A Thorn in the Eye?

Paul talks about suffering from a “thorn in the flesh.” Maybe he had trouble with his eyes.

but you know that it was because of a bodily illness that I preached the gospel to you the first time; and that which was a trial to you in my bodily condition you did not despise or loathe, but you received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus Himself. Where then is that sense of blessing you had? For I bear you witness that, if possible, you would have plucked out your eyes and given them to me. (Galatians 4:14-16)

Paul says that he preached the gospel because of a bodily illness. In Acts 9 we learn about Saul’s epiphany, where he encounters Jesus on the road to Damascus.

Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him; and he fell to the ground… Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; and leading him by the hand, they brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight.

Ananias visits Saul and lays hands on him.

And immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he regained his sight, and he got up and was baptized; and he took food and was strengthened. Now for several days he was with the disciples who were at Damascus, and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.”

It was because of his blinding encounter that Saul could see Jesus — nobody else who accompanied Saul on the road that day was blinded or could see Jesus. And certainly it was because of his mystical vision that Saul (who at some point and for some reason changed his name to Paul) began preaching the Gospel. Maybe Paul never fully regained his sight, even after Ananias healed him. Maybe his limited earthly vision enhanced his “second sight,” enabling him to envision Christ more clearly during his ministry. Because of his impaired vision Paul found it difficult to get around in the world, so he always had to rely on others to help him. The Galatians didn’t despise Paul for it; they would gladly have given him their own eyes.

I’m not strongly invested in this theory, and it’s not all that important. What do you think though?

Paul and the Hermeneutical Horizon

I beg of you, brethren, become as I am, for I also have become as you are. (Galatians 4:12)

Paul doesn’t command, like a Master imposing a new Law; he begs. “Become like me.” Should Paul’s Galatian readers accede to his request, or should they resist it?

Gadamer talks about the hermeneutical horizon (pp. 301-304 in my edition of Truth and Method):

The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, and so forth. Since Nietzsche and Husserl, the word has been used in philosophy to characterize the way in which thought is tied to its finite determinacy, and the way one’s range of vision is gradually expanded. A person who has no horizon does not see far enough and hence over-values what is nearest to him. On the other hand, “to have a horizon” means not being limited to what is nearby but being able to see beyond it. A person who has an horizon knows the relative significance of everything within this horizon, whether it is near or far, great or small.

Gadamer says that, in conversation, trying to discover where the other person is coming from is necessary for understanding the other. But it’s not enough if you’re trying to arrive at some sort of agreement with the other.

By factoring the other person’s standpoint into what he is claiming to say, we are making our own standpoint safely unattainable… Acknowledging the otherness of the other in this way, making him the object of objective knowledge, involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth.

Instead of regarding the other from a distance, like a professor giving a student an oral exam, Gadamer insists that it’s necessary to “transpose ourselves” into the other’s horizon.

For what do we mean by “transposing ourselves”? Certainly not just disregarding ourselves. This is necessary, of course, insofar as we must imagine the other situation. But into this other situation we must bring, precisely, ourselves.

In putting ourselves in the other’s shoes we don’t just make ourselves like the other, thereby eliminating the differences between us. Instead, by putting ourselves in the other’s position we become more acutely aware of the individuality and otherness of the other.

Transposing ourselves consists neither in the empathy of one individual for another nor in subordinating another person to our own standards; rather, it always involves rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other.

Here Gadamer explicitly deviates from the modern, scientifically-inspired hermeneutic that seeks to understand a text objectively by explicating the historical horizon within which it was written but that succeeds only in alienating the modern reader from other truths. He also disagrees with Nietzsche, for whom the multiplicity of other horizons is an irreducible source not only of difference, but also of mutual isolation and the loss of one’s own distinct horizon. What Gadamer wants is for both self and other to broaden their limited and prejudiced points of view by transposing themselves into one another’s different horizons. Understanding, insists Gadamer, is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves. But Gadamer doesn’t envision ultimately collapsing all individually distinct perspectives into a single universal horizon. Instead it is the tension between different limited horizons that makes new understanding possible. The hermeneutic task consists in not covering up this tension by attempting a naive assimilation of the two but in consciously bringing it out. In this way the two separate horizons don’t just converge and merge into a single point of view; rather, they are both simultaneously superceded.

“Become as I am, for I also have become as you are.” Is Paul being Gadamerian in his plea to the Galatians, or is Gadamer explicitly rejecting what seems to be Paul’s empathic blurring of distinct horizons? By transposing himself into the Galatians’ horizon did Paul learn something? Did he expand his own horizon, superceding his prior understanding, making it more universal?

Law as Servant

It’s Bible study time again at Ktismatics. The pew slip Anne brought home from church on Sunday printed out the epistle reading, which was that well-known passage about the fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5. It turns out there’s all sorts of very interesting stuff in Galatians 4-5.

Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave although he is owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by the father. So also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world. But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God. (Galatians 4:1-7)

Awhile back we spent some time looking at Hegel’s master-servant discourse and its ramifications in Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Girard, etc. Hegel went to school at a Protestant seminary; clearly the Bible influenced his thinking significantly. So here in Galatians we have Paul, the foremost interpreter of the master-servant discourse as it plays out in Judaism and early Christianity. What’s his read on lordship and bondage?

Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave although he is owner of everything.

Everyone appears to be a slave, even the heir of the master. Even he who is “owner of everything” — the master himself — seems to be a slave. You might even say that the master is in bondage to himself.

So also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world.

In speaking of “the elemental things” Paul clearly refers to the Law. The Law is the bond by which the lord holds the servant in thrall. But for the heir this same Law functions not as enforcer of servitude but as “guardian” or “manager.” This word “manager” in Greek refers to a steward, usually either a slave or freedman, to whom the master entrusts the day-to-day workings of his household. So for the heir the Law itself is a servant.

Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.

Now Paul seems to be backing off his introductory sentence: his readers didn’t just appear to be slaves; they really were slaves. Is he speaking only of the Gentiles, grafted in as sons of God through Jesus? I don’t think so.

God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.

You could interpret this passage as saying that everyone born under the Law was a servant to the Law until God adopted Jesus. But it seems to me that Paul is saying that Jesus was already a son, that he merely appeared to be a servant “until the date set by the Father.” He was born under the Law, but because he was an heir of the Master the Law was his guardian, his servant.

So Paul seems to be saying that, before Jesus, everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, was a servant under the Law. Now, through Jesus, the Law is servant of everyone.

Children in America

In a recent survey, only 41% of American adults say that children are important in achieving a successful marriage, a huge drop from 1990 results. The top three factors were faithfulness (90%), good sex (70%), and sharing household chores (62%).

The new Pew survey also finds that, by a margin of nearly three-to-one, Americans say that the main purpose of marriage is the “mutual happiness and fulfillment” of adults rather than the “bearing and raising of children.”

At the same time, the most important factor contributing to survey respondents’ personal happiness and fulfillment was their relationships with their children. Relationships with spouses/partners came in a close second.

Wasted Effort

The main problem of the modern and postmodern capitalist industry is precisely waste. We are postmodern beings because we realize that all our aesthetically appealing consumption artifacts will eventually end as leftover, to the point that it will transform the earth into a vast waste land. You lose the sense of tragedy, you perceive progress as derisive.

– Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Desire of Lacan,” 1999

The pile of wasted product is just the artifact; think about all the wasted effort that goes into making and consuming it. Our memories are vast waste lands, piled up with all the intentionally ephemeral mental energy we’ve put into activities that were never meant to last.

Say you do a consulting project for a big corporate client. The analyses you generate provide competitive advantage for one of the client’s new products within a selected demographic niche. The client uses the information to generate a surge in sales within that niche. The competition, aware of its disadvantage, responds with a subtle product modification or a targeted marketing campaign, closing the gap with its rival. Now the playing field is level again. Your client calls you back in, asking you to do another project in search of another edge, another opportunity.

At the end of a successful consulting career you look back and see — what? Clients come and go, their personnel and products come and go, market shares shift back and forth across the competitive environment. You’ve done some good work, met some nice people and some assholes, acquired a certain expertise, made some money. But the work itself? The most recent stuff fills a row of filing cabinets; the rest of it is long gone. The net impact of all that work is precisely nill.

You lose the sense of tragedy, says Miller. It’s tragic when you try to accomplish something you hope will last, and fail. In a world where nothing lasts tragedy is rendered futile. What do you call it when you purposely set out to accomplish something futile, and succeed?

Confessions of an Unprincipled Weakling

Trying to bootstrap myself back into the realms of the psyche, I’m pulling forward a bit of discussion with Jason on my Free Play post, written while I was still in France. In this post I summarized Derrida’s proposition that the structures of our late-modern Western culture have been decentered. Jason, for whom Christ is the center of all structures, agreed that secular decentering has occurred but didn’t share Derrida’s cautious optimism about the potential for free play inherent in structures without centers. Jason referenced the family structure:

But I think its important and “natural” that a man HAVE a “father figure” at all and in the first place in his life. I would actually maybe say that the whole issue is that everyone has the same shitty and impersonal Father Market…and everyone is either stressed out (the “squares”) or pissed off (the hippies) about it.

To which I responded:

As a father I’ve found it important to be able to adapt the way I interact with my kid as she matures. The whole era of “wait till your father gets home” would have forced me into a more rigid disciplinarian role than I’d feel comfortable with, or than seems necessary… Am I a source of security? Sure, I suppose so. But I think a child is also a source of security for its parents: a focus of attention, effort, amusement, etc. So it’s mutual. By the way, in my experience with other parents it’s mostly the mother who’s the authority figure. Dads are just too goofy to be taken seriously.

Jason replied:

So far as the whole father and family thing goes…I resonate with what you are saying… But I do think that some sense of hierarchy and authority, however it plays out (and I’m not entirely sure about that) is basic and foundational to the way God set up the cosmos… A father and mother “gather around” a child, and focus on the things on which it focuses, so to speak, but they don’t “need” the child for “security,” I don’t think (?)… So in that sense, God follows our gaze, and is also the reason for our gaze in a particular direction.

And then through our physical dislocation I lost track of the conversation. But today, in Zizek’s The Fragile Absolute, I read this passage that brought me back to the thread:

The ultimate paradox of the strict psychoanalytic notion of symbolic identification is that it is by definition a misrepresentation, the identification with the way the Other(s) misperceive(s) me. Let us take the most elementary example: as a father, I know I am an unprincipled weakling; but, at the same time, I do not want to disappoint my son, who sees in me what I am not: a person of dignity and strong principles, ready to take risks for a just cause — so I identify with this misperception of me, and truly ‘become myself’ when I, in effect, start to act according to this misperception (ashamed to appear to my son as I really am, I actually accomplish heroic acts). In other words, if we are to account for symbolic identification, it is not enough to refer to the opposition between the way I appear to others and the way I really am: symbolic identification occurs when the way I appear to others becomes more important to me than the psychological reality ‘beneath my social mask,’ forcing me to do things I would never be able to accomplish ‘from within myself.’

We usually regard the Other (with a capital “O”) as occupying the central position, defining everything and everyone else in the structure. Our job as peripheral members of the structure is to identify with the Other’s definition of who we are, even if this identification seems to bely who we think we “really are.” In this excerpt Zikek names his son as the Other; Zizek the father comes to occupy the central heroic position by identifying with his son’s (false) image of him. Zizek is prepared to regard this mask he puts on, this Other-imposed image, as who he “really is.”

Where I diverge from Zizek is that I’m more prepared to acknowledge to my daughter, both in words and in deeds, what Zizek wishes to conceal from his son: I really am an “unprincipled weakling.” If my daughter insists on seeing me as a hero it’s her own fault.

Osama’s Thirteen?

We went to see Ocean’s Thirteen last night and had a blast. Nobody gets killed, nobody has sex, the cursing is so infrequent you’re actually startled by it. Just plenty of good clean fun as we watch a lot of rich guys bully, hustle and scam one another.

As Danny Ocean and his crew plan their latest caper, offhand comments about “collateral damage” and “exit strategy” attuned me to something that should perhaps have been obvious: this is a war movie. In the world-within-a-world of Las Vegas, its silhouette marked by the Eiffel Tower and the pyramids, the casino bosses are the heads of state. They control real estate, infrastructure and security systems as they wage perpetual warfare against each other for control of the Strip. Through hostile takeovers, coups, and regime changes the territory is being remapped constantly. Even the territory itself takes on new contours: “I remember when this was the Sands,” Ocean notes wistfully as he overlooks a lagoon.

In a world crammed with nations that are nothing more than money-generating machines Ocean runs a rogue covert operation. Answerable to no-one, seemingly willing to cut a deal with anyone, Ocean and his (now) twelve disciples manage to outwit the swaggering heads of state, to disable the most sophisticated security systems, to rig every game in the joint, to suck every drop of juice out of the wealthiest of the wealthy. With no territory or egos to protect, with no command-and-control hierarchy to bog things down, the nearly-invisible Oceanic network can smoothly and calmly execute its ingenious schemes. They undermine the most impenetrable financial center, lifting the crown jewels right off the top of the tower. Even a third-world workers’ revolt comes to Ocean’s aid. And in the end Ocean funnels, via Oprah, an absurdly huge cut of the take to a sort of refugee camp.

De-Bourgification

The day before yesterday Anne and I took our daughter and her old pal to the downtown mall. We parked in front of the Daily Camera building, customary gathering place for the hippies, street musicians and vagabonds who pass through town every summer. We grownups had a couple errands to accomplish, so we told the girls to meet us back at the car in an hour. As we parted ways I wondered aloud whether it was a good idea to set up a rendezvous point in the midst of this crowd. “What’s the matter with this crowd?” Some young dude sitting under a tree clearly took exception to my attitude. Um, er, well, nothing, but they’re young, see? So be nice to them. The dude, smiling, said nothing.

Boulder is a capital of American bobo culture: plenty of liberal-thinking, art-film-watching, tree-hugging, Whole-Foods-shopping, mountain-bike-riding, SUV-driving, skinny-latte-sipping lawyers and entrepreneurs and stay-at-home moms. But this is also a university town that boasts a storied heritage of beat writers, Tibetan Buddhist gurus, ski bums and hippies. Soaring real estate prices have exiled most of the real bohemians. The downtown pedestrian mall is definitely a bourgeois haven, lined with pricey boutiques and trendy restaurants. But every summer the hippies make the pilgrimage to Boulder, where they hang out on the mall and make the locals just a little bit nervous.

Now we’re back in Boulder, artsier, edgier, poorer, more bohemian than our prior bobo incarnations. But our brief exchange with the dude under the tree made clear to us that we’ve still got bourgeois instincts. We should have been attuned to the opportunity of engaging in a possibly fruitful conversation. Or at least we should have been able to see “this crowd” less as a potential menace and more as fellow travelers. It’s time to de-bourgify ourselves.

Change of Scenery

A week ago, ten minutes out my front door I’d be strolling along a topless beach on the Riviera. Those same ten minutes today and I’m walking through the middle of a prairie dog town being dive-bombed by a redwing blackbird.

Please Feel Free

When we began unpacking our bags we found that two of them had been opened, with a Notice of Baggage Inpection tucked inside. The notice reads as follows (boldface added by me for ironic effect):

To protect you and your fellow passengers, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is required by law to inspect all checked baggage. As part of this process, some bags are opened and physically inspected. Your bag was among those selected for physical inspection.

During the inspection, your bag and its contents may have been searched for prohibited items. At the completion of the inspection, the contents were returned to your bag.

If the TSA security officer was unable to open your bag for inspection because it was locked, the officer may have been forced to break the locks of your bag. TSA sincerely regrets having to do this, however TSA is not liable for damage to your locks resulting from this necessary security precaution.

For packing tips and suggestions on how to secure your baggage during your next trip, please visit: www.tsa.gov

We appreciate your understanding and cooperation. If you have questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to contact the TSA Contact Center:

Phone: 866.289.9673 (toll free)
Email: TSA-ContactCenter@dhs.gov

Inasmuch as we did not lock our bags, we did not force the TSA agents into having to do anything they might regret in fulfilling their legal requirements.

The TSA is a division of the Homeland Security Administration, whose long arm has reached out to us at two other points (that we know of) on our return to the States. In applying for private health insurance we signed an agreement acknowledging that the insurer would provide information about our health records to HSA. Likewise when we opened a bank account we agreed that the bank would provide our financial information to HSA.

Back in the US of A

No great bloggable insights descended upon me as I stepped onto American pavement for the first time in a couple of years.

Manhattan is fantastic, spectacular, dazzling, overwhelming, turbocharged — but you already knew that. The movies can’t do it justice. Americans generally don’t have as much fashion sense as Western Europeans — but you already knew that too. Even in New York, even among the non-tourists, the attire is pretty ordinary. But collectively the people of Manhattan are extremely colorful: it’s a world city in every respect. And here’s something you might not know: Manhattan isn’t just an aggressive place; it’s also friendly. Manhattan is in your face constantly with such an adrenal outpouring of positive energy that it’s almost too much to bear.

So far everything else about America is just like I remembered it.

In Transit

Our internet connection is gone as we prepare for American re-entry. So it’ll be catch as catch can for awhile on Ktismatics. Feel free to unfasten your seat belts, stroll around the aircraft, chat amongst yourselves…

Attuning Self-as-Portal

Previously I put forward two metaphors for the self. Structurally the self is a membrane, passing vectors of information, desire, and intent and between inside (genes, desires, passions, memories) and outside (phenomena, other people, experiences, culture). Procedurally the self is a portal, actively transforming everything that passes across the membrane, continually creating the self and reality by embedding experience in dynamic networks of meaning. Therapy proceeds by decentering the membrane (as discussed yesterday) and by increasing the power and flexibility of the portal.

Culture and society actively territorialize the world and the selves that occupy it. The self, immersed in culture and society, conforms itself and its awareness to this externally generated territorialization without being consciously aware of it. The territories and their boundary markers operate outside the threshold of conscious awareness in activities like watching television, going to work, driving, participating in ordinary social discourse. Territories are marked by strands of meaning like money, communication, power, pleasure, anxiety, love, respect, lack, choice. Therapy should help the client become attuned to the territorialization in which they’re embedded. It should also help the client understand his/her complicities and resistances to the territorial markers.

The self too is a territorializer, marking phenomena and experience with indicators of meaning. Some of the strands of meaning are transferred across the membrane from the world into the self; other strands assemble themselves from inner drives and desires working their way outward across the membrane into the world. But the self also actively assigns meaning to inner and outer experiences. The self also refines the strands of meaning, converting inner desires and outer affordances into interests, preferences, values, careers, families. These refined strands become integral to the conscious portalic apparatus by which an individual transforms experience into self and reality, but these conscious transformative procedures are themselves shaped and modified by unconscious transformations on both sides of the membrane. Therapy should help the client become aware of how self-as-portal is always transforming the world and is in turn being shaped by phenomena and experience.

Selves are enmeshed in strands of meaning that do not originate in the self. Culture itself is a portal, actively transforming everything and everyone all the time. Therapy should help the client attune to how the cultural portals operate — the trajectories of desire and power and morality, the affordances transmitted by the world and other people, the flows of information and intentionality. In this way the client increasingly recognizes how s/he is always already embedded in the meaning systems stretched across the world, connecting self to world, self to other. At the same time, the client comes to recognize that as an individual s/he has distinct portalic capabilities, able to discern and to assign meanings to experience that are different from those of other people and the larger culture.

Through the therapeutic process the therapist encourages the client to make these identifications and differentiations, alternately enmeshing and separating the self from the culture. By becoming aware of the vast web of unprocessed territorial markings in self and world, as well as the multiple portalic procedures that generate and sustain them, the client may acquire greater facility as a portalist of meaning. Both in forming and in breaking personal territorializations and in actively cooperating and resisting collective territorializations, the self moves through the world more interestingly, more uniquely, perhaps also more dangerously.

Decentering Therapy

Continuing the trajectory of the last two posts, I’m thinking therapy ought to work like this…

Do not reinforce the center. I presume that most people regard their rational consciousness as the center of the self. I would not support this false centrality by continually reflect back statements the client makes with “you feel that…” or “you’re wondering…” or “when did you first…” By holding up a mirror an asking the client to comment on what s/he sees, I’m implicitly colluding with the client’s structural assumptions.

Do not fill the center. By offering interpretations, diagnoses, treatment plans, etc. I place myself at the center.

Do not destroy the center. By refusing to respond to the client’s conscious rational verbalizations, by responding in a seemingly irrelevant fashion, or by criticizing or undermining what the client has to say, I actively attempt to undermine the client’s center. In doing so, however, I’m again filling the center with myself. I can conceivably accomplish this coup d’etat, but to what end? I’ll just have to sabotage my own centrality, or allow the client to do so, which would just result in an endless exchange of placeholders.

Acknowledge the function of rational consciousness. Even if the intent is to decenter it, perhaps even to reduce its structure to that of a thin membrane, rational consciousness is a critical apparatus. Respond to the client’s verbalizations without drawing undue attention to the rational selfhood that generates the thought and speech.

Acknowledge the function of security. The client relies on the center to provide a reliable but immobile base. Forcing consciousness to fill this role is to burden it with goodness and “squareness,” while simultaneously freeing, marginalizing, and corrupting the unconscious and the passions. Is it important to deny or to undermine security? I don’t think so. Security needs to be loosened up in the structure, disconnected from conscious rationality and moved away from the center. Dislodged from the center, security becomes an important consideration in its own right, along with its dark shadow, insecurity, which is always also present at the unstable center.

Actively attend to the other strands that weave the structure together. Security/insecurity is one strand; reason/passion is another. We’ve discussed others in this blog. Hegel’s master/servant dialectic points to the importance of interpersonal power and recognition. Creation as a motive force is counterpoised with mimesis and its attendant manifestations in competition and rivalry. Continuity/rupture. Sorrow and loss, not just as a trauma but as a way of engaging the world.

Follow the strands as they traverse the entire structure. Don’t focus solely on the client’s subjective response to these strands. Explore also how they affect the client’s interpersonal interactions, work, politics, religion.

Follow the strands as they traverse the client-therapist relationship. Don’t ignore or deny transference, and yet don’t make it the centerpiece of therapy. Include it in the conversation as another nexus in the decentralized structure where the strands intersect. This implies a related point…

Decentralize the therapeutic process. Don’t center it on the client, or even on the interpersonal relationship between client and therapist. Instead let therapy traverse the structure freely, tracing all the interconnections and disruptions. Client and therapist agree jointly to engage in an intense and strange interval, with the content and process of that interval determined largely by the client. But if the therapist is to decenter the structures, then it should be acknowledged the structure traverses everything, from the intrapsychic terrain of the client to the transeference-countertransference process to the larger cultural forces in which we all are embedded.