Merde Alors

Il existe plus d’une manière de ne pas lire, dont la plus radicale est de n’ouvrir aucun livre.

– PIerre Bayard, Comment Parler Des Livres Que L’On N’A Pas Lus? 2007

The book I posted on yesterday? I just bought it.

I grabbed the clipping about it from the International Herald Tribune, looked up the French title on Amazon.fr and wrote it on the clipping, then headed up the street to the bookstore. It’s about a two minute walk from door to door. After a cursory look around I showed my clipping to a young woman who works at the store. Ah — juste la, she said pleasantly, pointing to the display table next to her. Two copies left. It’s a classic French-looking book: paperback, plain type font, no cover art, no endorsements on the back — just a 1-paragraph précis. I head for the checkout line, hand over my debit card, punch in my PIN, get my receipt for 15 euros, and, book in hand, out the door I go.

I take it home and look at it. It’s a short book — only 162 pages. That’s encouraging. The last time a friend lent me a French book it was a meditation on poetry by Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, something like 700 pages long. Imagine Dick Cheney writing a book about poetry. “I only read a hundred pages,” I admitted to Jöel when I returned it to him. “I have not read it,” he shrugged.

I flip to the front looking for the table of contents and it’s not there — that’s because French books put the table of contents at the back of the book. Also, the title and author written down the spine of the book? It’s flipped upside down compared to American books: the writing faces toward the right and reads from bottom to top as you look at it on the shelf. This book is part of the publisher’s Paradoxe series. Several other titles by Beyard are on the list: books about Maupassant, Freud, Proust, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare — psychoanalytic lit crit. Looking at the other authors’ names I recognize Deleuze, who has been the subject of a post at Church and Postmodern Culture where I’ve written a couple comments, including one alluding to the book that’s now in my hand. The other authors I’m pretty sure I don’t know, but I can tell they’d make good reading in pomo circles: The Aesthetics of Suicide; The Demon of Tautology; Listening: The Aesthetics of Espionage; The Dancer of Solitudes. The X of Y seems to be the formula for a good French pomo title. How about The Rigors of Caffeine? The Desolation of Masculinity? I should write those maybe. Then people could study Peyard’s book so they’ll know how not to read my books.

I turn to the beginning. It starts, as many books do, with a quote. This one is by Oscar Wilde: Je ne lis jamais un livre dont je dois écrire la critique; on se laisse tellement influencer. It’s not fair: Wilde wrote in English, but this quote is in French, so now I have to retranslate it back into English. “I never read a book dont I have to write a critique: one…” — what? “… it influences one too much”? Something like that: “I never read a book when I have to write a critique: it influences you too much.” LOL. Jokes aren’t nearly as funny when you have to work so hard to get them.

Next is a “Table of Abbreviations.” I don’t want to think about that right now. Next, the Prologue — skip that too for now. First section: Des Manières de Ne Pas Lire — Ways of Not Reading. First chapter: Les Livres Que L’On Ne Connaît Pas — The Books that One Does Not Know. French is big on the impersonal construction: one reads, one does. In English it sounds stilted. So the English title of the book: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read — “you haven’t read,” not the direct translation “one hasn’t read.”

Now the first line: Il existe plus d’une manière de ne pas lire, dont la plus radicale est de n’ouvrir aucun livre. What does it mean? “There exists more than one way not to read, dont the most radical is not to open aucun book.” I’ve got the gist, so I don’t really need the two words I’m not sure of. Dont appeared in the Wilde quote: there I decided it meant “when,” but that doesn’t quite work here. How about “of which”? Aucun I think means “any.” “There’s more than one way not to read, of which the most radical is not to open any book.” Pretty good. I’m looking up the two words.

The French-English dictionary doesn’t give a definition for dont; it refers me to paragraph 79. Where’s that? Way in the back, in special topics, just after conjugation of irregular verbs. Dont: of whom, of which, from which, on which, etc. So I’m good — it’s a multipurpose word, the meaning of which depends on context. Now, aucun: “no, none, not any.” So I’m good again, got it right the first try. “There’s more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open any book.” Ha ha ha. This book is going to be a pomo laugh riot. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll be able to tell one about the second sentence.

You Mean You Haven’t Read Proust?

I admit it: I don’t read much in French. I’m far from fluent, so it takes me a long time. Besides, there’s so much English-language stuff I haven’t read. But I think I’m ready to make an exception. It’s a book written by Peter Bayard, a Parisian professor of literature and psychoanalyst, and not yet available in English translation. The title: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. You can read a description of the book and the author’s intentions in writing it here.

Given the huge number of book discussions saturating the blogosphere, I’ve been amazed at how well-read everybody seems to be. Turns out I’m wrong: Bayard says a lot of people are faking it! What? Is it possible that some of these on-line discussants haven’t actually read Derrida, or Balthazar, or Dawkins? As Bayard says, To be able to talk with finesse about something one does not know is worth more than the universe of books.

The Big Five

On a recent post Jason Hesiak asked about the origins of the concept of introversion versus extraversion. This particular way of categorizing people has been around for a long time but was first formally proposed as a personality trait by Karl Jung. Personality psychologists and statisticians have worked on identifying a small set of reliable and distinct of traits for characterizing people’s personalities. They’ve zeroed in on what’s known as the Big Five. Various personality questionnaires based on the Big Five can be found online: here’s a particularly short version. The results identify the five factors and your score on each: low, medium, high. Remember, there are no right answers (yeah, right — oops, that’s my disagreeableness coming out) So, how did you do? What are you like? Put your scores in a comment… IF YOU DARE — MUAHAHA!

Stop Making Sense

Only a few situations is modern secular society seem sufficiently extreme and uncommunicative to have a chance of evading cooptation. Madness is one. What surpasses the limit of suffering (like the Holocaust) is another. A third is, of course, silence.

– Susan Sontag, “Artaud,” 1973

I don’t know if this is going to be fair. I’ve been tracking the impact of Hegel’s “Master-Bondsman” discourse forward toward the postmodern. The similarities aren’t just substantive; there’s also a stylistic affinity. In short, a lot of these guys seem purposely hard to understand. It’s not because they write in dry technical jargon; it’s because the way they write seems a little bit mad. The reader has a hard time telling whether they’re making sense or talking gibberish.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit purports to describe the history of universal Spirit coming into conscious awareness of itself. Spirit which is not yet conscious is, by definition, unconscious. As Hegel struggles to make himself undertstood (he was by all accounts a popular lecturer), perhaps he is also struggling to understand himself. The flights into unintelligibility may constitute Hegel’s unconscious making itself heard in a way that language cannot quite capture. Is this ecstatic language a sign of transcendence or of madness? Within Hegel’s theory it’s a little of both.

I can’t quote chapter and verse of Lacan, but here’s the idea as I understand it. The father is the master, channeling the subjected child into conformity with structured social interaction. The most important structures are morality and language. But the specific father is a placeholder for the Name of the Father, the universal signifier, the ultimate master of the Law and the Word. To become socialized is to subject oneself to the Law and the Word, to allow oneself to participate in these intricately-structured systems that sustain the meaningful order of things. But there is always a resistance, an incomplete containment of the self in Law and Word. This resistance expresses itself in “symptoms”: socially inappropriate, anomalous behaviors and mannerisms that take place beneath the threshold of consciousness, in the realm of irrational and nonverbal communication. This morning I wrote a comment on Church and Pomo about Deleuze and Guattari, who advocate a kind of “schizoanalysis” for freeing the flows of desire from “territorialization” in any sort of social or linguistic order. In explicitly moving beyond Hegel they acknowledge the source of their project: the link between the incoherent and the transcendent, a kind of metaphysical glossolalia. As Sontag observes, The literature of the crazy in this [i.e., the twentieth] century is a rich religious literature — perhaps the last original zone of genuine Gnostic speculation.

The blurred distinction between transcendence and madness characterizes quite a few postmodernists. I recently discussed Baudrillard as one example. There are plenty of others: the dadaists, Breton and the Surrealists, Lacan himself, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida sometimes, Zizek, Badiou. Then there are the half-mad writers they admire: Sade, Poe, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Jarry, Artaud (see my post on his Theater of Cruelty), Henry Miller, Beckett, Genet, Dick. The last hundred years of les artes plastiques have been dominated by non-representational expression.

There’s something rebellious in non-representational verbal and visual expression, something unwilling to become subjected to the rational-linguistic order imposed in the Name of the Father. This inability to be contained also manifests a transcendence, an excess over the usual registers of exchange. The mad, the transgressive, the transcendent — all are expressions of mastery in a society dominated by mutual enslavement.

I often put myself into this state of impossible absurdity, in order to try to generate thought in myself. There are a few of us in this era who have tried to get hold of things, to create within ourselves spaces for life, spaces which did not exist and which did not seem to belong to actual space… What is difficult is to find one’s place and to reestablish communication with one’s self. Everything depends on a certain flocculation of things, on the clustering of all these mental gems around a point which has yet to be found… Do you know what it means to have a suspended sensibility, this point of necessary cohesion to which being can no longer rise, this place of terror, this place of prostration?

– Antonin Artaud, “The Nerve Meter,” 1925

In witnessing the self-torment of someone like Artaud you realize that it’s better to be the master of your own uncontainable excesses than to be enslaved by them. In other words, it’s more fun to play at madness than to be really mad.

Authentic Angst

Heidegger’s Being and Time contextualizes man absolutely. There is no essential human nature that transcends existence in the world, in culture, in history. “Being” is always “being-in,” or Da-sein, thrown into a pre-existing world and inextricably entangled in it: that’s the take-home message of the first half of the book, my favorite half. It’s a message that has profoundly affected subsequent thinking in ontology, epistemology and hermeneutics. In the second half of the book Heidegger says that “to be-in” also always means “to be-toward” in time. Man doesn’t live in eternity, nor does he live in the pure present; he is always pointing back to his birth and forward toward his death. This last bit, this being-toward-death, points forward to the existentialists and their angsty successors. But it also points backward to Hegel’s absolute Master.

As long as you are entangled in the world you can never be whole, but it’s impossible to disentangle yourself from the world without leaving the world; that is, without dying. So every effort to transcend, to attain pure being for oneself, means being thrown forward toward one’s own death. I am always “not-yet,” always moving forward in time toward that moment that simultaneously completes me and ends me. Is my not-yetness like a ripening fruit? No, says Heidegger: death is the opposite of ripeness; not the fulfillment of possibility but its loss. As soon as you’re born you’re dying: being-in is always already a being-toward-death. Being attuned to this inevitability, to this absolute potentiality is what Heidegger calls Angst.

Succumbing to the temptation to cover over this awareness of being-toward-death Heidegger calls falling prey. It manifests itself in idle talk, in an everyday sociability with “the they” that constitutes a constant tranquillization about death.

The they does not permit the courage to have Angst about death… The they is careful to distort this Angst into the fear of a future event. Angst, made ambiguous as fear is, moreover, taken as a weakness which no self-assured Da-sein is permitted to know. What is “proper” according to the silent decree of the they is the indifferent calm as to the “fact” that one dies. The cultivation of such a “superior” indifference estranges Da-sein from its ownmost nonrelational potentiality-of-being. Temptation, tranquillization, and estrangement, however, characterize the kind of being of falling prey. Entangled, everyday being-toward-death is a constant flight from death. Being toward the end has the mode of evading that end — reinterpreting it, understanding it inauthentically, and veiling it.

Da-sein, being-in the world, is characterized by ambivalence, always simultaneously a being-toward-death and a flight from death. What, then, constitutes the existential project of an authentic being-toward-death? Not seeking one’s death; not brooding over death; but rather understanding, cultivating, enduring, and expecting death as possibility. There is no self-actualization in authentic Angst.

It is the possibility of the impossibility of every mode of behavior toward . . . , of every way of existing… Death does not just “belong” in an undifferentiated way to one’s own Da-sein, but it lays claim on it as something individual.

Death is non-relational. I can take care of the world or I can be distracted by the they, but ultimately my death is my own, something to be faced by myself alone, with a resoluteness. Resoluteness means letting oneself be summoned out of one’s lostness in the they.

Heidegger doesn’t dwell on master-bondsman. Instead he zeros in on Hegel’s “absolute Master” and the individual’s relationship to him. Losing myself in the they, even taking care of the they, is a distraction from my truest essential being, that which is always available to me as an autonomous self thrown into the world. It is the perpetual presence of my inevitable absence, the desire of dread, the one thing that is truly mine: my being-toward-death. Or, as angstmeister Jackson Browne once said:

Just do the steps that you’ve been shown
By everyone you’ve ever known
Until the dance becomes your very own
No matter how close to yours
Another’s steps have grown
In the end there is one dance you’ll do alone

Where You Gonna Run To?

I woke up sneezing at five this morning. A couple hours later I was still sneezing and tired again because of it, so I went back to bed and I had a dream.

I was talking with someone, possibly my wife. “You want to see something?” asked Bill, my old work colleague and friend — Bill who is now Shaun, but in this dream Bill is still Bill, before he had become a woman. “You want to see something?” He took his notebook computer and opened the screen, which when unfolded was big enough to cover half a wall. It had some kind of surround sound system built into it too; I don’t know how it worked.

It was a commercial that Bill showed us, or actually a parody of a commercial. I’ve never seen the original commercial in the waking world, but I knew it in dreamstate and I can infer what it probably was like. The dream commercial is set in a classroom, with a bunch of kids maybe eight years old or so, some sitting at desks, some standing; no teacher that I can recall. The classroom has desks and a whiteboard but not much else in it. A couple of kids put a few books and papers down on open surfaces. Pause. Suddenly, fast motion, and all the kids start filling the classroom with stuff: books, papers, drawings, who knows what-all. Stuff is stacked on top of stuff; piles of books stack up, fall over. Stacks are coming out horizontally from the walls, from the whiteboard toward the viewer. The classroom itself begins to fall apart, walls and ceiling disappearing. I’m loving this commercial, grinning, laughing, really happy about it. A song starts playing: Hooray for the Red White and Blue, instrumental, lots of blaring brass.

I wake up and the music in my head changes to the song playing behind the closing scene/credits of David Lynch’s Inland Empire. The song is lip-synched in the movie while many women of various colors dance, some in wild abandon, some swaying hypnotically. The actress who stars in the movie sits on a sofa with two other women, both of whom are actresses who starred in prior Lynch films. The filmgoer, who has been watching the singer and dancers, now watches the three women as they watch the singer and the dancers. A week ago a Lynch fan from Spain linked to my post about Inland Empire on his blog, Mujoland. I made a comment there, leaving a link to the closing song. Trying to retrieve that link I came across a post on 17 dots that identifies the source text for the lyric. The first line of the text, which isn’t directly cited in the song, goes like this:

the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up…

Baudrillard: The David Bowie of Philosophy

What I am going to write will have less and less chance of being understood. That’s my problem.

– Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard is dead at 77: here’s an obituary. The temptation is to Baudrillardize his death, to say it’s a simulation, or that he’s always already been dead so this is a second-order death, or his death provides the rest of us with the illusion that we’re alive. That we can play these games, and that these games can actually mean something, is itself a tribute to Baudrillard. I’ve been thinking about Baudrillard a lot lately: he figured prominently in yesterday’s post, and a new flurry of comments has reactivated this riff about Simulacra and Simulation, its citation of Borges and its citation in The Matrix.

If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing, wrote Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont about postmodern theorists. Here’s a sentence they cite from Baudrillard:

Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes.

This text, say Sokal and Bricmont, continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense. They call attention to the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology — inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning.

In summary, one finds in Baudrillard’s works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard’s thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.

Richard Dawkins wonders about the astruse, nearly-hallucinatory style adopted by so many postmodernists, including Baudrillard:

But don’t the postmodernists claim only to be ‘playing games’? Isn’t the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, and no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn’t it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn’t games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense?

The joke Dawkins alludes to here is the notorious one played by Richard Sokal on a prestigious literary journal in 1996. Sokal, a physicist, wrote an incomprehensible discourse riddled with pomo “metatwaddle.” The essay was accepted by the editorial board and published before Sokal revealed the hoax. Journalist Gary Kamiya wrote a commentary for Salon about the inevitability of a pomo parody like Sokal’s, filled with the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for ‘advanced’ thought, is nevertheless complete, unadulterated bullshit. Sokal himself wrote a commentary on his pomo adventure, which must eventually have led to his book deal.

And what did Baudrillard himself have to say about the pomo humbug? In a way it was a compliment, he told Steven Poole in an interview that would make a fine elegy to the man Poole called the David Bowie of philosophy. Lecturing a roomful of puzzled London architecture students Baudrillard said, probably with a smile on his face:

Gone is the innocence of nonsense. It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

The Surplus Value of Desire

For Hegel there’s the master, the bondsman, and the thing — the object of desire that passes back and forth between master and bondsman, promising plenitude of being on its owner but always slipping out of reach, the promise remaining unfulfilled, the self always dependent on the other for autonomy. In Lacan the object is the phallus, passing back and forth between child, mother, and father yet never really existing anywhere: a thing defined by its absence. In Girard the object of desire is identified not in itself but in the desire of the other. I don’t desire anything in particular; I desire what the other desires. The other desires something because it bestows plenitude of being, so I should desire it too. Mimetic desire turns into mimetic rivalry.

It seems like the obvious place to go next is the marketplace. The idea is this: what I desire is defined by the other’s desire; the other’s desire is defined by mine. An escalation of desire lands on some object, imbuing it with value that exceeds its use, or even its exchange value. It doesn’t just meet needs; it is a carrier of desire. The excess of desire over use and exchange value, the excess of demand value over supply value, defines the surplus value of a commodity. This surplus value can be equated with its value as an object of mimetic desire, bestowed upon it by mutual imitation and envy and rivalry for securing whatever bestows fulness of being on its possessor.

The problem is that the object of desire never fulfills its promise: it never bestows plenitude on whoever controls it. When you obtain it you experience a sudden thrill: I’m becoming whole at last. But once the moment of acquisition passes, the self recedes back into its former incomplete status. Somehow the promise has slipped away; the object seems to have lost its ability to fulfill desire. Exposed again as incomplete, the person starts looking around again. Desire has slipped off the acquired object and transported itself elsewhere, landing on some other object that is now the focus of mimetic desire. Now the effort to fulfill desire shifts to this new object. Every time desire lands on something new, surplus market value accrues to that object. And the demand for personal fulfillment, rather than being satisfied by acquiring the object, merely increases through the frustration and failure. An ever-increasing intensification of desire ensues, rippling across the marketplace, increasing the overall value of commodities distributed across the marketplace.

Value in this sort of calculation isn’t defined by labor or capital but by the sign value of objects as carriers of personal plenitude, as carriers of desire that is really a lack in every self, a lack that pulls to itself an ever-increasing stream of money. This is why economies can continue to grow even after everyone’s needs are met. The desire for autonomy of being is never fulfilled, and every failed effort to acquire it just jacks up the price of trying again next time. The object of desire is a desire for the desire of the other, which stimulates price competition. And the object is the presence of absence, which means it can continue to suck money into itself without end. And the object is not tangible: it’s a non-object, something that attaches itself like holiness or sin to one thing after another, only to slip away as soon as it’s in your grasp. The futility of pursuing an unfulfillable desire fuels the engine that drives the continual expansion of the economy.

Whose elaboration on Hegel’s master-bondsman discourse is this? Marx coined the term “commodity fetishism,” but he didn’t mean what we’re talking about here. Bataille talks about excess value, but he’s interested more in extravagant expenditure as fulfillment than in the continual pursuit of desire. Debord identifies the commodity as spectacle, but his is a discourse about appearances.

Deleuze and Guattari? From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look on it primarily as a lack; a lack of an object, a lack of a real object (Anti-Oedipus, 1972). That’s the trajectory we’re interested in: desire as lack, as incurable insufficiency of being, as an inability-to-be that is life itself. Deleuze and Guattari explore this idea in the context of psychoanalytic theory, where the “fantasized object” becomes for Lacan the phallus, the object defined by its absence. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire.

Then there’s Baudrillard in his post-Marxist, pre-simulacrum phase. I don’t have these earlier books, but I think he elaborates the idea of tying a commodity’s value to its being the repository of imitative desire among consumers. Baudrillard deals more in sign values, like a linguist, rather than in desire and master-bondsman, like Hegel. So maybe it is Deleuze and Guattari, though they seem stuck in Freud and Lacan. Perhaps it’s an idea that never originated anywhere in particular; it’s always imitated but there never was an originator. So Baudrillard wins again with his simulacrum and hyperreality paradigms.

That Goes Without Saying

Here’s a study showing that communication gaps can result from people knowing each other too well. When we share a lot of assumptions, preconceptions, and knowledge with someone we start speaking in shorthand, assuming that the other person will fill in the gaps. But it doesn’t always work: we don’t say enough;we talk past one another; new information falls through the gaps. Sometimes it’s easier for strangers to understand you, because you don’t have any presupposions to get in the way. And sometimes it’s hardest to say something new to those who know you best, because they think they already know everything you know. [Also follow the link in the article on “messages” to a curious little study about instant messaging.]

My Rival is Myself

Hegel exposes the self and the other engaged in mortal combat. The winner hopes to establish his autonomous being-for-self, but this autonomy is attained only through recognition by the loser. The loser, on the other hand, finds autonomy in being able to fulfill the winner’s desire for recognition. The master and the bondsman can both achieve a kind of autonomy, but it’s always incomplete. The master desires the other’s recognition; the bondsman desires the master’s reliance on him. Both desire the desire of the other.

Rene Girard presents another elaboration of Hegel’s desire of desire. In exploring mythic conflicts, Girard discovers that whatever one party values, the other invariably tries to take away. The wronged party seeks vengeance; the other party retaliates. As the conflict escalates it becomes self-perpetuating, until eventually no one can remember quite how it started. To an outsider witnessing the escalation it becomes increasingly difficult to discern who is the provocateur and who the avenger. Though the adversaries see each other as opposites, to the outsider they seem indistinguishable from one another, identical, whatever differences there once were effaced by the irresolvable rivalry that threatens to destroy them both.

Girard traces rivalry to desire. I sense an incompleteness within myself; my desire is to complete myself, to attain whatever it is that I lack. But what will fulfill my desire? I don’t know — my desire is free-floating, unattached to any particular object of desire, characterized purely by lack. So I start looking around at others: what is it that they desire? A piece of land or a goblet, the favor of a particular woman or god? If they desire it, then that must be the thing that would complete them. If it will complete them, it will complete me. I want it too. This is what Girard calls mimetic desire: imitative desire, desire of the desire of the other.

In all varieties of desire examined by us, we have encountered not only a subject and an object but a third presence as well: the rival. It is the rival who should be accorded the dominant role. We must take care, however, to identify him correctly; not to say, with Freud, that he is the father; or, in the case of tragedies [e.g., Cain and Abel] that he is the brother. Our first task is to define the rival’s position within the system to which he belongs, in relation to both subject and object. The rival desires the same thing as the subject, and to assert the primacy of the rival can lead to only one conclusion. Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it. In desiring an object the rival alerts the subject to the desirability of the object. The rival, then, serves as a model for the subject, not only in regard to such secondary matters as style and opinions but also, and more essentially, in regard to desires.

When modern theorists envision man as a being who knows what he wants, or at least possesses an “unconscious” that knows for him, they may simply have failed to perceive the domain in which human uncertainty is most extreme. Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before, man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being. If the model, who is apparently already endowed with superior being, desires some object, that object must surely be capable of conferring an even greater plenitude of being. It is not through words, therefore, but by the example of his own desire that the model conveys to the subject the supreme desirability of the object…

Two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash. Thus, mimesis coupled with desire leads automatically to conflict. However, men always seem half blind to this conjunction, unable to perceive it as a cause of rivalry. In human relationships words like sameness and similarity evoke an image of harmony. If we have the same tastes and like the same things, surely we are bound to get along. But what will happen when we share the same desires? Only the major dramatists and novelists have partly understood and explored this form of rivalry.

– Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 1972

Absence of Absence, Desire of Dread

I’m trying to identify the trajectory passsing through Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” discourse to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. Both of these guys I find extremely difficult to understand. Both are systematizers, so linking them through this one small discourse threatens to overflow into all sorts of excess theory that I can’t contain.

In Hegel’s discourse, self-consciousness is engaged in a struggle to establish its own being-for-self. What happens, though, is that the self seeks this self-assurance through others. There are two complementary ways this can happen: either the master receives recognition of self through the bondsman’s service, or the bondsman through work becomes the autonomous sourse of self-affirmation which the master desires but lacks. So what you end up with are three things: the master; the bondsman; and that mysterious thing , that obscure object of desire, which provides the self with assurance of its independent existence. That third thing always seems to be passing back and forth between the master and the bondsman. The master acquires it from the bondsman, which means that really the bondsman is its source. But the bondsman is always already giving this thing over to the master. Both of them desire this thing; both have had it in their possession but neither of them really has it now; both think that the other has it.

This “thing” becomes a focal point in Lacan’s theory. Everyone desires it; everyone believes that they once had it but lost it; everyone believes that the other has it. What is it? It’s the thing that fulfills you, or at least that you believe will fulfill you. It’s the thing that makes you whole. It’s the thing that you had but that you lost, that was in fact taken from you. Someone else has it now. I want to serve that person, who is whole. But I also want to destroy that person, taking back that thing that once was mine but that the other took from me.

And now we enter Freud’s system, with Lacan reinterpreting Freud in light of Hegel. This “thing” that is desired and that makes me whole is the phallus. My loss of the phallus is castration anxiety. The one who took the phallus from me, who castrated me, is the Father. The one who desires the phallus is the Mother. If I can get the phallus back from the Father, I can become whole and satisfy the Mother’s desire: Freud’s Oedipus complex. Or, if I can become the phallus, the object of desire, then I can make the Mother whole. This whole economy of the phallus is gender-independent; it is not the same as penis. It is Hegel’s abstract object of desire and fulfillment that is always already lost. Males and females alike experience the lack of the phallus in themselves, the desire to regain the phallus in order to complete themselves, the desire to be desired by being the phallus that completes the other.

The thing is, says Hegel, this thing, this sense of self-containment, is an entirely negative thing: it is the dread of the ultimate Master, which is death, and which enlivens the motivation of all human endeavor. So the thing that is desired is simultaneously a non-thing that is the source of all existential fear. To have lost this thing is to have lost a loss; to desire it is to desire a dread. What we seek is what we fear; our loss is the absence of an absence. The phallus is defined by its absence; our desire is also our greatest fear. And the Father, the one who has that which we desire and dread, that which to have is to be without? He is not the father with a small “f” — the person’s actual father, the master of the home. He is the ultimate Master, who is death. We can’t kill the Father to get the phallus back because He is always already dead. Our pursuit of completion, our desire, our desire to be desired, are all the pursuit of the ultimate Master, Death.

It’s no wonder we’re so screwed up.

But You Don’t

“I’m Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem, 2002

Yeah, I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
The kids are coming up from behind.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the kids from France and from London.
But I was there.

I was there in 1968.
I was there at the first Can show in Cologne.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on the decks.
I’m losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978.
I’m losing my edge.

To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin.
I’m losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.

But I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge, but I was there.
I was there.
But I was there.

I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge.
I can hear the footsteps every night on the decks.
But I was there.
I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City.
I was working on the organ sounds with much patience.
I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band.
I told him, “Don’t do it that way. You’ll never make a dime.”
I was there.
I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.
I played it at CBGB’s.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.
I’ve never been wrong.

I used to work in the record store.
I had everything before anyone.
I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan.
I was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes.
I woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988.

But I’m losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they’re actually really, really nice.

I’m losing my edge.

I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody. Every great song by the Beach Boys. All the underground hits. All the Modern Lovers tracks. I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit – 1985, ’86, ’87. I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good ’60s cut and another box set from the ’70s.

I hear you’re buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.

I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.

I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.

But have you seen my records? This Heat, Pere Ubu, Outsiders, Nation of Ulysses, Mars, The Trojans, The Black Dice, Todd Terry, the Germs, Section 25, Althea and Donna, Sexual Harrassment, a-ha, Pere Ubu, Dorothy Ashby, PIL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, the Human League, the Normal, Lou Reed, Scott Walker, Monks, Niagra,

Joy Division, Lower 48, the Association, Sun Ra,
Scientists, Royal Trux, 10cc,

Eric B. and Rakim, Index, Basic Channel, Soulsonic Force (“just hit me”!), Juan Atkins, David Axelrod, Electric Prunes, Gil! Scott! Heron!, the Slits, Faust, Mantronix, Pharaoh Sanders and the Fire Engines, the Swans, the Soft Cell, the Sonics, the Sonics, the Sonics, the Sonics.

You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.
You don’t know what you really want.

Turning Yourself Into an Adventure

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and other.

– Michel de Montaigne, 1580

I’m struck by how this fusillade of “stupefying verbiage” — Hegel’s “Master and Bondsman” discourse — anticipates so many ideas that would later come into prominence. Marxism is probably the most widely-recognized intellectual successor to Hegel’s discourse, though now it seems that 20th century political philosphers Georg Lucacs and Alexandre Kojeve may have invented this supposed lineage. What interests me more are the links to philosophical psychology.

Nietzsche called himself a psychologist rather than a philosopher. He talked a lot about the will to power, about the lordly virtues of the Greeks and Romans compared with the slave morality of the Jews and Christians — not particularly Hegelian themes, these. But then, in The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes a hypothetical scenario in which enslavement turns into the conscious self. The master, his every desire fulfilled, has no need to develop intent, rationale, interest, cooperation, memory, calculation, planning, morality, conscience, or any of the other trappings of sentience. What he wants he takes. The slave, possessed of the same desires as the master but unable to fulfill them, must carve out other channels:

All instincts that are not allowed free play turn inward. This is what I call man’s interiorization; it alone provides the soil for what is later called man’s soul. Man’s interior world, originally meager and tenuous, was expanding in every dimension, in proportion as the outward discharge of his feelings was curtailed… Hostility, cruelty, the delight in persecution, raids, excitement, destruction all turned against their begetter… man began rending, persecuting, terrifying himself, like a wild beast hurling itself against the bars of its cage. This languisher, devoured by nostalgia for the desert, who had to turn himself into an adventure, a torture chamber, an insecure and dangerous wilderness — this fool, this pining and desperate prisoner, became the inventor of “bad conscience.” Also the generator of the greatest and most disastrous of maladies, of which humanity to this day has not been cured: his sickness of himself, brought on by the violent severance from his animal past, his sudden leap and fall into new layers and conditions of existence, by his declaration of war against the old instincts that had hitherto been the foundation of his power, his joy, and his awesomeness. Let me hasten to add that the phenomenon of an animal soul turning in upon itself, taking arms against itself, was so novel, profound, mysterious, contradictory, and pregnant with possibility, that the whole complexion of the universe was changed thereby. This spectacle (and the end of it is not yet in sight) required a divine audience to do it justice. It was a spectacle too sublime and paradoxical to pass unnoticed on some trivial planet. Henceforth man was to figure among the most unexpected and breathtaking throws in the game of dice played by Heraclitus’ great “child,” be he called Zeus or Chance. Man now aroused an interest, a suspense, a hope, almost a conviction — as though in him something were heralded, as though he were not a goal but a way, an interlude, a bridge, a great promise . . . .

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 1887

Man, his instincts thwarted by the master, be his name Father or King or Society or God, turns in on himself, with consciousness emerging from the internal struggle. In the generation after Nietzsche a prominent Viennese physician of the soul would assign new names to these concepts: id, superego, ego. It’s the working-through of Hegel’s development of self-consciousness in the bondsman.

But… Nietzsche and Freud both see self-consciousness developing in a top-down hierarchy. In Nietzsche’s scenario it’s literally the bondsmen serving a master who emerge as the first self-aware humans; for Freud every child under subjection to parents, then to the society, develops an ego. It’s as if they pick up Hegel’s master-bondsman discourse halfway through, after the dominant-submissive roles have already been established. But Hegel begins with two equals who, in confronting one another, separate into dominant and submissive. Every dyadic encounter leads to this same negotiation of status: sometimes you end up on top, sometimes on the bottom. So the individual isn’t either master or bondsman; he’s both — and that’s not even taking into account the possibility that roles can reverse themselves over the course of a relationship. So everyone has to triangulate toward self-autonomy both as the one who feeds off the other’s acclaim and as the one who has to serve it to the other.

And that’s not all. For Hegel the master-bondsman negotiation recapitulates an internal conflict between consciousness and self-consciousness. The external striving for recognition and autonomy is doubled internally. Do I serve my self-awareness, following my reasons and beliefs and calculations and plans? Or does my self-awareness serve me, figuring out ways to fulfill my desires?

Kids Too Self-Absorbed?

Here’s an article about narcissism among American college students. “You’re special,” American kids are told over and over again. I think maybe every American kid should spend at least a year going to a French school, just to get a feel for what it’s like not to be special. When our daughter was in the CM2 (5th grade) her teacher explained medieval feudalism like this:

The king is like the directrice (principal), the lords are like the teachers, and the serfs are like the students. Serfs could never become lords. Just like you: no matter how old or smart you get, you’ll never be more than just a student in this school.