Love Is a Bourgeois Construct
(Descartes vs. the World)
Imagine if you will a future in which doctors know everything about you, before you do, and in which psychiatry is merely a specialization of physiology, not at all a separate discipline. Imagine your doctor is already aware of all of your personal habits, physiological and emotional states, and has actually been combined with your psychiatrist into the same person: your own personal "wellness director." Imagine that you go to the doctor for some specific health issue and they start talking to you about lifestyle habits which you hadn't even told them about, but which they can observe from data already sent to them by a device you willingly implanted in your brain, in order to keep up with the technologically increased IQ levels of all of your peers, who have all had the same, or better implants. Imagine the godlike power possessed by such an individual as a technologically augmented psycho-physician, who views you as whole, mind and body as one system, neither aspect having any precedent over the other. It is their sworn oath to optimize your whole self for your own good, so that you can live your best life, as an aspect of globalized techno-biological “life systems.” Now, from the National Library of Medicine, Mind-body Dualism: A critique from a Health Perspective.
"The field, which is facing crisis today, is that of medicine, and the paradigmatic stance that is responsible for the crisis is Cartesian dualism—a view that mind and body are essentially separate entities. This paper discusses Cartesian dualism in the context of the practice of medicine."[1]
I began writing this essay in an attempt to explain why to me this article, sounded, paradoxically like it was describing dystopian hell, despite all intentions to the contrary, of its author, Neeta Mehta. As I'll go into, we must proceed through our technological world without either cultural extreme: paranoia, or optimism. My speculation is that what if the author’s dream of mind-body unification in healthcare is realized, but without changing the fact that, as she puts it, “The pharmaceutical companies with their focus on commercial interests have great stakes in the existing medical system.” What if we get ‘holism’ with even more technological profit seeking, and integration with our personal, and biological realities?
The world seems set on jacking devices directly into our brains (like "Neuralink"), I don't see why it will stop at helping disabled people, not if there is money to be made making in recreational, or instrumental in the world of alienated knowledge-based labor markets. Combined with current and ongoing cases of common, if not, rampant medical abuses, we might understand why trust in the healthcare industry has been significantly undermined. Whatever you think of vaccines (I'm not much of a skeptic in this regard, myself) we can safely assume that quite a lot of vaccine skepticism and hesitancy comes from a well founded but misplaced mistrust towards the ‘medical-industrial-complex.’ In its inception, however, it is not an irrational feeling. This mistrust is not helped by those who just want to shout down the concerns of others (however confused they may or may not be) by the use of thoughtless slogans like "trust science" or whatever other pseudo-intellectual college-brained nonsense which urban liberals use, in fact, merely to feel superior to the rest of their less institutionally "enlightened" countrymen.
It seems that some easily forget, when politically convenient, that it is not remotely unheard of for the American health care industry to wantonly overprescribe, carelessly misdiagnose, lie, take corporate bribes, perform unnecessary surgeries, refuse to change practices which have been demonstrated to fail, gaslight their patients about their concerns, and so on. It is no wonder that trust is a problem in healthcare. Neeta Mehta, seems sympathetic to these concerns, too. The system sucks. The liberal democratic, bureaucratic hierarchy of knowledge is at least as unfounded on the basis of reason as is InfoWars most incredible screeds or ramblings. Saying "a pox on both your houses" is more than an easy way out of the culture war, it is a complete, full throated refusal to participate in the ideological spectacle which serves to keep us distracted from the primary issues at hand, it is a case of Bartelby politics: "I would prefer not to."
The left used to be sympathetic to skepticism towards professionalization and the institutions. What is called "the left" today has almost entirely ceded that ground to what is called "the right," seemingly in an effort to become as culturally irrelevant to anyone without a college degree as possible, and despite this state of affairs, huge swaths of "the left" including some of those who pronounce, as they should, that "the left is dead…" will hiss and spit at you for even using the phrase "professional managerial class" (PMC). So, even to the more enlightened segments of "the left", the PMC both exists and doesn't, but I digress. [2]
My fear is that making the medical industrial complex more enlightened, raising its consciousness beyond a simplistic so-called "Cartesian" dualism, succeeding in making it more "holistic" could have the unintended consequence of ushering in a dystopian nightmare of cinematic proportions. I would prefer, actually, that my doctor stay far away from my brain, or particularly my mind, as much as is possible. Provided that we are forced into a conservative stance, due to a lack of transformative willpower and possibilities, then the health industry remaining anachronistic, focused on old-fashioned ideas of physiology, and only getting better and better at figuring out how to solve health problems the way a mechanic fixes a car, then I say that is all the better for it, and for its patients. I do not want physicians, in their current forms, outside of extreme cases requiring lifesaving brain surgery, thinking about the mind in the way in which a mechanic thinks about a car. Mind body separation is fine, thank you. Pretend as though my mind does not exist, is my preference, rather than inviting the bureaucracy of health to meddle in my thoughts, my cares, my personality, my personal life, my cognition, or anything else archaically separated out as "mental" phenomenon. What if old mind-body dualistic prejudices might be the final ideological bulwark we have against psychiatrists fusing with physicians and therapists, and becoming an impenetrable wall of wellness knowledge against which even mild dissent becomes blasphemy against the godlike position to which we have elevated the abstract notion of "science," closely connected to the medical industry. Never mind that the actually existing scientific apparatus, far from being an abstract enlightenment ideal, is dominated at this point in history, by corporate and state interests.[3] Perhaps mind-body dualism is the sort of illusion which we do not want to transcend, maybe it serves an important purpose in society. I like Neeta Mehta, she’s probably right, I don’t want to be a conservative on behalf of this shitty reality, but presently, aren’t we all sort of forced to be? When the development of history has been coopted by the corporations, one tends to distrust change.
On the other hand, Descartes did not believe in "Cartesian subjectivity" and was not a "mind-body dualist," but merely a metaphysical dualist, which is clearly a stepping stone towards modern materialism. Here's what Descartes actually thought in his Meditations on First Philosophy.
"These sensations are confused mental events that arise from the union—the intermingling, as it were—of the mind with the body…. Furthermore, some perceptions are pleasant while others are nasty, which shows that my body—or rather my whole self insofar as I am a combination of body and mind—can be affected by the various helpful or harmful bodies that surround it." [4]
Let's compare that to a quote from Mind-body Dualism: A critique from a Health Perspective
"Moreover, living systems have come to be seen as systems (of which mind and body are a unit) which are integral parts of larger systems, in permanent interaction with their environment and capable of constructing their own subjective realities."
The two conceptions, from the modern and postmodern period respectively, are really not all that philosophically different, except for that while the details of Descartes' scientific work are wrong (the soul probably doesn't reside in the pineal gland), certain critiques of him are worse wrong: they’re political. Modern thinkers were already more than capable of conceiving of complex systems, contrary to the popular belief of a number of postmodernist thinkers. The difference is only that the moderns did not have a reductive stance toward human subjectivity, as a singularity, which every "system" obsessed thinker appears to have. People in the premodern, early-modern, and modern periods, did not tend to reduce things to nominalistic multiplicities (in the guise of complexity) as is so terribly fashionable in postmodern philosophies. Reductivism by boiling subjectivity down to—what is actually a vague notion—of "complexity," is an artifact of the historically regressive era that is postmodernism, a period defined in part by the steady outsourcing of all sense making and cognition to treacherously inaccessible islands in a mountain archipelago of professionalized knowledge. Why it does not occur to some that the latter material condition actually encourages the former cultural attitude, I cannot say. The priest class of our day are economists, scientists, government officials, CEOs, engineers, doctors and academics. In more recent years we can also add the new semi-professionals: influencers, who took up the Oprah model in the age of the internet as intercessors to the professional class, as much as to snake-oil salesman, whose entire shtick has always been posing as insurgent professionals, unfairly cast off the islands and into the murky waters, due to outdated island prejudices, which they seek to overcome with a small monetary contribution from you.
However, I underlined the last part of the above quote from Mind-body Dualism for a reason. I laud the optimism that people generally can indeed "construct their own subjective realities," that is, make sense of our own worlds for ourselves, without the intercession of priests or priest-like experts (but perhaps with the help of regular, non-fetishized experts). In that respect, Mind-body Dualism… represents a contrast with the generalized death of subjectivity, and the dawning of “discursive Taylorism”[5] in which we've entered a kind of infantilized stage where we do not believe that we know anything unless it has been sanctioned by an officially accredited organization, whose accreditation comes from an officially accredited accreditation organization, in an infinite regress of certification, run through a double blind peer-review process and other checks and balances which presume to keep us safe from the tyranny of our own inner dialogue. Either that, or in an extreme and not very well thought through overreaction we assume that anything at all that is condoned by the institutions, or by the particular institution which we are most concerned about, must be a lie orchestrated by the secret cabal behind the throne at the top of the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Why it can never be that the undemocratic (in the most robust sense) bureaucratic structure itself is to blame, is a curious and constant oversight. On the one hand there is an arrogant sense of faith in the bureaucracy, which on the other hand generates a paranoid reaction, but in either case thought is terminated. We seek the help from more complex minds, in perhaps, simpler times.
Enter another very subjective modern thinker to supplement Descartes: George Santayana's thought has been cast aside by the rampant sweep of North American nominalism elevated in the post-war and neoliberal eras to religious heights through the secular institutions.
“The test is always the same: Does the thing itself actually please? If it does, your taste is real; it may be different from that of others, but is equally justified and grounded in human nature. If it does not, your whole judgment is spurious, and you are guilty, not of heresy, which in æsthetics is orthodoxy itself, but of hypocrisy, which is a self excommunication from its sphere.”[6]
How does Santayana in the same essay, manage to claim that "beauty is pleasure objectified." Because what he is saying above is not that every valuation of beauty is equal, but that material human sensibility is the measure of beauty. This is how we escape the pull of society's mimetic desire, by loving what we love as though, in Cartesian fashion, there is nobody else at all in the world but you and your object. Desire may indeed be the desire of the Other, but appreciation is yours.
In Descartes' Meditations of First Philosophy he strips the whole material world away, doubting everything, but he does so intentionally while he is alone. He doesn't begin his meditation while he is in a crowded market and begin to slowly erase all the other subjects around him because each one of them would stop him and protest their erasure. That is, he would have to contend every time he wanted to erase another subject with the manner in which each is in fact a subject, not a mere object, and is capable of protesting, arguing and resisting on its own volition, capable of arguing that 'there is in fact a world which you cannot simply delete at your whim, here you and I are-in-the-world.' In order for one subject to erase another that subject which is subject to erasure has to become, first, desubjectified… that is, reduced to mere object, deprived of whatever volition makes it real as a subject. This is a two-step process, that is not to say that subjects cannot extinguish one another, of course they can, but it is a little bit more difficult to destroy something which is like you, something in which you can see yourself, rather than something which is inanimate… unless of course you hate yourself, (or as Freud points out in sadism, you enjoy the vicarious experience of pain), in that case it's easy, or enjoyable to destroy something like yourself.
It is safe to assume, however, that Descartes did not hate himself (and was not a sadist) since he went away into his study to be alone before he began to erase the world. He got busy erasing everything until he was left with two things, himself, and God. He recognized that he was such a tiny little subject, that he would only have enough juice to sustain his own existence alone, but that the infinite power of The Omniscient Subject would be able to sustain the whole universe. Three factors speak volumes to the correct interpretation of the Meditations On First Philosophy. (1) Descartes felt he had to be in complete solitude in order to erase the world (2) Descartes, a subject, could not erase himself (3) When Descartes bumps up against another (the ultimate) subject (which can't be extinguished through solipsistic meditation since it is all-powerful) the world is reconstituted.
But it is the very process, which Descartes did not carry out (quite the oppositie) of desubjectification, that has rendered us incapable of building up our own worlds, has rendered us dependent on the worldviews which descend from heaven every morning through the technological systems of mass communication,[7] down from the heaven of bureaucratic officialdom: the companies, the government, i.e., the institutions. With the dominance of multinational capitalism, a state planned project itself, mind you, and the gentrification of neighborhoods, the startling shipping overseas of jobs which once sustained small town America, the destruction of local and regional capitalism, the NGO-ification of once informal mutual aid, the professionalization of politics, etc., the agency of the subject, its volition, is all but annihilated: it always must ask permission, even to have its own thoughts, as it is always economically dependent on some institution or other for them.
Not everything today is doom and gloom. I can sometimes give off that impression, but it's not really what I think. This, right here, is one place where I find hope, in this work, in my tiny little audience, and in my small number of cherished family and friends. But when the circle of hope seems so small, and expands so slowly, and is indeed so fragile, one is hard pressed not to revert again to despair, which however, contains a seed of hope in itself, as long as it emerges from a dogged sense of realism about the world. I suppose my other fountain of hope is my own potentiality-for-being, for becoming someday, the kind of modern subject which Descartes or Santayana was, despite living squarely in the midst of the dark age of the information cloud, an electrical storm precluding the meditation necessary for individuality. I have recently been asking myself the only question that matters more and more: how can we use the current state of affairs to our advantage, rather than succumb to its most oppressive tendencies? It is the increase in the agency of the individual that is the good of modernity, and postmodernity (which is in fact only an accelerated version of the "modernization" process) represents its perversion, figuratively, but perhaps as well as in the literal Lacanian sense! Postmodernity took up the idea of the liberated individual as an image, and ironically in doing so, mastered it. The postmodern individual is a re-mastered version of the modern individual, a high fidelity copy, like a mosquito frozen in amber, preserved perfectly as a static image, even magnified through the amber's lens effect, incapable of movement except on the end of a chain as a kitschy adornment, a state in which it might circumnavigate the world a hundred times, moving far outside of its original ecosystem. In fact, the postmodern subject is bigger and better, like an Oldenburg installation, although it has lost the functionality which was an aspect of its modest original size, and lower resolution. This explains the confusion in which people refer to our moment as 'hyper-individualistic.' It isn't, the individual is dead, but the reason for the death of the individual is our falling in love with the idea of the individual and forgetting the entire content of the idea.
Can we chart a course for the reemergence of agency, that is, individual volition? Of course we can, but if and only if we can re-imagine the "we" which we are inquiring about. There must be a new coming together, breaking out of the pseudo-cultural mass constituted by mass media, and reformulation of a new spontaneous culture, in the world of mass media, but not of it. The distinction between culture and pseudo-culture I have used elsewhere, is not a moral argument, but an anthropological one. The observation is merely that there is what I am calling culture, something which bubbles up from a group of people as a spontaneous making-sense-of-the-world, and what I am calling pseudo-culture, which is imposed from above by one more powerful group onto another. There obviously is such a thing as pseudo-culture if we look at an empire attempting to assimilate a newly conquered people: it imposes its foreign life-ways onto the subjugated group. This is not a moral point because it is value neutral as to which culture, the old spontaneous, or the new and imposed is better or worse, that is not relevant to the concept of culture v. pseudo-culture. The mass media is pseudo-cultural, a gentrified neighborhood is pseudo-cultural, the suburbs are pseudo-cultural. None of these forms are volitionally self-created by any of the consumers of mass media, the inhabitants of the gentrified neighborhood (new comers or old hangers on) or of the suburbs. Ours is a culture, which we may take to be our own, but which is largely imposed onto us from without by corporate-state systems. Nobody who lives in the suburbs had any volition in the planning of them, likewise with a neighborhood or likewise with the mass media: hence why we are rendered as mere "consumers," a name which nobody (consciously) wants to go by, but which was foisted onto us by the mass media itself, as our primary identifier. Cultures may all to some extent be different mixes of pseudo-culture and culture, some things which once were pseudo-culture might be adopted as cultural, and some ancient temporal threshold might get crossed wherein a pseudo-cultural element has been around so long that it becomes cultural. In any event, the difference between the two comes down to volition: do you have volition in the creation of the culture, or not. [8] This brings me to Heidegger on Descartes.
"The entity which Descartes is trying to grasp ontologically and in principle with his "extensio", is rather such as to become discoverable first of all by going through an entity within-the-world which is proximally ready-to-hand—Nature. Though this is the case, and though any ontological characterization of this latter entity within-the-world may lead us into obscurity, even if we consider both the idea of substantiality and the meaning of the "existit" and "ad existendum" which have been brought into the definition of that idea, it still remains possible that through an ontology based upon a radical separation of God, the "I", and the 'world', the ontological problem of the world will in some sense get formulated and further advanced. If, however, this is not possible, we must then demonstrate explicitly not only that Descartes' conception of the world is ontologically defective, but that his interpretation and the foundations on which it is based have led him to pass over both the phenomenon of the world and the Being of those entities within-the-world which are proximally ready-to-hand."[9]
It is not that I think that Heidegger is wrong here, not exactly. In some ontological or pre-ontological sense perhaps, I fully grant that there is a radical continuity between "God," "I" and the "world," and that there is a sense in which we even experience our being-in-the-world as a continuous flow from nature, to tools, to self, and back again, when the process of modernization is not ripping our worldhood apart. In some sense the separations between "God," "I" and the "world" are after the fact and totally arbitrary, and yet, that is exactly the point. "I" am an arbitrary instantiation of my own very will-to-power, "I" am my volition, I am my ego's active narcissistic cathexis of libido, nothing more and nothing less; "I" am (as everything else is) energy, but a particular formation of electro-chemical energy which produces self-consciousness, which is the process of reflection on myself and my environment. Heidegger in no way takes away from the Cartesian worldview through his critique of him, not that this was necessarily his goal, the point is only that Heidegger stands next to, and not over Descartes. Chief Joseph pointed out after dealing with European religions:
"They will teach us to quarrel about God, as Catholics and Protestants do on the Nez Percé Reservation (in Idaho) and other places. We do not want to do that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit. We do not want to learn that."[10]
In my only partially educated opinion when it comes to Heidegger, his mistake seems to be thinking he could overcome Descartes, rather than actually supplement him. His error is, in this particular case, the mistaken exclusivity of truth. The Universal is not anyone's particular domain, nor is it relativistic, since it is not, by definition, composed of a multiplicity of comparable perspectives. The abstraction necessary for the production of human language orients toward a beyond in which there may or may not be anything at all, but nonetheless we are united by this totally inaccessible universal, this empty everything, against which we find our own being in the sentimentality of our logical distinctions between "things.”
The illusion of separateness between "God," "I" and the "world" is itself the only basis for the separateness between them, but that is not a problem to be solved. Nirvana, (or for that matter the Nirvana Principle) describes nothing more than death. The only ontological wholeness I will ever feel, I won't, because I will no longer exist at such a point in which I would feel it. The universal has to released periodically into the realm of noumena, lest it become a caged beast, and take ill. The illusion that there is a separation between myself and the world is not really one which we want to transcend any sooner than is absolutely necessary, since to transcend the illusion would be to cease to exist as something which is only demarcated as such, by the illusion of the ego itself. Mystics, the world over, are nostalgic for death. This is not necessarily a bad thing, death is a fact of life of course and if mysticism helps us overcome our terror of death then all the better. Postmodern mysticism seems, on the other hand, of a disavowed sort, which resembles an unconscious death cult—exemplified by the various forms of "posthumanism"—more than a respectable religious practice for spontaneously and ritualistically grounding oneself-in-the-world, (although it is acknowledged that at times, 'respectable religions' themselves come to resemble death cults). Postmodern mysticism, whether it acknowledges itself as what it is or not, is the celebration of the postmodern period of multinational capitalism, or of what capitalism has done to abolish the bourgeois subjectivity of an earlier stage of capitalism, which was the basic cellular component of society. The loss of the subject is a massive tragedy, as it is the loss of volition, the subsumption of the individual into the "fractured mass," a being-in-the-commodity.
"The experts of the mass media transmit the required values; they offer the perfect training in efficiency, toughness, personality, dream, and romance. With this education, the family can no longer compete. In the struggle between the generations, the sides seem to be shifted: the son knows better; he represents the mature reality principle against its obsolescent paternal forms."[11]
Despite confusion and psychic difficulty in accepting our simultaneously degraded and hi-fidelity state of reality (this evokes cyborg zombies whose minds have been invaded by malware), we must insist on becoming realists about the state of things: as
has said, we need to be "realists about postmodernism," and in that sense we are all always already postmodernists.[12] The alternative, beyond merely limiting children's screen time as individual acts of parenting, is the aforementioned reformulation of a "we," the reconstruction of the conditions of subjectivity, not as a replication of old bourgeois-subjectivity, but certainly taking great inspiration from it, through the reading of early to late modern texts from Cervantes to Nabokov, or from Erasmus to Lenin. Reading is of course necessary, but insufficient. The new "we" will only be formed upon a new ego-ideal, a new "common ideal of family class or nation," a new modern community within the postmodern world, and as such, a city upon a hill, although complete geographical proximity in the age of the internet, may not be entirely necessary, or even desirable. This modernist diasporic polis will not be a looking backward, not a nostalgia for lost periods or lost causes, but a reconstitution of the political itself. From Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.""What is sometimes characterized as a nostalgia for class politics of some older type is generally more likely to be simply a "nostalgia" for politics tout court: given the way in which periods of intense politization and subsequent periods of depolitization and withdrawal are modeled on the great economic rhythms of the boom and bust of the business cycle, to describe this feeling as "nostalgia" is about as adequate as to characterize the body's hunger, before dinner, as a "nostalgia for food.""[13]
Thinking the above quote alongside the notion of the family, or its disappearance, or relative irrelevancy today in contrast to other historical periods, provokes us to the realization that the idea of politics as such, that is class politics, might be tied up with the very notion of the family, more closely than has hitherto been recognized. We are beginning to see common interest formations which are capable of binding peoples together, at least somewhat. The pronatalism of Malcom and Simone Collins which unites special interests with the family itself, creating a diasporic community (or perhaps its just a proto-community) with in-person and online components. They have even invented their own religion (a move which I'm extremely skeptical of, but which is at least highly thought provoking). The family, difficult as that may be to obtain for many people today, might indeed be the basis of a resurgence of communities, within the postmodern and post-community world, it also appears to be one of the only things, besides shared doctrine, which holds churches together as communities. The shared desire for the rearing of children is, perhaps, the basis of common interest of communities, their desire to project themselves out into the future is to have a place to raise children in as much safety, and cultural richness, and future economic opportunity as possible. The extent to which the idea of community is dead might be the extent to which the family is seen, not as life itself, but as an impediment to it, and the degree to which we aren't interested in raising children is the degree to which we hold ourselves in perpetual adolescence as a society. This is not of course to say that everyone who chooses not to have children is somehow immature, there have always been people who have chosen not to reproduce for any number of reasons, what we are mainly concerned with here is the trend of choosing not to have kids merely because it will impinge on one's consumptive enjoyment. There are of course economic reasons, and other legitimate reasons that deter people from starting families. Let's connect this to class, as I gestured towards already.
A class is made up of communities, in the past, and still to some extent today, towns, counties and neighborhoods are composed of people of a similar economic strata, which was tethered more straightforwardly than today, to particular types of work (blue or white collar), even particular companies or industries. These "communities," a word which I don't use to imply any intentionality necessarily, were of course made up of families. There was, more or less naturally, and of course coexisting among other more hostile feelings, a sense on mutual recognition of shared struggle, especially if said community became more self-aware of the broader world, and recognized itself as part of a class. Mutual recognition, and the desire to improve one's lot in life as a member of a class, whether bourgeois, proletariat, or otherwise, is based on a shared understanding of generational progress: you want your children's life to be better than yours was, or at least as good, and fighting for universal political change was seen as a way in which that might be achieved. The generational nature is what implies universality, rather than the particularity of just obtaining what seems to be The Good Life, for yourself alone, and immediately.
During rising economic tides of the post-war era in America, we got steadily worse at class politics in large part because the budding multinational system was delivering general prosperity. Despite the fact that occasionally, there were resurgences of class politics, these resurgences in retrospect revealed themselves to be dying gasps. During that period we gradually learned that we did not have to operate as communities or a class in order to improve our lot in life, and that generational advancement is had by not taking up your father's trade (for example), but by getting the hell out of your home town as soon as possible, becoming a yuppie, an unquestioning consumer and working, entirely uncritically, for a multinational corporation. With the emergence of the yuppie comes the emergence of DINKs (dual income no kids) which for quite a long time, and in some cases still is, a designation worn as a badge of pride. In some cases these DINKs even appropriated the derogatory slogan out of gay communities of "breeders," to designate people who have children. While "breeders" when used by gay communities who have an established cultural habit of "throwing shade"—sarcastic verbal quips in a kind of social sparring game—might have an authentic ring to it, especially when understood as a defensive retort against a straight world which actively oppressed gay people, its 'appropriation' by straight DINK couples becomes perplexing. The badge of pride of being the ultimate conformist-consumer subject is at least in retrospect, difficult to understand, which is why it is always projected as the opposite of conformity. What it really comes down to is the fact that wealth and status are almost perfectly in sync in American society, so that consumption power correlates to the closest thing to the privileges of aristocracy which any American has ever known.[14]
The hostility that a straight couple which is merely too hedonistic to perform the sacrifices of raising children, and a world capable of encouraging such a lifestyle testifies to an utter breakdown of social and cultural life and its total domination by pseudo-cultural life-ways brought down from on high by the corporations. This is most definitely the trend which Cristopher Lasch was reacting to in the 1970s, and while I’m reexamining his use of "narcissism" (does Lacan provides us with a better term in "perversion?"), I still agree heartily with Lasch's social criticism, which is what I was drawn to in the first place when I first picked up his work. Unfortunately, this social criticism is almost always dealt with in an uncharitable and dismissive way, even by otherwise brilliant and careful thinkers. This yuppie-criticism is, again, not at all to say that not having children is necessarily bad, it comes down to the subjective reasons why, as a trend, people choose not to, and these do not always appear to be noble. Cristopher Lasch helps us see those pathological reasons involved for many, in eschewing the family, whether of one's past or future, better perhaps, than any other social theorist, despite potentially imperfect psychoanalytic details of his analysis.
To sum things up, the narrative goes as follows: due to the acceleration of economic change—the gutting of older forms of industry and the acceleration of knowledge-based multinational (brand/profile) production, and the explosion of rent-seeking capital—the role of the family is outshined in the development of the child into an adult, by the multinational. Thus the values of the multinational become the values of the individual. Once these values are imparted, then optimization of status and enjoyment along late capitalist lines become the imperatives of life, sacrifice becomes irrational. Once sacrifice is irrational, the rearing of children appears deranged, combine this with rising costs of living and the fact that having children is a huge net economic loss in the contemporary economy, and the birth rate will obviously plummet. Once the birth rate plummets and fewer people have children, then it appears confirmed that sacrifice is irrational because there are less examples of people doing it: less examples abound in daily life of care and unconditional love. Once few examples of care, sacrifice and unconditional love can be found, we more easily fail to recall, if we ever knew, what it looks like, and practically as well as spiritually, how to do it. Universalist and class solidarity (if you're doing it right they are the same thing) took its warmth from this source of unconditional familial love, class solidarity is an outgrowth of community solidarity, which has its basis in the family, and in the attempt to raise children in good (or improving) social environments, within the community. Furthermore once the reason for community disappears, that is, the rearing of children within it, further disintegration of community is inevitable, and therefore, further disintegration of broader solidarity is also inevitable.
What has replaced solidarity, rendering our political movements inept (more so than they would be otherwise), is moral profilicity, in which the purpose of participation in political movements cannot be the kind of solidarity, which once borrowed its warmth from the origin of familial love and common interest between families in this regard, but can only be proving to one's self and one's general peers that one is a 'good person'.[15] It is understandable why "narcissistic" would be a label some might wish to apply to this state of affairs, however, the Freudian use of the term only seems to refers to ego-cathexis, so I have come to avoid stretching the term too far in this way. However, Lasch's use of the term, following a number of European and American psychoanalysts, seems to have basis for example in Freud's discussion of the regressive nature of sadism, for example, from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This is an ego which does not comprehend (either through forgetting or never having known) the unconditional love found in the family, which lacks the basic self-assuredness to be found in that state wherein the family provides a backdrop to life which is loving, in which love and domination do not remain conjoined, as in a regressive state of development. The emotional state of the tyrannical toddler undergoes complicated reversals of guilt and confused outward projections of hate if it is not, as a state of emotional dependence, entirely overcome by the adult.
"We have long recognized a sadistic component of the sexual instinct: it can, as we know, attain independence, and as a perversion, dominate the whole sexual trend of a person. In one of the organizations which I have termed pregenital it appears as a dominating part-instinct. But how is one to derive the sadistic impulse, which aims at the injury of the object, from the life sustaining Eros! Does not the assumption suggest itself that its sadism is properly a death-instinct which is driven apart from the ego by the influence of the narcissistic libido, so that it becomes manifest only in reference to the object?"[16]
What after all do we find in broader late capitalist society but the inability to discover who is your friend, and who is just using you, whether for emotional or economic reasons. Love cannot be distinguished from domination, suspicion reigns in an age of increased individualized economic competition and turns out to be a more rational state, under the conditions, than trust: a living social horror. There is no better critique in mass-media, of the social relations that characterize the 21st century than the TV show Beef, which shows the lengths to which capitalist material ideology penetrates the family itself. The family is where all flaws and mistakes require forgiveness, and a failure of forgiveness and love results in the disintegration of the family. How many relationships cannot be sustained or started today in adult life, out of fear, and misplaced aggression. This is of course not an absolute state, but many statistical trends (just google it) suggest an overwhelming decline in our social lives over time. The way in which Marcuse was describing the 20th century might still ring true today, suggesting again, that the process of modernization has run absolutely amok.
"The rationality of progress heightens the irrationality of its organization and direction. Social cohesion and administrative power are sufficiently strong to protect the whole from direct aggression, but not strong enough to eliminate the accumulated aggressiveness. It turns against those who do not belong to the whole, whose existence is its denial. This foe appears as the archenemy and Antichrist himself: he is everywhere at all times; he represents hidden and sinister forces, and his omnipresence requires total mobilization."[17]
What does the freakish phenomenon of school shooting by children on children suggest but that the only difference between the atrocities of the 20th and 21st century are that society is not as good at providing scapegoats for "accumulated aggressiveness" as it was, so that the object of aggressiveness does not become, in as thorough a way, a particular minority, but becomes universalized: "I hate people." I have said that too many times to count. What is our posthumanism, as a material reality in automation and infrastructure of social avoidance, and the intense nihilism of adolescents, but the hatred which cannot find an object, in a bureaucratic world in which, by the self-protective design of bureaucrats themselves—a tendency inherent to such oversized human systems—nobody is ever to blame for anything that goes wrong: therefore everyone is always to blame all the time. See
for some good work on bureaucracies and their capacities for responsibility abdication.Beef follows the development of what eventually becomes a close relationship through a traumatic and drawn out overcoming of suspicion, which could only be achieved through mutual violence, dissolution and abuse of many other relationships, and repeated close calls with death. The theme of the show is that the disintegration of your entire defensive ego, and the explosion of your whole world of capitalist social relations, is what is necessary to rekindle love, in postmodern society. Self-annihilation of postmodern society is the only way to resurrect humanity, and save it from its own systems, and our own self-enforced dehumanization. A family, living in the same house, might still be disintegrated if there is insufficient attention, if the experience of love as a practice, activity, a form of attention and intentionality is not present. Perfection of this love is not the goal, just presence. Sherman Alexie's quote from Diary of a Part Time Indian is instructive, too, in this regard.
"I mean, yeah my dad would sometimes go on a drinking binge and be gone for a week, but those white dads can completely disappear without even leaving the room. They can just BLEND into their chairs. They become their chairs."
An integrated family is a loving family, no more no less, whether it is a "chosen family" a "traditional family," or even whether or not the parents are divorced and amicable and remain physicially and spiritually present in the life of the child. As long as there is the experience of love, which requires a soft hand when merited and a firm hand when merited, which involves as much prohibition as it does encouragement, or even, a measured abstaining from any intervention at all, depending entirely on particular circumstances, and which always proceeds along a path of trial, error, personal historical experience and blind instinct. In other words 'the family,' in reality is as imperfect as it is human.
The feeling of love for all humanity, which Freud calls "Oceanic," indeed rings false—as Fromm's universal love rang false for Lasch—when it is not clear that its basis is the recall of the cradle of familial love, which was and will always be the root of soladaristic impulse. Love for all men and all things, Agape, takes on a forced, performative quality, if it does not have a rootedness, a basis in having had the experience of receiving and giving personal, unconditional love, which is found in its origin, always and exclusively, in the love of parent to child. When the TV and internet raises children more than parents do, problems with attention span and later screen addiction, or slowness to take up certain cognitive tasks like reading and speaking, might be even less concerning than the signal-confusion of the child about who loves them more: the multinational corporation, or mom. It is no wonder that there is increasingly less and less skepticism—unless it takes the form of paranoid reaction, which is always terribly impotent in actually mounting any concerted political resistance of any kind—about inviting corporations, through their products, deeper and deeper into our communities, homes, families, and bodies. Corporation is so closely intertwined with us that in all respects, besides literally (so far) we are already physically integrated with them. As I've made clear, we have to avoid a paranoid reaction to this. We do not have the time, for instance, to make our own shoes because we have come to despise being swarmed and swaddled, and have become dependent upon the commodity. There would be nothing wrong with making your own shoes if you fancy the idea, but good luck doing that while holding down a job, growing all your own food, building your own house etc., etc.. We could try to become Amish-esque, but that will not change society, but merely establish a beleaguered separatism, cut off from history and equally impotent to change it as before.
If there is any desire for politics as such today, and not merely tinkering with our personal political profiles, playing the game of checking the right boxes on intersubjective, unspoken opinion polls, then I see no alternative at this point besides the reconstitution of community in a radically new sense, on the basis of the ancient family. This is what is meant by the new humanism, and the dawning of a new modernity. There is no going backward, we will not be nostalgic for any past, modern or pre-modern, but we will also recognize the present as an untenable state, not differentiated by new innovation, so much as by disappointment and fear with a past which we, instead, seek to reconcile ourselves to, so that we can build a future for ourselves, and for our leery abstraction "humanity." I'll end briefly with another pseudo-cultural example, which perhaps can always be transformed into a cultural object through the practice of aesthetic criticism, that is, social digestion. Every time a character invokes the idea of "humanity" in TV show Attack On Titan, that character is proposing something monstrously inhuman. It is often some bureaucrat, and also clearly an ideological principle in the society portrayed in the show. Whenever someone invokes the universal "humanity" they are suggesting that some particular humans need to be sacrificed for the sake of that universal. There becomes a sort of Great Refusal of the dominant ideology of the society, where in heroic moments—which lead eventually to actually improving the conditions of "humanity" (though outcomes are never clear in the moment)—frequently involve someone sentimentally rescuing particular humans, and disregarding this universalist call to abandon particular individuals. There is something instructive here in that the particulars of the family, of sentimental love, cannot be separated from the universal of the love of the species, without something monstrous, and potentially apocalyptic being born. Thematically of course in Attack on Titan, it is our protective walls in which lurks the very menace of our undoing.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3115289/
[2] I consider arguments against it being a "class" in the strict Marxist sense to be pedantic. You want to use a different word like "professional managerial strata" (PMS… lol) that's fine by me, but it is a revealingly PMC mindset to utterly derail a potentially productive conversation just because the details of the way in which is framed offends the sensibilities of your hyper-niche intelligentsia, which Marxism, for better or worse, is.
[4] R. Descartes, Meditations of First Philosophy, ("Fifth Meditation: The essence of material things, and the existence of God considered a second time").
[5] We have David McKerracher to thank for bringing the world that phrase and associated idea.
[6] G. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, (end of) Part II, Sec. 18.
[7] I’m paraphrasing a turn of phrase which I heard Hanz Georg Moeller use in an interview on
.[8] Spectacular culture, or pseudo-culture, is an artifact of the process of modernization, which has culminated in an overwhelming of history, rendering the past irrelevant, which is central essence of the condition which we call, following Fredric Jameson, "postmodernism." Modernity was defined by the incomplete process of modernization: where future and past were still juxtaposed in everyday life, like in Jacques Tati's Mon Uncle (1958) as opposed to his Playtime (1967) when the new, incessant novelty, is all that there is.
[9] M. Heidegger, Being and Time: "Hermeneutical Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the ' World'" (p. 128 Harper Perennial Modern Thought edition, 1962)
[10] V. Deloria Jr., God is Red, Ch. 11: https://ratical.org/many_worlds/StevenNewcomb/GodIsRed-Deloria.pdf (198)
[11] H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization…, Ch. 4 (p. 97 Beacon Press, 1974)
[12] This is like how Moeller and D'Ambrosio points out that proflicitiy cannot be critiqued as if from a perspective outside of ideology, that is, you can't critique profiliicty, from the perspective of "authenticity."
[13] F. Jameson, Postmodernism…,Ch. 10, Sec. IV, (p.330 Duke University Press, 1991)
[14] See Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling for more on the cultural life of the PMC and the origin and uses of the term "yuppie" and surrounding cultural discourse.
[15] "Proflicity" and "general peer" are concepts which both come from Moeller and D'Ambrosio's You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity.
[16] S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sec. VI (Great Books…, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1972, p. 659)
[17] Eros and Civilization…, Ch. 4 (p. 101)
[18] I’ve avoided making specific reference to any particular “postmodenrn-ists” or “posthuman-ists” on purpose, because I believe it to be a structural ideological quality of our period. That said, by
, and have been absolutely indispensable in helping me to understand “postmodern-ists” and “posthuman-ists” as such, and I will someday name some names when it comes to particular actors on behalf of the ideology of late capitalism. I also have to thank for a private conversation we had, which I imagine is what got me thinking about the family and its connection to the world-historical politics.