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.

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.

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.

When we accept a spiritual master or a guru, we treat abstract power as a reality. Is that better than treating real power abstractly? Let me read your next post, and we’ll take up that issue.

I dismiss out of hand your distinction based on self confidence. The last thing I want to do is pseudopsychologize it, but it sounds to me like you’re making excuses for yourself.

Everyone needs heroes, heroes to fit the moment, they are units of significance only. My heroes recently have done a lot to justify and excuse my addictions, and I thank them for that: ginsberg, who lived for seven months in North Kolkata buggering poets that I cannot find, burroughs who exiled himself, pynchon. They are only who I need them to be. I would hate to spend time with any of them in real life.

I need to return to d & g to get grounding, an odd thing to turn to them for, so I can stop contradicting myself constantly.

I’ve read most of the Zephayer piece. I like it best at the beginning. I asked about Power because I’m more interested in its internal functioning. This is what my email to you was about. Anyway, I think it’s problematic to treat power abstractly… doesn’t that make it an ‘abstract machine’ such as D&G talk about in the Kafka book? They say an abstract machine is a dead machine.. so far as reader impact goes..

I’m not giving up my defense of Zen masters yet. I hoped you would address my long comment more directly, but I am aware that the tone was neither energizing nor manly. The argument continues in my next post.

Also, guys, this is a great discussion. Keep it up, and I’d like to get involved or at least spotlight some things that have affected me in here - maybe when I have time on Saturday, if I have time on Saturday. God I hope so. The best thing about having a day job is having nothing to worry about on the weekends.

http://www.jedicist.org/blog/?p=39

6:
“Do not think
thought-worthy
that which is unthinkable.
Do no think
that that
which is unthinkable
Is not worthy
of thought
No such bias.”

10:
“The Supreme Truth
is this:
‘ there is no obstruction
there is no commencement
I am not fettered
I do not seek liberation
I have not attained liberation.’”

And

18:
The profoundly intelligent
having delved deep into books
for knowledge and insight
should discard book-knowledge
discard the husk
to obtain rice.”

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html