#freudianism

[ssjkamui-digitalphoenixug]

On topic of AI art: I use AI Art sometimes, but I have mixed feelings about it. Very mixed feelings about it.

One first thing: I think most AI critics make a huge mistake in thinking "AI bad, but technology good". In a way, AI is not just like every other technology but AI reveals the Essence of technology as such. I think every criticism of technology by heidegger, Marcuse, Ahmad fardid etc. Apply especially strong to AI. In a way, nick land was right: AI is the culmination of technology as such.

This will ofcourse be a very long topic and I cannot discuss everything in one article. If people are interested in it, I can do more texts.

I would like to start with Evolas criticism of technology. For evola, the main problem with technology is that better technology grants people access to powers they do not deserve to have and do not know how to handle in a responsible way. (Think this way: there are many superhero stories by marvel and dc, for example earth x, where suddenly everyone gets superpowers and society collapses due to many people abusing their powers. This is basically what evola meant.)

According to evola, the more time and effort it takes to learn a certain still and Power, the more this trains people to use it responsible. Best example here: it takes a lot of effort to properly learn Kung fu. But it's comparatively easy to learn how to use a Gun. And now, its almost unheard of that people use Kung fu to commit robberies and other Crimes. On the other hand, using guns to commit Crimes is very common.

One related aspect here is: if something takes a lot of effort, you think long before you decide to do it. You do not waste your time on crap. This weeds out bad stuff.

This problem is literally one of the Main explainations of AI slop: people do stupid things because its now easy to do. (And I must admit, one of the first things I did with AI was literally porn, just because I wanted to see if AI can be used for porn. Lol. Normally, I despise porn.)

But Here is a huge counterpoint: the knowledge that stuff will turn out as bad art did not deter people from doing it. Even before AI, the internet was literally a heap of slop.

15 years ago, the most common form of Art on the internet was literally that:

The internet was always a place of bad art where people did not spend effort on. In a way, AI even elevated the Quality of most internet art.

One other counterpoint is surrealism: the point of Surrealism was literally using art as a gateway into the freudian subconscious and to use your subconscious as a driving force of art. Literally art as destroying your own Barriers, your own shame etc. And experimenting with and revealing your Hidden desires, perversions, childishness, stupidity, ridiculousness, shamelessness etc. Art as a way to have limitless freedom without shame or social taboos.

And in that regards, AI allowing higg Quality art without too much conscious thought is actually a good thing. AI becomes the ultimate Surrealist Tool and vessel to your own unconscious.

And sometimes, you want to do art to check if an idea works. For example, I wrote an article where I suggested that we need to combine retrofuturist discsrded styles of Design ans architecture with traditionalism.

What is the right way to check that? Spend Months on Re learning bauhaus theory, googie architecture, feng shui etc. And carefully crafting a drawing just to end up with an idea which did not work in the first place? No. With AI you can check if an idea works and then, you can spend more time in doing something more elaborate and thought out.

[haggishlyhagging]

We have already seen abundant evidence that the therapeutic game also consists largely in legitimating "normal," that is, lobotomized and tame behavior which is in fact indoctrinated, artifactual, man-made femininity. Thus Freud reversed the meaning of Dora's healthy reaction of disgust at sexual assault by naming it "hysterical." So also Jung slyly legitimates punitive measures against strong women, implying that strength of mind is abnormal. Writing of women who express strong arguments (women "ridden by the animus"), he states:

‘Often the man has the feeling —and he is not altogether wrong— that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary power of “persuasion”’ [emphasis mine].

Women who have been seduced by jungian ideology might do well to consider the implications of this attitude.

Moreover, women who have been seduced, brow-beaten, and mind-raped by individual therapists or by gangs of mini-therapists in marathon encounter sessions should re-consider the meaning of "normality" in such a setting. A clue is to be found in the fact that whereas only a few decades ago anyone was stigmatized who was discovered going to a therapist, today the stigma is inflicted upon any woman who does not go to a therapist. Any institution which could so rapidly reverse its status, gaining power and prestige in the most "advanced" nation of a patriarchal planet, clearly must be serving the interests of patriarchy.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

[stainlesssteellocust]

ruh roh

[arcticdementor]

Stephen Baskerville reviews Howard S. Schwartz's book describing "political correctness" in terms of Freudian psychology…

[jellobiafrasays]

moise et le monotheisme (1977 ed.)

[haggishlyhagging]

Two quotes I read today. Written 50 years apart but discussing the same phenomenon of female oppression.

The first is an excerpt of Kate Millett’s masterful takedown of Freud’s conclusions (which were foundational to much of the USA’s mid-20th century backlash to feminist advances) in her work Sexual Politics:

The three most distinguishing traits of female personality, were, in Freud's view, passivity, masochism, and narcissism. Even here, one can see a certain merit in the Freudian paradigm taken as pure description. The position of women in patriarchy is such that they are expected to be passive, to suffer, and to be sexual objects; it is unquestionable that they are, with varying degrees of success, socialized into such roles. This is not however what Freud had in mind. Nor had he any intention of describing social circumstances. Instead, he believed that the elaborate cultural construction we call "femininity" was largely organic, e.g., identical with, or clearly related to, femaleness. He therefore proceeded to define femininity as constitutional passivity, masochism, and narcissism. . . .

In convincing himself that the three traits of femininity were in fact constitutional and biologically destined, Freud had made it possible to prescribe them and for his followers to attempt to enforce them, perpetuating a condition which originates in oppressive social circumstances. To observe a group rendered passive, stolid in their suffering, forced into trivial vanity to please their superordinates, and, after summarizing these effects of long subordination, chose to conclude they were inevitable, and then commence to prescribe them as health, realism, and maturity, is actually a fairly blatant kind of Social Darwinism. As a manner of dealing with deprived groups, it is hardly new, but it has rarely been so successful as Freudianism has been in dealing with women.

The second quote is from Yagmur Uygarkizi’s piece “‘Feminism Allowed You to Speak’: Reinforcing Intergenerational Feminist Solidarity Against Sophisticated Attacks” which was published in the anthology Spinning And Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century. Uygarkizi is here discussing the foundational tenets of queer theory and its attendant postmodern analyses of women as socially-constructed entities:

Finally, and most importantly, sex roles are no longer imposed but ingrained: gender becomes an identity. If you as a woman are foolish enough to abide by the stereotypes that constrain you, then that's your problem: you could have just identified your way out of it. This is the message the disparaging "cis women" expression hides.

We are witnessing an essentialisation of our oppression: what men do to us is who we are apparently. If they rape us, we are the rape. If they veil us, we are the veil. If they stereotype us, we are the stereotype. One can sense a hint of victim-blaming here: just like a woman in prostitution/pornography might feel that she is only good at that, queer theory rehashes that yes, that is very true. Instead of taking material biological reality as the basis of an identity, socially constructed practices are taken as accurate indicators of someone's identity. What this means is that any criticism of those practices becomes a criticism of the person. Whorephobia. Islamophobia. Transphobia. The basis of the discrimination shifts from the female sex to the sex-based discrimination itself.

The link between Freudianism and postmodern queer theory is a simple one: women exist to be oppressed. We have simply shifted from it being seen as a natural phenomenon, based on the material reality of sex, to a chosen one based on the psycho-social assumptions based around personal identity.

[haggishlyhagging]

The lines of influence which psychoanalysis will exercise over sexual politics are set; generations of practitioners will follow, reputable or ridiculous. Yet more effective even than penis envy is the school's tendency toward a pseudoscientific unification of the cultural definition of masculinity and femininity with the genetic reality of male and female. Dressing the thing up in jargon—"passivity," "low libido," "masochism," "narcissism," "undeveloped super ego"—one gives the old myth of feminine "nature" a new respectability. Now it can be said scientifically that women are inherently subservient, and males dominant, more strongly sexed and therefore entitled to sexually subjugate the female, who enjoys her oppression and deserves it, for she is by her very nature, vain, stupid, and hardly better than barbarian, if she is human at all. Once this bigotry has acquired the cachet of science, the counterrevolution may proceed pretty smoothly. Sex, like race, is something one cannot really change. It is a sign of a rather superior female to wish herself out of such a case, seeing and aspiring to the virtues of the ruling group. But it is futile to hope to escape one's birth caste. Aspiration on the part of the truly incapacitated only forbodes frustration. And, after all, psychoanalysis promised fulfilment in passivity and masochism, and greater fulfillment, indeed, the very meaning of woman's life lay in reproduction, and there alone. Then too, in venal hands, psychoanalysis could not only discredit the revolution and turn it back, but give work, make money, sell itself and consumerism as well.

-Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

[haggishlyhagging]

We have arrived at our final point: the importation of clinical Freudianism to stem the flow of feminism. Girls in the twenties and thirties found themselves halfway in and halfway out of the traditional roles. Thus they were neither insulated and protected from the larger world as before, nor were they equipped to deal with it. Both their personal and work lives suffered. Their frustration often took hysterical forms, complicated by the fact that they were despised the world over for even the little false liberation they had achieved. Mass confusion sent them in droves to the psychoanalysts. And where had all the psychoanalysts come from? By this time a war was going on in Europe, and much of the German and Austrian intelligentsia had settled here in search of a practice. It was ideal: a whole class of suffering people awaited them. And it was not just a few bored, rich women who were sucked into the new religion. For America was undergoing serious cramps from withholding a sexual revolution already well beyond the beginning stages. Everyone suffered, men as well as women. Books came out with such titles as How to Live with a Neurotic (because that oppressed class is right there in your kitchen, whining and complaining and nagging). Soon men, too, were turning up at the psycho-analysts. Well-educated, responsible citizens, not just psychos. And children. Whole new fields were opened to deal with the influx: child psychology, clinical psychology, group therapy, marriage counseling services, any variation you can think of, name it and there it was. And none of it was enough. The demand multiplied faster than new departments could be opened up in colleges.

That these new departments were soon filled up with women is no wonder. Masses of searching women studied psychology with a passion in the hope of finding a solution to their "hangups." But women who had grown interested in psychology because its raw material touched them where they lived soon were spouting jargon about marital adjustment and sex-role responsibility. Psychology departments became halfway houses to send women scurrying back "adjusted" to their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Those women who persisted in demanding careers became in their turn instruments of the repressive educational system, their new-found psychological “insight”—that babble of Child Psych., Social Work 301 and El. Ed.—serving to keep a fresh generation of women and children down. Psychology became reactionary to its core, its potential as a serious discipline undermined by its usefulness to those in power.

And psychology was not the only new discipline to be corrupted. Education, social work, sociology, anthropology, all the related behavioral sciences, remained for years pseudo-sciences, overburdened with a double function: the indoctrination of women, as well as the study of "human" behavior. Reactionary schools of thought developed: social science became "functional," studying the operation of institutions only within the given value system, thus promoting acceptance of the status quo.

It is not surprising that these remained "women's fields." Men soon fled to (exclusively male) "pure" science; women, still only semi-educated, awed with their new entrance into academia, were left to be snowed with the pseudo-scientific bullshit. For, in addition to role indoctrination, the behavioral sciences served as a dike to keep the hordes of questing "nouveaux intellectuelles" from entering the "real" sciences—physics, engineering, biochemistry, etc., sciences that in a technological society bore an increasingly direct relation to control of that society.

As a result, even access to higher education, one of the few victories of the early W.R.M., was subverted. More average women went to college than ever before, with less effect. Often the only difference between the modern college-educated housewife and her traditional prototype was the jargon she used in describing her marital hell.

-Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution