Sean Chou

20. BA Social Anthropology student at LSE. Interested in books, human rights and philosophy.

[seanchou77]

Cut!

Power is taken and given. I’ve held both ends of the stick. It’s a worldview which views everything in competition and threat to each other, and everything gets reduced to strategy and tactical planning. I’ve felt the need to plan and organise things like veins that wrap around my skin. I’ve dreamed about board-game or strategy-based games, where I command an army and make moves to defend and dominate against other players. Power doesn’t exist in a rational consciousness though: I’ve had dreams which convince me it’s linked with the most intimate and personal ideas of ourselves. In one dream, I was Cleopatra and I watched a Byzantine emperor eye every one of my carefully sensuous moves.

Friedrich Nietzsche used the analogy of Apollo and Dionysius to explain the critical dilemma the individual self faces in dealing with his shortcomings and meaning-creation: to choose the path of Apollo, god of the state and representative of hierarchical organisation and power; or, to choose the path of Dionysius, the god of wine and representative of hedonism and creative spontaneity.

More on Nietzsche later. But suffice to say, power is an inexhaustible topic - but worth touching on for reasons that will be explored. This essay will discuss power, the personal dilemmas it creates, and how it relates to our understanding of social issues we face in today’s society.

Power is difficult to touch on, because it has many definitions. This essay will first touch on its personal dimension, which has helped to generate a field of self-help books written to deal with power play which happens in a lot of interpersonal environments, through personal training.

According to Sun Tzu, mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. This resonates with many realist theorists and should be held as a defence of political realism; realism is a serious intellectual task, and should not be understood as holding power for the sake of power. Power is a disciplinary task, which hones skills of self-awareness, respect for knowledge and applied skills.

This is understood by theorists like Robert Greene, who seriously covers topics as wide-ranging as classics, anthropology and politics to condense stories into supporting examples of life lessons.

One proponent of realism is Niccoli Machiavelli. Machiavelli argued for value pluralism, as interpreted by Isaiah Berlin: to get outcomes you want, sometimes you play either the cunning fox to avoid traps, or the fearsome lion to scare off wolves. This suggests an interesting metaphysical theory: the importance of positive and negative strategies where participation or withdrawal is needed to succeed overall. This is similar to advice given by Sun Tzu, who says ‘he will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight’.

These thinkers are similar because they describe the profile and subjectivity of the ideal statesman: rational, authoritarian and decision-making. But it is wrong to prescribe their philosophy to the rest of society, because their perspective is unique to their role.

Indeed, discussion about power could appreciate Hegel’s analysis. Hegel argued that power is a dialectical struggle between master and slave; human phenomenology, history and development of society can be reduced to this single struggle. Between the struggle of master and slave, the master exploits the slave’s productivity, but the slave is the one with consciousness because the slave produces for the master and learns to use his creative skills to create products of his consciousness. As a result, the master teaches the slave and the slave learns how to desire, according to a Lacanian reading.

Georg Wilhelm Hegel was interested in how slave consciousness could accept servitude and submission. Hegel argues this had multiple stages: stoicism, where the slave understands the world divided into subject and object; scepticism, where the slave grows unconvinced of previous dogma due to unequal power dynamics; and unhappy consciousness, where the slave grows split between the ideals of his consciousness and the power dynamic of his social reality.

Hegel argues this is resolved through the absolute ideal, which the collective consciousness helps to enact into reality. Only when we live in a society which gives humans the most freedom in their consciousness can we live with this absolute ideal.

A Hegelian understanding of power helps us to understand phenomenological accounts of power, as constructive of wider dynamics in dialectical discussion with each other in a master/slave paradigm.

However, this discussion on power could appreciate a deeper understanding of Master as also the Other. Emmanuel Levinas speculates about the role of the Other in the Judeo-Christian tradition as invisible yet omnipotent. Levinas argues that the first task of philosophy is ethics because our existence is owed to our relationship with the Other; we have a personal responsibility towards the Other because it is embedded in our consciousness and ontological existence. Thus, Levinas helps to explain how power is embedded in our understandings of ethics rather than something opposed; as we ourselves exist only because of power, so we use our power to contribute towards empowering others.

An important issue is the intrapersonal/interpersonal divide. According to Jean-Jacques Lacan, the individual psyche is a metaphysical reality and cannot be denied; the id is real, and bundled with antagonism and competition with the Other.

Lacan’s understanding of the intrapersonal/interpersonal divide has been applied to film studies. It is worth asking, why are we attracted to film stars? Lacan answers this by arguing that the intrapersonal ego projects onto the film star its ego ideal, how it imagines and fantasizes it can be. However, this creates interpersonal distance which can frustrate the codified subject and later lead to backlash and jealousy directed at the star.

According to Richard Dyer, stars are a solution to a social dilemma because their image symbolises and resolves a social contradiction. For example, Marilyn Monroe is seen as sexy but innocent (and didn’t threaten men) which was contrary to the perception of women as the femme fatale.

Thus, power is also constructive of wider social subjectivities as byproducts of social tension and attachment patterns.

Power could also be understood as instances of wider discursive practices. Jacques Derrida argued for his theory of differance, which used the analogy of sentences to explain how meaning is context-situated and informed by the reader’s background knowledge. In a sentence, the meaning of the sentence is only ‘discovered’ in retrospect at the end of the sentence. However, the sentence can be separated into individual units of words which allow for meaning to proliferate freely. Thus, a sentence creates ‘differance’ in two ways: it defers meaning, and makes meanings different from each other despite the same sentence.

This suggests the possibility of a totally power-driven society; if power is generative of meanings, this creates infinite possibilities which may lead to collapse of existing stabilising institutions which regulate and discipline meaning. According to Baudrillard, this is a process of the semiotic irrupting into the symbolic; the symbol is destroyed in the endless, immanent interplay of semiotic signs. Thus, the real implodes into the virtual; it is no longer possible to recognise the real from the virtual, because the virtual has overtaken the real as the main source of social action. Thus, related to Guy Debord’s thoughts, the spectacle replaces meaningful political participation.

Overall, this essay can make several conclusions. Firstly, power is a disciplinary and realism is an approach which understands the spiritual and metaphysical limits this imposes on theories of human understanding. Secondly, power can be understand in relation to phenomenology and the master/slave dialectic, which creates different subjectivities. Power could be understand as relational, as debt relations to the Other which creates ethical responsibilities and obligations; or could be understood as constantly deferred, which creates resignation and stagnation that removes meaningful political participation. The overall conclusion however is that power does not exist in a vacuum: understanding of power should be contextualised in phenomenology, ethics, psychoanalysis, semiotics, frameworks which have been used in this essay.

***

I’m guilty of taking power trips.

I like dominating others. It makes me feel like control and I can squeeze the small, vulnerable child out of me when I tell others how they should think or feel.

I’m not aware of it all the time. But when it happens, I get drunk on power.

In those moments, I’m the most narcissistic megalomaniac person in the world. But I’m also the loneliest, never able to trust others, and I know deep inside it’s not sustainable to feel this way.

I want to use that power to make everyone who ever crossed me bow down. But moving on, I’m going to treat power carefully - with an open palm, closed fist approach. Sometimes it’s just better to have empathy for others.

[seanchou77]

This Is Not A Sentence

Obedience to authority is where reason goes to die. I’m most disgusted by my obedience to things because I know I can be unmindfully obedient to a lot of things in life. I’m working on it. You could say that’s where a lot of wish-fulfillment comes from in my dreams, when I’m angry and shouting at others, because it’s proof that I could stand up and stick up for myself in real life. Of course, even those dreams aren’t so straightforward. One dream I had, I was running after some boy when the police came after us. They chased him into a train station and out of sight. I thought that was the end of it - until the very next day, when I took the train and saw him strung up by his neck, hanging from the ceiling with a noose around his throat.

According to Georg Wilhelm Hegel, man’s consciousness is his freedom to use consciousness; he hoped one day man’s individual consciousness could be connected with a greater, social consciousness, only possible in a political society which gave man the most freedom.

Another perspective is offered by Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer argued that the soldier who goose-steps out of sync is the one who has the most freedom; he understands the greatest constraints on freedom.

With these perspectives in mind, this relates to the aim of this essay: to discuss the importance of critical reflection which can help us imagine an alternative society and possibilities for social freedom in the future.

As pressing and urgent as current crises may seem in their call for our action, we should also feel humbled by previous generations of theorists and intellectuals who have passed before us. With their knowledge and unique perspectives on society, we can hopefully learn and gain from them so that we can make a difference on our society today.

As previous perspectives suggested, critical theory helps us understand society through a dialectical, immanent process. This means that analytical or single-issue understandings of society aren’t helpful in understand how society has formed, often through conflict, contradiction and antagonism between different aspects of society.

This thought process is drawn out in Theodor Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics, who argues that the critical task of social analysis is to find possibilities for a social theory which doesn’t explain society as a sum of individual parts, but expands and elaborates on its elaborations which prevent it from achieving a total whole; society is a type of ‘non-identity’, with individual and society disconnected and fragmented from each other, which makes attempts to create possible reconciliations between these differences bourgeois and normative tools of social control.

Indeed, this is also argued in Horkheimer’s explanation of critical theory as opposed to traditional philosophical theory. Horkheimer argued that traditional theory has previously negelected how knowledge is generated and produced as an economic materiality within a specific mode of production; categories of knowledge are only a reflection of the power dynamics and structures it is constructed in, used to legitimise existing institutions which perpetuate social domination of the ruling classes.

Some features of critical theory via the Frankfurt school include immanent critique, speculative theory and dialectical reason. These features help us to critically engage with society as an ongoing intellectual project which examines future possibilities for human emancipation.

With such an ambitiously theoretical front, some theorists are also justified in exploring the divide between theory and practice. Erich Fromm was an example of a Frankfurt school theorist who accepted some need for division for theory and practice; as a psychoanalyst, he appreciated that the greatest concern should be showed to the patient’s recovery as opposed to conforming to theoretical dogma. Similarly, he was ambivalent about applying Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis which was in parts instinctive and didn’t derive from critical understandings of society based on social organisation. He said that the ultimate goal was to understand how the human condition could grapple with questions of human freedom won in the age of modernity without collapsing into old regimes of automatism and conformism seen in late industrial society; doing things the same because they were done before is an example of authoritarian behaviour, without capacity for individual initiative and self-actualisation seen in creative arts.

This demonstrates perhaps limits to theory. After all, as Karl Marx argues, the point of philosophy is not interpret the world, but to change it.

Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu supported practice theory, which argued that social norms and behaviours were practised before awareness could be raised of them in a pre-linguistic realm; this was called ‘habitus’ as a social field of actions. This suggests limits to social theory if attempts to explain behaviour are hindered by our previous interactions and engagements with behaviour.

This joins discussion of critical theory with historical theorists like Aristotle and Avicenna, who were interested in material, evolutionist understandings of society as the elaboration of contradictions which would resolve themselves through participation and engagement rather than isolated self-contemplation.

It could also be question whether such isolated self-contemplation is possible: indeed, individual consciousness could be structured in radically social ways. According to Marx, it is not one’s individual consciousness which determines their social status, but the inverse.

According to Louis Althusser, the ideological state apparatus stabilises actors into individual subjects as citizens. This form of social control is practised through interpellation where the individual walking on the person is unaware of their status of their individual until he is hailed and this brought into his attention, as a violent act of alienation.

Michel Foucault moves further than Althusser’s theory of ideology and argues we should be more interested in knowledge theories as discourses of power. Discourse creates regimes of knowledge, which create subjectivities and discipline subjects. This demonstrates the wider ambition of the modern state, to discipline bodies that conform to social norms; the soul is the prison of the body.

Overall, discussion has led to different perspectives in critical theory about how to engage with issues of social inequality and power disparities. Firstly, critical theory via the Frankfurt School helps to criticise the subject/object dichotomy by arguing that the individual’s fragmentation and dispersal in modern, industrial society has created a reconcilable ‘non-identity’, the contradictions of which can only elaborated through processes of social critique called ‘negative dialectics’ for Adorno. Secondly, limits to theory are offered by thinkers like Marx and Bourdieu’s practice theory, which suggest that philosophy is a set of contemplative practices which risk distracting participants from the real business of enacting social change through engagement and active participation in the generative materiality of society. Thirdly, Althusser offers ways to join structuralism in discussion with Marxism, by arguing that critical issues have structural and linguistic features which can be critiqued. Finally, Foucault suggests there are possibilities to talk about social change beyond the parameters of Marxist theory, which suggest that every knowledge theory should be subject to criticism about power, discipline and the constitution and regulation of subjectivities as historical byproducts of cultural discourse.

***

Sometimes I want to be by my own.

I feel angry people don’t share the same interests as me. Most of all, I’m scared people won’t understand me, feel uncomfortable around me, and eventually reject me.

I spend a lot of my time on my own reading and reflecting about the society I see around me. But I feel like I’m doing something wrong if I can’t join in with the interests other people have and feel like I belong somewhere and people really care about me.

It can be self-repetitive cycles of anger and sadness in loneliness. I read more, but it doesn’t fix how detached I feel from everyone else.

[seanchou77]

To All The Boys I've Loved Before

I could write a whole book about the men in my life, that are either real or I’ve imagined. I dream about men, in scenarios too intimate to say here. I’ve dreamed about being rescued by men - literally swept off my feet and carried off. Everyone feels empowered in different ways, I suppose. The most important dream I’ve had of a man was with Freud. In one of my dreams, he gave me a notebook and told me to write my own story in it. And now I’m doing it.

There will be a time when I’m able to write fairly and objectively about my relationships with both men and women. This is not such a time: this essay will articulate my thoughts and feelings about the men in my life, and how they can be framed as routes of becoming, self-actualisation and coming-of-age.

Some of this has theoretical background. Eve Sedgwick argued her theory of the ‘homosocial’, where particularly among males, competition and rivalry for females creates a sense of intense social and intimate bonding; the female performs the symbolic role of token, as evidence of homosocial desire among men for each other.

It is within this framework that we should understand man-to-man relationships in the framework of mentorship, friendship and solidarity - the subtext of tacit homosexual desire may be read but is not intentional.

An important psychoanalytic scene which constitutes man-to-man relationships is the Oedipal complex, which constitutes the roles in the child-father relationship. The meaning the Oedipal complex depends on the psychoanalytic author, so three main perspectives will be drawn upon: Freud, Lacan and Zizek.

Sigmund Freud argued that the Oedipal complex begins as a rivalry between the father and child for the mother. The father however threatens to castrate the child if he pursues. The child accepts his inferior status and learns to internalise the father’s sense of morality and purpose, which the son uses to eventually find his own partner. Freud was unable to resolve where attraction for the father came from however: fantasy theory suggested that the child imagined being forced upon and dominated by the father; whereas seduction theory suggested that the father entices the child as the agent of society and culture.

Jean-Jacques Lacan builds upon the symbolic role of the father, arguing that the father is an epistemological and symbolic agent. The Real father castrates the imaginary phallus of the child, which creates a symbolic debt where the child accepts the name-of-the-father (or his cultural knowledge) and they cooperate to eventually integrate the child into society where he can eventually marry and have sex with his own wife.

Lacan’s reading of the Symposium helps to elucidate his thoughts on desire in mentorship. In the Symposium, Socrates refuses Alcibiades' declaration of love and therefore refuses to mask his lack. Socrates does two things: firstly, he is the Other to Alcibiades’ unknowing desire which constitutes him as erosmenos (younger male) as the manifest effect of desire. Secondly, Alcibiades understands his desire for Socrates and becomes constituted as erastes as the latent effect of desire. Mentorship is therefore the desire for the isolated object of desire (or, Agalma) which is seen to transcend the ‘dialectic of desire’; it is the role of the subject to desire, but the Other’s responsibility to disappoint his desire.

Slavoj Zizek wants to deconstruct the structural analysis performed in both Freud and Lacan’s work. Zizek argued that structuralism was concerned about analysing surface structures to reveal a universal, deep reality which could generalise all human behaviour. Zizek was critical of this view and said that postmodern society had so enfeebled the authority of men, the presence of the Oedipal Father had been overtaken by the Anal Father. The Anal Father is concerned about behind-the-scenes work, practically useful but no longer ideologically convincing. Seduction had therefore failed; we are no longer convinced by our fathers, but we are still obedient to their law because we know no alternative.

Thus so far, we have understood the meaning of the father in three main ways. Firstly, if we take Freud, the father breaks the mother-child dyad and the son internalises the morality principle in the superego. For Lacan, the father performs the imaginary role who castrates the mother’s penis and the symbolic role as agent of culture and society. Finally, if we understand Zizek, the father is an example of an ideological metaphor which is no longer convincing - but keeps working like it is.

Given the connotations of the father as a person with wisdom, knowledge and expertise, perhaps this opens wider questions about how meaning of life can be constructed through the father’s social subjectivity. This relates to questions of coming-of-age and maturity into adulthood; the father provides a model for growth and established security and integration into society, a symbolic debt which according to psychoanalysis must be repaid.

Erik Erikson provides perspective with his thoughts on the eight psychosocial stages of development. Each stage details the main conflicts and social value learned each person goes through at different stages; fixation or interruption to growth in each stage can create wider emotional problems. Erikson was well-known for this theory; indeed, he is credited for coining the phrase ‘identity crisis’.

The stages most relevant to the Western coming-of-age narrative is the late adolescent stage, concerning the crisis of identity and role confusion; and young adulthood, concerning the crisis of intimacy and isolation.

This could be related to how life-changing events are understood, which makes puberty and adolescence particularly special. Joseph Campbell argued in ‘The Hero’s Journey’ there were seventeen stages to the ‘hero’s journey’ which can be divided into three main parts: departure, initiation and return.

This reflects on Arnold van Gennep’s work on the rituals where he argued rites of passage like initiation could be divided into three main stages: separation, liminality and reintegration. Thus, it could be argued that during the stage of separation, symbolic death of a previous social status is achieved, creating an ambivalent, transitional status during liminality, until a new identity is eventually enforced and encoded into the social order through reintegration.

This suggests that coming-of-age and growing up can be transformative processes of self-discovery and meaning-making, and internalise codes of determination, resilience and purpose.

However, what if growing up is refused? What if it is critiqued as socially normative? Or risks losing our individuality and freedom?

Theodor Adorno was critical about such concerns and argued that it is part of our responsibility as adult citizens to critically engage and challenge existing authority structures which constrain possibilities for human emancipation. Indeed, in his critique of consumer popular culture, he argued that media like TV shows produced such standardised content, it de-intellectualized people and infantilised audiences into passive, childish breathlessness at media stars so removed from everyday active political engagement.

According to Kant’s theory of reason, we begin life as children with absolute faith in authority, believing obediently to dogmatism. Then, during adolescence our attitudes turn to scepticism. Kant believed that we had three categories of the mind: sensibility, reason and judgement. The latter two allows us to discern between what is/ought to do, and the necessary courage to make sense of the world and try to correct it.

Thus, this essay has covered different perspectives on men and the meaning of masculinity. It has firstly understood the meaning of the father. It has understood the meaning of the father as a challenge for personal self-actualisation through psychosocial stages of life. Finally, it warns about the refusing the task of maturity and integration into adult society, without which will lead to passivity, obedience and non-participation in engaging with social issues.

***

Sometimes it’s like being pinched really hard. I wish I could fill that lack, that feeling something should be filled but you don’t know how or what.

I’m honoured to take on my mission in life though. I think about people who don’t have the opportunities I have, to study, make friends or have experiences some people could only dream of.

I’m thinking of them the next time I want to complain. My ultimate goal is to be the person I wish was there for me when I really needed someone.

[seanchou77]

Autopilot

I’ve had dreams about going up or down. What takes me there depends: it could be stairs, escalators or lifts. I just dream about the constant moving, never stopping. Maybe I’m not even moving if I dream about taking a train somewhere - sometimes I don’t even know where. It’s the constant moving, just knowing you have to be somewhere - but where do I want to go? Will I ever get there? I don’t really know.

A lot of understanding about free will and liberal agency is built on space. The liberal free agent is imagined as the adventurer or the explorer who, in the Age of Discovery, found new lands and met distant peoples; now, it finds more recent cultural equivalents like astronauts, backpackers or people on their gap year abroad.

This means it’s important to critique and probe into the meanings of space, and how it can frame our wider cultural attitudes about individual freedom. Who gets space, or is excluded from access to space? What forms does space take, as something physical, mental or none of the above?

Firstly, we should explain how space is intrinsically linked with time in the Western imagination, usually in opposition and serving as a conceptual contrast.

Martin Heidegger provides an important perspective. He theorised about time in relation to Being and made several theoretical moves: Being, or Dasein, was essentially temporal; Being moves from an individual to a shared, unbordered understanding in his concept of being-in-the-world.

Existence is predicated on time, as an invitation to different possibilities being can actualise into. Consciousness is historicized: one uses their personal history to recollect the past, as inspiration for future projects, which create the overall unity of the present and creates authentic temporality according to Heidegger.

Heidegger helps us to understand several points. Firstly, we should dismiss materialist or causative accounts in our understanding of time. Time is about consciousness or being, which means it is a hermeneutic, meaning-finding exercise in relation to our phenomenological existence.

Secondly, Heidegger points to the historicity of consciousness. This explains nostalgia and respect for cultural heritage as forms of collective imagination, and suggests that personal or collective memories and histories help us to imagine an alternative future for the present. But if nostalgia is the starting point for change - as a way to reckon with a world we’re ‘thrown into’, according to Heidegger - we should avoid contrasting activity of the present with the passivity of the past, which could turn into a blank canvas we could freely paint on and interpret how we please.

Is there potential for us to become reified subjects of our past? As only playthings of collective, anonymous forces that have accumulated over our lives?

Two figures can help us delve into this question: Sigmund Freud, as the original thinker behind dream theory; and Carl Jung, who built important modifications into Freud’s theory.

Freud argued that our unconscious could only be interpreted and never directly accessed. One tool for interpretation was dream analysis; through symbols or tropes in our dreams, these could be analysed to uncover a whole panel of desires, tensions and previous childhood traumas.

According to Freud, the unconscious represented omnipotent time, without clear boundary or delineation. This was used by Jung to support his theory of active imagination: if the unconscious could be activated, it could serve to inspire and re-energise our conscious active life worlds. Jung went further, and argued beyond Freud’s theory of personal unconscious, but the collective unconscious; so far in history, we have only theorised about our personal unconscious thoughts, and not understood how we share collective archetypes with society or history in summation. While Jung’s thought was indeed dualistic and assumed rationality, it could be brought in conversation with later theorists like Jean-Jacques Lacan who joined Jung’s theory of archetypes similar to his thoughts on ‘signifiers’.

Several conclusions can be made then. According to Freud, the unconscious could be interpreted as a source of omnipotent, timeless imagination; for Jung, this was an active exercise, of understanding conscious life as the elaboration of a powerful unconscious logic based on imagination which served our self-actualisation. For each thinker, the image was important - how it left a mnemic trace which, with appropriate analytic tools, could be unearthed and create new meanings in our life.

To return to our original question about how space relates to understandings of agency, we can make several advances in our answer. Firstly, space is about consciousness which alludes to historicity and nostalgia for the past, inspiring us to search for possibilities in the future. Secondly, the temporality of consciousness could be deconstructed to reveal about our personal and collective imaginaries, transcended through analysis and the meaning of our individual lives overtaken by collective archetypes.

So far, we have only understood space as a set of personal interventions: tools for doing this include activating our nostalgia or interpreting our dreams.

But we could also understand space as a challenge to completely revamp our understandings of metaphysics. According to Gilles Deleuze, we have so long speculated about a metaphysical theory which could contains all ontological possibilities and outcomes; the point is to come up with a metaphysical theory which opens up these possibilities and outcomes.

Henri Bergson provides an interesting precursor to Deleuze. Similarly to Heidegger, Bergson was interested in consciousness, but was concerned with the data of consciousness. Bergson argued that temporality in consciousness had several features: it was heterogenous, having different elements; multiplicitous, having different elements which contradicted each other; and simultaneous, where these contradictory, different elements existed with each other. Bergson summarised his thoughts with his theory of duree, or duration; what counted more in understandings of existence in our consciousness was not their objective materiality nor their subjective interpretation, but combination to exist in our consciousness as a dialectical process.

Friedrich Nietzsche also contributes to our understanding of time. Nietzsche argues for ‘eternal recurrence’, by dismissing metaphysical theory as illusion; the only constant is the will-to-power, or struggle, where metaphysical theory provides only comforts which hold us back from realising this truth and actualising our ability to grow. If some are more powerful than others, than so be it, for that is the state of nature.

Deleuze combines both theorists on time to create a unique theory of space: his theory of metaphysics as difference. If we understand from Bergson that the duree is about simultaneous, contradictory elements in process; and if we understand from Nietzsche that history is non-teleological and creates its own collapse and renewal; Deleuze innovates upon these previous theorists by saying that discussions of theory system and categorisation are redundant if they neuter and sterilise difference.

Most radically, Deleuze posits the analogy of the ‘body without organs’: so far philosophy has only offered interior, isolated explanations of the world; the point is is that we should approach exteriority as a invitation for our spontaneous engagement with the world, which formulates in simultaneously and creative ways with our Being. We could almost imagine Deleuze talking about the philosophical nomadic, searching in the desert and visiting different tribes for their ‘truth’ but never settling.

Deleuze makes some interesting contributions to space as a result. For Deleuze, space is about difference and always shifts between the grids of the actual and possible, where the virtual exists like genetic information as unactualized potential to be realised in the present.

In this essay, we have wandered like Deleuze’s nomad through different understandings of space, as existential historicity, reified dream subjects and metaphysical theory of difference. To conclude, space could lead us to different understandings of space: it is about personal and collective imaginaries; it lends us omnipotent imagination, as subjects of an anonymous and overriding generative drive towards creativity; it is about the spontaneity and manifest forms of Being which erupt and escape theorisation in a constant process of unfolding ontological change.

***

I don’t know if I please others too much.

Sometimes I give in to what people say; I don’t know what I want.

Now, it’s funny if I reflect back and think about it. In some ways, saying ‘no’ is easy. It’s just a word. But in my head, there’s a mental wall stopping me from saying ‘no’ and after a while it’s just easier to go along with other people tell me to do.

But if think seriously about it, it’s embarrassing. There’s something about unconditional obedience which can violate your very core sense of being. It means being mindless, detached, like complete submission destroys what it means to live in the first place.

Too often, I’ve crafted a perfect image I want others to see. But I’m sick of it; it makes me feel so sterilised and neutered for other people’s inspection.

Now, I want to live authentically.

[seanchou77]

Broken Prams

Death is the scariest thing you could dream about. For other people, it’s falling or being chased. But I hate dreaming about death. And I’ve dreamed of the worst kind - children dying, in the most violent ways. They get run over by trains or cars. I never see blood or their bodies properly. But there was one time when I saw a broken pram getting picked up from the side of the road and you could tell it was run over. It was goddamn awful.

Every beginning knows its own end. According to Sigmund Freud, without death, there wouldn’t be growth; the same growth principle which allows the organism to break out of the constancy principle must eventually resolve its ontological contradiction and die.

With that sentiment in mind, this essay will be discuss about death and what it means, inversely, for life. Discussions on death have taken place in a lot of quarters; while this essay will approach it through mainly a psychoanalytic lens, it will also borrow voices from philosophy and religion to add a more nuanced perspective.

Firstly, death is tied into long-held views about our mortality, impermanence and transitional status as human beings on earth. Whatever views we have on the after-life, it’s clear in our modern day, secular society such views do not hold traction for a lot of people.

Schopenhauer provides a modern perspective on death, through his transcendental metaphysical theory called, ‘will-and-representation’. Arthur Schopenhauer argued that everything in the world could be divided into subjects and objects, but that they were byproducts of an anonymous force called the ‘will’. This creates an active/passive binary, where ‘representations’ are byproducts of a ‘will’ which drives us as subjects; we feel this in our passions, desires and emotions.

As a result of will, we desire and suffer when our will is frustrated. Schopenhauer compared human beings to blind mole rats, digging underground without vision or directionality. This pointless suffering can drive us to despair, disappoint our expectations and leave our desires unfulfilled.

Schopenhauer argues instead we should accept the dissatisfaction of our will; instead of the temperamental and fickle nature of our will, we should accept pain as a constant and practise life through non-attachment. Only through aesthetic experience, in arts or music, could we temporarily transcend our direct experience of space and time towards a more perfect, timeless universe.

Schopenhauer must be understood for our next theoretical steps. To really understand Nietzsche’s work, he must be read in conversation with Schopenhauer. Friedrich Nietzsche followed Schopenhauer in his early 20s but then quickly abandoned him - he cried when he learned he had been living his youth like he was already old.

Nietzsche disagreed with Schopenhauer. He thought he was too pessimistic and neglected questions about power and self-transcendence. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer was another example of a philosophical ascetic: self-denying the potential for human beings to live self-generative and flourishing lives through the will-to-power. According to Nietzsche then, our understanding of death shouldn’t be understood as just as certainty - this was true, as ‘God is dead’. But Nietzsche understood that it was a greater fault to live our lives as if we were already dead and deny our living potential; instead, we should embrace our heroic drives and attain the Superman status which exceeds previous horizons of outstanding achievement. Thus, through the transvaluation of all values, we can create new values.

The discussion between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche reveals several things about death. Firstly, we should be concerned about what it means for our phenomenological existence and selfhood; it can be self-defining and constructive of wider life missions. Furthermore, it could be understood as a self-transformative process, where the self achieves spiritual enlightenment (for Schopenhauer) or self-transcendence into Superman (for Nietzsche).

So far, the subject/object binary and notions of the self have been taken for granted.

Lacanian psychoanalysis can help to deconstruct these notions. Jean-Jacques Lacan introduced ‘mirror theory’ as a type of mimicry; Lacan argues that the self is introduced to the child during the ‘mirror stage’ between the age of six to 18 months, as an image or signifier which stabilises their notion of personal identity. The self therefore cannot be understood in isolation, but as a construct which must be stabilised within a wider language context of signified chains of meaning.

Julia Kristeva was interested in stages of child development prior to the mirror stage. Kristeva introduced the notion of the ‘semiotic’, of meaning as continuous, undemarcated and fluid - similar to the fluidity of a child being in the mother’s womb.

Both provide contrasting perspectives on death. Lacan argues that death should be accepted and internalised as the No-Thing; later on, Lacan replaced the ‘No-Thing’ with petit objet a (or the ‘object of desire’) and argued that jouissance helps us to overcome transitional, changing desires with permanent drive towards jouissance. For Lacan, drive is the horizon which already anticipates its death but envelops everything into a single plane.

Kristeva however suggests that death is one of many meaning-making exercises. We should be more interested in how the Other is constructed in opposition to the Self. The Self already recognises its death because it sees it in the Other and rejects the Other for that reason; the Abject Other suggests a fear of death is needed to stabilise a symbolic hierarchy of meaning. We could escape this instead by inverting, destabilising and playing with the meanings of things like death which would otherwise indicate notions of permanence and prescribe strict, disciplined action.

Lee Edelman helps us to understand how death can be queered. Death is an affront to heteronormative society, which builds a teleological narrative of families and future generations, who inherit what has been accumulated and preserved for the future. Edelman criticises the heteronormative assumptions of this narrative, which depend on the bio-power, reproductive force of straight, monogamous couples to perpetuate their lifestyles, at the exclusion and Otherising of alternative queer relationships.

Queer experience and identity can be constructed on alternative readings of death. Instead of death fitting into a linear timeline of marriage and having children, queerness means to explore alternative metonymies which can frame our identity: our creative pursuits can be our most powerful voices, but to also fundamentally retain our critical engagement skills to critique a heteronormative society which systematically excludes or assimilates us. Like Adonis, we are born through cycles of life and death and know no generation to inherit our legacy onto; our stories are tragic and beautiful.

But we could find an alternative understanding of death without pandering to pessimism. An an analogy in psychoanalysis on death runs like this: death is the bones which frames the flesh it upholds; without the hardness of death, our lives are supple, docile and lack self-definition.

Ernest Becker discusses this in his thoughts on heroism, as response to (and denial of) death. Becker argues for the need for genuine heroism where the individual is led, through self-acceptance and non-attachment, to accepting the reality of death but feeling inspired by the awe and opportunity of living even temporarily in the wide expanse of the universe and the mystery of the cosmos. We are not driven by the conformity of cultural heroism or the excess of personal heroism, but simultaneously humbled and driven to make the most of our time here.

Thus, this essay has touched on multiple perspectives on death. We could understand it as an elaboration of contradictions in our phenomenological experience; as a semiotic interplay between semantic systems of meaning; contrast desires and drives which arise from death; which lead ultimately to maturity, spiritual enlightenment and acceptance which opens our abilities to self-flourish and be responsible towards others.

***

I’ve had moments when I’ve been too scared to say anything or do anything.

I just feel so self-conscious, like my face is burning and my palms creasing with sweat.

I feel like I’m always being judged and I’m scared I won’t be good enough. It’s moments like that when I don’t want to do anything at all; I just want to feel invisible and hide. Maybe it’s because it feels like I’ve already died inside. Everything now is just the excess you want to scrap off your plate and pretend you never asked for. Actually, I didn’t ask for any of this.

I want to escape from all my responsibilities.

[seanchou77]

R.E.M.: Reflections, Emotions, Memories

R.E.M. (short for Reflections, Emotions and Memories) is an essay series that I wrote in February 2019. For me, this time period was a really pivotal point: I’ve been going through cycles of change, challenged by the constant flow of people and events around me.

R.E.M was a chance for me to be self-reflective and engaged with the world around me. I want this to come across in my essays: six essays in total, each on a different topic which holds a lot of personal meaning for me.

By putting this out to there, it’s a statement to myself and to the world: I’m always thinking, and I want to keep up with a world which feels as rapidly changing as myself.