kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
>Errr... you've smuggled in autonomy (?) as the telos of what it means to be
>human. This might be desirable, it probably won't make us happy, and it is
>certainy a requirement for politics... but... I reserve to make an absolute
>wasteland of my life. On another note, I see nothing non-pathological about
>waking up in the morning, brewing a cup of coffee and sitting at a plastic desk
>that looks like wood, fingering another plastic toy called a mouse while
>looking into a shiny screen that is connected by a plug in the wall to who the
>hell knows what - all the while worrying about whether the local transit
>system, which runs on rails, will move me from one place to another where I can
>meet with people and talk about my other plastic toys and some tree products
>that have been mashed real thin with ink spilled on them.
I think it's possible to enjoy these things under conditions of, so to speak, autonomy. Etymologically, _autonomy_ is self-rule, _svaraj_ -- given the sociability of our species, it would have to be communal anyway, and thus could be expected to afford us some of the benefits of the division of labor and high technology.
On the other hand, I'd agree that new stuff might not appear with the ferocious volume and speed that we have grown used to under capitalism. There's no denying that capitalism produces nice, shiny toys and a lot of them. I was over in Hoboken Saturday with Food Not Bombs demonstrating against police repression of the economy of gift and mutual aid, and looking at the golden youth with their cell phones, Palm VIIs and MP3 players sitting in the cafes across the street I could understand how that production of toys and the political violence which must accompany it could be a necessity of life to many people. To them, the prospects of some kind of shabby world-wide hippie commune must seem like a nightmare, not a utopia, to be prevented by calling out as many cops and cruise missiles as required.
I don't think "autonomy" is a _telos_ but an intrinsic possibility which is obscured by violence and fraud. The _telos_ would not be the construction of autonomy but the removal of the things which obscure it. One would not construct but de-construct, if I may use the word.
> ...
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
>> 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.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
> Well, I don't think I was saying that.
You weren't. I produced it from your idea of object-free desire, which only a god of the Genesis sort could experience in complete purity, and only before the creation.
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
>But I'm fascinated by the 'fact' of
>consciousness, and I really don't think that it is fully explainable outside of
>some sort of mythology... now this, I'm sure, will lend itself to vast
>misundertanding... but I quite honestly think there is something fundamentally
>strange about consciousness. I like Castoriadis's take on the matter: we put
>the world into categories through, in part, our imagination - without knowing
>whether or not the world is an appropriate subject for categorization... but we
>can't just impose anything, there is resistance...
Consciousness isn't strange if you start with it. It becomes strange because people go to such an effort to exclude it from the universe, and then having done so they must go to an equally great effort to bring it back. It's sort of funny when you think about it.
Resistance exists because there are other wills Out There. And _in-here_ as well, if we accept the psychobabble I'm about to disparage.
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
> > 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.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
>> >The unconscious knows things in a way that the conscious self does not...
Ted Winslow <winslow at yorku.ca> wrote:
>> How do you know this?
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
>Because breathing happens whether I consciously think about it or not. Desires
>alone don't make the body go, the drives do.
That answer doesn't speak to the question, which was about knowledge, not performance. Is there a thing that knows in the unconscious, in the same way that the conscious mind knows? If so, what is it? How do we know? Machines and programs can model the world and produce actions including utterances that are similar to the productions of animals (us), but it is doubtful whether they can be said to _know_ things in the same sense that animals know things.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
> Well, if you're saying that psychobabble simply makes things up... there is a
> tremendous amount of clinical evidence that points to the contrary...
Ted Winslow <winslow at yorku.ca> wrote:
>> This presupposes a subject for whom evidence can point to something, doesn't
>it? For whom can evidence point to the non-existence of any subject for whom
>evidence could point?
>Psychobabble doesn't presuppose a subject. It simply asks the question "Who is
>speaking?" As it turns out, there is never just one voice, there are many
>voices. And, try as I might, I can't figure out what your last sentence means.
I think he's asking a rhetorical question as a way of saying that the receipt of an indicating (pointing-out) communication requires a subject / receiver to whom the indication can be made -- the one who will look at what was pointed out. Or _seems_ to require. A humorist could _point_out_ -- probably in French -- that the indication could be a kind of gesture to the void. Rhetoric affords many opportunities for play.
> ...
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
> 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.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
> Well, if you're saying that psychobabble simply makes things up... there is a
> tremendous amount of clinical evidence that points to the contrary...
But that pointing-to is a construction. And "the theory tells us what we can observe." If even dumb little particles drove physics to the Copenhagen Interpretation, then surely something as complicated and ambiguous as the mental behavior of human beings and its biological and physical context require a similar agnostic confession. In particular, I find the ontological promotion of supposed alternate selves and voices rather suspect, something like a theory of demonic influence and possession. I can't help noting how it strongly implies a need for authoritarian violence under the direction of psychiatrist-kings, evidently making it very attractive to certain prospective psychiatrist-kings. (Because there is no reason to respect the selves of others -- the great Platonic good up in the sky _and_ material well-being on earth require that the selves, being mere bags of squalling and perhaps deformed animal drives, be brought to order. The similarity of this sort of thing to medieval Christian theology and the Inquisition is remarkable. And then there's the "socialist" version.)
> ...
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.
Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
>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.
kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
>Well, you're probably more honest than I am. I'd likely turn the whole thing
>into a co-op and go from there. In any event, my Super7 lotto ticket didn't win
>me the $20M so I guess my dreams will have to be shelved for the moment.
>Some polling service called me the other day and asked me what I thought the
>most pressing problem facing Canada was. It took me a good two or three minutes
>to answer and I think I kind of sputtered out... "democracy... or at least the
>lack of it." I was kind of disappointed with my answer and felt like I should
>say something like "poverty" or "violence." The rest of the questions were
>equally vague... except for the one asking, "Do you have any children under the
>age of 18?" to which I responded, "I hope not." "Good answer" followed by gails
>of broken laughter. Then we started talking freely about education and
>employment... breaking out of the script. For some reason this made me feel
>better. I guess this might be the best we can hope for at the moment, findings
>ways of breaking out the script we've been handed.
Exactly.