I said in my last post that we need to learn to invest our body -- the locus of our activities -- into the social field. What is meant by the social field? It should come to no surprise that we are all social beings. We are born social. As infants, not only are we introduced to others, but others form the way we see ourselves. And as infants we connect ourselves to others. The baby laughs and smiles and grabs and bites and sucks. Other objects and other people. As we grow older, we grow more curious: we wish to connect ourselves to the world, whether it be in different or similar ways. We are constantly interacting with others. Indeed, our words, our thoughts, our actions -- they operate in a context that is dependent on the other.
So we always operate within a social field. This social field is the field where desire both operates and is cut off from operating, disconnected or drawn away into a different direction. It is a field where living (which always implies living with others) can be thought. And different ways of living can be thought. Always a multiplicity. I want to live differently. To be sure, we cannot view desire as being so sharply disconnected from pleasure or enjoyment. We commonly have this image of desire as something prior to pleasure or "satisfaction." But there is a certain joy in desiring and a certain joy in seeing the world in new ways. This may be what we call "playing." When children play, they imagine different possibilities of living and acting and they connect their world to these different ways of living. As a result, they create a mode of existence in which they play. In this way, toys and clothes are not simply representations of another life, one that they fantasize about living, but means of imagining another way of life and consequently performing in this imagination.
We are not much different from children in this respect. We imagine ways of living and in our imagining perform certain activities. We understand ourselves to be doing something based on this imagination. This imagination is the work of desire and is inherently social. That is, it inherently deals with the other; it needs to be validated or countersigned by another. The other makes my imagination real to me, and my desires work off of my relationship with the other. Therefore, I propose that investing desire into the social field is the work of imaginaing our relationships with others -- people, animals, environments, the world.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Desiring-production
"There is only desire and the social, and nothing else."
-- Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
I will attempt to speak more clearly in this post about what I mean to say, or rather, about what I understand myself to be doing. What I am focused on more than anything is what can be done, what can be enacted, what can disturb social processes and form new ones. I wholeheartedly believe we can only do this through investing ourselves -- investing our desires, our beliefs, our hopes -- into the social field. But not from outside this field, as if "we" are not constituted by it. It would make no sense if we weren't: what would be the point of investing in something with no return? I'm interested in this return, this revenue, since when one invests something one always wants something in return, to come back to one. That's the image of economy, the image of the circle.
What does it mean that action happens when we invest desire into the social field? It means that education is no longer the great excuse for the position that we're in. Nor is it some "rational" or "self-interested" or "self-centered" choice -- which, I believe amounts to the same thing. That was perhaps Marx's biggest mistake: to believe that miseducation or the lack of education is the main reason for the repression of the proletariat. "If people were only educated, if they only knew, then..." The if-then of politics, which is related to the cause-effect of scientists, is perhaps one of the greatest sins against continuing political action, that is, against creating true revolutionary behavior. We need to stop seeing desire as being haunted by selfishness or economic gain. "I want what I do not have, and when I do have what I want, I want it forever." And we need to stop seeing desire as the primal force that comes before education, and which is restrained after one becomes well educated. Desire involves investing oneself into ways of living and into an understanding of how one lives.
The truth is -- people's oppression goes hand-in-hand with their investments of desire; and these investments aren't necessarily educated or rational. Nor are they selfish or self-interested, even though the self is a necessary part of it. To invest desire is to invest the body, but not simply the body, but, to borrow from Bourdieu, the habitus. The place of habit, of ritual. In other words, we need to stop thinking of the body as an object, a stationary, rigid thing, but as an active force, a locus of activity, of multiple activities. The infant experiences the body as forces letting him eat, suck, grab, kiss, bite, hug -- that is, as forces which let him connect to other forces or activities. He doesn't experience the body as an image -- as we seem to do in anatomy -- but as that which allows him to make images of the world, of ways of living.
-- Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
I will attempt to speak more clearly in this post about what I mean to say, or rather, about what I understand myself to be doing. What I am focused on more than anything is what can be done, what can be enacted, what can disturb social processes and form new ones. I wholeheartedly believe we can only do this through investing ourselves -- investing our desires, our beliefs, our hopes -- into the social field. But not from outside this field, as if "we" are not constituted by it. It would make no sense if we weren't: what would be the point of investing in something with no return? I'm interested in this return, this revenue, since when one invests something one always wants something in return, to come back to one. That's the image of economy, the image of the circle.
What does it mean that action happens when we invest desire into the social field? It means that education is no longer the great excuse for the position that we're in. Nor is it some "rational" or "self-interested" or "self-centered" choice -- which, I believe amounts to the same thing. That was perhaps Marx's biggest mistake: to believe that miseducation or the lack of education is the main reason for the repression of the proletariat. "If people were only educated, if they only knew, then..." The if-then of politics, which is related to the cause-effect of scientists, is perhaps one of the greatest sins against continuing political action, that is, against creating true revolutionary behavior. We need to stop seeing desire as being haunted by selfishness or economic gain. "I want what I do not have, and when I do have what I want, I want it forever." And we need to stop seeing desire as the primal force that comes before education, and which is restrained after one becomes well educated. Desire involves investing oneself into ways of living and into an understanding of how one lives.
The truth is -- people's oppression goes hand-in-hand with their investments of desire; and these investments aren't necessarily educated or rational. Nor are they selfish or self-interested, even though the self is a necessary part of it. To invest desire is to invest the body, but not simply the body, but, to borrow from Bourdieu, the habitus. The place of habit, of ritual. In other words, we need to stop thinking of the body as an object, a stationary, rigid thing, but as an active force, a locus of activity, of multiple activities. The infant experiences the body as forces letting him eat, suck, grab, kiss, bite, hug -- that is, as forces which let him connect to other forces or activities. He doesn't experience the body as an image -- as we seem to do in anatomy -- but as that which allows him to make images of the world, of ways of living.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Capitalism and Happiness
I think I'm more struck by our inexhaustible search for contiguity than by how trapped we are (injustice isn't merely conjoined with the cage of oppression; or rather, oppression isn't merely a cage). What Freud calls displacement. "Desires are constantly displaced": this seems a constant mode of capitalistic suffering and happiness. We go to the next best thing. This is the metonymic relation: we cannot have the body, so we choose the hands, or fingers, or chest, or torso, or....or... Jesus, in his brilliance, reverses this: "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it out; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell" (Matthew 5:29, KJV). The body cannot offend you: only these contiguities, these associations.
Why suffering and happiness? Because we misread this displacement and make it metaphorical: "I will have it later" or "This lack is a sign!" This is how we get happy; how we feel us getting stronger; our passion grows this way, for some reason. Indeed, suffering itself, as Marx says, is a kind of pleasure: we consume it, it becomes ours. It defines our happiness, in a sense, within the capitalist system of lack and possession: happiness must be attained, gotten, had, possessed, consumed, like capital itself, which is defined in its quest for consuming more capital. The goal: to become a body without organs.
Is this where we are left?
Why suffering and happiness? Because we misread this displacement and make it metaphorical: "I will have it later" or "This lack is a sign!" This is how we get happy; how we feel us getting stronger; our passion grows this way, for some reason. Indeed, suffering itself, as Marx says, is a kind of pleasure: we consume it, it becomes ours. It defines our happiness, in a sense, within the capitalist system of lack and possession: happiness must be attained, gotten, had, possessed, consumed, like capital itself, which is defined in its quest for consuming more capital. The goal: to become a body without organs.
Is this where we are left?
Thursday, October 9, 2008
The Force of Writing
"What we have tried to show in following the connecting thread of the 'dangerous supplement' is that in what we call the real life of these 'flesh and blood' creatures,...there has never been anything but writing, there have never been anything but supplements and substitutional significations which could only arise in a chain of differential relations."
-- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [Tr. Gayatri Spivak. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), p. 158]
She is my truth, supposing, as Nietzsche does, that she must be seduced. Brought into life through my life, she is my reality, my truth, the feeling of the real, and thus the feeling of pleasure as if it is being forced upon me. As if: this possibility, this metaphor, the introduction of writing: her play, the long chain of supplements and substitutions. She enters and leaves through a doorway that folds into other doorways, and other ones, without pause, which is only itself a pause -- the play of an ellipsis...
Writing writes -- the supplement supplements -- the trace traces: such an active field of forces, becoming intimate -- that is, on the one hand, the becoming-inward of an outward interaction and, on the other hand, the becoming-outward of an inward pleasure. In other words, within this active field or relation of forces -- the scene, or rather production, of writing -- is perhaps where intimacy is born(e), is produced or carried across an infinite field of power. Intimacy is then the product of writing, the product of substitutions and mediations, forces acting upon one another, taking over one another, instituting and removing different paradigms: intimacy with the other, she, my truth becoming-fantasy or my fantasy becoming-real, begins with this writing, this paper, my hand...
I will perhaps be criticized for this: that it is writing which allows this intimacy with the other, with her; that my other is necessarily gendered, excluding from sight the whole field of intimate relations which produce, even if secretly, a kind of homo-eroticism; that I will have affirmed an intimacy that is saturated with mediations upon mediations. For how can truth ever be reached that way? Is this not precisely un-realistic, that is, un-pragmatic, having to do with nothing important, significant, in the world? An expression somewhat of madness or delirium or pointless walks down unnecessary roads? Wasted energies?
I must leave these questions unanswered. Not simply because a choice or decision has been made to "abandon all hope," but because responding to them will only push me to defend a thesis that, in my opinion, is indefensible. Unjustifiable, in a sense. That my world must always start anew, under a new name, a new position, a new state, yet by an image that is always signifying the past, like the light from a very distant star -- this cannot be justified under writing here. To those that say I am too romantic or too idealistic or too un-realistic, I cannot respond, and thus lie in my irresponsibility.
On the other hand, it seems the main thrust of this unjustifiability lies in an impossible configuration of the criticisms at hand: how are they to formulate the problem in any other way? This might perhaps point towards the truthfulness of the problem; but in a very simple way, it also points to the problem's extreme narrowness: the inability to formulate it in any other way is an attestation of its weakness, it's powerlessness, it's inability to justify itself outside of itself, a reliance on the power of repetition to reveal somehow the truth of the world (is this not the definition of madness?)...No, I will not go that route, then; my route is troublesome enough.
The force of writing is perhaps the production of intimacy: that feeling of pleasure being almost forced upon you, a suffering of the real, in a sense, since the real is never something that one predicts to bring you suffering. Is not all this the literary life, a life made up of literature, of a narrative that is already being written, of a writing already signifying the death of a star, its supernova?
-- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [Tr. Gayatri Spivak. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), p. 158]
She is my truth, supposing, as Nietzsche does, that she must be seduced. Brought into life through my life, she is my reality, my truth, the feeling of the real, and thus the feeling of pleasure as if it is being forced upon me. As if: this possibility, this metaphor, the introduction of writing: her play, the long chain of supplements and substitutions. She enters and leaves through a doorway that folds into other doorways, and other ones, without pause, which is only itself a pause -- the play of an ellipsis...
Writing writes -- the supplement supplements -- the trace traces: such an active field of forces, becoming intimate -- that is, on the one hand, the becoming-inward of an outward interaction and, on the other hand, the becoming-outward of an inward pleasure. In other words, within this active field or relation of forces -- the scene, or rather production, of writing -- is perhaps where intimacy is born(e), is produced or carried across an infinite field of power. Intimacy is then the product of writing, the product of substitutions and mediations, forces acting upon one another, taking over one another, instituting and removing different paradigms: intimacy with the other, she, my truth becoming-fantasy or my fantasy becoming-real, begins with this writing, this paper, my hand...
I will perhaps be criticized for this: that it is writing which allows this intimacy with the other, with her; that my other is necessarily gendered, excluding from sight the whole field of intimate relations which produce, even if secretly, a kind of homo-eroticism; that I will have affirmed an intimacy that is saturated with mediations upon mediations. For how can truth ever be reached that way? Is this not precisely un-realistic, that is, un-pragmatic, having to do with nothing important, significant, in the world? An expression somewhat of madness or delirium or pointless walks down unnecessary roads? Wasted energies?
I must leave these questions unanswered. Not simply because a choice or decision has been made to "abandon all hope," but because responding to them will only push me to defend a thesis that, in my opinion, is indefensible. Unjustifiable, in a sense. That my world must always start anew, under a new name, a new position, a new state, yet by an image that is always signifying the past, like the light from a very distant star -- this cannot be justified under writing here. To those that say I am too romantic or too idealistic or too un-realistic, I cannot respond, and thus lie in my irresponsibility.
On the other hand, it seems the main thrust of this unjustifiability lies in an impossible configuration of the criticisms at hand: how are they to formulate the problem in any other way? This might perhaps point towards the truthfulness of the problem; but in a very simple way, it also points to the problem's extreme narrowness: the inability to formulate it in any other way is an attestation of its weakness, it's powerlessness, it's inability to justify itself outside of itself, a reliance on the power of repetition to reveal somehow the truth of the world (is this not the definition of madness?)...No, I will not go that route, then; my route is troublesome enough.
The force of writing is perhaps the production of intimacy: that feeling of pleasure being almost forced upon you, a suffering of the real, in a sense, since the real is never something that one predicts to bring you suffering. Is not all this the literary life, a life made up of literature, of a narrative that is already being written, of a writing already signifying the death of a star, its supernova?
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The Media and the Bodiless Eye
I want to discuss the media, but through a different filter: as a medium. We don't tend to notice it, but the media isn't simply the guy standing at a prompter; it's the whole construct that allows us to see him. The media is like a bodiless eye: it gives us a seemingly un-mediated look into the lives of celebrities, the candidates, their views, their positions, their reactions and over-reactions, etc. In other words, we think that through the media we're getting the "true story," however much we criticize the media, however much we show that they are just exploiting people and controversies in order to get more ratings. We still look to the media as some sort of bringer of truth, an access to the "real" world.In my opinion, the media will be the ruin of this election. Media that is constantly portraying itself to be "fair and balanced." And not just FOX news. I'm tired of seeing battles being fought in the name of "universal ideals" such as unbiasedness, fairness, balance, etc. I'm not saying I don't believe in these ideals, because I really do. But these things aren't what one fights for, but the things that define the fight itself. They are the things history is made out of.
So this is what I'm fighting for:
1) that the media should stop being seen as a bodiless eye. It has a body and it works.
2) that the media should stop being seen as separate even from our personal lives. We are constantly producing and reproducing ideas that influence and are influenced by others. We are our own media.
3) that the media should stop being seen as producing the "true story." Every opinion is not a "side" to an argument, but a reformulation of the argument. We are constantly producing, that is to say, reformulating, combining, and editing, new stories, new myths, new fables.
4) that the media should stop being seen as merely subject to the people. We do not control the media any more than it controls us. But we can control the course our influence has, just as the media can control the course of its influence on us.
As much as this appears to be a manifesto, anyone who takes these claims seriously should (hopefully) see how complicated and unprecedentable this fight is. I'd be happy to hear anyone's thoughts on this.
So this is what I'm fighting for:
1) that the media should stop being seen as a bodiless eye. It has a body and it works.
2) that the media should stop being seen as separate even from our personal lives. We are constantly producing and reproducing ideas that influence and are influenced by others. We are our own media.
3) that the media should stop being seen as producing the "true story." Every opinion is not a "side" to an argument, but a reformulation of the argument. We are constantly producing, that is to say, reformulating, combining, and editing, new stories, new myths, new fables.
4) that the media should stop being seen as merely subject to the people. We do not control the media any more than it controls us. But we can control the course our influence has, just as the media can control the course of its influence on us.
As much as this appears to be a manifesto, anyone who takes these claims seriously should (hopefully) see how complicated and unprecedentable this fight is. I'd be happy to hear anyone's thoughts on this.
Welcome!
Hey guys. I'm Mark Blasini and this is my blog, centered on exploring and developing social and philosophical thought. I'm really interested in coming up with ways to think about and discuss society, philosophy, culture, religion, and politics. I'd really like to hear anyone's thoughts on my blog posts, so don't be afraid to comment on anything I write.
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