Unwittingly, the practices of both the Lacanian psychoanalyst and the Zen master aim to disrupt the internal functioning of power in the subject of a ruling class. Power operates in the ruling class as an illusion. The illusion is situated in the subject as a sense of purpose, responsibility, or right. The subject draws its sense of purpose, responsibility, or right through an internal discourse with an ‘image,’ ’super-ego,’ or ‘Other.’ (This process operates differently in the conscious or the unconscious, unconscious or super-ego, depending on the person). This ideal entity, whatever we call it, and in whatever quadrant of the brain we imagine it to be situated, is an internal seat of power composed of a vast multiplicity of injunctions, repressions, prides, beliefs, and biases introjected over the course of one’s life. It is the aim of the Zen Master and Lacanian psychoanalyst to reveal the subject to the entirety of this discourse and process of introjection. The aim is to liberate the subject from the mental processes which, by keeping one in a cycle of happiness and unhappiness, consumption and lack, activity and comparison, hold one back from desiring in a revolutionary manner. This liberation is not from one’s body, but from the illusion through which life in accordance with the status quo is ensured to be consistent. It is a disruption which, rather than being violent, and rather even than being a deconstruction of that ‘Other’ which holds the subject captive, should be an enabling of subjective activity in which that Other is not needed because actual others are so close at hand. This ‘enabling’ is the reform suggested by Guattari. Here’s Lacan, near the beginning of his career (”Beyond the Reality Principle”).
But let us pursue our outline of analytic experience. The listener is thus situated in it as an interlocutor. The subject solicits him to assume this role, implicitly at first, but soon explicitly. Remaining silent nevertheless, and hiding everything including even his facial expressions (which are, moreover, barely noticed in him), the psychoanalyst patiently refuses to play this role. Is there not a threshold at which such an attitude must bring the subject’s monologue to a halt? If the subject continues, it is by virtue of the law of analytic experience; but is he still addressing the listener who is truly present or is he instead addressing some other now, someone who is imaginary but realer still: the phantom of a memory, witness of his solitude, statue of his duty, or messenger of his fate?
In his very reaction to the listener’s refusal to assume the role of interlocutor, the subject reveals the image he has replaced him with. He communicates to the analyst the outline of this image through his imploring, imprecations, insinuations, provocations, and ruses, through the fluctuations of the intention that he directs at the analyst and that the latter motionlessly but not impassively takes note of. Nevertheless, as these intentions become more explicit in his discourse, they interweave with the accounts with which the subject supports them, gives them consistency, and gives them a rest. In this discourse, he formulates what he suffers from and what he wants to overcome through his analysis, he confides his secret failures and his successful designs, he judges his own character and his relations with other people. He thus informs the analyst about the entirety of his behavior, and the analyst, who witnesses a moment of that behavior, finds in it a basis for its critique. After such a critique, this behavior shows the analyst that the very image he sees emerge from the subject’s current behavior is actually involved in all of his behavior. But the analyst’s discoveries do not stop there, for as the subject’s demands take the form of pleas, his testimony broadens through its appeals to the witness. These are pure narratives that appear “outside the subject” that the subject now throws into the stream of his discourse: unintended events and fragments that constitute his history, and, among the most disjointed, those that surface from his childhood. But we see that among these, the analyst stumbles anew upon the very image that, by playing the game as he does, he has awakened in the subject, the trace of which he found impressed upon himself by the subject. He certainly knew that this image was of human essence, since it provokes passion and oppresses, but it hid its characteristics from his gaze, like he himself does from the patient’s. He discovers these characteristics in a family portrait that includes the image of the father or of the mother, of the all-powerful adult– tender or terrible, kindly or punishing– the image of a brother, a rival sibling, a reflection of the subject himself or of one of his companions.
But the very image that the subject makes present through his behavior, and that is constantly reproduced in it, is ignored by him, in both senses of the word: he does not know that this image explains what he repeats in his behavior, whether he considers it to be his own or not; and he refuses to realize the importance of this image when he evokes the memory it represents.
Now, while the analyst completes the task of recognizing this image, the subject, through the debate that he carries on, completes the process of imposing its role on the analyst. The analyst derives the power he will have at his disposal in his action on the subject from this position.
In effect, the analyst then acts in such a way that the subject becomes aware of the unity of the image that is refracted in him into disparate effects, depending on whether he plays it out, incarnates it, or knows it. I will not describe here how the analyst proceeds in his intervention. He operates on the two registers of intellectual elucidation through interpretation and handling affect through the transference. But to establish the times at which he does so is a matter for technique, which defines them as a function of the subject’s reactions; adjusting the speed at which he does so is a matter of tact, thanks to which the analyst is informed about the rhythm of these reactions.
Let us simply say that, as the subject pursues his analysis and the lived process in which the image is reconstituted, his behavior stops mimicking the image’s suggestion, his memories reassume their real destiny, and the analyst sees his own power decline, having rendered useless by the demise of the symptoms and the completion of the personality.
Such is the phenomenological description that can be given of what happens in the series of experiences that form a psychoanalysis. Some might say that it is the work of an illusionist were the result not precisely to dispel an illusion. Its therapeutic action, on the contrary, must be essentially defined as a twofold movement through which the image, which is at first diffuse and broken, is progressively assimilated with reality, in order to be progressively dissimilated from reality, that is, restored to its proper reality. This action attests to the efficacy of this reality.
Felix Guattari offers redirection in 1973 interview titled ‘Molecular Revolution and Class Struggle’
The first task of a theory of desire must be to try to pick out ways of breaking through into the social field, rather than sanctioning the quasi-mystical practice of the private psychoanalytical encounter as it has developed after Freud. Correspondingly, any theorizing that bears on the present class struggle must be concerned primarily with how to open that struggle out to the desiring-production and creativity of the mass of the people. Marxism, in all its forms, is lacking in desire and loses its essence by tending towards bureaucratism and humanism, while Freudianism has not merely ignored the class struggle from the first, but has, further, continually falsified its early discoveries relative to unconscious desire by trying to handcuff them to the family and social norms of the prevailing order. Refusing to face these fundamental drawbacks and trying to gloss over them results in making it seem that the internal limitations of the theories are limitations that are intrinsically inseparable. There are two methods of receiving theoretical statements: the academic’s way is to take, or leave it, the text as it stands, whereas the enthusiast’s way is to take and leave it, manipulating it as he sees fit, trying to use it throw light on his circumstances and direct his life. The point is to try and make the text work.
[…] Some twelve years ago, in an effort to get somewhere with these questions, I put forward the notion of transversality to convey the capacity of an institution to rearrange the ‘introjects of the super-ego’ in such a way as to get rid of certain symptoms and inhibitions. A modification of the ‘local coefficient of transversality’ implies the existence of a source of desire, a group eros, a takeover, if only a partial one, of the individual’s organization by the group as subject. Thus a social formation can alter the unconscious ‘causality’ that stimulates the super-ego to act, and its modification of the introjects of the super-ego can result in a rearrangement of the psychic area as a whole. In this situation, the problem of internal and external repression takes on a different form. When it is backing up what takes place at school, in the family, in the army, etc., psychoanalysis is quite simply reactionary. No existential bursting open, no splitting of the self, no lack, no castration, can justify intervention of a repressive third party. It is pointless to say that it is no longer the real father, that what is really involved is a structural logic that would enable the subject to become established as desire in the signifying order, that it is vital for him to give up his undifferentiated imaginary pleasures if he is to attain to the ’symbolic’ — which is the be-all and end-all; all this paraphernalia of theory exists merely to justify the cosiness of the analytic session. Don’t worry about society! Your desire is our affair — we’ll give it free run secretly, here on the couch. And it works, one must admit. Psychoanalysis works very well, which is why it is so dangerous. It is the capitalist opium par excellence. Just to expose it is not enough; some way must be found of rendering it ineffective, unprofitable.
We need a profitable, public forum for creative expression operating as a gap in which the calling-to-power between the one (the subject) and the other (its phantom despot) itself falls silent.
Yes! A powerful assault on psychoanalysis. Opiate par excellance. I couldn’t agree more.
This exposition of psychoanalysis makes me want to try to read a guru relationship in the same way. In many ways, this is just what psychoanalysis reacts against, what it inverts. I mean that the student acts as the listener and the guru the subject. As much as the student seeks mastery over the tradition that the guru transmits, s/he is also explicitly studying the guru himself (i think here we can stay masculine). The image that the guru incarnates
(” the unity of the image that is refracted in him into disparate effects, depending on whether he plays it out, incarnates it, or knows it.”)
1. is the image of the culture. Tired of repressing itself, that culture fuels a constantly burning revolutionary desire. Everything that Hinduism is, hinduism contradicts, almost immediately. There is no single point of revolution, but a constant daily revision.
2. is a body of traditional knowledge (any knowledge is traditional), and he refracts it in him, even though he may be a formal rebel or iconoclast and the knowledge he represents may be only as old as him, and so the student is well advised to study him and mimic him.
Honestly, that didn’t get me very far at all. I thought I had a point in there, but it never materialized.
Let’s see, though, I did do something on Power, which I might as well type in here because I’m still not settled on a stable computer, (It’s complicated), so I might as well put it here for my later use and you can read it now…
Power is a raw material, matter out of which to form wealth in all forms.
India, for example, is a unit of power that operates in diffusion and multiplicity. It cleaves power into ever smaller units, units that each contain the void of hunger, hunger to regrow and make larger accumulations of power. Power denies other power, and so it propigates itself. Wealth is unlimited because endless laboring bodies repreoduce themselves for use by power. Power is the raw material of faith, which carries obedience in its body. We obey because we must, obey ourselves becasuse we must eat.; Must be fed. In order to maintain mortal beings we subscribe to power, which is as undying as the I inside by mortal body. Whether we are masters or sercants, we will continue to Be. While we seeek to serve others, we will continue to be slaves. May wer persue leisure and leisure alone, may our labor serve some purpose, may that purpose be a sincere body of power, may we mantian our faith in that power so that we may continue to signify, may we signify in order to maintain a lexicon with which to act in leasure, with which to write poetry that no other body will ever read, may we continue to read only to justify continued writing, may we serve a language as that is the material of power which we serve, the rawness with which we keep ourselves enlaboured, if only to ourselves, may we continue to create machines to serve us so that we can continue to be masters even if all the power is gone. Machines are simple servants.
And so we seek to escape, as if we could simply float away, a favorite myth that Power teaches us, for while we consume our ignoble addictions, make ourslevs feinds of ourselves, addictions that place power over our bodies in the iron tyrant of our bodies, by which we make ourselves our own unforgiving Masters.
Bodies need to feel the gaze of Power to labor. But Power can be created abstractly, can be instilled in clay idols that we make ourselves or pay others to make for us, which we will discard back into the river polluted with the discarded husks of previously obeyed power, we sacrifice ourselves so that we may be sacrificed, we give labor to ourselves.
Power may fragment into small parts obeying entropy, can be held by elastic quantities of bodies, but it can also accumulate into a giant pimple of power that rises over our cityscapes. The shards of power can be parallel to each other, massing themselves, or they can be set against eachother. In such cases the largest mass of obedience will win.
Witness India, an unweildy mass of disconnected powers set against each other in order to solidfy their holdings of what is left. Fundamentalism finds perch in such environs. I need remind no one that it was once gathered under a Central Imperialism that made India much larger than it was today, and ruled it from without. And when they left, their last gift was a mighty partition, to begin the dissolution of the union they made, to ensure the destruction of what they had already destroyed. That division began a general cracking, the breaking off of India from itself like mud dried hard and cracked into camps. And now what is to be had? the federalism that once thought so much of itself is hugely ineffectual, itself fragmented and unable to know itself in any of its other nationalist manifestations, set against itself and other nonstate accumulations of Power that have been brought forth by religion and hunger and hungry religion that have gained tremendous weight. The virility of the power they comand is unparelleled.
And in America we have continually recentralized power under first the paranoia of an empire attacked, forgein terrorism, and recently have (thankfully) recentralized power under the fear of Bush itself. As bush weakened, so did Americanness. We began to disavow our national identity in public. I was not proud to be an American face abroad. Noww we have installed a new power “That We Can Believe In”, one that will again unify and renew our empire.
We create heroes and gods for ourselves to renew our power, our stocks of obedience and faith so that we can labor to fill our larders with things that satiate hunger and desire, which are only the two avataras of the same thing, the hunger which is undeniable and righteous, the pursuit of Prana the life breath which gives health to our bodies, and the other the desire that we repudiate and deny even as we continue to consume at literally earth-shattering levels.
November 16th, 2008 | #
I disagree with a lot of this… and I agree with some too. You misunderstand my emphasis. I called this post ‘the enthusiast’ because I wish to treat Lacan enthusiastically. As Guattari says there, ‘the enthusiast both takes and leaves the text.’ I am not saying ‘Back to Lacan,’ but you have to remember that Deleuze and Guattari love Freud, a particular Freud, and that throughout their work, they are rather deferent to Lacan. This was something Professor Silverman always urged us to notice in the seminar I had with him. D&G are anti-oedipus, not anti-psychoanalysis. I agree with them that psychoanalysis gets sidetracked, and that it becomes part of the machine. But I also think there’s a ton to be learned from Lacan about the psyche of privileged people, the people whom the machine services, and whom service the machine. In my terminology, I think Lacan can teach us loads about ‘the domination of vocational desire.’
My favorite part from the Guattari quote is the bit about ‘not sanctioning the quasi-mystical experience of analysis.’ He doesn’t say ‘Let’s assault the experience,’ he says ‘let’s not sanction it.’ Which means, let’s sanction something else; let’s not be mystical in our effort to sanction the libido. I’d prefer that we talk about what we are sanctioning than deconstruct that which is deluding us.
You call this an exposition. I purposely ended that Guattari quote with him saying ‘It is not enough to expose.’ This is not about holding psychoanalysis up to the proverbial light; it is about taking from it and leaving it. I will not tell you that you should refrain from assaulting guru-ship, but I will ask you this: who are you trying to convince? Are you not revealing to me the outline of the image you are replacing me with? It seems that I begin to assume the role of the analyst, becoming the object of your “imploring, imprecations, insinuations, provocations, and ruses, through the fluctuations of [your] intention…”
In an earlier comment, you said it sounded like I was making excuses. I was happy that you said this; it only shows why people go to analysts in the first place: because their friends don’t want to become the repository for their battles. What I was trying to do was to place mySelf in the position of analyst. I was describing my image for you, the image in whose shadow I operate. You are still operating with your image, and you draw power from it, and I cannot tell whether you think this is a good thing, a bad thing, or not a true thing at all. I see Marx, America, India, gurus, Hinduism hovering over you; I see you combating them all by calling them Power. This abstraction, I feel, is a mistake, insofar as you do not keep consistently aware of the polyvocity to whom you are responding. Why? Because the Power that operates as an Image (image, not gaze) under which we labor is always multiple, and it is better for us to understand it as such, to know our phantom despots by their faces rather than by their abstract Name. Because for too long, it was the Name that held humans subject– it was God. And Power is just another name for God, and we only fight the Power of God by seeing and remembering how rhizomatic and multi-faced He is. (This is an application of Alain Badiou’s critique of Deleuze.)
Along those lines, I would disagree with your reduction of hunger and desire to ‘avatars of the same thing.’ Again, if you read my thesis, you’ll see some of my thinking on this point. I think that the essence of human existence, at this point in time anyway, is ‘desiring-subjectivity.’ This essence is indeed ‘undeniable’ and it has a tendency towards ‘righteousness’; it is a ‘pursuit of wisdom (prana)’, it is a ‘life breath.’ But there is also a fundamental split, the dash separating desiring and subjectivity, the disjunction, the holding apart of those two fundamental drives. Freud’s discovery was that subjectivity (an ego) ‘repudiates’ (represses) desire (the id). I think this discovery needs to be rephrased. We need to learn to think of subjectivity (consciousness) itself as a type of desire. Our egos, our identities, our intentionality, is all the effect of a fundamental desire to organize, to labor, to arrange. This desire, of which consciousness is a static force, and which I call ‘Vocational,’ is the Apollonian, as opposed to the Dionysian. Dionysian is the libidinal, the sexual. In our culture, and in the culture that our culture is expanding and procreating all over the world (globalism), this Apollonian/intentional/job-oriented/scientific/vocational desire is valued over the libidinal, the earthly, the Dionysian, the leisurely, the discombobulated. This second desire, the libidinal, is just as real and present in us as the first, the vocational. It’s just that we are taught and convinced to value the vocational more, however libidinal we think we are. Especially us, who went to college and do not reject the benefits of the vocational system. I think it is important to think of America not as Power or a ‘That we can believe in,’ but rather, as this valuation of the vocational, this will-to-domination over the libidinal.
I ended my ‘exposition’ by saying we need a forum for people to exist outside of the call-to-power. We need a place for people to escape vocational dominance. Vocational desire operates by constant interpellation, by constantly convincing people that they need to exert their power (spending power, attracting power, will to power, power over children, power over animals, power over savages, writing power, as you say, etc. etc. etc.). Where that interpellation falls silent, where that constant convincing goes subordinate, there the libido is found. Because we are always one of two things: vocational or libidinal. This is what it means never to be able to escape: we are always one of two selves. Which is not to say that one of them goes away while the other rules, but that one is always dominating the other. We need places for the strength of the libidinal to rule (art), not just the functioning of the libidinal to find its exertion (pleasure). We need to leave deconstruction to the academics. We need enthusiasts.
November 18th, 2008 | #
I disdegree with what I just said. Don’t take any of that too seriously. I’m riffing on your comment instead. I do not know if it applies to any real person in particularly.
The subject is the desiring-machine of I-den-tity. I have been of a confusion until now, not knowing when to say ‘ego’, when to use words like ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality.’ This is because I am describing something very new, or at least something only recently perfected. We are better machines than ever we have been before. And the mechanism of this lifestyle is the subject, which has hit such a groove that it calls the pavement “freedom.” And little does one– beastly fellow, this “one”: Realize that we only paved the world so we could litter on it and that the profusion of things we throw away are the shitted shards of our soul. And you like that, dear reader, you like those sh-shs drifting into that silly old word, soul. You like it with your subject, you dirty hypocrite, because that’s who I wrote it with and that’s who you read it with! Let the ball of the cynic sirs commence!
The goddam hypocrite is the free lover whose non-abstinence has only helped fuel the vocational machine. The hypocrite descries morality in the name of the free subject, the subject free to choose among the Faustian lineaments sold at the department store closeout sale on the streetcorner in Baghdad. The hypocrite believes (s)he champions the libido, but has in fact made a grosser pact with the machinic Devil. The Devil says “You want sex? Have it.” And with a grin it turns its blood-red pen to add three voluntary work hours per day to your life’s agenda book. You are free to stay at the office. Now you have what you want: Work More!
Fie on your freedom. I protest subjectivity. I shall have no purpose. I shall have no goal. I shall have what was given me on the morning of my birth: the desire to hurt nothing and to live. I shall go as fortune decreed– prone to sickness, happy in health. Neither duty nor malevolence shall forthwith enjoin my passion. I wish everyone the best. I must be off. My lady Chance awaits.
November 19th, 2008 | #
Okay,
I thought this was really interesting, and rather than agree or disagree with anything, I just wanted to submit new information into the dialogue. I have to admit, I am not sure I follow–I haven’t read many philosophy texts, and I think I may be less adept at following the line of thought when the terminology is interchanged.
One thing that we’re up to here is putting Marxian philosophy into conversation with psychoanalysis. One Marxian critique (I think I’m hearing, but I might be totally off-base) is that psychoanalysis is actually a fairly bouregois pursuit that in fact reasserts hierarchical structures as it seeks to “liberate” the mind.
I wanted to riff on this because it’s been on my mind.
If we’re putting psychology into conversation with Marxist thought, then I think it’s worth observing that quite a few of psychology’s central principles are grasped intuitively. Sophocles wrote Oedipus and Shakespeare wrote Hamlet before Freud ever came to terms with the funny ideas and tensions they were outlining in these plays.
I’ve been working at the registrar of a technical college for the past couple of days–the students are “blue-collar folks” from places like Enumclaw, Washington and Gary, Indiana who have come “to learn a trade.” A few may have a year in college or two but most either have a HS degree or a GED, little exposure to these ideas. Nonetheless, that intrinsic sense is still there. I heard someone make the remark the other day that somebody’s big truck meant that he was “making up for something.” What a neat, exacting, brutally true and complex statement! I’m not advocating for psychoanalysis, or even suggesting that it’s a useful frame for thinking about the world, but you could write a couple theses about that sentence alone. I think it’s an important observation, because it subverts a sense of self that is grounded in power and capital.
There has been the suggestion, and I guess I’ve occupied this view at times, that there is some correlation between Marxist and Freudian thought in that they both concern themselves with the immutable in people (the id and the base), and they both address the imposition of externalities on that constant (the superego and superstructure). And shit, I think I understand but I may be embarrassing myself: Guattari argues that psychoanalysis is somewhat decadent, that it in some way prostrates itself before a bigger and badder structure, the class structure, and doesn’t address the most real, most profound problems (it probably isn’t fair to call them “social neuroses”) those of inequity and injustice and poverty?
My first thought is that, if everyone has an intuitive understanding of things like guile and self-deception (the things it is the psychoanalysts job, in some ways, to “root out”), then in some ways there is a fundamental notion in our people–la genta, a gente, les gens–that the social order is a heinous farce. The existence of hierarchy–albeit a phantom one–in psychoanalysis lessens its credibility as an instrument of any kind of change; but there are some psychoanalytical principles that may advance a Marxist agenda, or an agenda that seeks truth, rather than to obscure its existence, or to create it in the Society of the Spectacle where to have = to be.
The other thought I have about this is about the idea of a public forum “for creative expression operating as a gap in which the calling-to-power between the one (the subject) and the other (its phantom despot) itself falls silent.”
Again, I think I need someone to explain this to me. I thought maybe you might mean a forum of creative expression without the listener/listened, observer-ovserved dynamic, but I think that might be totally reductive.
If it isn’t, if I’m basically right, I thought of an example of such a forum: the carnival. And the bossanova singer Gilberto Gil has already outlined the Marxist implications of that forum, so I’ll just quote him:
The happiness of the working man appears as
the grand illusion of Carnaval
The people work the entire year
for a single moment of rest and dreams
to fantasize about being kings, pirates
and everything is through with by Friday
Sadness has no end; happiness does.
I agree that a profitable forum for self-expression is necessary, but it shouldn’t be one that creates a polarity between self-expression and its lack. So the forum is problematic in itself, in that it is localized.
So the question I’m wondering after this convo is how can we avoid confining self-expression to a forum?
November 21st, 2008 | #
At least we have a forum for this self expression, though. Pinko’s is the true manifestation of the power of the internet for creation; by keeping it small, we’ve given ourselves one hell of a space.It means a lot to me to be able to have these discussions when I can’t even communicate in complete sentences (yet) with most of the people I interact with daily. It may be a localized forum, but at least it’s a locality that can follow me around wherever I go. Our discussion here has gotten really diffuse; there are way too many issues at hand here for me to do anything except add more.
I’ve done a lot of reflection about why I’m so inclined to treat Power abstractly and what the function of that abstraction is, and you’ve really convinced me. To put it in terms of the vocabulary i seem to have made for myself to talk to myself (last night I literally spent twelve sleepless hours talking aloud to myself) If the accumulation and centralization of power is paranoia is fascism, then the abstraction of power is the ultimate centralization. But I’m still really interested in being able to talk about the forms of Power are connected to teach other–first, pure physical power (electricity, calories, ADP or whatever) is related to the powers that govern how we use and consume our calories. I’m inclined to place divinity more in the realm of electricity and calories, and I want to find ways to talk about that, too.
Forgive me if this is presumptuous, but I think we’re getting some consensus on psychoanalysis; it needs to be practiced on the molar (vocational, social) level in the context of the ongoing class and otherwise warfare. Fleshing out and shaming the oedipal pathologies that we all may or may not carry around with us is the least useful psychoanalysis can be. It was jps comment, of course, that helped solidify that for me. If we are to practice analysis on a vocational level, can we, as vaguely middle-class vaguely educated Americans on the Eve of America, spread out across continents, working with NGOs, preserving and publishing Art, making beauty available where and how we can, consider ourselves to have a role in it?
I’ve got a lot of reading from you two to do. Looking forward to it.
November 22nd, 2008 | #
ShiT! My friends. No, I’m not equating Pinko’s to Carnaval. I agree, Jed, this is a great forum. I’m thankful as hell for it because I don’t have many friends here in Seattle who engage in the way you guys do. And it is important to consider all this stuff, and it is fabulous that we have a public forum to do so. And here, on the wonderful internet, Black Friday never comes.It’s Mardi Gras all the time.
I think I should express my thought better: i guess I was thinking about things like Carnaval or, hell, a bar, where power dynamics exist to a lesser extent, don’t exist, or are confused and complicated.
And I don’t know if those forums complicate power structures, or reassert them. I don’t know. I would suspect, since they are, like I said, pretty strictly localized, that they do both: on one hand, Bottom the Weaver gets to play King, even though he has an ass’ ears; on the other, there’s always the next day there for you like a piece of cold granite. Thinking aloud, or something. I just wanted to engage, because it was/is an interesting conversation.
November 22nd, 2008 | #
No, I didn’t think you were, I was just feeling good about it. I think I misinterpredted the forum word. This is just why I feel good about perusing publishing, even though it’s the most capitalist and least interesting way to approach textual culture. I want to have a hand in creating an internationalist publishing house with an emphasis on first-time writers that would not really distribute to bookstores but would use the internet. Wouldn’t have to make bestsellers or anything, just make good books available to whoever wants, and open up the scope of what gets published in this world.
November 22nd, 2008 | #
Yes!
November 23rd, 2008 | #
When I said that about the gap falling silent bla bla, I was rephrasing a sentence in my thesis. I’m just gonna copy and paste that part. It begins with a passage from Women in Love, in which two sisters talk about whether one can escape the ‘everyday personality’ or perhaps even the Oedipalized self:
“But there can be something else, can’t there?” she said. “One can see it through in one’s soul, long enough before it sees itself through in actuality. And then, when one has seen one’s soul, one is something else.”
“Can one see it through in one’s soul?” asked Gudrun. “If you mean that you can see to the end of what will happen, I don’t agree. I really can’t agree. And anyhow, you can’t suddenly fly off on to a new planet, because you think you can see to the end of this.”
Ursula suddenly straightened herself.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes—one knows. One has no more connections here. One has a sort of other self, that belongs to a new planet, not to this. You’ve got to hop off” (462).
There are two fundamentals to take. First, one has this other self. The other is not a separate entity, a different nature, but is instead connected to the subject in precisely that place where no known connection to the world exists. One connects with the other at the gap in which all callings are silent. Such invokes the second point. This ‘something else,’ this renovation and departure which does not leave the world, is sighted first in the realm of what is potential, or virtual. Ursula affirms the virtual as such.
The question regarding a gap and its forum, as I take it, is this: given that most of us understand, at some intuitive level, that the social order is a heinous farce, where do we go and what might we do to find an order that is less heinous, and less of a farce?
In my thesis I end up arguing that there is a fundamental split in our society which, whether or not it is “natural” or “cultural,” is real, and worth discussing. We all know about it: it’s the split between what we do and who we are in our jobs, and what we do and who we are on our own time. We need to work with this split, rather than against it. It’s so systemic in the education that takes place, and can only be worked upon by ’specialized technicians’ at every level of society. Reality seems to be such that, on the one hand, our consciousness is expanded, encouraged to control the body, and that, on the other, our bodily desires ‘go somewhere else,’ or express themselves in a revolutionary way, a perverse fantasy, a non-genital ejaculation. This emphasis on the body is a Foucaultian point. This is where Foucault is useful, because he gets us beyond the whole Freud vs. Marx thing and allows us to see repression/alienation as one process connected (Jed, you are more a Foucaultian than you think) to Power.
We need to work with the present fuck-over of the mind if we’re going to make things better. Body politics. This whole class struggle, this whole unhappy, neurotic society that psychologists talk about (and which we experience and combat in our egoism or cynicism), is part of One process. I think myself clever for putting the emphasis on the word ‘one.’ I got this from a book I’ve alluded to earlier in the conversation, a book published a few years ago by a prominent French philosopher, Alain Badiou. The cover of the book has an inverted “One” and “Deleuze” and “The Clamor of Being” written on it.
The point is, well not what he says but what I infer from his intuition, is that repression, alienation, religious righteousness, the doctrine of sin, the idea of evil, the ideal of heaven, the presence of God, this whole clamor of oppressive Being — all of these things are part of the same exact structure that puts us into a vocation today. This desire is lead out of us, encouraged into existence, it seeks knowledge of a topic or the conscious ability to intentionally fix problems of a particular nature. It pursues an ‘excellence.’ Somehow, and I am not at all sure of the causality of it, this ’seeking knowledge’ and ‘conscious ability’ encourages the formation of identity. We become excellent at what we do, and in the same moment we become excellent at ‘knowing’ who we are. How does it happen. Let me be more specific in describing how I understand causality: the fact that we’re taught to be purposive necessarily causes us to be more self-obsessed, and the interest that accumulates in the self comes to form a society of Ones, subjects, identities, rather than a community of animals. But even this does not go deep enough, far back enough. It’s an effect of the Protestant work ethic, something that Jed draws attention to in his thesis on Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a trickle down of religious values that infiltrate even the most secular areas of our society. It’s a matter of valuation. The prominence of science and technology in our society is somehow, and again, I do not understand the causality, is somehow part and parcel with the domination of vocation over sexual desire, and also with the development of consciousness in the individual, and the fixation of that consciousness in a subject, or ego. This is why Foucault turns the table on ‘the Enlightenment’: it was never about snubbing out superstition, this light has always been about bringing subjective conscience into the focus of our mind’s eye, and this ‘bringing about’ is the exertion of Power.
Ultimately, I think what we need to be working on is not Power but the ‘will to power.’ Nietzsche came up with this phrase and imagined he had discovered the essence of existence. Less cynical people will have some bubbling up of emotion which informs them that humanity is not so cruel, that life has not progressed solely through exploitation (which Nietzsche often argues). Biology discovers thousands of examples of symbiosis, and I account for them as expressions of libidinal desire, a form of desire that has no knowledge of power. (The tree of knowledge in Eden is a metaphor for vocational desiring, for consciousness, power, intentionality, with the effects of restlessness, anxiety, malevolence: it opened the deep rent in us between two forms of desire.)
Will to power is the essence of vocational desire. (I thus replace will to power with desiring-subjectivity, an ‘essence’ which can explain both vocational and libidinal desiring). Vocational desire, the efficacy of which takes place in consciousness, works by making everything into a problem to be solved, a calling to be responded to, an argument to be formulated, a voca-tion (voice-ing). But it gets caught upon itself, it wants ever more problems, it makes problems where they don’t exist, it hears callings all the time, there are voices and suddenly one wonders why one is wearing a petticoat and telling the mailman about the naughty incontinence of one’s pet badger. But where this desire has not overextended itself, has not been over-educated, the result is consciousness plain and simple. Consciousness is the distantiation of the body from its environment. Vocational desire operates by giving a body this second degree of awareness, invoking the range of possibilities open to the body’s activity. For some reason, in our culture, this second degree of awareness has become obsessed with its capacity for forming second degrees of personal identity. Those who do not enjoy the game will be left behind.
Our culture works by manufacturing identities. The Facebook helps this, as does advertising and branding. We are raised to be concerned about who we are, what we are in this world, and we invest in concerns and projects. In our lonelier moments we dissimulate in anxiety. And so the most enlightened Buddhist can smile and say “the multiplicity of five petals is one flower, the opening of one flower is five petals,” meaning that your facebook profile, your family, your job, your lover and your pastime are your multiplicity, and the development of all of these is you — and we can read this and say ‘I suppose that is true.’ I can write it in my thesis and we can talk about it here. Trails bearing new growth, tread by many and mapped by few. When I say a forum I mean people need a place to express without expressing their self, such that these maps and trails, once kept secret by Druids and esoteric subversives, grow interconnected. A basket weaved by WASTE. A forum operating as a black hole. Den-lightenment, noctophilia.
Guattari, after saying we need to avoid sanctioning a mystical encounter, goes on to say, “Correspondingly, any theorizing that bears on the present class struggle must be concerned primarily with how to open that struggle out to the desiring-production and creativity of the mass of the people.” Key phrase: “creativity of the mass.” Class struggle, to me, is about poverty. Poverty, to me, is about the denial of opportunity for the investment of one’s desire. Impoverishment extends into every subjected mind. Buddhists have always said that you can be poor and still be happy. It is because one is made a ‘one’ that one’s desire comes to seek investment; lose the attachments that make up the self and you are rich. (The Buddhists teach non-attachment, with the aim of freeing your desire from the poverty of the one, the Oneself.) But we are all ‘ones’! We are all subjected, we are all raised to be conscious of ourselves and our efficacy in the world, this isn’t going anywhere, let’s not meditate our subjection away. Instead, let’s provide a forum where these subjects, these impoverished minds, rather than encounter the silence of the analyst or the buffoonery of their blog, have precisely the sort of space in which they are encouraged more to express ‘themselves’ creatively than to feel the need to make this expression represent them or demonstrate their ‘power’. A myspace without the my, a facebook without faces, a personal wikipedia, a youtube that people actually take seriously but still have fun perusing. That sort of forum.
November 24th, 2008 | #
To summarize the forum: it would let the unconscious speak, forced not to speak a recognizable language, but only to be coherent in its beauty, beautiful in its incoherence, an expression weened comfortably away within a stunning, impotent, infinitely unrecognizable medium of signification.
November 24th, 2008 | #
For the record. I finally printed out your thesis and am a certain number of pages through it.
November 24th, 2008 | #
TTL,
Ok, I’m pretty sure I follow. Could Carnaval be conceived as one part or example of such a forum? Do you read Adbusters? Is that such a forum? But, yeah, I have a better sense of what you’re saying, and I agree.
That’s why ‘zines are so cool–the artifice is diffuse. There is this little place in Portland that sold these little hand-drawn comics people had done. One was about a crazy lady who worked in a department store, and the drawings were totally pathetic but awesome, and it had been published anonymously. I literally couldn’t put it down.
Hey, btw, I found this really interesting:
Vocational desire, the efficacy of which takes place in consciousness, works by making everything into a problem to be solved, a calling to be responded to, an argument to be formulated, a voca-tion (voice-ing). But it gets caught upon itself, it wants ever more problems, it makes problems where they don’t exist, it hears callings all the time, there are voices and suddenly one wonders why one is wearing a petticoat and telling the mailman about the naughty incontinence of one’s pet badger.
That harkening to the latin voca was really interesting to me: reading it, immediately I thought of how schizophrenic people will often talk to themselves, even before the badger thing. Surely schizophrenics are called to do something, as well. The only thing is, we don’t share any context with them–that connection has been severed or obscured by the system. I am thinking right now how other cultures view epileptics and schizophrenics as having a connection with the world of the dead–and how we localize “crazies” (again public space comes up) in the loonie bin.
At the homeless day center I used to work at, we had no shortage of crazy people. What was interesting about that were the occasional moments of conspiracity, the times where you don’t get how, exactly, but you know just what someone means.
Whitman was probably crazy when he admitted:
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and so lonely.
But now we have Will and Grace.
November 24th, 2008 | #
Carnaval.. I think of wearing masks, boozing, revelry, dance, Italian music… wearing masks means being someone different, boozing means slackening the brain, revelry means love of life, dance means the body is awake, Italian music means…. the forum would involve being someone different, slackening the brain, love of life, bodily wakefulness, and Italian music means…..
Yeah I think those moments of conspiracity, as you call em, are moments of negated sublimity. Meaning it’s sublime, it’s true, it’s the co-motion of all things caught in a word, but it’s angry. And those moments happen all the less, indeed, because we now have Will and Grace. Somewhere Deleuze or Guattari talks about how there are football games on sundays but only so many people are satisfied. Whitman and the Crazies. Good band name; it could play Italian music. I don’t read adbusters frequently; suppose I should.
Lacan says the unconscious is structured like a language. I say the conscious is structured like an argument. It takes a stake in something, makes its stake, and tells the body to go eat steak. We understand schizos because they’re still arguing; they’re still called by something. But we don’t understand why they won’t eat steak. I think it’s not so much that the context of their calling/argument is obscured by the system, but that the system is their context, and that it is very difficult to follow an argument, let alone eat steak, when the system, the entirety of everything, is precisely what is at stake. Consciousness becomes filled with Italian music. Madness!
November 25th, 2008 | #