Portrait in Six Moments of Wanting


  Spinoza really means it when he says that the essence of humanity lies in desire not personality or selfhood. Such a claim needs to be understood in two ways. On the one hand desire both defines the parameters within which a self incarnates and the personality evolves. It is desire’s role therefore to gather passions into itself, and set them into some kind of order or focus them according to this or that action. We feel and we do so because we ‘want so very bad’. We create worlds in the name of this want, both real and imaginary; we act in its light. On the other hand there is a dimension in which such wanting as it is tied to essence, is communal or at least understandable between humans. I understand then that you are a wanting, needing, creature, and you understand that about me also. We feel each other’s desires, we might even share them, and can certainly react in their light. Humans therefore comprehend one another as desiring, even when they do not share that desire, and can react and act according to the light of that knowledge. Thence to claim with Spinoza that desire is the essence of humanity is to focus that essence away from notions of individuality and onto one’s ideas of questing, needing and partial sharing.

  Moreover if wanting lies at the essence of what we are, then that essence has a paradox right at its heart. We will claim we want this or that, and strive for it and do constantly, and it is this claim that is the essence, and not the actual achievement of things. To be united under one light or with one goal in mind is therefore as often as not, a reality in itself. If one ever achieves that goal, then the very achievement will be something of an anti-climax as it is a diminution of reality. One loses the right to be questing and expressing oneself through this want, a right which one might cherish. Or to put it another way, the fight is more exciting and certainly easier to understand than the peace. This paradox lies at the heart of political parties, which are united in the gaining of power, and yet immediately once in power start to debate about what to do now. New labour worked then in opposition but in government found it hard to find real direction; while the Liberal Democrats are united in wanting government, but unsure when it is offered to them, whether they should take it or not.

  To claim that essence lies in wanting is to make another claim about the nature of the essential. For we all know that wants are by no means compatible with one another. Any one situation will gather to it a fairly large number of conflicting desires, desires that then must be resolved in any which way we can. These differing desires cut across individualities, uniting people at times and dividing them at others as they unite and divide any one individual. What is more, we are very used to reckoning up such desires both on the collective and the individual levels. Such complex chords of desire, individual and communal, both conflicting and reconciled, infuse the entire system as it infuses all our communal actions. To be part of that system, to have a vote and feel it matters (in spite of the evidence to the contrary) is then to be caught up in a vortex of differing desires. Spinoza in his last book gathers such political desires up into three basic categories – democratic, aristocratic and monarchical, desires. This division is based not on a political system so much as how the desires reflect upon individuals (leaders whom one wants or not) or collective values  (causes that we want), or those groups which we think should govern (this or that party). To desire a ruler is not necessarily to desire their values or their party’s values and vice versa: one might like Cameron but not the Tories (or their policies), or one might well like Labour but loathe Brown…. Nor are these desires themselves that simple. Spinoza suggests in the same book that each of these desires has at least two different aspects, making six types of desire in all: Giving a six way typology for political desire, a typology that is very much in evidence in the recent British Election.

  The starting point of all such typologies is that strange desire that a selection of the population has to be in charge. People join political parties then for two reasons, each of which gets confused one with the other. They join them because they want that mysterious thing called power. Power is therefore an end in itself. But also, given the obvious fact that most individuals cannot directly achieve power, our system offers a second option: one can join one party or other and so work in order that one can lobby for one’s own attitudes and beliefs, and hence ensure that even if one does not rule oneself, one’s values, thoughts, beliefs and prejudices do. Thence there is a real glamour to being a part of the party of government, and a reluctance to share that glamour with individuals whom one identifies as different or other: a feeling that also runs very high in the political activists whose only shot at power is having campaigned for this or that party. It is not the case that party interest runs before national interest, so much as the entire rubric of a political party is such that it confuses national and party interest. The point of a political party is that it thinks that its interests are the national interest. It’s sharing then of power amongst its members is in the best interests of the country. From which it follows that all coalitions are naturally difficult, all the more so when people actual agree across party. For if I agree with you in spite of our parties, then that agreement itself puts at peril the entire identity of the party system (that channels power elsewhere). What is more the existence of this party system and the confusion that is invariably made between it and the national interest, means that any such coalition has very disruptive forces surrounding it. A party that uses a coalition for its own interest or its own subsequent electoral advantage, will be congratulated and not condemned (unless the move does not work). Coalitions then are stymied by the fact that one will be rewarded for using them any which way one can; while one receives no direct reward for keeping them!

  However when we are asked to vote, we never really understand it in this way. To be asked to be a part of a democracy is, we are told, to be free. We are then all invited to choose what we want - always a dangerous offer. The problem is of course, that we are all capable of endlessly creating new wants and new dreams, and find their creation itself a pleasure. Moreover if we are not asked to resolve such dreamings in any particular manner then we are very likely to want many things all at once, and wonder why our democracy cannot achieve then actually incompatible goals, and then blame ‘the system’ (we want better public services and less tax). A political party then in talking the language of democracy conjures with the fire of hope and eventual disappointment.

  A move that is made all the more profound as the very act of sharing dreams between individuals makes those dreams feel more real. We feel then that WE have been promised this or that hope as a nation, and that somehow if it does not happen the betrayal is all the deeper. In the recent Election this collective dream created its own deep unreality. For each party knows not to break it. To say then that actually we are screwed and have no right to such a dream, is to lose any hope of power. Except of course the logic of the result will mean that there is likely to be another election soon, when the debate about cuts will have to dominate… We therefore elected a hung parliament in the hope that it could achieve all we are promised (or at least electoral reform) and the fact that it will not is going to come as a profound shock as the depth of those eventual cuts becomes at last clear.

  Thirdly when we actually make that choice in the voting booth, a strange sentiment overtakes us all. As often as not we actually act rather differently from the dreams we had dreamt. Such dreaming was creative and collective, but our actions in that booth are based not so much on that dream as on what we really do not want (and trust others not to want). To vote for this party or that is more often than not to be voting against another party: One voted then against this party or that, and knows that others will be acting in a similar manner. Such collective voting against this or that group, makes all political polling rather difficult. What one polls are the dreams: but this is not the way that one actually votes – as other wants enter in at that moment that one stands in the booth, and contemplates one’s future; a shift in which wants matter then occurs. - A shift that produces real uncertainty as to the result. This of course is the trouble with the current system. It makes the act of voting so complex, as one has to wire into the single choice, all the mechanics of whom one wants and whom one does not want. It renders then the act of voting too complex in itself to be simple or predicable.

  The trouble then of course is, that this is the result that the logic of the system dictates matters. It is the solitary act within all these shifting desires. We expect therefore politicians (but also the media) to make sense of this action, and create workable government almost in spite of it. Their job is therefore to make that strange mood that inflicted us in thinking about them matter: They must listen to it (even if the act itself is actually silent) and will be judged according to how they make it make sense. We therefore deal our politicians an absolutely impossible hand. They must make sense of a senseless act, and do so not in their own interest but in the ‘national’ interest: and what is more they will be judged across all history according to those actions they then take in those few days, with their lack of sleep and having come off the back of a gruelling campaign. Moreover the logic of this process is such that they have to treat the public will as sovereign as it is expressed within the ballot box, however stupid that result is. They will therefore have to talk the language of listening and responding, while all the while one gets the feeling they are seething with anger at a stupid system that could produce such a daffy result!

  Fifthly there is a real contradiction in the attitudes of the general public; they have created this mess up, but they do not half want it sorted out as soon as possible; they hanker after ‘strong government’ (whatever that might mean - perhaps it is little more than a single scapegoat). This desire is then reflected within the money markets, where investors always react against what they perceive as uncertainty in government. In doing so, and in the face of what is always a very short-term affair, they  threaten to ruin the country, and thereby make any instability so much worse and so much longer lasting. That is, any political instability plays to the money market’s bad side. - They will threaten to ruin country based not on long-term likely outcomes so much as market sentiment and the panic of a moment. The market’s impatience with democracy is however merely a reflection of the wider public’s impatience. We appear to so want it all to go away  - a sentiment that is surely rather dangerous (or at least it would be at any other time, and is this time really so very different?).

  Finally there are in every political party, a pooled set of desires about what can or cannot be allowed. There is therefore no guarantee that the Tories will be able to come to any arrangement with the Liberal Democrats, as both parties actually desire different things when all is said and done: desires that actually they cannot compromise or dilute. Or to put it slightly differently, the entire possibility of a deal will eventually come down to one or two (probably one) desire of the Liberal Democrats that the Tories will offer to allow. The choice here is then very difficult, for this desire must be enough to carry the Liberal Democrat Party as a whole forward (and for them to allow other things which they do not like to happen) while not irritating the Tories too much. The sacred cow here is then electoral reform. This is the one desire that it is always felt that will carry the Liberal Democrat Party forward (and it might if the offer was genuine). But of course that offer can only be made if the Tories can find in their own tradition enough reason not to block it (if not directly support it). The question will, one suspects, come down to a short-term trade off between desires. That is, is the hunger for government ‘Now’ (after thirteen years in opposition) enough to overrule long-term desires about the electoral system or not. A dilemma that is very real, and yet once again has rather little time to play out.

  In short the power of democracy perhaps lies not in its ability to create government, so much as its ability to contain and control shifting desires. One moves then seamlessly in such a system between wanting this or that, and between reacting to one’s own desire but also the desire of others. Democracy is the system that holds all these reactions one within the other, and creates a single articulation for them. Or perhaps one needs to say, it nearly achieves this. The trouble is that external to that democratic articulation lies the money markets, which know no such containment of their desires, and may yet unpick any of democracy’s rather careful articulations. A fact that makes the current situation all the more exciting and unpredictable!