like a stone skipping on the water's surface:  Jobs' anger and abuse of people;  his dogged search for simplicity;  his drive to build not just marvelous products, but a lasting, strong, unique and pathbreaking company.  His hippiness collides with building a corporate behemoth;  his creative drive is less harnessed than vaulted into a strange arena of corporate governance;  disdain for money lies fitfully beside the awareness of wealth's power.

A DEEP PULSE, A GUIDING CLUE

I felt something pulsing here, and that is to Isaacson's credit; this rather journalistic work (any chapter could have been an article in the New Yorker or Vanity Fair, if not Fortune and certainly not Forbes) did not succumb to banality;  or that he is wise, loving and attentive enough to assure that "something" a "mystery" about Jobs shone, or murmured through the journalistic composure.
It comes down to this:  How are we to regard Jobs' seeming cruelty when it clearly yields such formidable performances?  Jobs himself says "A" players can take it, that they appreciate direct, frontal assaults on what they themselves know to be mediocre.  And Jobs is cited again and again as saying his dropping acid was a gateway for him;  and those who haven't done it just won't get it.  This is a clue, a guiding thread, as Heidegger might say.  I think this clue takes us into the deep ruminations of the (yes, French) philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.  Stay with me.
Why was Jobs so cruel, we ask again and again, right up to the very end?  Jobs is an artist, we might say, as an excuse.  And so it is.  But if we conceive of artists as temperamental and emotionally stunted decorators and artisans of prettyness, we miss our chance.  We have to "think different," as Jobs famously proclaimed. Artists capture, encircle and bring to us the barest wisps of what beckons and what is calling us to pay new and fresh attention.  Nothing less.

THE ARTIST'S MISSION: A SOLDIER FOR A VISION

As Deleuze and Guattari say in What is Philosophy, "It is always a question of freeing life, wherever it is imprisoned, or of tempting it into an uncertain combat."  That description of the artist's mission contextualizes Jobs' ferocity to a tee. What artist's devote their lives to is akin to the mission of "The Dirty Dozen;"  a life-threatening feat of daring-do. These artist's evocations, which become works for our eyes and ears and touch, are but things of air when the artist is working.  How are these fantasms to break through if they are not propelled with explosive power?  How are they to survive this "combat" (with mediocrity) if they are not shielded with uncompromising protectiveness?  Would a mother meekly suggest that a bully might prefer to desist (like a distended Bartleby?);  or would she strike out like a lion against a predator?  How else is Jobs to assure these births he feels, sees, can touch and smell right THERE?  "The artist is a seer, a becomer," says Deleuze-Guatarri.
Isaacson is insightful enough to capture Jobs premonition of having a short life.  This soldiering for the fresh and new is an eviscerating exercise.  Jobs anger requires that he summon, to his own detriment as well, these overpowering, otherworldly energies.  Says Deleuze-Guattari, "What little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of their illness or neuroses, but because they have seen something in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves, and that has put on them the quiet mark of death."
Here we follow the clue to the end.  Jobs was furious, insulting, demoniacal for what had to be fought for, and with no less fury than this.
If you can't abide Jobs' offensiveness, take your leave.  But don't pander with kitsch and cuteness like a Gladwell.  Better to leave and let the sting linger (as do the women I described in my blog, Leader Pathways, (leadermentoring.blogspot.com) last month).

SATURATED, INVISIBLE, FULL TO THE BRIM

One last thing:  Jobs craved simplicity, thinness, near invisiblity of technology and gadgetry so that a relation, and interaction can take place.  Again, Deleuze and Guattari, here quoting Virginia Woolf: "Saturate every atom, eliminate all  waste, deadness, superfluity...  It must include nonsense, fact, sordidty: but made transparent.... I want to put practically everything in;  yet to saturate."  A Cloud, perhaps?