Not for (the) Lack: Episodes in Trying

[© Tweed the Younger]

One point I shall touch on here will return to the opening sentence of this work: the relation of time to the unconscious.  Zerzan’s comment comes in the context of exploring Dreams for potential “liberatory clues”… allow me to quote in full the relevant part:

When we dream the sense of time is virtually nonexistent, replaced by a sensation of presentness. It should come as no surprise that dreams, which ignore the rules of time, would attract the notice of those searching for liberatory clues, or that the unconscious, with its ``storms of impulse'' (Stern 1977), frightens those with a stake in the neurosis we call civilization.

I would also like to ‘set the table’ with a short comment taken from linguist Daniel Everett’s study of the the Piraha, an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe in the Amazon:

Finally one Pirahã asked me one day, well, what color is Jesus?  How tall is he?  When did he tell you these things?  And I said, well, you know, I've never seen him, I don't know what color he was, I don't know how tall he was. Well, if you have never seen him, why are you telling us this?  

And now, the line immediately succeeding the above quote from Zerzan:

Norman O. Brown (1959) saw the sense of time or history as a function of repression; if repression were abolished, he reasoned, we would be released from time. Similarly, Coleridge (1801) recognized in the man of ``methodical industry'' the origin and creator of time.

Above we have a) dreams as a window into the timeless state of the unconscious; b) an un-historic primitive society unconcerned with that which cannot be directly sensed (the Piraha lost all interest in Christ once they learned Everett had not directly witnessed Him); and c) the tie of the sense of time to the repression of desire, and further, to domestication.  

To restate the problem currently facing us, it is, how do we ‘displace’ or sublimate the id-desire, using its force to achieve goals congruent with the world-view of the other aspects of character?  As Zerzan notes, the unconscious has no sense of time.  Dreams are timeless: events happen in succession, with the perception of a chain of cause-and-effect, but rarely if ever does the protagonist reflect “Wow, I have been here a long time” or anything of the sort.  On the contrary, the unconscious known to us in dreams seeks to achieve its objet petit a through a ruthless engagement with the present.

But our goals explicitly ask the id to defer.  I argued above that I am most successful when I have the feeling that through my re-direction of libidinal desire, I am only delaying gratification, rather than ceding it, with the illusion that through non-sexual work I am coming closer to the possession of my desired sexual object-form.  And, currently, it persists: I have thoroughly convinced myself that through my clumsy invocation of Lacanian terms, and my multifaceted exploration of various problems of the now, I will impress in some way or another the 24 year old young woman in Austin, and she will submit to me the use of her sexual faculty in a distant and consensual present.

How am I going about this, asking the id to defer?  For if the unconscious has no sense of time, which Zerzan rather conclusively argues, how can it really understand the idea of delaying gratification?  The easy answer is that it can’t, that ‘Flow’ is but an adaptive trick, that there is the illusion that possession of the objet petit a is but a keystroke away, and if I just keep at it, keep at it, ad infinitum…   ‘Adaptive knowledge’ is conditioned and can at times elude elucidation.  But I am tempted to go a bit further, to pursue the translation of my “storms of impulse” (as should be possible if the Lacanian ‘unconscious as knowledge’ holds), and achieve that Popular Front of unity with the other elements of my constitution through this continued bargaining.

In the meantime I feel it opportune, in remaining on the topic of “delayed gratification”, to turn back to the topic of the debt culture.  For what is debt if not the concrete socio-economic form of delaying gratification?  I take out this student loan, hand over this part of myself to the already-enriched Other (who must, as a result of his prior success in accumulation, know something), and thereby place my own hopes of accumulating wealth onto a distant and indistinct future.  There are obvious parallels to our current situation of my seeking the attainment of my desired sexual object.  In a world without much intellect nor restrictive socio-superegotistical mores, it would be far more advantageous to simply relocate my physical body to Austin, attempt to find this woman, and take her by force.  Notwithstanding the fear of reprisal on the part of society (or whatever more literally Paternal force currently protects her), there is a part of me that is thoroughly convinced that the path of writing this text is simply the better way to go; much as our student, instead of heading into arrears, could at the outset accumulating commodities in the present.  But he is convinced that the deferral of this goal is, again, the better way to go; this will be our departure point into the analysis of the libidinal energies inherent in the debt-dystopia.

[© Tweed the Younger]

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The concept of debt is everywhere; economy cannot persist without it.  It makes me eternally disappointed that we never got the benefit of Marx’s full body of Capital, instead only the ‘torso’  of his larger planned work.  One of the volumes would have been about credit and credit markets.  Nevertheless there is plenty we can learn on our own: as Lenin once said in a very different context “On this, Marx and Engels wrote nothing…”  Occasionally even the most devoted subject has to go it alone.

And besides, we are not really on our own.  Great work in the blossoming of the debt ‘crisis’ has been done by Wolfgang Streeck.  His main thesis is that this simply represents a stage in the evolution of post-War capitalism.  First, we had the inflationary problems of the 1970s.  Wages for the heavily unionized workforce had yearly increased baked-in, and workers achieved a relatively static proportion of the benefits associated with gains in productivity (as opposed to the situation in the neoliberal era, as productivity has soared while wages stagnate).  Then, after the Volckerist shock and induced recession, and the concurrent union-busting, we had the emergence of the debt culture.  First this was largely sovereign debt, as borrowing ballooned under Reagan.  But increasingly this has been augmented with the rise of towers of public debt: mortgage debt, credit card debt, student debt… it is everywhere.

From this we can deduce a few crucial points.  First, we can apply the framework of fetishization, particularly in its explicitly sexual form (although I will argue elsewhere that the ‘gap’ [or ‘lack’, if you prefer] between the sexual fetish and the fetishism of Marxist lore is not nearly as large as presumed… to this we shall return).  For simplicity’s sake, allow us to take the recurring theme of my muse from Austin.  Allow us to suppose that I fetishize her feet: they are objects of my sexual desire, seemingly distinct from my greater objet a desire to possess her sexually.  The problem is not only that this desire can never be satisfied, no matter how many hours I would prove able to interact with her feet in largely any context I would so desire, but rather, that her feet would never really be themselves .   I could look at them, touch them, whatever, daily for a year, but there would remain this intraversable and irreducible gap between the concept so-embedded and what they actually are… I could stare, but again, as with the concept of ‘Flow’, we would have this mental-libidinal trick: if I just stare one more moment, achieve this one more form of sensory stimulation, I will have achieved possession.  Of course, that day never comes.  (I cannot help but here mention how striking is the similarity between this account of sexual fetishism and Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, although I’ve already mentioned it.  It’s all the same.)

Hence, private debt (which we shall take first, before sovereign debt), redoubles the commodity fetish.  For not only is the chair of Marxian dogma never going to be simply a bunch of wood, nails, and whatever else, if I have borrowed to purchase the chair to begin with, I do not even own the right to never be able to own the chair.  As with sexuality, the young woman’s feet are never a bunch of tendons, ligaments, and so on, the totality is something far more and it eludes symbolic description.  Here will be our starting point for moving towards a more libidinal analysis of debt.

[© Tweed the Younger]

I realized I just made a crucial error above.  I will revise when I get back to work ca 330pm.

[© Tweed the Younger]

Here marks a turn in the form of argument.  Above I rather over-simplified in order to explore some more over-arching tendencies, but here, I will introduce a more complicated model of debt and libido.  Do not try to reconcile this model with the above text, you may fail.

Recall that above I have made clear I am seeking a unity of id, ego, and superego, in order to displace my libidinal energy into productive, non-sexual work.  This is referred to as the ‘Popular Front’, and mental space therein is called ‘Flow’.   We have largely settled the ego and super-ego components of this question: they both are on board with Dave-the-socialist-revolutionary, though they may at times disagree on how to perform the task.  The problem lies with the id, which is the motor: how can I ‘talk’ to my libidinal energy-force, get it to buy into this project?  For even if it is possible to go about it without the id, it seems silly not to try.  Compared to the other two constituents of the character, it is a renewable energy source.  If I can devote the raw force I feeling with which I pursue the sexual object to the revolution, I’d really be getting somewhere.  Moreover, this is seen as desirable, for it works to create a pro-revolutionary space.  This work will, at worst, serve as a signifier: Dave is a socialist revolutionary.  Good, that’s what I want to be!  But further, it has the capacity to change the environment: say that a reader is hit with this signifier: he could keep it all to himself, yes.  Or he could write something back, or contact me.  All of this is good, very good, because it serves to expand the space in which the socialist revolution is predominant.  Once this space becomes sufficiently large, it forms a Community.

So the deferred dream is, and I know I am going over familiar ground here, the deferred dream is the dream of the expansion of that socialist-revolutionary space, and the attainment of a sexual object within that space.   One reader advised me after reading an earlier section to “find a socialist girl”, either here or in New York City.  Sounds good to me!  I remarked to a sexual partner last month, that if I could find a hot Marxist-Leninist of any stripe, I would be liable to fall incurably into love.  A few questions are popping to mind.  First of all, let us take again our current muse, the young woman from Austin. Let us just simplify here and call her a ‘socialist’, whether she is or not.  Now let us return to the example of foot fetishism: say I am attracted to this young woman’s feet, they are the object-within-the-Object, an encapsulation of my desire.  The question is: are her feet, as a sexual object, socialist-revolutionary?  If so, would it not follow that it would be possible to dialog directly with the ‘socialist’ aspects of her feet, especially in contrast with ‘non-socialist’ feet which I nonetheless properly fetishize?  And how does this socialist-revolutionary character therein effect that experience itself, and serve to enhance it?

[For Oklahoma]

Tweed: Modern thinker, philosopher, cult leader, master of the TL;DR...

[Simfan34]

I found myself writing about Csikszentmihalyi just now and was immediately reminded of this series, which introduced me to his work. I'd forgotten what an undertaking this was.

Ironically, I am using Csikszentmihalyi as a very small piece in an argument where I postulate leaving the child masses out to pasture and redirect our resources to the gifted.