This is almost certainly the last time that I will write on monogamy and polyamory and associated sexual matters. The subject has fascinated partly for personal reasons but equally because it is central to how we view future social development in the liberal West as it comes under pressure from external communitarian pressures such as the emergence of Islam and a growing internal authoritarianism.
This internalised authoritarianism is chipping away at the margins of difference and freedom in order to create a new 'normality' that its proponents think might restore the order on which States and institutions thrive. But this is not a political paper. I am not interested here in that chipping away of freedom by a weakened authority or the challenge of organised political communitarianism.
I am interested here in the liberation of that limited proportion of humanity capable of the emotional intelligence required to live beyond restrictive historical community constraints on sexual and emotional expression and how they can be protected from both the community-State and from a culture of anxiety where freedom's greatest enemy comes not from the Right but from the enemy within - the frightened neo-authoritarianism of the liberal left, the snowflakes intent on turning us into ice.
Basically, how can these people be protected from the majority. There is no answer to that here, just a statement of that which must be protected. Having resolved and understood one aspect of freedom, I propose to move on over time to explore the broader framework necessary to preserve liberty.
A polyamorous orientation is just a state of being for an individual. Polyamory is the living out of that state of being in society. Contemporary Western society is definitely not accepting of polyamory. The polyamorous individual is forced into secrecy and stigma with his or her opportunities for self expression severely limited by the refusal of others to recognise that polyamory is a free and non-harmful individual choice which they have no right to condemn if it is between consenting adults (though they also certainly have the right not to accommodate automatically the polyamorous person within their own relationship situation).
The internet has had the dramatic effect of 'sub-normalising' (that is, creating a different normality that works for a sub-set of those otherwise regarded as normal) minority sexualities of all types, bringing people with those orientations together and enabling discussion that reassures and encourages people who are questioning their own 'normality'. It is one of the reasons why the internet is so loathed by authoritarian personality types of both Left and Right. The new media landscape has enabled people starting out on their own journeys of self development to consider forms of behaviour and organisation that suit their true natures rather than simply accept pre-packaged models delivered by the past and by the community.
The current state of polyamory is defined by the social assumption that just one partner be recognised in law and social situations. This inhibits a secondary (or tertiary) partner so this has to change at some stage. Similarly, variation in polyamory needs to be more widely recognised - it is not a case of simple replacing a couple with a 'thruple', thereby merely expanding conventional forms. It is really about finding consensual arrangements that suit individuals, with very different psychologies, in their dealings with emotional need, sexual desire, economic relations and property holding and responsibility for child rearing and other dependents.
Far more common than the thruple is the 'vee', one person with a relationship to two people who are not involved with each other. And the 'vee' may have the two others become or be sustainable friends without any emotional or sexual content. Economic and social realities will tend to make one partner 'primary' in terms of household and property but this does not mean an incompatibility with equality in sexual or emotional terms or with equality in terms of intent to equality all things being equal, especially if the alleged 'secondary' actually has their own effective household or property arrangements with their 'primary' who may have nothing to do with anyone in the first 'vee' ... or may have everything to do with them - in theory, a chain of 'vees' could theoretically extend forever. Yes, it can be complicated.
The polyamorous personality may be fully (say) heterosexual but they strongly tend to tolerance of queerness and fluidity. They may participate in alternative sexualities at different times of their lives. The central aspect of polyamory here is its resistance to definition and to fixed identity, working against the prevailing identity politics of our time, a reason why it is clearly resented by the authoritarian Left. One reason that there is only a minimal polyamorous identity group presence is because polyamorists generally (except as psychological support) see little point in defining themselves as other sexual identity groups have done, precisely because it works against the instinct for fluidity and adaptability.
Polyamorous people tend to adopt the same fluidity towards friendship (avoiding closed groups and cults), business (avoiding corporate restrictions), politics (being wary of authoritarianism of both the Left and the Right and tending to left and right-libertarianism), culture (being open-minded, following a more tolerant, appropriative, hybridising and hedonist approach to art and popular culture) and religion (being either more atheist than average or, at least, more vaguely 'spiritual' without seeking fixed external moral frameworks). There will, of course, be exceptions to all these claims because difference and fluidity means being different from even the norm of the non-normal.
It is certainly no accident that the leading edges of polyamory were non-heterosexual and often pagan in orientation because 'normality' binds the heterosexual and the communitarian first before it binds anyone else. We are in a free society nominally and, in a free society, regulation does not bind our emotions and the vast majority of our sexual desires. What binds us are our own fears and circumstances. Our society is expressly designed to be constructed around a core of monogamy between heterosexuals sanctified if not always in a religious ceremony then by the State. The polyamorist is rarely a revolutionary as such but Church and State are not generally his friends.
Once the barrier to personal acceptance of polyamory is broken down, the tendency within the polyamorous personality is to see a breaking down of many other barriers and the creation of new boundaries that are personally-directed and not socially-directed. People are seen as relating to each other as complex and different so that it is recognised that it is rare and probably undesirable that one person should aim to meet all the needs of another person or that exclusivity necessarily be reciprocated.
Instead, the polyamorous personality sees the central aspects of his or her life as all potentially separate but equal, interdependent but each unique to its own needs. Economic security, cultural or sporting interests, intimacy, sexual expression and so forth are all separable and potentially identifiable with different people. 'Normality' recognises this to some degree with the bifurcation into life partners and friends but then limits friends considerably to friends of the same gender (for example) or limits the nature of the friendship if members of the opposite gender (in heterosexual relationships) enter into the 'household' or community circle.
'Polyamory' changes these boundaries so that perhaps fewer but deeper relationships are designated by the needs of the polyamorous person, under conditions where more than one person might even serve the same need - so one might see shared households (economic), group engagement in culture or interests (friendships), shared child-rearing or shared intimate and sexual bonding with more than one person consensually and transparently.
It is central at all times to polyamory that the participants who actually participate are aware of the relationships that exist even if (perhaps) one participant might have a partner in turn 'who does not want to know' but has released the person to be free to do what they want or need or the participant has claimed that right in general regardless of their own #primary' and stated their nature yet the partner on that side does not want to participate or engage. The model presupposes the freedom of the individual so long as they are prepared to be honest about their true nature.
Polyamorous people tend to have quite strong moral codes about transparency but also to vest the 'right of resistance' in the individual not to be bound by the codes of 'normals'. This can require immense courage on the part of the polyamorous person as well as some potential for misery. One partner may, for example, insist that they themselves cannot lie and that their partner cannot lie to others although, once the right to polyamory is asserted, there is no obligation to 'tell'. Truth-telling becomes bound into the group of those who tell the truth to each other and who tell no lies to others (but need not go around telling the truth to others outside their circle).
Above all, polyamorous relationships are coded to be unique. There is no standard format. 'Normality' can often result in compromises that mean the standardisation of social relationships into the necessary 'norms'. Some monogamies can be indistinguishable from other monogamies as all aspects of the individual's personality are shoe-horned into a pre-existing framework in order to meet essentially communitarian ends dictated by history, family and social convention. The polyamorist can have relations that are primarily directed at one aspect of themselves with one person and another aspect with another. Part of the early stress and pleasure of a polyamorous relationship is creating these private boundaries - emotional, sexual and practical.
One of the counter-intuitive (to 'normals') results of all this (as far as mature and experienced polyamorous set-ups are concerned) is that the addition of persons actually tends to relieve psychological pressure on the primaries (and there is generally a starting primary) because they are also no longer trapped in the need to be all things to one person and see their own personality limited and distorted.
Many polyamorous people coming to this late in life are faced with the potential for massive disruption if their primary has no understanding or liking for the change. This deters some who live, in effect, in private misery, unable to move forward, not only because they cannot afford at many levels to alienate a primary who 'holds all the cards' but also because a sexual and emotional life outside monogamy under conditions of secrecy is not tolerable to such people. They are not swingers and do not seek the frisson of illicit affairs. Indeed, the stress of illicit affairs is so great and sex without emotional commitment so miserable that polyamorists tend to prefer the private misery of the closed relationship. But eventually such people either snap and divorce at great cost or simply decline into a deathly acceptance of their fate.
However, for those primaries who are not themselves polyamorous but are open-minded and comprehend the truth-telling and trust aspects of the case - and make the effort to understand the situation - then the evidence indicates significant benefits after a period of adjustment and disruption. Certainly, the polyamorous person's commitment to a primary is usually strengthened and not weakened by the emergence of a secondary, possibly because he or she can concentrate on those aspects of the relationship that work instead of trying to make the aspects that do not work fit into some socially pre-set model.
It turns out that the pre-set model can often not work in terms of exclusivity because of circumstances or personality differences. Secondary relationships can strengthen 'marriages' or at least whatever primary structure existed at the beginning of the process of creating a polyamorous situation or even household. Polyamorists, if they have a fault, tend to a certain neediness that places pressure on single partners so that relieving that pressure by 'spreading the love' enables a more direct dialogue on what really matters between the two primaries.
Under 5% of Americans are consciously polyamorous and seeking that lifestyle. The numbers are likely to be less, for cultural reasons, across the rest of the West. This far-flung community is not likely ever to overwhelm the wider instinct and cultural prejudice for monogamy if only because polyamory is stressful even if that stress might be regarded as 'good stress', creative and life-affirming. It is open-ended and fluid with no sense of absolute certainty for the future and so it appeals only to a certain personality type and this type is not going to be a majority in any society. Apart from anything else, most polyamorists are inveterate communicators and many people prefer silence in relationships.
What polyamorists want is just 'permission' from society to develop alternative lifestyles that offer no threat to 'normality'. Above all, the polyamorous person probably needs not to be locked in too early in life to a socially determined structure that will be next to impossible to climb out of without massive pain and disruption not only to himself or herself but others.
He or she just wants to associate with others like himself or herself and go with the flow of being as it changes with the coming and going of children, the acquisition and loss of property and the different needs of a personality at different life stages. At its best, it is a programme of self development and life management where command and control is in the hands of an individual negotiating directly with other individuals. It is fundamentally libertarian, unsuited to the authoritarian personality and probably with identity politics.
Research also shows that polyamorists tend to be far better educated than the general population. This may simply mean that education enables a person to engage in critical thinking about normality and abstracts them from communitarian contexts. Education may also be correlated with emotional intelligence which is definitely required to maintain a successful polyamorous relationship - without EQ things generally fall apart. Communitarian models are probably better for many people simply because people without adequate EQ may need external frameworks to ensure some degree of stability and decency in their lives. This need for adequate EQ alone probably dictates that, given the nature of our species, fully-functioning polyamory will never be the norm for more than 15% of the population at any given time.
This EQ aspect can be tiresome - polyamorists have a tendency to over-communicate and some even to over-think and privilege every passing feeling and anxiety although things eventually settle down. Psychologists who have studied polyamorous behaviour have, however, suggested that normally monogamous people might learn a great deal from this capacity to communicate and question given boundaries. The instinct of the polyamorous person, when faced by a troublesome emotion like jealousy or anger, is to go inward and question why they may be feeling that emotion before discussing it with a partner. Once having carefully considered the roots of the emotion, they then feel free to explore what was going on and come to a resolution through dialogue.
As for jealousy, it might not be the love or sex act that causes jealousy but something deeper, like a perceived 'being taken for granted' or failure to respect the aggrieved person. A few easy to manage and sensitive behavioural changes, usually with some sincere reassurance, can resolve the issue and adjust boundaries.
Commonly, many marriages that are monogamous are enhanced if one partner
takes risks and expresses frustrations and feelings for resolution.
Some marriages of course cannot be resolved and decline into negativity. A monogamous relationship often bottles up feeling in a model of mutual possession that ends up exploding in anger and recrimination, quarrels and eventually, after much misery, divorce.
The entire framework of honesty, transparency and respect is also more likely to encourage safe sex, according to University of Michigan research (2012). This is possibly because sexual activity is less likely to involve spur of the moment drink or drug-fuelled activity. It is 'timed' according to 'rules' which may be a bit of a passion killer for the impulsive but can work well for people who are not.
Polyamorists are not generally wealthier than average which is equally interesting because polyamory does incur expense in time as well as funds. Time is often essential to 'wealth creation'. Polyamorists tend to have priorities other than financial ones, yet need sufficient resources to be able to maintain their lifestyle. It could be argued that some of the time and financial costs arise out of the secrecy required by the dominant communitarian culture.
If there was sufficient cultural change to make polyamory more acceptable this problem might disappear as it has disappeared for the gay community. Polyamorists tend, however, to have an experiential rather than an acquisitive or materialist orientation - they may not necessarily be 'spiritual' but they do have a greater orientation towards the mind than the body in general or at least towards a balancing of emotion with reason.
There is also a misunderstanding about 'permission' because permission is not a matter of asking Mummy or Daddy if the polyamorist can go out to play but a more generalised 'permission' that really means just acceptance of the working out of difference within a framework of rules. Again, there is the potential for misunderstanding about rules - some relationships seem to require detailed rules because that is who the personalities are but others simply require an understanding of what could 'hurt' one of the parties through another being crass or negligent or lacking in basic respect for the individuality of another.
This latter form of rule-making is the more intelligent version (we can liken it to the preference for principles-based regulation in British culture over rules-based regulation in other cultures) because it abandons any attempt to command and control someone else instead of oneself. Self control is central to responsible polyamory as is adjustment to changed conditions and knowing precisely when someone is 'taking the mickey' or pushing a boundary too far. Such informal framework acceptance also permits improved communication, including communication about jealousy which may not at all be sexual or even emotional but simply of too much time spent in one place rather than another.
In other words, polyamory is the art of calibrating the needs, desires and circumstances of three or more individuals and their dependents so that all achieve the maximum reasonable state of happiness and self development that is possible under the available material conditions. In this form, polyamory is here to stay for a significant minority of the population alongside standard monogamous options with people phasing in and out of each as circumstances change. This fluidity, if well handled by mature people in consensual contexts, can only be beneficial to those people capable of dealing with its inherent stresses and negotiations and so to society.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Showing posts with label Authoritarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Authoritarianism. Show all posts
Friday 8 December 2017
Saturday 13 December 2014
Playing with Lacan ... Love, Desire & Cowardice
This post is not to be taken overly seriously. It is an over-simplified approach to Lacanian thought. I take him as the 'other' against whom I measure my argument but it does no justice to the complexity of his performance. I write performance because I cannot take him seriously as a formal thinker but only as a poet or life-dramatist arising out of the surrealist tradition. My contribution is thus necessarily merely playful and provocative despite its formalism.
Are we captured by our environment? Do we create an image of ourselves designed to allow us to operate in the world? This is Lacan's early insight - that, whether he is precisely right about its origins in our condition of coming into the world, persons construct imaginary selves to navigate reality.
The Invention of Reality
The imagined self is to all intents and purposes our reality - it is our operating system. Our self-constructed imagination of the world merely gives us imaginary selves to test out new ways of dealing with our environment. The imagined self may be functionally and pragmatically 'real' but it is not the whole story of our body's relationship to reality.
Freud and Lacan, by observation and experimentation, saw that this imagined self would see reality as material or social fact at one level but then re-interpret it with narratives that were somewhat false. The conclusion drawn was that persons need coherence and completeness in preference to truth whenever the truth is neither coherent or complete.
Falsehoods to oneself and others are thus the very stuff of humanity. It is the imagined self of the other that is the person that we will have deal with. No imagined self is a reliable guide to the world or to its own full self - Anton Wilson's biogram. It is a projection, a performance, an actor or actress.
We can re-interpret this eighty years on by considering the piecemeal nature of our sensory inputs (as increasingly revealed by neuro-science) and the instant subconscious choices that create coherence out of fragmented reality as we create our own sense of 'reality'. The self is building an interpretation of reality out of its own expectations and templated choices.
Becoming Paranoid
Barriers to reality (what actually exists 'out there') are thus two-fold - the choices made by sensory inputs (which may have strong genetic elements) and the construction of reality out of the sensory inputs (which is redraft of a previous mental draft and so dependent upon its own past). Without a conscious redraft, our mental text originates from the one with which we were born and which has had overlaid upon it all the cultural and social habits that Anton Wilson calls the logogram.
Paranoia arises when our mental text (and our description of the world is linguistic and not merely experienced) begins to redraft sensory inputs in a radical way to avoid any creative redrafting that would return us back to a right understanding of both ourselves and the world. Investment in the original mental text has become so great that reality must now change to save the text - the imagined self spins off into insanity.
In the most extreme cases, the mental text becomes the world - which perhaps is analogous to those social insanities where texts become the world for whole societies. Personal madness is the ideology of an imagined self taking charge of reality dysfunctionally just as social madness is ideology dictating social action, perhaps in excess of invented functionality. This will be dealt with below.
Lacan suggested that human knowledge itself was 'paranoiac'. He was sociologically right insofar as defining existence imposes boundaries on existence, an ordering of existence, that detaches the knower from existence itself. However, this is not a value judgement just an observation.
The Rationality of Madness
Lacan's greatest insight was perhaps to point out that madness is perfectly rational once certain understandings are in place, much as ideology is perfectly rational once you accept certain initial absurdities (such as God or scientific materialism or the 'war on women') and then link real phenomena to what is presented in the world in the light of these absurdities.
Madness is always logical in this sense. The relationship between the body (which is detached from the imagined self or ego) and the sub-conscious - an insight of Reich in his work on body armour - brings the body back into consideration as a sign and signal of not only physical but mental pain. The logic is far more hidden in neurosis than psychosis but it is there.
A physical pain might be interpreted as a mental signal that is seeking from the imagined self some reconsideration of its own mental drafting. The conditions of such a pain (if not organic) give profound clues to the nature of any redrafting of reality that is required to bring the body back into line with a workable imagined self.
Language in this respect is a mediator so that physical pain and the subconscious use of language are all appeals to the desire that the 'text' refuses to recognise. These are words that are demanding to be included in our text instead of being left to the side unused.
Language
Words and images provide a data bank for analogy - much as magical thinking uses language and imagery analogically to build alternate realities where people have more control, at least imaginatively, of their lives. This data bank can be plundered to hold the line against internal rigidities and stop the march to full paranoid detachment.
Whenever external texts are used - whether for the person or the society - we are seeing the half-way house of near-madness that we referred to in a previous posting, that point where texts and words are used both to protect society or the individual from their own true nature and to suggest adaptations to make things tolerable but not 'true to themselves'.
The words are thus never the thing, never the person and never representative of the human condition, but the free play of words permits an entity the opportunity to assert some value that is more in accord with reality (as society or person) than the imagined and constructed self of ego or ideology.
Words, gestures and images are our first line of defence (if they are our words and not the words of others) but they are also a 'false friend' because they compromise from the start with the very nature of ideology to set terms on the permissibility of our language and with the imagined self whose adaptations are to be constructed almost entirely out of inherited words and images - references back to something 'golden' that should have have been rather than what is if we were only to look and see.
Alienation
Language is at the heart of our alienation as persons. Language gets in the way of us being who we are even as it is the most effective tool for our being able to function in the world with and against others. Every time we are defined by ourselves or others, we lose something of our complex selves. Every time we define, we insult the complexity of the other person and mislead ourselves about the nature of social reality. The social sciences are the sciences of misleading ourselves in a disciplined way.
Nevertheless, the point about words is that they are not a simple matter of relationship between signifier and signified but that each word is a connection to other words which connect ad infinitum into the past. The tension between the ego-draft (or social-draft or ideology) and the alternate possible draft that each use of language implies is profound.
Every dissident thought within a society that is expressed in words has revolutionary potential because it offers an alternate reality to the 'given' draft. Every imaginative rethinking of reality has the same potential for the liberation of the individual. Reality is symbolic. Art and magic are ways in which people attempt to circumvent language but even they are, like poetry, evasions, failures to look language in the eye and challenge its domination of us.
But, and this is where madness comes into the frame, a dissident thought or imaginative rethinking of reality that is not in accord with objective physical and relational reality beyond the social and beyond the individual is in danger of replacing the 'zombie' conditions of the ideological-social or the socialised person with a form of madness. Which makes us ask - what is madness under such conditions?
What is Madness?
The reality of madness as a biological and so physical reality, making people dysfunctional in the world and often deeply frightened and miserable, cannot be dismissed. In the individual, such madness debilitates and destroys but, in a society, it creates either an alternate ideological 'reality' (a false reality) or a form of free-floating paranoia which is where we may be heading in a rootless cosmopolitan globalised society where the ideology is to have no ideology other than distrust.
In 1968, Lacan famously said to the students: "I won't mince my words. What you want is another master". Perhaps he remembered Kojeve's lectures on Hegel and the master-slave dialectic but the point is well taken. To remove one ideological framework is to imply its replacement or collapse rather than paradise - to be liberated from a thesis, the ideologue feels he must enslave himself to the antithesis. This is no liberation, just a swapping of seats.
This gives us a clue to how we may handle symbolic reality whether as persons or as a society. The answer is a somewhat trans-human one because it suggests a conscious awareness of one's symbolic history and an active acceptance or rejection of its components rather than the assumption of it as a whole that is intrinsically right and proper.
If we learn who we are because of the defining of oneself in language by others, then, if we become that definition, we are no longer who we are to ourselves but a creation of history and the social. If we are not comfortable with this then, despite the claims of the Hegelian 'realists', we have a choice to rewrite history, redraw social relations and redefine ourselves. Our future is not cast in stone - we can re-make it through resistance to the texts that define us.
The Hidden 'Other'
This may involve asking whether significant others are oppressive or supportive and ruthlessly rejecting those who stereotype or define us to meet their own needs and not ours. The same culling may take place in the acceptance or rejection of ideas or pleasures. Why do we go to Church if it gives us nothing? Why vote if it changes nothing?
This is where Lacanian insights are useful when the question is asked to whom you are appealing when you act in a such-and-such way. If you go to church, who are you going to church for? If you vote, who are you voting for (not in terms of the candidate but the 'hidden watcher' who helped create your symbolic universe)? What are these habits and what secret anxieties to they hide?
It cuts both ways. If you ostentatiously do not go to Church or vote, who are you ostentatiously trying to tell that you do not go to church or vote? Language as change presupposes some 'other' to which talk or speech is directed. How to stop speaking to the other and engage in a conversation with your secret self does not say you will or should go to church or vote or not but it will bring the decisons into line with who you are and should be to yourself. For the record, I don't go to church and only intermittently vote when I feel it is important.
The paradox in personal and political language is that language as ego-construction and ideology blocks off reality but linguistic expression appears to be the only means of effecting any change to social conditions or to the person. We cannot live without language but the world in which it is our master and the world in which it is consciously used as our tool or weapon are very different.
The Intellectual and the Other
This applies as much to culture and politics as personal relations. One speaks if not to an identifiable other then to an 'other' who serves as reason for speech. The radical intellectual is speaking to no one that he sees while writing his article nor to every person who may read it but is speaking to an imaginary interlocutor who is a projection of himself. He is trying to order the world because he feels the need for order in himself.
After a while, the functional nature of the intellectual, as of the person, coalesces around this symbolic other who is really an avatar of himself. Indeed, with modern communications technology, we have avatars of the self speaking to yet other avatars of the self in order to communicate with the wider universe. The multiplication of self-avatars represents the very essence of a new phenomenon - the virtual society mediated by the internet.
Beyond all this lies the 'real' which might be confused with the existentialists' Existence but which is really that which lies between Existence and our own symbolic and imagined personal or social realities. It is that which is there, including the material effects of other men's dreamings, but which is not articulated to be there - it is the dark matter of being and it comprises most of our world.
We only know it is there when we consider the possibility of its being there or notice the lack behind what we see or experience as there. Perhaps its non-existence in our minds is what makes us into zombies because only non-zombies can see what exists as a function of what is not there (as a 'lack').
The Ineluctability of Political Persons
The Lacanian distrust of the 'I' statement is critical here. When someone says that they approve or disapprove of military action against (say) Syria (under conditions where their opinion matters not one jot to the action itself), then the assertion is an expression not so much of the 'I' but of something behind the 'I'.
This helps to explain one of the great truths of Facebook - no matter how much reasoning is employed, most persons most of the time 'stick with their position'. The 'position' is derived from something beyond access to new reasoning and that derivation is almost certainly embedded in some 'other' that is being identified as essential to identity.
To some extent social intelligence can be defined by the looseness of this identity - we have all seen the 'vulnerable' personality who scuttles from a robust Facebook Group debate because they think a critique of the existence of God or a questioning of the existence of patriarchy is a personal attack on them. They feel bullied because they have weak identities while their opponents are often just secure in their ability not only to challenge but to be challenged.
These 'weak identities' are matched by weak identities who are bullies - people who cannot argue through the logosphere but must attack the person. Both types - the weak and the bullies - tend to get exuded by the strong in free debate and, as in 'real life', the weak seek protective regulation to buttress their weak identities and the bullies seek regulation to enforce their world view on others.
Persons and societies will always be divided in these ways in all possible human worlds because persons and societies not only have multiple perspectives in themselves but societies have the multiple perspectives of multiple persons. The person who is militaristic may live inside a person who is socialist without any awareness of the rational problem of both existing together. Almost any set of rationalising variations is possible even if the vast majority fall into easy to accept categories that make life easier for themselves.
The ego will readily rationalise all this into something that passes for reasonable but, in doing so, it will redefine its terms to allow it to undertake this mental legerdemain and, in doing so, become more resistant than ever to reasonable criticism - precisely because the structure they have created is a paradigm that cannot afford any cracks. Like madness - as we have seen - political ideologies are always perfectly logical in their absurdities.
Ideologies
An ideology like Marxism, for example, might go through the process whereby a core inherited belief (say, the withering away of the State) and the actual practice of power require a rigid totalitarianism to hold them together. The personality type that holds together incompatible propositions by its nature is likely to feel happiest in an authoritarian ideology of this type.
The more internal contradictions in relation to the messiness of the real world, the more the collapse into Authority. The difference between the authoritarian and the liberated is, thus, the difference between seeing the accumulated history of one's situation as a 'given' to be managed or as an opportunity for further change and experience.
Institutionalisation, with its body of inherited codes and behaviours, represents both the paradise of the authoritarian and the hell of the libertarian. The first, desperate to extend order over reality, tries to impose church, state, party, marriage and law on the latter. The latter is often disadvantaged because there is no will to put in place the organisational structures required for their own survival.
This is not to say that institutional organisation is not necessary to undertake functional tasks (like provide clean water or get a plane to fly) but only that there is a difference between creating functionality for individual will or pleasure and creating functionality for symbolic representation. The challenge for the anarcho-libertarian is how to create sufficient organisation (an innoculation, if you like) against the virus of authoritarianism - and it is a challenge generally evaded and a fight generally lost from naivete and incompetence.
Markets & Love
The market brokers functionality for individual will or pleasure but the existence of authoritarians and libertarians alongside each other in the market makes the market problematic. Libertarians are rarely equal in political or cultural purchasing power - and so societies like persons are perpetually conflicted or else sclerotic.
Authoritarian obsessionalism in societies and persons tends to a living self-mortification just as a libertarian curiosity about the 'other' (a perpetual desire for the new) might lead to neurosis if the understanding of what is actually going on in the desire is limited.
It may seem odd to introduce the idea of love or desire into the discussion at this point but it is the relationship to desire that defines our accommodation to this world. The point about desire and love is that demand is never able to be satisfied once that path is chosen.
This is very disturbing to some people. It results in an unconscious denial of desire (the impulse of the so-called 'great religions' which are at the heart of the institutionalisation of culture) which, of course, is worse than acceptance of desire because it denies not the possibility of fulfilment of desire but the fact of desire itself - absurd because it is human to desire.
Displacement of Desire
Displacement of desire may result in fetishism in the person but it also has social effects in the displacement into an obsessive interest, without functional value in terms of direct acquisition of resources or power or participation as an individual, in politics or culture or sport. Above all, it tends to voyeurism or exhibitionism.
These are displaced desires for actual power or participation and are as absurd as fetishism - yet wholly necessary for those who have not been able to fulfil their desires 'in action' so to speak without the crutch of observing and commentating on the performance of others.
But if anything explains the persistent anxiety of the thinking person, it is this - the inability never to know what the mysterious other truly wants. Not knowing what the mysterious other - woman, self, interlocutor - wants is the source of passion and creativity but also anxiety, depression and indecision.
As Lacan pointed out in the 1950s, all desire has fetishistic qualities insofar as all attraction is to the components of the desired as much as to the whole of a person - a preference for redheads, say, over any other hair colour. The desire for love may be unconditional but love is directed very conditionally despite claims to the contrary. There is always something specific being desired whose direct expression is usually being avoided or evaded.
Sex and Existence
It is uncovering our real desires without the need for displacement which is interesting because we are all embedded in a world where there is no language and so no social order that can deal with sex or the fact of existence.
The only step we can take is to capture language for ourselves regardless of the effects on others. Take: 'I love you'. This is now so socially embedded in its multiple meanings that it is difficult to say for many people. There is an anxiety about misunderstanding. So, something important is often never expressed. Instead of taking the risk of saying it and then exploring the meaning through action in the world, it remains a phrase that festers in the hearts of the meek.
One approach might be to recapture this and other phrases by stating them regardless of the anxiety, shifting responsibility for the anxiety to the other person. Does this seem cruel? Not at all because the other person is free to make what they wish of the language and reject or accept on their terms - and so things can move forward. The 'sayer' simply has to accept the risk of rejection and 'rejection fear' is at the very heart of human cowardice and leads directly back to the easy fall into the jackboot and the uniform. 'Belong me into order', the frightened human rabbit says.
This is a revolutionary reversal of traditional modes in society. Instead of allowing anxiety and rational argument to thwart desire out of fear of consequences, the default position becomes the expression of desire and the acceptance of consequences. Ours may be the first non-aristocratic society where that is possible - in theory.
Final Linguistic Trickery
However, desire has become associated in our culture with an authoritarian notion of 'sin' and controlling desire has come to be an 'ethical' position yet it is quite possible, indeed probable, that 'sin' actually lies in an unnecessary state of anxiety and the failure to communicate and that the relief of tension involved in expressing desire will result in ethical consequences.
Remember - this is linguistic trickery. The revealing of desire is not the acting out of desire. Saying 'I love you' or 'I hate you' is not rape ... words are not actions, a proposition very difficult for modern liberal totalitarians to understand. To say, we repeat, is not to do - words are not things in the world. Assuming consensuality, the desire might then be acted out but the consensual nature of human relations is a given here. The expression of desire must include this courage to accept rejection.
To communicate desire and accept the consequences of rejection is truly revolutionary. It enables learning - both to find new ways to express desire and to adapt to others' different ideas of desire. It stands against authority and the 'other' as arbiter of anxiety and it enables the libertarian to draw a line in the sand against both the authoritarian and the weakness of liberal fears, against both the rat and the mouse.
Are we captured by our environment? Do we create an image of ourselves designed to allow us to operate in the world? This is Lacan's early insight - that, whether he is precisely right about its origins in our condition of coming into the world, persons construct imaginary selves to navigate reality.
The Invention of Reality
The imagined self is to all intents and purposes our reality - it is our operating system. Our self-constructed imagination of the world merely gives us imaginary selves to test out new ways of dealing with our environment. The imagined self may be functionally and pragmatically 'real' but it is not the whole story of our body's relationship to reality.
Freud and Lacan, by observation and experimentation, saw that this imagined self would see reality as material or social fact at one level but then re-interpret it with narratives that were somewhat false. The conclusion drawn was that persons need coherence and completeness in preference to truth whenever the truth is neither coherent or complete.
Falsehoods to oneself and others are thus the very stuff of humanity. It is the imagined self of the other that is the person that we will have deal with. No imagined self is a reliable guide to the world or to its own full self - Anton Wilson's biogram. It is a projection, a performance, an actor or actress.
We can re-interpret this eighty years on by considering the piecemeal nature of our sensory inputs (as increasingly revealed by neuro-science) and the instant subconscious choices that create coherence out of fragmented reality as we create our own sense of 'reality'. The self is building an interpretation of reality out of its own expectations and templated choices.
Becoming Paranoid
Barriers to reality (what actually exists 'out there') are thus two-fold - the choices made by sensory inputs (which may have strong genetic elements) and the construction of reality out of the sensory inputs (which is redraft of a previous mental draft and so dependent upon its own past). Without a conscious redraft, our mental text originates from the one with which we were born and which has had overlaid upon it all the cultural and social habits that Anton Wilson calls the logogram.
Paranoia arises when our mental text (and our description of the world is linguistic and not merely experienced) begins to redraft sensory inputs in a radical way to avoid any creative redrafting that would return us back to a right understanding of both ourselves and the world. Investment in the original mental text has become so great that reality must now change to save the text - the imagined self spins off into insanity.
In the most extreme cases, the mental text becomes the world - which perhaps is analogous to those social insanities where texts become the world for whole societies. Personal madness is the ideology of an imagined self taking charge of reality dysfunctionally just as social madness is ideology dictating social action, perhaps in excess of invented functionality. This will be dealt with below.
Lacan suggested that human knowledge itself was 'paranoiac'. He was sociologically right insofar as defining existence imposes boundaries on existence, an ordering of existence, that detaches the knower from existence itself. However, this is not a value judgement just an observation.
The Rationality of Madness
Lacan's greatest insight was perhaps to point out that madness is perfectly rational once certain understandings are in place, much as ideology is perfectly rational once you accept certain initial absurdities (such as God or scientific materialism or the 'war on women') and then link real phenomena to what is presented in the world in the light of these absurdities.
Madness is always logical in this sense. The relationship between the body (which is detached from the imagined self or ego) and the sub-conscious - an insight of Reich in his work on body armour - brings the body back into consideration as a sign and signal of not only physical but mental pain. The logic is far more hidden in neurosis than psychosis but it is there.
A physical pain might be interpreted as a mental signal that is seeking from the imagined self some reconsideration of its own mental drafting. The conditions of such a pain (if not organic) give profound clues to the nature of any redrafting of reality that is required to bring the body back into line with a workable imagined self.
Language in this respect is a mediator so that physical pain and the subconscious use of language are all appeals to the desire that the 'text' refuses to recognise. These are words that are demanding to be included in our text instead of being left to the side unused.
Language
Words and images provide a data bank for analogy - much as magical thinking uses language and imagery analogically to build alternate realities where people have more control, at least imaginatively, of their lives. This data bank can be plundered to hold the line against internal rigidities and stop the march to full paranoid detachment.
Whenever external texts are used - whether for the person or the society - we are seeing the half-way house of near-madness that we referred to in a previous posting, that point where texts and words are used both to protect society or the individual from their own true nature and to suggest adaptations to make things tolerable but not 'true to themselves'.
The words are thus never the thing, never the person and never representative of the human condition, but the free play of words permits an entity the opportunity to assert some value that is more in accord with reality (as society or person) than the imagined and constructed self of ego or ideology.
Words, gestures and images are our first line of defence (if they are our words and not the words of others) but they are also a 'false friend' because they compromise from the start with the very nature of ideology to set terms on the permissibility of our language and with the imagined self whose adaptations are to be constructed almost entirely out of inherited words and images - references back to something 'golden' that should have have been rather than what is if we were only to look and see.
Alienation
Language is at the heart of our alienation as persons. Language gets in the way of us being who we are even as it is the most effective tool for our being able to function in the world with and against others. Every time we are defined by ourselves or others, we lose something of our complex selves. Every time we define, we insult the complexity of the other person and mislead ourselves about the nature of social reality. The social sciences are the sciences of misleading ourselves in a disciplined way.
Nevertheless, the point about words is that they are not a simple matter of relationship between signifier and signified but that each word is a connection to other words which connect ad infinitum into the past. The tension between the ego-draft (or social-draft or ideology) and the alternate possible draft that each use of language implies is profound.
Every dissident thought within a society that is expressed in words has revolutionary potential because it offers an alternate reality to the 'given' draft. Every imaginative rethinking of reality has the same potential for the liberation of the individual. Reality is symbolic. Art and magic are ways in which people attempt to circumvent language but even they are, like poetry, evasions, failures to look language in the eye and challenge its domination of us.
But, and this is where madness comes into the frame, a dissident thought or imaginative rethinking of reality that is not in accord with objective physical and relational reality beyond the social and beyond the individual is in danger of replacing the 'zombie' conditions of the ideological-social or the socialised person with a form of madness. Which makes us ask - what is madness under such conditions?
What is Madness?
The reality of madness as a biological and so physical reality, making people dysfunctional in the world and often deeply frightened and miserable, cannot be dismissed. In the individual, such madness debilitates and destroys but, in a society, it creates either an alternate ideological 'reality' (a false reality) or a form of free-floating paranoia which is where we may be heading in a rootless cosmopolitan globalised society where the ideology is to have no ideology other than distrust.
In 1968, Lacan famously said to the students: "I won't mince my words. What you want is another master". Perhaps he remembered Kojeve's lectures on Hegel and the master-slave dialectic but the point is well taken. To remove one ideological framework is to imply its replacement or collapse rather than paradise - to be liberated from a thesis, the ideologue feels he must enslave himself to the antithesis. This is no liberation, just a swapping of seats.
This gives us a clue to how we may handle symbolic reality whether as persons or as a society. The answer is a somewhat trans-human one because it suggests a conscious awareness of one's symbolic history and an active acceptance or rejection of its components rather than the assumption of it as a whole that is intrinsically right and proper.
If we learn who we are because of the defining of oneself in language by others, then, if we become that definition, we are no longer who we are to ourselves but a creation of history and the social. If we are not comfortable with this then, despite the claims of the Hegelian 'realists', we have a choice to rewrite history, redraw social relations and redefine ourselves. Our future is not cast in stone - we can re-make it through resistance to the texts that define us.
The Hidden 'Other'
This may involve asking whether significant others are oppressive or supportive and ruthlessly rejecting those who stereotype or define us to meet their own needs and not ours. The same culling may take place in the acceptance or rejection of ideas or pleasures. Why do we go to Church if it gives us nothing? Why vote if it changes nothing?
This is where Lacanian insights are useful when the question is asked to whom you are appealing when you act in a such-and-such way. If you go to church, who are you going to church for? If you vote, who are you voting for (not in terms of the candidate but the 'hidden watcher' who helped create your symbolic universe)? What are these habits and what secret anxieties to they hide?
It cuts both ways. If you ostentatiously do not go to Church or vote, who are you ostentatiously trying to tell that you do not go to church or vote? Language as change presupposes some 'other' to which talk or speech is directed. How to stop speaking to the other and engage in a conversation with your secret self does not say you will or should go to church or vote or not but it will bring the decisons into line with who you are and should be to yourself. For the record, I don't go to church and only intermittently vote when I feel it is important.
The paradox in personal and political language is that language as ego-construction and ideology blocks off reality but linguistic expression appears to be the only means of effecting any change to social conditions or to the person. We cannot live without language but the world in which it is our master and the world in which it is consciously used as our tool or weapon are very different.
The Intellectual and the Other
This applies as much to culture and politics as personal relations. One speaks if not to an identifiable other then to an 'other' who serves as reason for speech. The radical intellectual is speaking to no one that he sees while writing his article nor to every person who may read it but is speaking to an imaginary interlocutor who is a projection of himself. He is trying to order the world because he feels the need for order in himself.
After a while, the functional nature of the intellectual, as of the person, coalesces around this symbolic other who is really an avatar of himself. Indeed, with modern communications technology, we have avatars of the self speaking to yet other avatars of the self in order to communicate with the wider universe. The multiplication of self-avatars represents the very essence of a new phenomenon - the virtual society mediated by the internet.
Beyond all this lies the 'real' which might be confused with the existentialists' Existence but which is really that which lies between Existence and our own symbolic and imagined personal or social realities. It is that which is there, including the material effects of other men's dreamings, but which is not articulated to be there - it is the dark matter of being and it comprises most of our world.
We only know it is there when we consider the possibility of its being there or notice the lack behind what we see or experience as there. Perhaps its non-existence in our minds is what makes us into zombies because only non-zombies can see what exists as a function of what is not there (as a 'lack').
The Ineluctability of Political Persons
The Lacanian distrust of the 'I' statement is critical here. When someone says that they approve or disapprove of military action against (say) Syria (under conditions where their opinion matters not one jot to the action itself), then the assertion is an expression not so much of the 'I' but of something behind the 'I'.
This helps to explain one of the great truths of Facebook - no matter how much reasoning is employed, most persons most of the time 'stick with their position'. The 'position' is derived from something beyond access to new reasoning and that derivation is almost certainly embedded in some 'other' that is being identified as essential to identity.
To some extent social intelligence can be defined by the looseness of this identity - we have all seen the 'vulnerable' personality who scuttles from a robust Facebook Group debate because they think a critique of the existence of God or a questioning of the existence of patriarchy is a personal attack on them. They feel bullied because they have weak identities while their opponents are often just secure in their ability not only to challenge but to be challenged.
These 'weak identities' are matched by weak identities who are bullies - people who cannot argue through the logosphere but must attack the person. Both types - the weak and the bullies - tend to get exuded by the strong in free debate and, as in 'real life', the weak seek protective regulation to buttress their weak identities and the bullies seek regulation to enforce their world view on others.
Persons and societies will always be divided in these ways in all possible human worlds because persons and societies not only have multiple perspectives in themselves but societies have the multiple perspectives of multiple persons. The person who is militaristic may live inside a person who is socialist without any awareness of the rational problem of both existing together. Almost any set of rationalising variations is possible even if the vast majority fall into easy to accept categories that make life easier for themselves.
The ego will readily rationalise all this into something that passes for reasonable but, in doing so, it will redefine its terms to allow it to undertake this mental legerdemain and, in doing so, become more resistant than ever to reasonable criticism - precisely because the structure they have created is a paradigm that cannot afford any cracks. Like madness - as we have seen - political ideologies are always perfectly logical in their absurdities.
Ideologies
An ideology like Marxism, for example, might go through the process whereby a core inherited belief (say, the withering away of the State) and the actual practice of power require a rigid totalitarianism to hold them together. The personality type that holds together incompatible propositions by its nature is likely to feel happiest in an authoritarian ideology of this type.
The more internal contradictions in relation to the messiness of the real world, the more the collapse into Authority. The difference between the authoritarian and the liberated is, thus, the difference between seeing the accumulated history of one's situation as a 'given' to be managed or as an opportunity for further change and experience.
Institutionalisation, with its body of inherited codes and behaviours, represents both the paradise of the authoritarian and the hell of the libertarian. The first, desperate to extend order over reality, tries to impose church, state, party, marriage and law on the latter. The latter is often disadvantaged because there is no will to put in place the organisational structures required for their own survival.
This is not to say that institutional organisation is not necessary to undertake functional tasks (like provide clean water or get a plane to fly) but only that there is a difference between creating functionality for individual will or pleasure and creating functionality for symbolic representation. The challenge for the anarcho-libertarian is how to create sufficient organisation (an innoculation, if you like) against the virus of authoritarianism - and it is a challenge generally evaded and a fight generally lost from naivete and incompetence.
Markets & Love
The market brokers functionality for individual will or pleasure but the existence of authoritarians and libertarians alongside each other in the market makes the market problematic. Libertarians are rarely equal in political or cultural purchasing power - and so societies like persons are perpetually conflicted or else sclerotic.
Authoritarian obsessionalism in societies and persons tends to a living self-mortification just as a libertarian curiosity about the 'other' (a perpetual desire for the new) might lead to neurosis if the understanding of what is actually going on in the desire is limited.
It may seem odd to introduce the idea of love or desire into the discussion at this point but it is the relationship to desire that defines our accommodation to this world. The point about desire and love is that demand is never able to be satisfied once that path is chosen.
This is very disturbing to some people. It results in an unconscious denial of desire (the impulse of the so-called 'great religions' which are at the heart of the institutionalisation of culture) which, of course, is worse than acceptance of desire because it denies not the possibility of fulfilment of desire but the fact of desire itself - absurd because it is human to desire.
Displacement of Desire
Displacement of desire may result in fetishism in the person but it also has social effects in the displacement into an obsessive interest, without functional value in terms of direct acquisition of resources or power or participation as an individual, in politics or culture or sport. Above all, it tends to voyeurism or exhibitionism.
These are displaced desires for actual power or participation and are as absurd as fetishism - yet wholly necessary for those who have not been able to fulfil their desires 'in action' so to speak without the crutch of observing and commentating on the performance of others.
But if anything explains the persistent anxiety of the thinking person, it is this - the inability never to know what the mysterious other truly wants. Not knowing what the mysterious other - woman, self, interlocutor - wants is the source of passion and creativity but also anxiety, depression and indecision.
As Lacan pointed out in the 1950s, all desire has fetishistic qualities insofar as all attraction is to the components of the desired as much as to the whole of a person - a preference for redheads, say, over any other hair colour. The desire for love may be unconditional but love is directed very conditionally despite claims to the contrary. There is always something specific being desired whose direct expression is usually being avoided or evaded.
Sex and Existence
It is uncovering our real desires without the need for displacement which is interesting because we are all embedded in a world where there is no language and so no social order that can deal with sex or the fact of existence.
The only step we can take is to capture language for ourselves regardless of the effects on others. Take: 'I love you'. This is now so socially embedded in its multiple meanings that it is difficult to say for many people. There is an anxiety about misunderstanding. So, something important is often never expressed. Instead of taking the risk of saying it and then exploring the meaning through action in the world, it remains a phrase that festers in the hearts of the meek.
One approach might be to recapture this and other phrases by stating them regardless of the anxiety, shifting responsibility for the anxiety to the other person. Does this seem cruel? Not at all because the other person is free to make what they wish of the language and reject or accept on their terms - and so things can move forward. The 'sayer' simply has to accept the risk of rejection and 'rejection fear' is at the very heart of human cowardice and leads directly back to the easy fall into the jackboot and the uniform. 'Belong me into order', the frightened human rabbit says.
This is a revolutionary reversal of traditional modes in society. Instead of allowing anxiety and rational argument to thwart desire out of fear of consequences, the default position becomes the expression of desire and the acceptance of consequences. Ours may be the first non-aristocratic society where that is possible - in theory.
Final Linguistic Trickery
However, desire has become associated in our culture with an authoritarian notion of 'sin' and controlling desire has come to be an 'ethical' position yet it is quite possible, indeed probable, that 'sin' actually lies in an unnecessary state of anxiety and the failure to communicate and that the relief of tension involved in expressing desire will result in ethical consequences.
Remember - this is linguistic trickery. The revealing of desire is not the acting out of desire. Saying 'I love you' or 'I hate you' is not rape ... words are not actions, a proposition very difficult for modern liberal totalitarians to understand. To say, we repeat, is not to do - words are not things in the world. Assuming consensuality, the desire might then be acted out but the consensual nature of human relations is a given here. The expression of desire must include this courage to accept rejection.
To communicate desire and accept the consequences of rejection is truly revolutionary. It enables learning - both to find new ways to express desire and to adapt to others' different ideas of desire. It stands against authority and the 'other' as arbiter of anxiety and it enables the libertarian to draw a line in the sand against both the authoritarian and the weakness of liberal fears, against both the rat and the mouse.
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