1/23/22: Go Fourth
and prosper, I bid my hideous progeny.
5 Easy Tips for Learning How To Want
A random google search when I was coming up with the (bad) title pun brought me to this Mary Shelley quote, from Frankenstein:
And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.
Oh, how few of us could write such words today! What can one say of “death and grief” in captivity? What can one say of “the offspring of my happy days” when one does not toil toward creation?
Another quote (boldface mine), to lead where I want to go, this time from the “disclaimer” to Sadly, Porn, which I introduced at length in an earlier post:
Reinhold was working at Captain Hook Fish and Chips in the pirate uniform, and was told to go make a delivery, so he changes out of the uniform into street clothes but his boss stops him. “During deliveries you’re still a representative of CHFnC-- have some pride.” You can well imagine the reaction of all the recently awoken Holden Caulfields watching this scene, enraged at the boss for making him wear the humiliating costume and having to address the customers in Piratese, and consoling himself with tiny subversions like, “Arrrgh, here’s a basket of hardtack and a joke for the table: a wench walks into a pirate bar and asks for seamen and a towel.” HA! Funny as ever. So every 14 year old knows exactly what he’s thinking: “have some pride?”
In what? In his stupid minimum wage job? Why should he have any pride? He doesn’t own the means of production, he’s an exploited wage slave, and we all know that pride is the lie capitalism uses to make us work harder for them.” The thing is, even if this were a fact, that knowledge doesn’t get anyone to do more pushups or more math or become an actual pirate let alone a captain; it doesn’t move the story forward, it only gets you out of work, yours and your job’s; and instead of one exploited but concrete step forward you solidify your status quo; you satisfy yourself with wearing street clothes at work and pillaging the occasional burger, to you these are a kind of compensation, you deserve to steal a little back for yourself since you have no power. The idea that he could be proud of the business itself, of what the owner had built, the form of this creative act-- whether or not he benefits-- that this respect costs him nothing and it might change him-- such an idea is so revolting to his me vs. them psychology that he pretends it’s really an us vs. them philosophy, and us has more important things in store for me, yet when he ditches the job and the burger out another window and goes back home to masturbate to the girl who is literally 15 feet but two psychologies away from him, he tells everyone to keep it down because he has work to do.
“Where the hell are you going with this crap?” Just you wait, because I’m leaping straight to… Hegel. You’re gonna love this (well, some of you). Specifically, I want to quote a Reddit post I made, in which I “get a little more autistic” and explain how Hegel’s Lordship-Bondage (or “Master-Slave”, but we can’t say that anymore) dialectic clears everything up.
Before I paste the difficult Hegel quote, let me clear something up: “dialectic” for Hegel is a sort of movement or motion of consciousness; it’s not “frozen in time” like classical logic1. Specifically, it is a movement that, through consciousness apprehending its object, ultimately transcends (sublates, aufheben) that object.
The Lordship-Bondage dialectic describes the process by which one transcends bondage, in the sense of servitude for someone else’s enjoyment, alienation. Time for the hard quote, from Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶196. I promise the rest is easier, I’m front-loading here:
in fashioning the thing, [the bondsman] becomes aware that being-for-self belongs to him, that he himself exists essentially and actually in his own right. The shape does not become something other than himself through being made external to him; for it is precisely this shape that is his pure being-for-self, which in this externality is seen by him to be the truth. Through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own. For this reflection, the two moments of fear and service as such, as also that of formative activity, are necessary, both being at the same time in a universal mode. Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains at the formal stage, and does not extend to the known real world of existence. Without the formative activity, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become explicitly for itself. If consciousness fashions the thing without that initial absolute fear, it is only an empty self-centered attitude; for its form or negativity is not negativity per se, and therefore its formative activity cannot give it a consciousness of itself as essential being.
Phew, not so bad. Here’s J.N. Findlay’s notes on that paragraph:
Hegel thinks that the discipline of service and obedience is essential to seif-consciousness: mere mastery of things alone would not yield it. Only the discipline of service enables the conscious being to master himself, i.e. his finite, contingent, natural self. Without this discipline formative ability would degenerate into a narrow cleverness placed at the service of personal self-will.
Does this not seem what’s at stake, in the quote about the fast food worker above? Does he not “[fashion] the thing without that initial absolute fear”, and thus achieve “an empty self-centered attitude”? Is “formative activity [which] cannot give [him] a consciousness of [himself] as essential being”, lacking “the two moments of fear and service as such, as also that of formative activity”, not the defining condition of the modern, permissive upbringing? If the fast food worker were to truly “be proud of the business itself, of what the owner had built”, then could he not, although “[seeming] to have only an alienated existence”, ultimately “[acquire] a mind of his own”?
I know that this seems to go against the Twitter dogma, but the essential piece here is that it’s not just empty captivity, “child jail”, but an instance of identification as well as bondage. This is what gives the lord the capacity to evoke “absolute fear”: failure only means a certain death if one takes value in one’s work. What happens is that the individual in bondage, through their bondage, learns how to want.
You might pause and say, hold up, can’t we learn how to want without being subordinate to the other? I argue that this is not possible. We may learn what to want through mere observation, but we wont learn how. This is because the “how” is private, not observable, subjective, unless you are the one tasked to execute it. Thus only the bondsman can learn how. It’s no coincidence that, as Hannah Arendt puts it in “What is Authority?”, “religion” in Roman times “literally meant religare: to be tied back, obligated”.
What happens when one never enters into this sort of dyadic relation? Captivity is an absence of an other, where the actions of your superior are managed by impersonal systems, creating an impersonal sort of guy. In captivity, there is no “other”, all that remains is this empty “I”, who wants, but only for “freedom”, itself a negative movement against captivity. It is the negative of the negative, “I wish I were freed so I could [live happily every after].”
But does the captive really want to “live happily ever after”? Freedom from captivity would mean losing the dream, the deeply invested fantasy of being freed. A piece of the captive would die upon release. Stockholm syndrome. The proper response to that sort of world-crushing satisfaction is grief. Easier to perform endless revolutionary fantasies, or better, to deprive the other of their own satisfaction. Now everyone is in captivity together.
Point is, in cases like this, it’s as easy as “choosing to be happy”, but that also means a great loss, so maybe it’s not as easy as it seems. It’s almost a form of suicide, like achieving enlightenment. And, although you can choose to be happy, what you can’t simply do is choose to be satisfied.
Form vs. Content-ment
A redditor writes, before I show up:
Sadly, Porn is about the desire of the Other, not the desire of the other. That sounds more like mimetic desire.
So, how does mimetic desire tie into all this? I hint at it earlier, when I wrote “we may learn what to want through mere observation, but we wont learn how.” Although I haven’t read any Girard, mimetic desire seems to focus on the idea that we learn what to want through observing the other. If you see something someone else has, that now you want, that produces a rivalry. In the Freudian case, this rivalry is with the father, who is now seen as a competitor rather than like the “lord” as in the Hegel quote above. You don’t identify with your competition, you beat them.
Sadly, Porn has a lot more to say about rivalry, but I want to take it in a different direction, of form vs content. Learning what to want means learning about the specific contents of desire, while learning how to want means learning the form, abstracted away from any particular contents. We often confuse the two, so much that there’s an idiom for it: “missing the forest for the trees”. Hence my post here:
But what is a “form-preserving inversion”? Let’s say you’re in the forest, busy missing it for the trees, and in the forest you meet a treehugger who’s doing the same thing. The other guy loves trees so much, it disgusts you, because you’re lumberjack and chop down trees for a living. So you want to stick one to the treehugger (deprive him of his satisfaction, because captivity), and you chop down the forest.
What happened here? Both parties missed the forest for the trees, but you took their missing of the forest and turned it around on them, while continuing to miss the forest for the trees. In politics, this plays out as a group being for X, so another group shows up as anti-X. The “men’s rights movement” is a great example. It’s feminism, for men! They kept the form, but inverted the content. You see where this is going?
“That’s not silliness, it’s politics”, one protests. And they’re half right, this is how politics works, because this is how the media industry makes a living. But it is still silliness: consider the “dissident right”, who use essentially the same tools as the leftist groups they hate, with intent of depriving “the left” of their satisfaction by inverting their stances. “Oh, you like equality? Well, I like hierarchy now. You like individualism? Well, I like the family”. What this sort of positioning misses is the forest for the trees. I’m not going to dig deeper into this one, you can use the tools yourself, and I don’t think every right-winger thinks like this, but it’s the kind of thing I see a lot and wanted to point out.
My little thread on the topic was about masculinity, though:
The problem is with “toxic masculinity” is that it actually has almost nothing to do with the positive form of masculinity. The positive form is learned, and if we respect the esoteric interpretation, then what makes masculinity at all is learning how to want, how to find meaning in the world and desire, how to live. So perhaps we can take one more step of abstraction from the Lordship-Bondage chapter and describe that entire process as how to be a man, which would accord with the somewhat less esoteric interpretation of Nietzsche, that he was secretly influenced by Hegel.
Infohazard as Faith
Is the above an infohazard? Have I said something out loud that I wasn’t supposed to say? Maybe so. I tried to capture a distinction between how infohazards tend to be used, and what I really think they are:
The infohazard here is hazardous not because you just learned it, but because you already believe it, thus preventing you from moving beyond it (moving beyond? Transcending? Sounds a lot like… Hegelian dialectics).
In this kind of thinking, maybe my base intellectual commitments are themselves an infohazard, in a weird way:
The entire thread goes into some detail, but the gist of it is that I only accept “natural” explanations for events, and not “supernatural” ones. This is a pretty normal thing, I think, in our secular world, but it’s still a constraint that I could plausibly, one day, overcome. But as a constraint, it does still bind me to it (like… a religion, perhaps?), so maybe I’m waiting for the right moment to put it down, after having held it for so very long.
Miscellania
You know what else I’m holding onto for a long time? This post. I’m gonna cut it off here, but if I had more space, I would talk more about Hegel but on History:
Continuing the “All Communication is Manipulation” thing from last week, Suspended Reason wrote a really cool memoir using that frame as a tool. I really enjoyed it, check it out:
Oh, and, if we’re playing the same video game, hit me up for a group chat:
Song of the week (random CD find from a 100 year old record shop in Edgewater, New Jersey):
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my “advice column” (actually that’s the Curious Cat), even though this week was again more “substantive” than I wanted it to be. Go forth and prosper, my hideous (beautiful) friends!
Žižek (??) describes the form of the dialectic best (!!) in his Preface to his first book The Sublime Object of Ideology, called The Idea’s Constipation?:
True cognition is thus not only the notional 'appropriation' of its object: the process of appropriation goes on only as long as cognition remains incomplete. The sign of its completion is that it liberates its object, lets it be, drops it. This is why and how the movement of sublation (aufheben) [transcending] has to culminate in the self-relating gesture of sublating itself.
…what is released into its own being in speculative cognition is ultimately the object of cognition itself which, when truly grasped (begriffin), no longer has to rely on the subject's active intervention, but develops itself following its own conceptual automatism, with the subject reduced to a passive observer who, allowing the thing to deploy its potential without any intervention of his own (Ziltun), merely registers the process.