Owning Reality 2
One of the strange consequences of modernity is that humans have a highly problematic relationship with their own passions. More particularly we are gripped, in our thoughts upon the nature of passions by a language of ownership. We impose a deep choice upon our minds. Either we own our passions or our passions own us. We are thereby able to exert carefully (cognitive) control and therefore behave like responsible citizens, and make ‘informed choices’ or we are the simple product of our passions opened to endless manipulation, and thought control. The real problem with such a crude dilemma, is that what it loses is the obvious sheer complexity of passions in the first place; as it replaces that complexity with a long meditation upon the nature of thought control. In this language of control, perhaps four distinct axes or perhaps focuses/loci of control can be most clearly discerned. One might be able to master one’s own passions and exert conscious control; one might be able to master biology and exert chemical control; one might be able to learn the ways of the unconscious process, and exert historical control; or finally one might be able to use and reuse language to recast feeling, as if to exert linguistic control. Each of which is buried within a complex web of power-control relations; and so each relation is double edged. ‘One controls or is controlled’ is the dogma. In this rant, each of these loci will be considered in turn, before I consider the alternative approach to this weary lament of slavery, an approach which seeks to replace the language of control, with the language of companionship.
The position of conscious control in our society is perhaps one of its most perplexing features. On the one hand it goes without saying that our society really does not make sense unless conscious control is not just possible but easy, and straight forward. Or to put it better, that freedom which we so loudly trump about, only exists as long as our minds are free to choose what is in our own interests, be that a political party, a TV station or a brand of cornflakes. Now there are two distinctive elements at play here.
On the one hand there is the play of small scale decisions as they play out within and to certain individuals. We only choose, and therefore act freely, if we can define what we really really want. The problem of course is in that second ‘really’ - as is so easy to overwhelm, as it depends on knowing what one is choosing between. Increase the choices too much, and any hope of an explicit or implicit conjunction between those most erstwhile of bedfellows, desire and rationality, slips away. One will not be able to choose, so will choose randomly, and develop a reason why one made a choice later (I have always bought this soap powder…).
On the other hand, the entire rationale of our system, lies within us being able to make such decisions. If we cannot, then that ‘hidden hand’ of collective interest which is meant to make all our world so much better, is effectively fingerless, as the shit can rise to the surface just as easily as the cream. Or to put it differently, our entire economic and political system has, since Adam Smith, at least, been based upon the assumption that one can hold down, the potentially disruptive power of collective decisions (the ones which no one need take responsibility for), if and only if everyone can make rational choices between known alternatives. If this benign situation arises, then the net effect of everyone’s choice is that the ‘better’ product (however that better is understood) succeeds and the worse fails. The minute however, that there is no clear best, or even more problematically, no possible way of ever choosing the best, the entire system is in peril, and runs the risk of slipping back into the creation of collective irrationality and irresponsibility. A world we all probably know all too well.
The problem of conscious control of one’s desires is caught up in the problem of how one mediates between a world of desire, and the world that is formed as the product of our collective desire. Consciousness, that is the world of rational choice, is the bridgehead between immediate desires, and the eventual consequences of acting on those desires; and if conscious control is lost, this link, this attempt to breed a collective which is rational and useful, is likewise lost. No wonder then, we bang on constantly about the language of freedom and choice, as if by repeating the holy mantra enough we might start to believe it once again…
The second ruse which we follow in our language of control, binds us back to chemistry. Here the starting point is suspiciously similar to the previous locus. Chemistry is held up as the answer to the problems which too much choice creates for desires. The mechanics of modernity might make rational choices (including the choice of which passions to feel) in effect impossible. And yet, the honeyed claim runs, that that need not itself matter much if one can take a nice little pill, which allows our mind to be what it OUGHT to be once again: or better what we might demand it to be. Consciousness uses drugs to fight back… This fight back has however, clear dimensions of its own.
Firstly it is clear that ‘drugging’ one’s self up has become both the national past time, but also a national paranoia. It is almost as if the conscious mind is weary of the duties which modernity imposes on it. - Weary of having to keep the unruly world of desire in order, and therefore finds release in alcohol or some other more benign drug. Or perhaps it is the case that the conscious mind, feeling that the demands of choice makes the world too complex, or too painful, acts to replace such choices by drugging itself up. A move that has the double advantage of both ensuring that all demands to choose are at once negated (Leave me alone, I am Drunk). But also and just as importantly, that the mind replaces the entire rather problematic ‘decision making’, over which it has control, with a process which it actively wills, and whose effect and result it knows full well. The mind then in limiting itself in drugs has the deep comfort that at least it knows where it is. Or rather at least it knows why it does not know (quite) where it is and what it is doing.
Secondly there is the entire issue of humans wanting to become at one with their biology. The claim rings out across the media that we should ‘blame the genes’ for obesity, for violence, or for depression. The tangible glee implied within these headlines, runs in the face of the science itself, as very few (or non existent) are the scientists who are daft enough to make such crude claims. Science speaks only of probabilities and tendencies (given certain contingent conditions) and not ever simple certainties. It is I – by which I mean us (the public) who in their lust for the language of simple control, speaks thus. It is almost here as if the mind, once it has given up the hope of being able to be responsible for itself (well the world is so complex) wants to find a nice simple agent (one capable of behaving as if it were a conscious mind or at least a programme) to blame. Moreover this move has the additional advantage that it offers the promise that, through the ‘correct’ drug therapy, the mind might be able at some later time to regain its control over itself. In the glee is therefore hidden the double glee of a child, who is given permission to be removed from the responsibility of their own actions (I am fat, I eat too much, it is medical, it is nothing I can help); and the glee of the tyrant who has been offered the promise at some later time of acting to resume control over the mind.
The problem which biology poses is not that thorny problem of nature and nurture: A problem that is not only defined so as not to have any possible resolution, but also does not matter (who cares why I am what I am if I can change nothing by the knowledge?); But rather the problem of the dream of control without consequence. Our ‘knowledge’ of our own biology holds out the promise that we might become the true tyrants of our souls, and so the true master once again of the world. And yet for many (if not now most scientists) it is the case that such a claim is too simplistic in its endeavours. The same rules which makes it so hard for collective decisions to work en masse as a positive force, also will intervene in between the gene and its actions. One might intervene at a certain point, but the consequences of that interaction further down the line will (as the butterfly’s wing action) create numerous rather unintended consequences…
The language of control based upon the past, and our history, starts off at least from an ostensibly rather different place. The claim runs that there is always more to our mind. We have a history, be it collective or individual, which contains thoughts and feelings which are already necessarily bothering us. It is then by addressing this history, with its rules of composition and action, that we move beyond its untoward effects upon our minds, that we regain control. Our past becomes then a weave of memory which the mind can thread and rethread, restitching the past to form a more comfortable present.
However, hidden within all the language of acceptance and the jeremiads written against conscious control, is a very basic, and utterly rationalist assumption. Namely that there is a necessarily causal connection between events (that is memories) and the passions which they inspire. What must be rewoven is the world of causes, that is the world of memories; once this is done (and redone) passions must learn to behave themselves (and follow their masters in events). On the deepest of levels the unconscious carries over into the unknown the deep assumption of the conscious mind. Namely that its experiences, its perceptions and memories are the ones which ultimately hold the whip hand over passions. Memory might be a bit disordered, might be (at times) a bit problematic, but no matter, experience, and memory are what they claim to be, are what cause passions.
Thence psychology’s two planks rest upon either the claims of psychoanalysis that memory (and so experience which can be conscious) is master; or the claim if passions are sovereign, one must treat the ‘patient’ with drugs (anti-depressants or the like). The old seventeenth century idea that passions (or affects) might have a world and logic quite separate from our claims over them is thereby squeezed out in our desire to own a means of control. In short there is something far too comforting in this language of the mind.
The final locus, attempts in part no doubt to move beyond this impasse by looking to alternative structures, be they found in memory, perception or language. The advance here is that such structures need not be defined by individuals but by structure. Hence language can be sharded into a structure and humanity defined in the pieces. Language or perception becomes then a net within which the mind can be caught. Control slips away from anything that can be deliberately owned by any one individual; it becomes threatening. Something which someone else does to one’s mind and makes one not quite as one was (this the is the world of subliminal advertising or a tyrannical and quixotic unconscious). Advertising claims therefore to be the true descendant of mythology. It invents an elaborate series of myths which are rooted in the pre-thought world of structure (the thoughts that lead to our known thoughts) through which our minds can be at once delighted and enslaved.
However, such an approach remains caught up in the language of control, even if that control is not something that any one individual can wield. So much so, that this language of control forces the ‘structural’ approach to forget what is surely one of the most salient facets of the human mind. That being, that the mind changes what it is all the time (Freud is right here that memories, that is, events do matter). Structures need therefore to be dynamic and shifting, and cannot be simply anchored in a world of a series of oppositions or parts that take one necessarily beyond all such memories. Control becomes possible, if in controlling, it freezes the elements which it is controlling (at least for the space of the control which it exercises). Hence there is something truly obnoxious in advertising. It not only tries to make us do what we otherwise would not want to do, but also in doing so, it conspires to build a mind robbed of its own dynamism (its own ability to problematise itself), a mind which can relax into being ‘pampered’ and so controlled. Likewise the overly ‘nice’ and careful structuring of the modern supermarket ensures that everything appears at hand when one wants it. All effort is then occluded, and the mind can then relax into its most immediate desire: So that in effect, structure builds laziness, and laziness slavery.
The question of course has to be asked, whether there are any other ways for grasping at the passions (or affects). The answer here, drawn from the history of philosophy is clearly yes. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries share a deep understanding both as to the independence of passion, from both experience and their collective nature. In regard to the former, Hume argued that such links were learnt as experience itself was learnt. Passions would arise in the mind sometimes spontaneously, sometime encased within other passions and sometimes in association with certain memories, and yet there was no hard and fast law. Passion could easily arise independently (given the right circumstances) and always needed to be allowed a mechanics quite of their own. In regard to the latter point, Spinoza in his ‘Ethics’ develops, in the concept of affects, an entire language to understand a world of passions which clearly has nothing to do with any one individual. A language which sought to teazle out those numerous subtle and conflicting ways in which a single passion interweaves between different individuals, all of whom feel that they own it in their own way (think here of collective grief, or ambition, or anger).
If one really wants to move beyond the weary language of control (with all its implications for the capitalist system) then perhaps the lesson of this is that one must become historical again. One must re-allow a past in which there was no need to impose (at some level) a language of the self or a dynamic of control. Passions (operating without memory as such) could re-throw one’s own mind anew. Failure to allow such a thought (or to think it far too difficult) sentences the thinker to describe a mind in terms of power relations whose provenance endlessly slips beyond any one individual; and so must therefore create a mind which must be perpetually re-incarcerated within whatever structure (or memory or drug) that is at hand. Perhaps we need to modify Foucault’s dictum. The Soul is not just the prison of the body, but also the mind; and it is only by allowing other things into our very soul (other’s passions) that we can be free from its chains.
