Butler and bad writing

Rob Schaap rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au
Thu Jan 28 23:18:14 PST 1999


G'day Kelley and Ange,


>The self is
>a self because it is founded on the need for wholeness, a longing for
>reconciliation, the desire for unity. Yet, at the same time, the self bars
>the path to wholeness, unity, and reconciliation by deflecting desire,
>misrepresenting itself, misrecognizing what it truly desires. It is a
>seductive deception which only serves as the conception for further loss
>and fragmentation. The dream of plenitude is a deceitful dream; wholeness,
>unity, reconciliation can never be achieved."

Now you guys know I'm not a philosopher's arsehole, and that I have a knack for innocent misreading that can astound and bemuse, but I will make so bold as to posit some limits to this - a road we need to take for a way, but follow it all the way and you're in the bowels of hell, I reckon.

We seem to have split the self rather asunder here - as subject and irredeemable object. The subject here, the 'I', is apparently metaphysically posited as a seeker of the apparently metaphysically posited (but apparently impossible actually to define) desires that constitute the essential object, the 'me'.

It seems to me the 'I' and the 'me' are one - albeit 'one' in the sense of Marx's notion of a contradictory unity - the currency of the dialectic. For a start, among the desires we seek to understand is the need to search in the first place. The 'me' seems to be kickstarting the apparently prior 'I'.

I locate the dialectic in the relationship between what we grasp as our subjectivity/intersubjectivity (I/we) and what we grasp as our objectivity (the whole spectrum from our 'me'/'us' to that chipped ashtray). It's the whirlpool within which we do our thinking and our transforming. It's why we don't just sit there like chipped ashtrays. It's why to be human is to be mutable. It's why we're going somewhere. We're at the wheel whether we like it or not, and we're moving whether we like it or not, so we might as well grab the thing and try to point the headlights.

Our lot is the journey, not the destination.

I quite like John Ralston Saul's closing paragraph to *The Unconscious Civilisation* - he's aiming at corporatism here, but we can throw in fascism, economic rationalism and the kind of Taylorising paternalistic Marxism Angela so elegantly peed upon the other day:

'The virtue of uncertainty is not a comfortable idea, but then a citizen-based democracy is built upon participation, which is the very expression of permanent discomfort. The corporatist system depends upon the citizen's desire for inner comfort. Equilibrium is dependent upon our recognition of reality, which is the acceptance of permanent psychic discomfort. And the acceptance of psychic discomfort is the acceptance of consciousness.'

So our whirlpool being is not just a tragedy of eternal frustration, but also the condition of possibility for human self-gratification.

Bugger me, another contradictory unity!

...

I shouldn't reread my posts before posting them - did that mean anything?

Cheers, Rob.



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