kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
> Ahem. Emphasis on the nonpathological, eh? Enjoyment is nonpathological, desire
> is *always* pathological. From the critique of pure reason to the critique of
> pure desire...
Not by me. By pathology I refer to a functional failure of some kind. Part of becoming a functioning human being, that is, an animal that can get what it wants and live in the world, is the internalization of repression that I mentioned. People who failed to do this -- because, for example, they grew up under conditions of slavery -- might require masters. I regard that requirement as a pathology.
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
>> By the way, by _subjugation_ I don't mean the accomodation of the individual
>> to the community, which may occur between equals.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
> All things being unequal, however...
Well, all things are equal, or unequal, depending on how you look at them. I was thinking of the abstract, artificial _equal_ of liberalism, because like most of us I have been soaked in liberalism all my life and it's not easy to think outside the liberal categories. In this case, I should have used some word that denotes a kind of mutual acceptance of _ahimsa_ or nonviolence, but I don't know of one offhand.
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
> I mean the permanent subjection of one person to another's will, as
> institutionalized in the State.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
> Ah, that's a different story. Certainly I agree with this, that subjection of
> one to the will of the State is certainly not a permanent fixture of human
> relations...
> ...
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
> >> I don't see that as something one could predict in advance.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
> > That doesn't make for a very good argument though...
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
> > It makes a very good argument.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
>Justification of project X because the results of X are unknown and unknowable
>isn't much of an argument... maybe I'm missing your point - but there needs to
>be more substance to the argument than that: existing conditions Y are
>intolerable, so we can be assured, at least, that X will be better, even if we
>don't know what X will look like.
Well, supposing anarchism is a project for a moment, what I'm trying to say is that I'm not advertising it as something that will produce a utopia. In many ways some forms of slavery might have a higher degree of utility for some people, for a variety of reasons. I do think it's the only way willful beings can live together without some of them crushing the others -- a situation which I happen to find morally and aesthetically repugnant. And as I've said I think the crushing business is reaching the limits of what the earth can successfully tolerate.
Speaking of will and desire, this comes in somewhere here --
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
> > >The object of desire does not exist, it is imagined - fantasized.
Rob Schaap <rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au>:
> > Insofar as I guess we do not desire that which is at our disposal, and that
> > our desire is therefore for the availability of something that is
> > definitively not currently available, and that our desire is therefore for
> > a way of things that is not the current way of things, I could agree with
> > you, Ken. But I don't think you do mean that. So what do you mean?
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
>That's close enough. In psychobabble, there are a good many layers to this:
>first, the desiring subject of the unconscious is not the same as the desiring
>ego (ie. what my 'uncs' desires is not the same as what 'I' want). I might
>want a cheeseburger, but my uncs desires something else, like to be mystically
>unified with the cheeseburger or some other such weirdness. In psychobabble,
>the subject is not the ego, it is the subject of the uncs, which does not exist
>as an object for the ego - it's more like the negating aspect of Hegel's
>dialectic - pure self-relating negativity. Now before this gets dismissed as
>mumbo-jumbo... it is important to note that what we say is not what we are, and
>that there is more than one 'speaker' that speaks. In a way, all language use
>is a Freudian slip, we can never say exactly what we mean because what drives
>language isn't necessarily in control of everything. Still, what you've
>written above is pretty close. Desire wants something. But there is another
>engine at work - the desire of desire. What does the pure form of desire want?
>Psychobabbalists argue that desire wants to reproduce itself as desire. This is
>its pure form: sheer reproduction. The desire of desire, then, always sabotages
>straightforward desire by setting up an object that is impossible to obtain. So
>what we get, whatever it happens to be, is a lesser object, a substitution
>(and Freud has a lot to say about substitutions). There is also the difference
>between desire and drive. Drive simply demands to be satisfied (hunger) but
>desire can't be satisfied because it always overshoots or undershoots its mark.
>It's kind of like an archer aiming at a target that doesn't exist, looking for
>the bullseye where there is none. The point being, that no state of affairs
>could ever "satisfy" desire, because it isn't in the nature of desire to be
>satisfied. Imagine wanting something, getting it, and then never desiring
>(ANYTHING) again. This is what psychobabbalists call the death drive... the end
>of the satis-factory line. Another way of putting it would be to say that
>desire sets up traps so that it can't fulfill itself. I like to use the example
>of a birthday cake. For those of us who like to devour cake, isn't it
>irrational to pospose eating the cake until after the meal? We set up elaborate
>rituals to delay gratification, lighting candles, hiding it, making a wish and
>so on. And then, even after we eat it, we look forward to the next birthday
>cake... we derive our enjoyment not only from eating the cake (which is the
>satisfaction of a drive) but also from the suspense of waiting for the cake.
>Yoshie objected to the chaperone metaphor that Krips uses in his book Fetish,
>but is is quite appropriate. How many times have we pursued a certain love
>interest through another person? Many times we don't just out right ask the
>person out because we want to "desire" them a bit more... And it is of interest
>that the chaperone, of course, is usually "less" the desired object even though
>they become more important for the potential establishment of the relation.
>Remains of the Day is an excellent example of this. The Butler desires
>desiring... so that the relationship becomes impossible (hence, the Butler is
>nothing less than a compuslive obsessive, who will do anything to avoid
>confronting his desire...).
>
> I find all of this stuff fascinating, but it doesn't surprise me that many
>aren't interested in it or think it some sort of hocus=pocus. I think there is
>tremendous explanatory power in thinking through these kind of concepts,
>although I'm worried about dogmatism. I also consider it highly speculative,
>and rather risky on a political level. As Kell love to point out, sometimes
>psychobabble goes through an elaborate maze of concepts and illustrative
>examples only to point out something rather obvious. I guess this is part of
>the challenge, to avoid being either a knave or an idiot - but also to find
>ways of explaining things that actually prompt greater awareness of their
>dynamics. As far as I can tell, it provides another explanation for those of us
>unsatisfied with the existing explanations. I don't think psychobabble can be
>expected to do much more than this.
I don't think what you're saying is complete hocus-pocus, but it seems overly cosmogonical. That is, if we imagine the universe coming into being in a sort of Genesis 1 manner, an incomprehensible God wills it into existence, for no reason, out of absolutely nothing; so this will, this desire, begins for no reason and with no object but its own existence. And something of this spontaneity is retained in the notion and common experience of will.
But the creation is at the extreme of existence. Most of us experience desires which generally arise out of our biology and social arrangements, targeted if not toward known entities, then toward known categories of entities. Also, most of us experience life as beings having a single unitary consciousness, so that theories of an active, ego-like (agential?) unconscious and multiple speakers within the self may be suspected to be artifacts of analysis rather than theories based firmly in the empirical.
(I think, dealing with consciousness, one has to be pretty empirical, given the native fluidity of the subject and the tendency for long words with Greek and even Sanskrit roots to rise out of the misty void in the background.)
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
> I don't think it does, however. And if it does, then the human race is
> doomed, because as our technological abilities grow, the aggressive violence
> implicit and sometimes explicit in the State will become more and more
> pervasive and deadly.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
>There is a new book out by Thomas Homer-Dixon, I can't recall the title at the
>moment, but it sounds really interesting. For the most part he argues that
>technological advance has shifted beyond the capacities of social organization
>- he points out that capitalism is doomed because of this. His earlier work
>talks a lot about scarcity and conflict. - and he's written about the conflict
>in the Middle East from the viewpoint of who controls the water... really
>interesting stuff.
It could be called _The_Dilbert_Effect_. But we are warned by _The_Cunning_of_History_ that, when persons become inconvenient to the State, the persons may be modified or liquidated. I think that would include the capitalist State.
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
> Simple reason would seem to indicate that the choice is not between socialism
> and barbarism, but between anarchy and communism on the one hand and
> annihilation on the other.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
>If I might dare, if you owned a company the size of Microsoft or GM or
>something, what would you do? I mean, knowing that the current state of affairs
>would lead to annihilation.
I would sell (almost) all I had, give to the poor, and take up my oatmeal cookies. If my understanding is right, then there's nothing any corporation or other organ of the State can do to help human beings deal with their predicament. If it's wrong, my governance of a large institution would be random and probably futile or even destructive (although possibly rather entertaining). Of course I would skim off enough to give me and my friends some really good parties before I dumped it all.