As the best actors move on from TV
And leave shows in shambles, viewers bereft,
And characters to death or surgery,
So do I move beyond my yesterdays
Into a new life, an acropolis
So perfect it seems built to be ruined.
Like a swimming pool at noon in summer
The future waits coolly to be entered,
But disturbances of satisfaction
Can overwhelm the impulse of the act.
There are plants that die from too much water,
Some living things are merely suppliant
And others are born to be sycophants.
I reach out for love without knowing if
To love means bliss or merely drunkenness.
There are plans that vanish in their planning
And dreamers that drown in their ambition.
I doubt my senses, I hear smells, I see
Symbols wherever images should be—
A sunbow’s arc above a waterfall.
As yet the beachcomber in me believes
That beneath the proof of dirt is payment
For the labor of creation, or love—
Maybe not the gold doubloon, but a shell
With the ocean where a creature should be.
For the first time, you hear your lover’s voice
Singing a language you don’t understand,
And the words you once knew lose their meanings.
I am so confused by this new feeling.
My greatest fear is I will outlive it.
Everything seems to be going well, but
Who knows well when less is nowhere near?
There is such a thing as a perfect storm,
When all the elements of misfortune
Converge to produce a great disaster
(One of the elements must be belief,
The others should be time and sacrifice),
Which descends upon a decent person
Who stands beside some mean, magnetic soul
To hide their darkness in another’s light.
I am anxious because my life is good
And I love a world I will have destroyed
Just as the rotten persona I’ve made
Transubstantiates in the tendency
Of burning to offer upward its ash.
While my sweetheart works overtime this week
I have spent my hours alone dismantling
The appalling device in my basement,
But as I pull it apart it mocks me,
Knowing as I do it has done its work.
Millions of miles away, death from above
Speeds through the solar system, approaching
The planet where Mahler wrote his music.
It will be a defunct truth that kills me
And the sight of a serpent in the sky
Will be the final sign the condemned see.
If only I had despised the winter
Instead of the cold itself, I could have
Found some relief in fashion and designed
Warm shadows instead of a burning crown.
One must be well acquainted with the charms
Of decorative dishes and warm pies
To know the power that a caterwaul
At midnight may have over someone lost
In chapter nine of Pride and Prejudice,
In which Darcy and Elizabeth speak
Of poetry’s relationship to sex.
Everyone knows what happens in the end,
But the end is just a catastrophe,
The good bits are in the complication.
Aristotle can be hard to follow
But tragedy is simplified in love.
At first, one seems to look at a stranger
In the mirror, and life is love reversed,
Then their reflection proves insubstantial
For conversations and convergences.
I am at this moment in my story
And have no idea how it will feel
To arrive with another at a shrine
With meanings both joyous and saturnine.
The other day I went out for pizza
With the woman who holds my hand in hers,
And the roads of our hunger there diverged.
We ordered a large half-mushroom, half-cheese
So we could our own ways together go,
But by the time the waiter brought our food
We had forgotten who had chosen what
And feasted without discrimination.
The desire to know each other’s desire
Had overwhelmed the knowledge of our own.
Transcendent moments become memories
Like everything else, and maybe that is
An error in the making of the world.
What if evolution’s fundamental
Force were not endurance, but amazement?
Or what if everything already runs
Zigzag toward heaven and I am wrong?
What if a giraffe stretches out its neck
Seeking not fulfillment but pleasing form,
And nature is guided by beauty’s voice?
Who was the real Walter Benjamin? Was it the otherworldly aesthete who believed, along with the German Romantics, that literature has a redemptive purpose, and who was indifferent to whether a literary work was actually read, since it is ultimately a metaphysical end in itself? Or was the...
...Marxism’s fatal error, Benjamin believed, was to have uncritically imbibed the shallow and deterministic worldview of nineteenth-century “scientism”–a perspective that reflected the nineteenth-century bourgeois faith in progress through achievements in industry and technical innovation. Scientism worshiped industrialism rather than striving to transcend it. Benjamin was convinced that Fourier’s fanciful phalansteries contained infinitely more “political truth” than Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Revolution meant a qualitative leap into the future, a utopian break with a long history of class domination. After all, if socialism merely perpetuated the status quo by giving it a slightly different shape and form, what was the point?
This was one of the reasons that theological notions figured so prominently in Benjamin’s work. He believed that historical materialism could ill afford to leave discussions of Paradise or the Last Judgment in the hands of deceitful clerics and prelates. Marxism’s utopian promise, for Benjamin, had more to do with the redemption of fallen humanity than it did with equitable transfer payments or a progressive income tax. As he put it: “My thought is related to theology as a blotter is to ink. It is totally absorbed by it.”
Benjamin’s idea of a social utopia hinged on his theory of “experience.” Like many thinkers of the time, he believed that experience was among the casualties of advanced industrial society, which had rendered everyday human interaction entirely functional, utilitarian and impersonal. He shared Max Weber’s belief that the modern world had undergone a process of “disenchantment.” The march of progress had cruelly denuded life of all mystery, solidarity and human warmth. Unlike Weber, however, Benjamin urgently advocated the re-enchantment of the world.
Theological messianism was, of course, one way of re-enchanting the world and making authentic experience possible again. Another, even more important approach to re-enchantment, for Benjamin, resided in literature, which he depicted as a repository of utopian strivings. Thus did he ingeniously transpose his youthful fascination with the aesthetic utopianism of German Romanticism onto his later political preoccupations as a Marxist. Stendhal once observed that beauty contains a promesse du bonheur, a promise of happiness, and Benjamin treated this remark with the utmost seriousness.
...Yet Benjamin knew that by infusing Marxist thought with the redemptive components that had been banished by the nineteenth-century esprit de sérieux, he was playing a dangerous game. For while orthodox Marxists prattled on about the prosaic ends of “scientific socialism,” “experience” (or Erlebnis) had become the exclusive province of the reactionary right–Lebensphilosophie, the German Youth Movement and literary Fascists like Ernst Jünger. Benjamin’s lifelong theoretical battle was to wrest the concept of experience from the right’s monopoly and to turn it to the ends of the revolutionary left.
...Baudelaire famously observed, “genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will."
1) The first one concerns the object relations...affirmations of a self that cannot be separated from its various attachments—political, psychical, sensory, amorous, or literary...
2) The second common characteristic of our three geniuses is their identification of thought with life…none of these three women simply places thinking, or sublimation, at the center of life. For them life is thought and thought is life, and in this way they attain the highest state of felicity in which to live is to think‐sublimate‐write. The metaphysical dichotomy between abstract and concrete, meaning and matter, being and existence dissolves in their experience as it does in their thought.
3) The third common characteristic of my three geniuses is their approach to temporality...Colette avoided dwelling on the inevitability of death and prefered to celebrate birth with Sido (and she frequently used the image of hatching): “All my life, I’ve been interested in birth, and more so than in any other manifestation of life. That’s where the essential drama of existence is situated, to a far greater degree than in death, which is no more than a banal defeat.” The blooming of a cactus rose, the budding of plants, and the birth of children—this woman, who was herself far from being a model mother, found above all in writing, this rhythm that she made her own. This is the rhythm of the infinite (in the sense of the French in‐fini, that which is never finished), of new beginnings: “To metamorphose, to reconstruct oneself, to be born again, have never been beyond my powers.”
...We could no doubt add other characteristics, which would be more or less convincing. The fact that we can associate them with certain constants of feminine psychosexuality does not mean that they cannot also be found in the works of many male authors—psychical bisexuality being common to both sexes. Besides which, in the course of my study of Arendt, Klein, and Colette, we can see the extent to which their achievements are a result of their “mental hermaphroditism,” to use Colette’s expression, and how it would have been impossible for them without a sort of phallic affirmation to express their uniqueness.
...By paying particular attention to sexual difference, my investigation of female genius has led me, in short, to go beyond the dichotomy of the sexes, to distance myself from the initial presupposition of a binary sexual system. This has been made possible not only because psychical bisexuality seemed to me to be a fact that applies to both sexes, with the dominant factor varying between sexes and between individuals. Nor is it possible just because each individually constructed sexual identity deviates from some standard. These factors are relevant, but finally and most importantly what allows us to overcome the traditional, binary model of sexuality is the fact that creativity, when developed to the full in genius, pushes this deviation from the standard to its furthest limit and to the highest degree of uniqueness, which is nevertheless something that can be shared. At the heart of the precarious solitude of their pioneering work, which was the price they paid for their unique creativity, Arendt, Klein, and Colette managed to create the conditions that give rise to a necessarily public opinion and, why not, a school and, at best, create an effect of seduction that solicits a communion of readings and a community of readers.
...So, is there a feminine genius? The example of twentieth‐century women has made it difficult to avoid the question. And it has led us to consider that the anxiety over the feminine has been the communal experience that has allowed our civilization to reveal, in a new way, the incommensurability of the individual. This incommensurability is rooted in sexual experience but nonetheless is realized through the risks that each of us is prepared to take by calling into question thought, language, one’s own age, and any identity that resides in them. You are a genius to the extent that you are able to challenge the sociohistorical conditions of your identity. This is the legacy of Arendt, Klein, and Colette.
Critchley claims we lack an adequate vocabulary for the subject, but his book is full of lucid, fluent and perhaps consoling formulations, suggests Brian Dillon
On Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you’ve forgotten your racket in the house. You go back to look for it, but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down into the basement. Your wife doesn’t notice this. She stays outside. The weather is fine. She’s making the most of the sun. A few moments later she hears a gunshot. She rushes into the house, cries out your name, notices that the door to the stairway leading to the basement is open, goes down, and finds you there. You’ve put a bullet in your head with the rifle you had carefully prepared. On the table, you left a comic book open to a double-paged spread. In the heat of the moment, your wife leans on the table; the book falls closed before she understands that this was your final message.
I’ve never gone into this house. Yet I know the garden, the ground floor, and the basement. I’ve replayed the scene hundreds of times, always in the same settings, those I imagined upon first hearing the account of your suicide. The house is on a street, it has a roof and a rear facade. Though none of that is real. There’s the garden where you go out into the sunlight for the last time and where your wife waits for you. There is the facade she runs toward when she hears the gunshot. There is the entryway where you keep your racket, there’s the door to the basement and the stairway. Finally there’s the basement where your body lies. It is intact. From what I’ve been told, your skull hasn’t exploded. You’re like a young tennis player resting on the lawn after a match. You could be sleeping. You are twenty-five years old. You now know more about death than I do.
On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972
A video documentary combining exhibition footage of the Situationist International exhibitions with film footage of the 1968 Paris student uprising, and graffiti and slogans based on the ideas of Guy Debord.
Interview with Stefany Anne Goldberg and Morgan Meis, co-authors of the forthcoming book: Dead People.
Stefany Anne Golberg is a writer for magazines such as The Smart Set, the former Critic-in Residence at Drexel University, a multi-media artist, and a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York.
Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy is a founding member of Flux Factory as well, and is a recipient of the Whiting Award.
...I don’t know if they understand me, but is the issue here the film or me? If it’s the film, I think—I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it. I’d rather feelings arise before intellect.
Q: What did you want people to feel in Pickpocket?
Rather than having a story I wanted to tell, I wanted people to feel the atmosphere that surrounds a thief, that particular atmosphere that makes people anxious and uncomfortable.
Q: Have you ever met any thieves?
I think I’ve me several, but you don’t know until after you’ve been robbed.
Q: You felt nothing at the time?
Yes, I did. I remember one time out in the country. I was in a room with my host and a third person who—we both felt this third person either was going to steal or had already stolen.
Q: What made you feel that?
Something very mysterious that I can’t put into words, and that’s the feeling I wanted to express in this film. That, and the terrible solitude that is a thief’s prison.
Q: Was that the starting point for the film?
I can’t really say what a film’s starting point is, but this solitude, which I didn’t want to show directly, was certainly a driving force.
Q: Your films are quite unlike most others. Are you aware of that?
No, not at all.
Q: But, from what we know of you, you can’t much like the cinema of today. You don’t want to film that kind of nicely structured story. How do you see cinema today.
There are some films I like, even thought they may not be according to my methods, but—in addition—this may be why I go to the cinema less often than I used to. There are certain things that annoy me, things that I wouldn’t do, techniques used today that I wouldn’t use. It’s quite natural for me to think that the others are wrong, not me.
Q: One essential characteristic of your films is your rejection of the theatrical.
The theatricality that I reject, or, rather, that I try to reject, because it’s not that easy, is expression by means of facial cues, gestures and vocal effects.
Q: But you seem to be looking for some kind of anti-expression. You push it to extremes. No only do you not want acting, but you don’t even allow realism. It’s as if you make the actors blank, less expressive than in real life.
I don’t think so. I try to draw them towards the automatism that occupies such a large part of our lives.
Q: But can you see how people might think you’re turning your back on what audiences want to see?
I don’t think so. It’s not something I’m aware of. I don’t think I’m turning my back on audiences, or that they’re turning their backs on me. I rely on my experience, and after making a film, I sit in the audience and try to feel what they’re feeling and experience my original feelings too. In general, they seem happy. The audience ends up feeling exactly as I did and being very moved.
Q: Why do you think audiences found it easy to feel what you wanted them to feel in A Man Escaped, but were less sensitive to it in Pickpocket?
Probably because the story itself is much more—the story of escape is much more—
Q: Heroic?
Dramatic. Maybe not dramatic, but certainly more heroic, and the character o the escaped prisoner is much more—
Q: Moral?
Much more sympathetic, far more accessible to many more people.
Q: Everyone wants to escape. No one wants to admit he’s a thief.
And the story of the escaped prisoner ends in freedom, whereas this one ends in prison.
Q: Do you think you’re in the vanguard of the film world?
I don’t know, but I think films in the future will move further and further away from the theater. The techniques used in these films will be completely different from theatrical techniques.
Q: Do you think today’s acclaimed films will be forgotten in 20 years?
I really can’t say.
Q: Do you feel alone?
I feel very alone, but I derive no pleasure from that feeling.
The sublime unknowability of Big Data lets us fall in love with our own domination.
I have a memory from childhood, a happy memory — one of complete trust and comfort. It’s dark, and I’m kneeling in the tiny floor area of the back seat of a car, resting my head on the seat. I’m perhaps six years old. I look upward to the window, through which I can see streetlights and buildings rushing by in a foreign town whose name and location I’m completely unaware of. In the front seats sit my parents, and in front of them, the warm yellow and red glow of the dashboard, with my dad at the steering wheel.
Contrary to the sentiment of so many ads and products, this memory reminds me that dependence can be a source of deep, almost visceral pleasure: to know nothing of where one is going, to have no responsibility for how one gets there or the risks involved. I must have knelt on the floor of the car backward to further increase that feeling of powerlessness as I stared up at the passing lights.
The same feeling came back to me when my Apple laptop casually reported that it had some updating to do. If I accepted the lengthy terms and conditions, it would take care of everything else. To my surprise, this produced a familiar, almost visceral pleasure. The imbalance of responsibility, the comfortable presumption of trust, took me back to those late-night family-car journeys. I was traveling blind, but someone qualified was at the controls: This was a few years ago, and Apple’s then-chummy, soft-focus anti-Microsoft brand was enough to trigger that infantile trust. (In the age of iCloud, however, it would probably be closer to the sensation of hitching a lift with a driver who’s suddenly slurring his words.)
That innocent experience of the software upgrade — the relinquishing of control to something one does not understand or want to understand, consenting to a back-seat ride on sheer faith — is now a normal part of being a smartphone user, so normal that we scarcely notice it any longer. It is the sort of asymmetrical expertise one typically associates with a visit to the doctor — and it’s no surprise that apps hope to mediate that relationship as well.
How did we come to believe the phone knows best? When cultural and economic historians look back on the early 21st century, they will be faced with the riddle of how, in little more than a decade, vast populations came to accept so much quantification and surveillance with so little overt coercion or economic reward. The consequences of this, from the Edward Snowden revelations to the transformation of urban governance, are plain, yet the cultural and psychic preconditions remain something of a mystery. What is going on when people hand over their thoughts, selves, sentiments, and bodies to a data grid that is incomprehensible to them?
***
The liberal philosophical tradition explains this sort of surrender in terms of conscious and deliberate trade-offs. Our autonomy is a piece of personal property that we can exchange for various guarantees. We accept various personal “costs” for certain political or economic “benefits.” For Thomas Hobbes, relinquishing the personal use of force and granting the state a monopoly on violence is a prerequisite to any legal rights at all: “Freedom” is traded for “security.” In more utilitarian traditions, autonomy is traded for some form of economic benefit, be it pleasure, money, or satisfaction. What both accounts share is the presumption that no set of power relations could persist if individuals could not reasonably consent to it.
Does that fit with the quantified, mass-surveilled society? It works fine as a post-hoc justification: “Yes,” the liberal will argue, “people sacrifice some autonomy, some privacy — but they only do so because they value convenience, efficiency, pleasure, or security even more highly.” This suggests, as per rational-choice theory, that social media and smart technologies, like the Google Now “dashboard” that constantly feeds the user information on fastest travel routes and relevant weather information in real time, are simply driving cost savings into everyday life, cutting out time-consuming processes and delivering outcomes more efficiently, much as e-government contractors once promised to do for the state. Dating apps, such as Tinder, pride themselves on allowing people to connect to those who are nearest and most desirable and to block out everyone else.
Leaving aside the unattractiveness of this as a vision of friendship, romance, or society, there are several other problems with it. First, it’s not clear that a utilitarian explanation works even on its own limited terms to justify our surrender to technology. It does not help people do what they want: Today, people hunt desperately for ways of escaping the grid of interactivity, precisely so as to get stuff done. Apps such as Freedom (which blocks all internet connectivity from a laptop) and Anti-Social (which blocks social media specifically) are sold as productivity-enhancing. The rise of “mindfulness,” “digital detox,” and sleep gurus in the contemporary business world testifies to this. Preserving human capital in full working order is something that now involves carefully managed forms of rest and meditation, away from the flickering of data.
Second, the assumption that if individuals do something uncoerced, then it was because it was worth doing rests on a tightly circular argument that assumes that the autonomous, calculating self precedes and transcends whatever social situation it finds itself in. Such a strong theory of the self is scarcely tenable in the context for which it was invented, namely, the market. The mere existence of advertising demonstrates that few businesses are prepared to rely on mathematical forces of supply and demand to determine how many of their goods are consumed. Outside the market realm, its descriptive power falls to pieces entirely, especially given “smart” environments designed to pre-empt decision-making.
The theory of the rational-calculating self has been under quiet but persistent attack within the field of economics since the 1970s, resulting in the development of behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. Rather than postulate that humans never make mistakes about what is in their best interest, these new fields use laboratory experiments, field experiments, and brain scanners to investigate exactly how good humans are at pursuing their self-interest (as economists define it, anyway). They have become a small industry for producing explanations of why we really behave as we do and what our brains are really doing behind our backs.
From a cultural perspective, behavioral economics and neuroeconomics are less interesting for their truth value (which, after all, would have surprised few behavioral psychologists of the past century) but their public and political reception. The fields have been met with predictable gripes from libertarians, who argue that the critique of individual rationality is an implicit sanction for the nanny state to act on our behalf. Nonetheless, celebrity behaviorists such as Robert Cialdini and Richard Thaler have found an enthusiastic audience, not only among marketers, managers, and policymakers who are professionally tasked with altering behavior, but also the nonfiction-reading public, tapping into a far more pervasive fascination with biological selfhood and a hunger for social explanations that relieve individuals of responsibility for their actions.
The establishment of a Behavioural Insights Team within the British government in 2010 (and since privatized) is a case in point of this surprising new appetite for nonliberal or postliberal theories of individual decision making. Set against the prosaic nature of the team’s actual achievements, which have mainly involved slightly faster processing of tax and paperwork, the level of intrigue that surrounds it, and the political uses of behaviorism in general, seems disproportionate. The unit attracted some state-phobic critiques, but these have been far outnumbered by a half-mystical, half-technocratic media fascination with the idea of policymakers manipulating individual decisions. This poses the question of whether behavior change from above is attractive not in spite of its alleged paternalism but because of it.
Likewise, the notorious Facebook experiment on “emotional contagion” was understandably controversial. But would it be implausible to suggest that people were also enchanted by it? Was there not also a mystical seduction at work, precisely because it suggested some higher power, invisible to the naked eye? We assume, rationally, that the presence of such a power is dangerous. But it is no contradiction to suggest that it might also be comforting or mesmerizing. To feel part of some grand technocratic plan, even one that is never made public, has the allure of immersing the self in a collective, in a manner that had seemed to have been left on the political scrapheap of the 20th century.
***
Contrary to the liberal assumptions of rational-choice theory, the place of digital media in our society seems less about enhancing freedom than helping us — in the words of the Frankfurt School psychoanalyst Erich Fromm — escape freedom. Fromm worried that individuals would flee liberalism for authoritarianism. The warm feeling I received from being driven through the dark as a child would have looked to Fromm like a primary ingredient of possible fascism, should a leader manage to rekindle that same emotion in me. Today, however, it is less charismatic autocrats that threaten to evoke this feeling than a web of largely incomprehensible technological infrastructure. As sociologist Mark Andrejevic has argued, environments become “smart” so that we no longer have to be.
Common to both the charismatic leader and smart technology is their ability to evoke what Immanuel Kant described as the “sublime,” which, he argued, arises as a result of human cognition being utterly overwhelmed by an aesthetic experience. First we cower in terror, but then we quickly realize that everything is still okay. The discovery that the individual can survive, in spite of being overpowered, brings intense pleasure.
So in some ways, Big Data is an inappropriately cutesy and diminutive term for the system it describes. If it were merely big, like an elephant or the Empire State Building is big, it would not inspire the terror that induces us to relinquish our freedom to it. We should perhaps talk instead of a Data Sublime.
The notion of a Data Sublime has been suggested by art historian Julian Stallabrass in “What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography,” a 2007 article on photographic portraiture. Noting a trend towards blank, expressionless but technically awe-inspiring photographs of human subjects, manifest in the work of Rineke Dijkstra among others, Stallabrass argues that:
subjective, creative choice has been subsumed in favour of greater resolution and bit depth, a measurable increase in the quantity of data. The manifest display of very large amounts of data in such images may be related to a broader trend in contemporary art to exploit the effect of the ‘data sublime’. In providing the viewer with the impression and spectacle of a chaotically complex and immensely large configuration of data, these photographs act much as renditions of mountain scenes and stormy seas did on nineteenth-century urban viewers.
To this we might also add the recent popularity of Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood and novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard’sMy Struggle, which — as I’ve suggested before — take the content of the social media age but subject it to an epically modernist reformulation. The sheer granularity of representation achieves an impact all of its own.
Fascism can be understood as a form of political sublime, combining overwhelming displays of physical force with false memories and histories. What we see in the current culture of quantification and self-surveillance also involves displays and rumors of almost unimaginable physical capability. How big is Big Data? If loaded onto CDs and placed on top of each other, the pile would reach all the way to the moon and back 10,000 times. This is an aesthetic claim, not a scientific one; it functions beyond empiricism to awe us.
But awe is not the Data Sublime’s only approach. It also insinuates itself with subtle cultural appropriations from history, redeeming bureaucracy — whose cold, quantitative, deindividualizing rationality has been under sustained rhetorical attack since the 1960s, first by the New Left and later by neoliberals parroting Marcusean rhetoric — as a kind of nostalgia. The imposing force of a faceless, bureaucratic hierarchy has developed its own aesthetic and psychoanalytic appeal, in an age when individuals are ostensibly responsible for whatever befalls them. The phenomenon of “Ostalgie,” the aestheticization of old East German brands and lifestyles, offers a glimpse of this, as does the enthusiasm for communist iconography that has crept into some reaches of the intellectual left over recent years. As we reach the 25th anniversary of the demise of state socialism, the idea of a uniformed officer demanding to see one’s papers can feel curiously seductive. How else to understand our desire to “share” so much information that we have no need or incentive to provide? In terms of information architecture, the procedures of an early 20th century bureaucracy and the data analytics of, say, Facebook have little in common. But each offers individuals a taste of quantitative rationalism as a means to give themselves away.
The early quantified-self movement performed important work in helping aestheticize the habits and techniques of digital surveillance. Techniques for digitally auditing one’s body, moods, sleep, or behavior were developed and shared by artists and geeks in a spirit of playfulness and experimentation. The suggestion was that this was a new form of self government or autonomy. Processes of data collection and analysis were presented as fun and countercultural. Far from the fears of the “one-dimensional man” Marcuse warned of, the mechanical optimization of the self and body was framed as subversively creative.
Yet by stressing the self-authored artistic nature of this venture, it misrepresented what was to follow. Now that business models are emerging around tracking devices and self-surveillance —such as the integration of the Apple Watch with the health insurance industry — the affective appeal of quantification is to suspend the neoliberal injunction to self-create, or at least to share that responsibility with a data bank whose scale one cannot comprehend.
In this way, the Data Sublime confronts the individual with an almost irresistible paradox. Under neoliberal conditions, which stress individual authenticity above all else, this is an aesthetic which promises a higher order form of autonomy than that which is available through liberal appeals to consumer rationality. The appearance of “predictive shopping,” in which goods are selectively mailed to consumers on the basis of past behavior rather than expressed preference or choice (a case of what Rob Horning terms “pre-emptive personalization“), exemplifies the Data Sublime. First appalled by the loss of control, the consumer swiftly discovers that she is nevertheless receiving excellent customer service, and an even more intense pleasure resumes.
***
To whom or what are we relinquishing ourselves? And what do they want? The liberal fear is that we are subordinating ourselves to some master plan over which we have no democratic power. Political autonomy has been centralized. But for Fromm, things are more unnerving than that. According to his theory of authoritarianism, the “leader” is secretly as vulnerable as the “follower.” Unable to find any ethical purpose of its own, each party seeks it in the other.
This is the possibility that lurks within the Data Sublime. Sheer quantitative magnitude is as disturbing as exciting, no matter from which angle one perceives it. The engineers of the smart city or the sharing economy undoubtedly want to be rich. But the capacity for social control has now outgrown any currently available political project. Its sole purpose is to sate the more dispersed desire to be controlled.
In a November newspaper interview, Google CEO Larry Page confessed that he was no longer sure what his company was for. He admitted that, as the corporation moves into pharmaceutical research and bodily monitoring, it had outgrown its original mission statement to “organize the world’s information.” “We’re in a bit of uncharted territory,” he said. “We’re trying to figure it out. How do we use all these resources?”
We donate our identities to a sublime grid of quantification, ignorant of the ultimate ends to which this is put. What if there are no ends? Big Data’s proclaimed slaying of “theory” eventually spells existential crisis for all. The absence of any ideology behind the Data Sublime renders it a pure procedure, much as Kafka anticipated with respect to bureaucracy. The child enjoys not knowing where the car is heading. It doesn’t occur to him that the parent doesn’t know either.
There’s something innately funny about Merriam-Webster’s announcement, earlier this month, that “culture” is their 2014 Word of the Year. “Culture” is the “Scary Movie” of words of the year, which, ordinarily, are supposed to reflect culture (“vape,” “selfie”) without actually being “culture.” Merriam-Webster’s editors are at pains to clarify that they weren’t trying to be meta (which, incidentally, would’ve made a great word of the year back in 2000). The word “culture,” they explain, was simply the word that saw the biggest spike in look-ups on their Web site. Confusion about culture was just part of the culture this year. People were desperate to know what “culture” meant...
bacterial culture…cultured…culture and manurance of minds…French culture, company culture, or multiculturalism…culture as activity…culture that makes you a better person or culture that just inducts you into a group…
culture as opposed to civilization, an unpredictable expression of human potential for its own sake…the culture industry…culture used to be a good thing…counter-culture…celebrity culture…culture of transparency…culture of accountability…coffee culture…
...rape culture: the subterranean, group-defining norms (misogyny, privilege) that encourage violence against women and the cultural institutions that propagate these norms.
You can't see the word "culture" next to the word "rape' without revising your ideas about what "culture" means...
…Does it make sense to have a single word, "culture," with such divergent uses?
…It is possible to imagine a more rational system...
Those terms… 1) activities of artistic and intellectual life
2) group identity
3) implicit norms and ways of living
…whatever they might be, would be narrower and simpler—but they'd also be less accurate. They would obscure the overlap between life, art, and politics.
And they’d be less meaningful, too. “Culture” may be pulling itself apart from the inside, but it represents, in its way, a wish. The wish is that a group of people might discover, together, a good way of life; that their good way of life might express itself in their habits, institutions, and activities; and that those, in turn, might help individuals flourish in their own ways. The best culture would be one in which the three meanings of “culture” weren’t at odds with one another. That’s not the culture we have at the moment; our culture is fractured, and so our sense of the word “culture” is, too. But it’s possible to imagine a world in which our collective attitudes and institutions further everyone’s individual growth. Maybe, in such a world, the meaning of “culture” would be more obvious; we wouldn’t have to look it up.
--
Question: Is a "more obvious" meaning of culture, in fact, desirable?
Integrating The Non-Rational Soul by Jonathan Lear
Listen to Lear deliver the paper here:
And/Or, my abridged transcription:
Aristotelian theory of virtue and of happiness assumes a moral psychology in which the parts of the soul, rational and non-rational, can communicate well with each other, But if Aristotle cannot give a robust account of what communicating well consists in, he faces Bernard Williams’ charge that his moral psychology collapses into a moralizing psychology assuming the very categories it seeks to vindicate. This paper examines the problem and proposes a way forward: namely, that Freudian psychoanalysis provides the resources for the development of a satisfying Aristotelian moral psychology.
Aristotle says that ‘there seems to be some other nature of the soul that is non-rational, but which in a way participates in reason.’ The Oxford and Loeb translations give us a non-rational ‘element’ of the soul, the Rowe translation gives us another ‘kind’ of soul,’ but Aristotle is explicit that he is talking about a different nature. Since nature, for Aristotle, is an inner principle of change and rest, this would suggest that the non-rational soul on which Aristotle is focusing has its own principle of functioning. For Aristotle, we are in the best position to understand what a principle is when we grasp the excellent functioning of that of which it is a principle. For the virtuous person—in this case, Aristotle mentions the temperate and courageous person—Aristotle gives us two criteria: first, the non-rational soul is better able and more willing to listen to reason; second, with respect to all things, it speaks with the same voice as reason. That is, the excellence of this non-rational part of the soul consists in communicating—listening to and speaking with reason. So, the non-rational soul has a distinctive form of activity, but that activity is nevertheless communicative: it listens and it speaks. And performing that communicative activity well is nothing other than ethical virtue, according to Aristotle. For ethical virtue is the excellence of the non-rational soul.
…to a contemporary English speaker, the phrase ‘speak with the same voice as’ or ‘listening better and more willingly to’ may, on a superficial first hearing, sound as though it leaves out the active living that is the life of the virtuous person. But, for Aristotle, the courageous person acting courageously is precisely an instance of the non-rational soul listening better and more willingly to, and speaking with the same voice as, reason. Nothing more is needed; on the other hand, nothing less is involved than this excellence of communication.
More is at stake here than the interpretation of a short passage from Aristotle. The possibility of an Aristotelian approach to ethics is at stake. Aristotle delineates an intermediate part of the soul that, depending on the way one looks at it, can be considered either rational or non-rational. It is non-rational in that it lacks the proper capacities of reason; but it is rational in that it can participate in reason’s activities, and at its best can listen well to and speak with the same voice as reason. It is on this distinction that Aristotle grounds his further distinction between intellectual and ethical virtues. Ethical virtue is of the non-rational soul. And, as we have seen, the non-rational soul has a nature—its own inner principle of change—which consists in excellent communication (of the appropriate sort) with reason. This communication is what the integration of the non-rational soul consists in. We may not yet know much about it, but are in a position to see that anything less must be something less than Aristotelian ethical virtue.
It is this possibility of the rational and non-rational parts of the soul speaking-with-the-same-voice that lends insight into why, for both Plato and Aristotle, psychic harmony should have ethical value…
…It is another question what this possible harmony consists in…Aristotle says the non-rational soul has its own nature, and that means it has its own internal principle of change, even though he also says that in a way it participates in reason. If it participates in reason, it must be a form of mindedness; but if it has a different nature—a different principle of change—this implies that it is a different form of mindedness from that of the rational soul. But how can two distinct forms of mindedness communicate with each other? How could there be a harmony of different natures? It is not enough to say that each participates in reason; we need to know how they participate, and how that makes effective communication possible.
…A distinctively moral psychology, Williams says, ‘uses the categories of meaning, reason and value, but leaves open, or even problematical, in what way moral reasons and ethical values fit with other motives and desires, how far they express those other motives and how far they are in conflict with them.’ Williams thought that neither Aristotle’s psychology, nor Plato’s, could live up to this task, and he looked elsewhere for inspiration: ‘Thucydides and (I believe) the tragedians, among the ancient writers, had such a psychology, and so in the modern world did Freud.’ …
Unlike Williams, I do not see Aristotle’s psychology as inevitable moralizing; but rather unfinished. So, instead of using Freud as a way of leaving Aristotle’s moral psychology behind, I want to argue that psychoanalysis can provide valuable insight into the communicative relations between the rational and non-rational parts of the soul…It might at first seem strange that I am linking Aristotle’s non-rational soul to the Freudian unconscious, since the major activity of Aristotle’s non-rational soul are manifest in emotional life, and our emotions tend to be conscious experiences. However, Freud’s discovery is that the non-rational soul has a significant unconscious dimension, and that it proceeds according to its own form.
Indeed, I believe Freud’s most significant discovery is not of the unconscious per se, but that the unconscious mental activity has a distinctive nature. The unconscious, Freud teaches, (1) proceeds according to the loose associations and condensations of primary process mental activity; it (2) works in a mode that is exempt from contradiction and in a temporality of timelessness; it (3) substitutes psychical reality for external reality. It also emerges from Freud’s case studies that the non-rational soul—that part which he called the unconscious—is typically engaged in a basic project: trying to address a problem of human existence, albeit in a non-rational and childish way. Thus it makes sense to think of the Freudian unconscious as ‘another nature of the soul’ in Aristotle’s sense. It has its own principles of change as well as a telos—namely, negotiating a fundamental problem of human existence (albeit in a fantasied, imaginative, non-rational way). In this sense, Freud’s discover is an enrichment of that original Aristotelian intuition. And psychoanalysis, the praxis, is the attempt to facilitate communication between the non-rational and rational soul.
This has not been appreciated due to a widespread misconception of what psychoanalysis is. The misconception has various manifestations, but at its core is the idea of the psychoanalyst as an expert on what is hidden in another person’s unconscious mind…
On this model, the psychoanalyst is an expert at taking an empirical stance with respect the analysand, perhaps picking up unusual bits of available evidence, and then making an inference to what must be going on in the analysand’s unconscious mind. The analyst might also be good at encouraging the analysand to take just such an empirical stance with respect to herself.
Of course, in popular culture there are the familiar images of the analyst as someone relentlessly searching for repressed memories; or the analyst who somehow has the keys to unlock the psychic basement and a special light to shine under the cobwebbed stairs.
All of these images are based on something, but they misrepresent the psychoanalytic situation. Aristotle tells us that if we are to grasp an area of knowledge adequately, it is important to find the right starting point. And we must also distinguish the order in which we discover a field of knowledge from the order in which we set it out when we understand its mature form. At the beginning of his career, Freud was on the hunt for repressed memories; and he was willing to make so-called deep interpretations of what was purportedly going on in the analysand’s mind. An interpretation is considered ‘deep’ if it is not easily available to the analysand’s own self-conscious experience. But Freud fairly quickly realized that simply telling a person the contents of her unconscious not only had no positive therapeutic effect, it regularly provoked irritation and resistance; on occasion it led to the analysand breaking off treatment. In effect, he recognized that simply telling another person the truth about himself was not a therapeutic method. By the time he writes, “Remember, repeating and working through” in 1914, he gives a history of the development of psychoanalytic technique which consists in abandoning deep interpretation or the search for any particular hidden item in favor of facilitating the analysand’s own associations:
Finally, there was evolved the consistent technique used today, in which the analyst gives up the attempt to bring a particular moment or problem into focus. He contents himself with studying whatever is present for the time being on the surface of the patient’s mind, and he employs the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of recognizing the resistances which appear there, and making them conscious to the patient. From this there results a new sort of division of labor: the doctor uncovers the resistances which are unknown to the patient; when these have been got the better of, the patient often relates the forgotten situations and connections without any difficulty.(1914, pp. 147-148)
On this conception, the psychoanalyst is not an expert about the hidden contents of another’s mind. Rather, the analyst is a facilitator of the free speech of another. In that same year that he presented this revised technique, Freud added this footnote to a later edition of The Interpretation of Dreams:
The technique [of dream-interpretation] which I describe in the pages that follow differs in one essential respect from the ancient method: it imposes the task of interpretation upon the dreamer himself. It is not concerned with what occurs to the interpreter in connection with a particular element of the dream but with what occurs to the dreamer. (Freud 1930a, p. 98n)
The emphasis no is on the analyst facilitating a process through which the analysand him- or herself will come to be able to speak its meaning. In this sense, psychoanalysis stands in a tradition of Socratic midwifery.
From the beginning Freud encouraged his patients to say what was on their minds, but by 1912 he had explicitly formulated what he called the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis: namely, that the analysand should try to say whatever comes into conscious awareness without censorship or inhibition. In call this rule fundamental Freud signals that this is the basic norm of psychoanalysis: the analysand is to try to speak his mind; the analyst is to facilitate the process. I take this to be a constitutive norm: we come over time to understand what psychoanalysis is as we come to understand what is genuinely involved in facilitating a process by which the analysand develops the capacity to speak his or her mind in an unfettered way. Whatever the complexities of technique, it is worth noticing a great simplicity here: a single norm to speak one’s mind freely. And there is this humanistic elegance: whatever therapeutic value psychoanalysis has, it flows through the self-conscious understanding of the analysand. Obviously, there are a myriad of phenomena one might use the term “self-consciousness” to describe. But the fundamental rule gives us a basis for an unusual, and perhaps surprising claim: psychoanalysis is the activity of facilitating the free flow of self consciousness. This claim is more illuminating than the (ultimately misleading) claim that psychoanalysis concerns the discovery of hidden contents of the mind.
It is also misleading to characterize this relationship in terms of one person being an especially good observer of empirical evidence inadvertently disclosed by the other. The psychoanalytic relationship is one of emotional intimacy and mutual, concerned engagement—more like a second-personal, I-thou relation. As a formal matter, psychoanalysis begins with one persona asking another person for help, and the other person responding that he thinks he can be of help precisely through offering psychoanalysis. Whatever the demands of psychoanalytic neutrality, it is not a stance of detached, empirical observation. So, an analyst may be on the lookout for empirically available evidence, notable a pause in the flow of speech—but it is in the context of a committed engagement to help. This help does not consist in using such an occasion to formulate an empirically grounded hypothesis to present to the analysand. Rather, it is an occasion to ask the analysand if she is aware that she has paused, and to wait to hear the analysand’s own reports of what she was thinking during the pause, where her mind wandered, and whether she had an internal sense of whether the pause was somehow related to what she was thinking. It is astonishing how much will come to the analysand’s mind in this way.* In such cases, the analyst is not proposing an empirically grounded hypothesis about the hidden contents of another’s mind, he is facilitating a process by which the analysand expands and deepens her own capacity for first-person authority on the contents of her mind.
* Analysands have reported to me that, if they pay attention, they can feel thoughts escaping their consciousness; with effort they can draw them back. They can see for themselves that the thought they were about to lose was not an indifferent thought, but an unwanted thought; one which was about to lead in uncomfortable directions. That is, when the analyst is working with the analysand at the level of the analysand’s own conscious experience, the analysand will on occasion experience repression as a conscious experience.
It turns out that no one can follow the fundamental rule. As Freud said, ‘there comes a time in every analysis when the patient disregards it.’ (1913, p. 135n) That time comes very soon. There will be some kind of disruption to the free flow of speaking one’s mind; a pause or silence, a sudden change of subject, intense fatigue, the eruption of a somatic issue like coughing, a stomach ache, head ache, bowl troubles, and so on. These disruptions are not merely accidental but are motivated in various ways. They tend to function as inhibitions; sometimes under the guidance of self-conscious will, often bypassing the will, often just outside of conscious awareness, though it is relatively easy to draw a person’s attention to them. These moments are of philosophical significance. They show, first, that there is something internally conflicted about the spontaneous unfolding of self-consciousness. Psychoanalysis promotes self-conscious awareness of these specific moments of internal conflict within self-consciousness. Second, these are moment in which the rational and non-rational parts of the soul are speaking in manifestly different voices. It is as though the unconscious is interrupting the flow of self-conscious speech…
…Freud formulated the concept ego precisely because he came to see that the repressed unconscious is only part of the story. There are in addition motivated strategies for living, for dealing with uncomfortable material, for keeping the repressed at bay that are themselves unconscious. And these modes of ego-functioning, themselves resist self-conscious understanding. Thus “the unconscious’ lies on both sides of repressing/repressed—divide.
…we find ourselves in an unforeseen situation. We have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed—that is, which produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious. (1923, p. 17)
And he concludes, ‘we must admit that the characteristic of being unconscious begins to lose significance for us. It becomes a quality which can have many meanings.’ (p. 18)
From an Aristotelian perspective this is important because it means that ‘the unconscious’ can show up as something that looks like character. We are not just dealing with hidden forbidden wishes. It would require a paper of its own to delineate how the Aristotelian and Freudian divisions of the psyche map onto each other. For now the important point is this: The ego is and takes itself to be the voice of reason in that it is the capacity for self-conscious deliberation and intentional action, for forming conscious beliefs on the basis of perception and argument, and for giving reasons to others. It takes itself to be rational and reality-governed; and when all is going very well, that is correct. However, Freud’s point is that a person’s capacity for reason can be pervaded by unconscious, non-rational, mental forces; and when that happens reason can be pervasively distorted by a non-rational form of thinking. The issue is not just about repressed desires. And this complicates the question of what it would be for the rational and non-rational parts of the soul to speak with the same voice.
I once worked with an analysand Ms. A, who seemed to inhabit a disappointing world. No matter what happened, she would experience it in a disappointing way. Real life disappointments were of course disappointing, but even when something she wanted came to pass, there quickly followed a disappointing interpretive frame. ‘My boss told me he is going to seek a promotion for me... But he probably felt he had to... He was too embarrassed just to promote X, who he really wanted to promote, and not promote me as well.’ We can thus give sense to Ms. A living in a disappointing world in the sense that whether P happened or not-P happened, she would experience the world as letting her down. I came to think of this world as a geodesic dome of disappointment, because it was constructed of countless small triangles. In the case of getting promoted, it was someone else the boss really wanted to appoint. When a colleague to whom she was attracted invited her out, Ms. A assumed he had already been turned down by someone else, and now had nothing better to do. In relation to friends, X was always a better friend to Y than to her. In the family, there were the familiar triangles: the mother loved her brother more; the parents loved each other more than they loved her, and so on. Experiencing life in disappointing ways had become a style of living, experienced as rational; and the analysand was resolutely unaware of how active she was in living that way.
If we can put Freud’s insight into Aristotelian terms, the unconscious, non-rational soul has its own nature, its own form of mental activity. He mentions timelessness and exemption from contradiction as two hallmarks (1915, p. 187)—and it is uncanny to see how these features unconsciously pervade conscious life. From the point of view of consciousness, Ms. A’s disappointments looks like repetition (even if the repetition was not initially recognized by Ms. A as such): disappointment is happening over and over again. But if we try to capture the structure of Ms. A’s subjectivity, each of these individual disappointments is derivative. Each is there to sustain a large-scale structure: that life shall be disappointing. This injunction has a different temporality from the historical narratives of life (when I was young I was disappointed by my parents, then as a teenager I was let down by my boyfriend, and now in adult life...). It hangs over the historical narrative and informs it with the timeless quality of disappointment. Via the particular moments in life, a primordial structure, disappointment, is timelessly held in place. This insight links the Freudian unconscious to the Aristotelian conception of character. The ethical virtues are based on character and character-formation. Character is ethically significant because it too has a quality of timelessness. The ethically virtuous person has an excellent character and thus we can count on that person to act in outstanding ways, and it does not really matter whether it is this time or that. Of course, the tendency to experience the world as a disappointment is not a human excellence. Still, even here we can see a certain timeless steadfastness by which Ms. A insists upon (and thus protects) her unhappiness.
Freud also said that the unconscious is exempt from mutual contradiction, and as brilliant a philosopher as Donald Davidson interpreted this to mean that if a person consciously believes P, he may also unconsciously believe not-P. And he then concluded that the unconscious must be like another mind with its own holistic connections among propositional attitudes. But Freud’s point is not about believing in contradictions, it is about the productions of the unconscious being unopposed by rational considerations to the contrary. So when, in an intrusive daydream, Ms. A imagines I prefer another analysand to her—and in the fury and disappointment that evokes—the salient evidence to the contrary seems to fall away. Her capacity for seeing ‘the other side of the coin’ goes into abeyance.
Aristotle thought that the non-rational soul was childish in the sense that at its best it could listen well to and follow grown-up advice. Freud adds rich, non-moralizing detail to what this childishness consists in. And this opens up the possibility of a more nuanced account than anything Aristotle could have envisaged of what it might be for the rational and non-rational parts of the soul to speak with the same voice. For Freud the non-rational soul is childish in this sense: it shows up as an imaginative yet ultimately non-rational attempt to address a basic problem of human vulnerability—one that arose in childhood, and whose attempted solution was crafted in childhood, but which unconsciously persists into adult life. Ironically, our imaginations regularly act like a resourceful philosopher who lacks the capacity for rational thought. As finite, non-omnipotent creatures we are constitutively vulnerable in a world over which we have, at best, limited control. How disappointing that we cannot render ourselves invulnerable to disappointment! An imaginary strategy which the young Ms. A chanced upon was to render herself invulnerable to the world’s disappointments by getting there first and, in fantasy, inflicting the disappointment upon herself. This is an omnipotent ‘victory’—being in control of the disappointment—that consists in a lifetime of suffering disappointment. It has this illusory benefit: it protects a childish sense of omnipotence from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. There is, as it were, a hiding place for her omnipotence, and the disappointments paradoxically reinforce her sense of power and control. Of course, from an Aristotelian perspective, this is a disastrous outcome; in effect, a training of the non-rational soul to speak in ways that will ensure unhappiness. Psychoanalysis is an intervention which attempts to undo this outcome and open up hitherto foreclosed possibilities for human flourishing. The mode of its efficacy is of philosophical importance.
How does psychoanalysis help a person change her mind? Aristotle tells us that in the case of human excellence, the rational and non-rational parts of the soul speak with the same voice. This would suggest that when we are working with persons who are at best en route to a better psychological form of life, we ought to expect moments when the rational and non-rational parts of the soul speak with different voices, and when communication between the parts either breaks down or reaches a crisis point. Such moments of disruption can be put to creative use.
Well into the analysis, an hour began where I could hear Ms. A hesitate. She was pausing more than usual, breaking the silence with mundane topics such as an upcoming meeting, and then pausing again. As she entered into another pause, I asked if she noticed that she was pausing and whether there might be something on her mind that she was reluctant to say. She thought about it for a while and then said that actually she had wanted to ask me whether I could reschedule an hour, and she now realized she had been hesitating. As she thought further, she realized she was afraid I would say no. And as she continued to associate she realized that she had had a daydream-thought—that went out of her conscious mind almost as soon as it entered—that I would probably be with someone else with whom I preferred to be. So here, in the living present was one of the petite triangles of disappointment that made up her geodesic dome. Only this time, I was included in the triangle, an instance of what Freud called transference. The significance of transference is that it is a voice of the non-rational soul that immediately and presently entangles the analyst. It is, as it were, an attempt to draw the analyst inside an unconscious drama. Thus, Freud said, “transference presents the psychoanalyst with the greatest difficulties.” (1912b, p.108) He meant both the technical difficulties of handling it, and the emotional difficulties of tolerating it. Freud came to see that this was the key to the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment: ‘But it should not be forgotten that it is precisely [transferences] that do us the inestimable service of making the patient's hidden and forgotten impulses immediate and manifest. For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in abstention or in effigy.’ (Freud 1912b, p. 108) In the transference, the voice of the non-rational soul is alive, immediately present and palpable in the analytic situation. And the analyst and analysand’s joint task is to find a rationally informed voice that facilitates successful communication with the non-rational soul.
Ms. A associated to a litany of times throughout her life when she had wanted to speak, but stopped herself for fear of disappointment—thereby disappointing herself. She could see for herself that this was a fractal moment: immediately graspable in the present, but containing in itself a large-scale structure of her life. She could see—not just as a theoretical insight – but as an emotionally laden moment in the living present, that she was protecting herself from being disappointed by me by anticipating it and inflicting the disappointment on herself. She also grasped immediately and from the inside that her sense of rationality had been skewed. She knew with clarity and immediate availability to consciousness: this triangle was her creation. She then made a comment of unusual emotional intensity: ‘The rage I anticipate, the rage if you say no…no one has even said no. It feels like an eternal obstacle, a weight on my throat, keeping me from speaking.’’ The power of these words cannot be gleaned from their content alone. To be sure, the statement was a sincere, accurate and insightful account of her feelings; they also expressed her feelings, and were uttered by her in the process of coming to self-understanding. As such, the statement might have therapeutic value. But, on this occasion, the power of the words went beyond that. It was as though a weight was literally lifted off her throat. One could hear her larynx open, her throat clear. Freud taught that the unconscious often speaks in corporeal terms, with bodily symptoms and corporeal representations of mental activity. (Freud 1923, p. 26; 1925, p. 237) In this moment, Ms. A is self-consciously describing her experience, and she is using a metaphor to do so: it feels as though a weight has been lifted from her throat. This is the voice of her rational soul, her ego, self- consciously describing her emotional experience. In the same moment her non-rational soul—even though it has its own nature, its own form of mental activity – speaks in the same voice. It is a moment in which the word becomes flesh. Ms. A could feel that the various voices in her soul had come together. This speaking-with-the-same-voice has a phenomenology, of vibrancy and efficacy. Ms. A could feel that in the power of her speech and self-conscious awareness, she was actively taking this particular triangle apart. Her awareness of her efficacy was constitutive of this efficacy, and she was aware of that. That is, her ability to break this triangle down was flowing immediately through her self-conscious understanding of the artificiality of the triangle. For lack of a better term, this seems to me a kind of poetic efficacy, one that occurs when the non-rational soul and the rational soul come to speak with the same voice. With laughter, relief and relish she could ask me: might I be willing to schedule a different hour? In asking this question I could hear that she was, as it were, all in. She herself could feel her world changing. This speaking-with-the-same-voice is itself a moment of integrating the rational and non-rational soul.
Do that again and again and again with the petite triangles as they keep coming up over time and you have the process that Freud called working-through. It is too simple to call this a step-by-step process, but it is sufficiently discrete and clear that it takes the mystery out of the thought that over time the analysand herself can take apart a world that had hitherto held her captive. This is ethically significant in that it enables a person to live more realistically and truthfully. And by now it should be clear that psychoanalysis aims at more than theoretical insight into oneself—that I tend to experience the world in disappointing ways; and it aims at more than the practical ability to take ameliorative steps when one feels disappointment coming on. It aims to change the structure of the psyche, by facilitating communication between the non- rational and rational parts of the soul.
…Aristotle is clear that the ethical virtues are excellences of the non-rational part of the soul; while practical wisdom (phronêsis) is an intellectual virtue…Yet the possibility of happiness depends on getting these excellences to work together. Without ethical virtue, Aristotle suggests, practical wisdom degenerates into mere cleverness—the skill of obtaining poorly chosen goals…Conversely, the development of true ethical virtues requires the aid of practical wisdom…The Freudian contribution is to offer a rich account of what this being-with relation might consist in.
Aristotle is clear that eudaimonia—regularly translated as ‘happiness’—is possible for humans, but not for other animals…For Aristotle, the non-rational souls of other animals lack the capacity to be with reason in the right sort of way. This is the capacity for the rational and non-rational parts of the soul to speak with the same voice. Without a substantial understanding of what this consists in, Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia, the highest human good, remains a placeholder. Freud thus gives us resources to flesh out the distinctive nature of Aristotle’s moral psychology. And this can open up possibilities for philosophy.
To give one example, it is a familiar thought in contemporary philosophy that our rationality and thus our freedom consists in our ability to step back in reflection and consider whether the evidence before us gives us a reason to believe, or whether in the face of a certain desire we have a reason to act. (Korsgaard 1968; pp. 92-92; McDowell 1998, pp. 170-171) This conception fits a moral psychology in which the threat to rationality comes from a sea of unruly desires—some conscious, some unconscious—pushing for satisfaction. These are treated as outside, though reason can either rule them in or rule them out. This psychology also makes plausible the thought that by this very activity we constitute ourselves. (Korsgaard, 2009) On this model, in the absence of our self-conscious commitments all that remains are unorganized desires.
But Ms. A’s desires were not disorganized—indeed, that was part of her problem. Her non-rational desires were all too organized, around a principle of disappointment. And her capacity of reason, for its part, had itself been infiltrated and shaped by her non-rational soul. Ms. A was adept at stepping back in reflection and judging that her experience was disappointing. It was in this very act of stepping back in purportedly rational deliberation that she unwittingly manifested her unfreedom. What Ms. A needed to move in the direction of psychic freedom and rationality was a break in the structure she experienced as reason, a break in her familiar activity of stepping back and reflecting, a break in the ordinary exercise of her capacity to judge.
It does not do justice to the phenomena to think of Ms. A as constituting herself through those self-conscious judgments which manifested disappointment. Those judgments themselves were surface manifestations of a powerful non-rational, unconscious structure – and they added a misleading patina of rational reflection. It defies plausibility to insist that this non-rational structure of desire has nothing to do with her—on the grounds that it is not the expression of her rational judgment. (Korsgaard 2011, Lear 2011, pp. 84-102) The unconscious structure is itself the manifestation of early non-rational, but imaginative attempts to address a basic problem of how to live. We should not rule out the thought that the expressions of this structure are coming from her simply because it does not fit a psychology that is inadequate to capture who we are.
Aristotle’s conception of the rational and rational parts of the soul speaking with the same voice provides a more illuminating model of what our rationality—and thus our eudaimonia—consists in. Here the central image is not of reflective distance, but a coming-together of voices into one. Rationality, on this model, is manifested in a lack of distance between the voices. Obviously, as rational animals, there will be important moments of stepping back and reflecting. But in those moments there will always be a further question of the manner in which that stepping back takes place. Is this moment of stepping back one in which the rational and non-rational parts of the soul are in the process of coming to speak with the same voice? Or is a cruel superego punitively holding desire in place? Or is the reflection just one more move in a pseudo-rational life, dominated by exaggerated acts of ‘rationality’? Certainly, the bare fact that self-conscious judgment has ruled a desire in or out is not sufficient to determine whether the voices of the soul are thereby coming to speak together. And this opens room for us to consider genuine acts of reflection to nevertheless be mere appearances of rationality or freedom.
They can also be mere appearances of our happiness. Aristotle’s insistence that reason speak with the same voice as the non-rational soul manifests a deep intuition of what eudaimonia consists in. For Aristotle, our happiness consists in part in the knowledge we are happy. That is, it partially consists in the correct, appropriately grounded, self-conscious comprehension of our happiness. Part of what it is for a happy life to be ‘lacking in nothing’, to be a ‘complete life’, a life of excellence according to reason is that it possesses within itself the knowledge that it is the happy life that it is. Now this knowing that constitutes our happiness is not just the propositional knowledge that we are living a happy life. It is also the rational, self-conscious grasp that the various voices in our soul are speaking with the same voice. This is an immediate, non-reflective knowing; a self-conscious experience of our rational and non-rational voices speaking with the same voice. This is a kind of knowing that is foreclosed to other animals, and it is one of the reasons Aristotle excludes them from eudaimonia.
Psychoanalysis is a form of self-conscious speech that aims to enhance the efficacy of thoughtful, self-conscious speech, an efficacy that runs through a self-conscious grasp of this efficacy; and an efficacy that can change the structure of the psyche. It is a form of psyche-formation that proceeds essentially through the psyche's own understanding of itself. This understanding has a theoretical as well as a practical aspect to it, but it is also poetic in the sense of self-creating through its own self-conscious grasp of its own meaning-making. In this way, psychoanalytic practice seems to me the best model we have of what is involved in reason coming to communicate with and thus inform the human soul. When Aristotle said that humans are by nature rational animals, he was isolating a distinctive capacity of the human soul. (Boyle, 2012; Thompson, 2004) Psychoanalysis shows us what is involved in bringing that capacity to fruition.
This is a humanistic value, do we wish to be creatures who take this peculiar responsibility for shaping our own psyches? Yet it is not easy to measure with empirically testable outcome studies. One can measure how well different therapies treat a discrete pre-existing condition, like depression; or one can measure the self-reports of satisfaction with a treatment, but none of these measures get at what psychoanalysis offers. Ironically, what psychoanalysis offers is basically itself. To put it in Aristotelian terms, psychoanalysis is both kinêsis and energeia—process and activity. It aims to help a person shape her mind in such a way that she can continue the life-activity of taking the non-rational part of her soul into harmonious and creative relations with her thoughtful self- conscious understanding. To bring Freudian and Aristotelian language together: psychoanalysis is both terminable (as kinêsis) and interminable (as energeia). It is the flourishing human activity of the rational soul taking immediate, poetic responsibility for the non-rational soul. Other names for this activity are, I think, truthfulness, rationality, freedom and eudaimonia.
…Freud added depth to the Aristotelian insight that the non-rational soul has its own nature, and that will inevitably complicate as it enriches what we might mean by the rational and non-rational parts of the soul speaking with the same voice. We risk yet another moralizing psychology if we assume we already know what speaking with the same voice must be. In particular, do not assume we need a marching band of the soul. Think instead of marvelous improvisational jazz: there are syncopated voices, some in the moment might appear at the edge of breaking the composition apart, but then they come spectacularly together – and the experience as a whole teaches us something about what it might be to come together into a single voice. If the voices of the non-rational soul are an occasion for a creative, in-tune and thoughtful response from reason; and if, in turn, reason is able to enliven and free up the voices of the non-rational soul, as it channels them into a life worth living, we can give content to the thought that this is a rich form of speaking with the same voice. This, I think, is a route for an Aristotelian ethics.
Some people will tell you that they have a clear sense of who they are, and that their sense of self is stable over time. Psychologists refer to this as having high “self-concept clarity.” In a new study, Jean Guerrettaz and Robert Arkin shine a spotlight on these self-proclaimed self-knowers. The researchers find that their confidence is often fragile, and that somewhat paradoxically, it is people confident in their sense of self whose self-esteem is most undermined by challenging questions about who they are...
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Question: Is it preferable to be “more modest about self knowledge,” thereby knowing oneself better “in the sense of being more in tune with (one’s) own limited self-knowledge,” OR to be “confident in (one’s) sense of self,” thereby repeatedly encountering the need to negotiate “challenging questions about who (you) are?”
Is it fair to conclude a "modest sense of self" puts an end to practices motivated by the need to negotiate questions of who you are and who you might be?
"Nomad thought" does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds.
The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislating subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which their subject, to the extent that they can be said to have one, is only secondary. They do not reflect upon the world, but are immersed in a changing state of things.
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. OR it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. "What interests us are the circumstances."
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Translator's Foreward
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
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Question: Is the opposite of "restrictive analogy" a "conductivity that knows no bounds," OR a conductivity that knows "bounds" as one of the things "immersed in a changing state of things?"
The hope was that network technology would bring us together, create a "global village," make our political desires more coherent. But what's happened is that our desires have become distributed, exploded into images and over screens our eyes relentlessly drop to view.
REVOLUTION OF THE PRESENT examines the strange effects — on cities, economies, people — of what we might call accelerated capitalism. Set against a visually striking array of sounds and images, 15 international thinkers speak to the complexity and oddity of this contemporary moment as they discuss what is and what can be.
Humanity seems to be stuck in the perpetual now that is our networked world. More countries are witnessing people taking to the streets in search of answers. Revolution of the Present, the film, features interviews with thought leaders designed to give meaning to our present and precarious condition. This historic journey allows us to us re-think our presumptions and narratives about the individual and society, the local and global, our politics and technology. This documentary analyzes why the opportunity to augment the scope of human action has become so atomized and diminished. Revolution of the Present is an invitation to join the conversation and help contribute to our collective understanding.
As Saskia Sassen, the renowned sociologist, states at the outset of the film, 'we live in a time of unsettlement, so much so that we are even questioning the notion of the global, which is healthy.' One could say that our film raises more questions than it answers, but this is our goal. Asking the right questions and going back to beginnings may be the very thing we need to do to understand the present, and to move forward from it with a healthy skepticism.
Revolution of the Present is structured as an engaging dinner conversation, there is no narrator telling you what to think, it is not a film of fear of the end time or accusation, it is an invitation to sit at the table and join an in depth conversation about our diverse and plural world.
Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.
What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.
...Heaven knows it is difficult enough to say precisely what it is that a piece of music means, to say it definitely, to say it finally so that everyone is satisfied with your explanation. But that should not lead one to the other extreme of denying to music the right to be "expressive."
My own belief is that all music has an expressive power, some more and some less, but that all music has a certain meaning behind the notes and that meaning behind the notes constitutes, after all, what the piece is saying, what the piece is about.
This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer to that would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No." Therein lies the difficulty....
...In a sense, the ideal listener is both inside and outside the music at the same moment, judging it and enjoying it, wishing it would go one way and watching it go another- almost like the composer at the moment they compose it; because in order to write their music, the composer must also be inside and outside their music, carried away by it and yet coldly critical of it. A subjective attitude is implied in both creating and listening to music.
