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.
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