Obscene Supplement: A Reaction

At Salon.com, Cary Tenis, in his advice column of sorts, he responds to a letter by a woman complaining that her and her boyfriend, while they both make good money, have radically different relationships with money. She spends what she implies is a “normal” amount, while he lives “frugally” and in something of a vow of miserly poverty. Miserly, because he “earns a decent income as a teacher and has investment income.”

In other words, he takes the oldest and most central rules of the Capitalist game so seriously—above all, save and work hard—to the detriment of the Superego injunction to enjoy (i.e. consume). What’s more is he, in a certain sense, wins the game according to the given rules, but not according to the unspoken ones of late Capitalist ideology. More amazingly is the way he gets criticized for being a miser, when what really bothers everyone complaining on the Letter Writer’s behalf is that he himself takes on the poverty that they need someone else to take on for them. It also doesn’t help that the guy seems to be satisfied with his way of life. In other words, there is an other way to experience jouissance.

Here it seems to be an Otherly jouissance, because the discipline with which he lives his life is focused on holding back the pleasure of consuming. It is this holding back, but especially in the dimension that he can tap into this comparatively (though not actually) infinite source of pleasure (i.e. consumption), that he has mastered in order to enjoy bearably. In other words, his enjoyment is not genital at all, but in a certain sense psychotically grounded in an anal pre-genital phase of development. To this end, inasmuch as he always risks being consumed by the Other’s jouissance should he partake in it as others do, he probably doesn’t know how to consume without being over-whelmed, which is why his life depends as much on not spending as it does making money. Money being the fiat of all commodities, which is to say obscured social relations of stolen surplus labor/jouissance, in a Capitalist society money (qua capital) is a libidinal and economic intensification. Only through the Symbolic mediation of the consuming practices of ideological identities are members of Capitalist society normally able to handle the intensity of social labour/desire. For the boyfriend, he doesn’t ascribe to the ideological identity of the age, the all-enjoying consumer, and therefore don’t know the first thing about what to do with money.

This identity is only commanded from off-the-scenes, as it were, while the official line of the Capitalist subject is: save and work hard. The guy is successful not because he hears the obscene superego injunction to consume, which creates an ambiguous meaning to money, commodities and things of consumer enjoyment; he’s successful because in the absence of such an external injunction telling him what to do with his money, and in the world of an otherwise operating Symbolic order, he knows how to take literally what others take metaphorically.

His impulse to save is really an impulse to hold off the unbearable pleasure he risks in consuming it should he let it invade him the way Cary Tenis and his commenters seem to endorse. The difference between him and the CEO or the more traditional miser, is that he has no ideological supplement to make his practices coherent to him, which directs a mode of consumption. Not having been installed in the Symbolic order properly, so it seems, which makes itself clear here in the absence of a (capitalist) subjectivity, his lack of a consumer-identity means he lacks the ability to consume except directly through work.

What’s also interesting is vis-a-vis this psychotic relationship to money, there is a certain kind of feminization insofar as the female sexuation has been reproduced as a literal character of poverty as well as having access to the Other’s jouissance, normally under the care of a male’s endorsement. The LW is more typical of the sort of masculine subject that enjoys her much jouissance in this mediated way, and feels threatened by not only the Other’s jouissance, but the one who knows how to deal with it directly. If her enjoyment is, as it were, achieved through a certain kind of will to Nothingness, then the boyfriend enjoys by not-willing. If only the LW talked more about what was so great about the actual sex!

 

Beautiful Commenters with Beautiful Comments

This is a comment, posted by “chlamor,” on an Alter Net article on a self-proclaimed “yuppie” who “goes green” by moving to a farm in New Mexico.

There is much pretending throughout the progressive and liberal community.

Success and the good life, credentials and status, position and privilege must be protected, at least for people like “us.” At the same time, our position and privilege is dependent upon playing a certain role. We must pretend that we are not defending privilege and position and must pretend that we are for the downtrodden. We must pretend that privilege and position is all earned, and that anyone could have anything that we have. We must defend the system of dog-eat-dog competition

When our bluff is called, there is no amount of time and energy we will spare in internecine warfare arguing fine points of what a liberal is, or what our position should be on each and every minute issue and sub-issue and variations on every issue. These arguments can never be resolved, because there is no basis of consensus. Actually there is a consensus, but an important component of the consensus is that we never talk about it and we must pretend that it isn’t there.

The consensus from which liberals-progressives-Democrats operate:

“We are the better people. We are smarter, we are humane, we are more compassionate, we are better informed. We are better citizens, we are more cooperative and realistic. We are winners, not losers, and we deserve everything we get. We are spiritually superior. We are centered and balanced, calm and insightful. We are on the right side of history. We are building a better world.

Most of the problems in the world are the result of stupid people running things. If we smart people were in charge, all of the problems could be solved with science and technology and rational social planning.

Class analysis, and the struggles of working class people against tyranny have no place in modern society. They are obsolete and passe, and only something that we read about or see in movies. Romantic as those stories are, they are no substitute for hard-headed practical reality, whether we like it or not. This is a matter of being a mentally healthy, modern, well-adjusted adult in society. None of the lessons from history apply, because things are different now. Only strange maladjusted people are attracted to obsolete political ideas. They are all obviously losers, and are a great danger, almost as much of a danger as the Republicans are.

Since politics and economics in the traditional sense are dead, we embrace a new paradigm of self improvement and self-actualization. Anything that interferes with our focus on ourselves and our pursuit of creating ourselves as an actualized being is to be rejected. The way to achieve the perfect society is first to create a perfect self. Meanwhile, so long as the authorities do not interfere with our self-actualization, we must comply in all ways with that authority. This allows us perfect self-expression within perfect social conformity. Anyone who attacks our personal choices is the enemy, and anyone who attacks the social system based on personal choice is also the enemy.

Others, however, who do not share our values are not to be given personal choice, when and as we can prove that their personal choices are wrong, often with convoluted claims that their choice impacts us somehow. We support the police state and massive incarceration of people, so long as they are being harassed and imprisoned for the right reasons. Any variance from our idea as to how people should be is the right reason, by definition.

We believe that we must ‘be the change we wish to see,’ and the change we wish to see is more people like us: polite, talented, beautiful, intelligent, calm, successful, clever, enlightened. So we merely need to be ourselves, focus on ourselves, and serve ourselves. Those who cannot or will not become like us need to back down and get out of the way.”

It’s so bizarrely true too. Some of the responses garnered self-cataloguing that chlamor brilliantly picks up on without even decending to the imaginary level of the self-indulgent liberal-progressives’ clash with the “pretenders.” Cathyc responds:

What do YOU mean by the ‘progressive and liberal community’? To whom are you referring, exactly? People who PRETEND they are progressive and/or liberal?

Believe it or not, there are people in this world who ARE actually making progress with their lives, usually painstakingly slow progress, but REAL as opposed to pretend progress. I’m one such person. I’m in no hurry; one can’t hurry nature….

BTW, I’m so involved and focused on my natural progress, I don’t pay much heed to my critics aka The Pretenders. As far as I’m concerned, I’m ALIVE, they’re not and Vive la Difference!

To which, chlamor replies without denying or affirming Cathyc’s demand of “What do YOU mean by the ‘progressive and liberal community’? To whom are you referring, exactly?”

Re-read my post.

Then re-read your response.

Take note of how many times you referred to yourself.

Proving the very point.

Amazing how deeply inculcated is the self-indulgence.

It’s just swell when people refuse to give up their desire.

 

So What?

No, I’m not talking about the Miles Davis song, but you should listen to it.

Over at I Cite, Jodi resounds with me, albeit in a different register, in saying “so what?” to all the hub-bub raised over Obama’s speech on race. She comments that his pastor’s anger is politicized in a way that comparable anger coming from white pulpits is not, but also that “Many liberals (Zizek’s beloved liberal multiculturalists) like it this way. They are most comfortable talking about racism, not race. To notice race, in their way of thinking, is to be racist.” It’s telling that these same liberals take a similar distance to race as these Fox News jerks debating the finer points of what one can “get away” with when speaking of race, particularly when you are of one race and your comments are directed towards another.

Towards the end of that clip, Chris Wallace, another Fox News anchor, pretty smartly says that he thinks Obama’s generalization is true! One of the other anchors, however, was quick to downplay Wallace by suggesting that the sentiment is “generational.” In other words, we can be honest about the relevance of age difference in how people view the world, but not when it comes to race. To have invoked race on that show would have been to actually take their comments about racism seriously, but it would have probably yielded wildly different results. For example, it makes sense that Obama (black or white) invokes a “typical white person,” because there is a typical white experience in America, because that is practically all we know collectively. It makes no sense for a white-person like Hillary Clinton or Chris Matthews to talk about a “typical black person,” which in our collective self-image doesn’t exist, except as a scary blind-spot.

The offensiveness of it is not merely that there is a black experience not captured in white America’s white vision of itself, which is all too aware of the racism that persists to this day, but that when anyone tries to talk about the difference and why there is a difference they are dismissed or chided. You don’t have to argue that the black-experience is of equal or superior value to anything else in order to just point out that that very black-experience exists because and is a symptom of white hegemony. The key is not to enjoy the black experience (read as: the multiculturalist experience), but to reject the racist horizon defining this experience of race.

 

Activity in Buddhism

[x-posted at Progressive Buddhism]

Whitney Joiner wrote an interesting appraisal of the Dharma Punx phenomenon, which she playfully titled “Dive-bar Dharma.” Specifically she considers how this new phenomenon within American Buddhism relates to the more original phenomenon of American Buddhism itself (i.e. Buddhism that rushed into America after WWII and proliferated with the then counter-culture). In the end she comes out with what, I think, is the typical utilitarian/skillful-means defense of the movement. Rather than strive for appeal through the quasi-authority of Eastern exoticism—which may or may not fairly describe the original appeal for ’50s and ’60s counter-culture-warriors like Allen Ginsberg, who like many other disaffected youth of his time was already enamored with quasi-mystic figures of the Romantic movement like William Blake and the less mystical but no less romantic Walt Whitman, not to mention being steeped in the Jewish and Christian mystic traditions—Joiner thinks Levine and a fellow dharma punk, Ethan Nichtern, are on the right track with their edgy new approach to spreading/practicing the dharma. What I think is missing from this sort of account is the flip-side of even this movement. I’ll digress for a moment in an excerpt from the lengthy comment I left, which I think says my point about as well as I care to right now.

The key to understanding how active Buddhist practice is already (before getting hipsterfied or whatever) is in understanding how active our minds are already.

We are typically dominated by a more or less mild froth of mental activity, both in the moment but largely also out of it. That is to say, when we pull out the drawer to get a spoon for eating our freshly poured bowl of cereal, our minds are probably engaged in that activity, but more likely than not a bunch of other stuff too—whatever we were doing before we made our bowl of cereal, whatever we anticipate doing afterwards and associations and thoughts of other sorts. What happens is we are constantly pulled out of the moment and to the extent that we are in the moment, the weight of the rest of our mental activity can make things that are not in this moment feel very present. Isn’t it common to be in a bad-mood and to take what someone said or did, or some otherwise inadvertent circumstance, as we put it “the wrong way,” only to realize later that “I was just in a bad-mood” and feel crumby about it?

Tarrying with this mental activity, which takes us out of the moment when we don’t even normally realize it until after the fact, is the core of Buddhist practice. Stilling the mind is not simply turning our inessential mental activity off, because we can’t turn our thoughts off like that. Luckily for us, what comes goes, and the same is true for our thoughts. So, the trick of Buddhist practice, at least when we’re talking about meditation, is staying with these thoughts long enough to notice that they are there, but not so that we become unaware of everything else that is going on around us. This is, on the one hand, profoundly difficult, more difficult than anything else someone can try and do, because it is asking that we stay in full contact with every nook and cranny of our mental activity so we don’t lose track of it. On the other hand, it turns out to be profoundly simple too, since after establishing our mindfulness, the mental activity goes away by itself. We’re just there to watch, engaged enough to know what’s going on, but not so much that we’re really worried about what’s going to come of it, since we already know: when this arises, that arises; when this ceases, that ceases.

In this way, Buddhism is already profoundly active from the get go. I’m very much on board with what one of the commenters said about the ease of this practice perhaps unskillfully being put before its simultaneous [depth and] difficulty. As much [as] overly esoteric practices and teachings are unskillful (not in themselves, but because they are brought [up in] an inappropriate context), I think that overly exoteric practices and teachings are probably just as unskillful. The idea that “you aren’t doing anything” isn’t wrong, as I already pointed out, but it’s incomplete, and it is incompleteness of a view or a practice that makes it unskillful. What we do on the meditation cushion, or however you meditate is, first of all, tremendous work, but it isn’t to be just something we do on the meditation cushion. The goal is bring this practice we have in meditation into every moment of our lives. If that doesn’t sound like positively the most difficult thing anyone has ever suggested to you, then I don’t know what will. Nonetheless, somewhat in defense of the article, it doesn’t matter what’s going on the outside so long as the same practice is happening on the inside, whether you say “Peace, man” or “Oi!”

That’s pretty much all I have to say, but I should still add a bit more. What is at stake for Buddhists brought up in Generation X and now Generation Y is still very much what was at stake for the first mentionable generation of American Buddhists in the last century: suffering and its cessation. I probably gloss over a lot when I say this, but I’m not giving a rigorous historical account, just a perspective. The way I see it, people have come to the dhamma because they are ready to begin taking up the path to the cessation of (their) suffering and dissatisfaction with life. If they aren’t, then allure of the exotic (whether its from China, the hippie commune, or the tattoo-parlor) wears off, as everything does, and they get on with their lives—still unsatisfied.

The point I fear is missed by many in the Dharma Punx movement and those surrounding it is that we practice the dharma for its own sake—not because it’s cool or fun or whacky or edgy or however you want to describe the vehicle. I think this marks one of the difficulties for the development of a truly Western (or American) Buddhism, because we have a deep cultural penchant for commodities (i.e. things whose first and practically only purpose is to be consumable by as many people as possible, which is to say, things that are all exterior), which translates into approaching something like the dhamma asking “so what is it good for?” The only meaningful answer I can think of is: everything, and nothing less.

This reminds me of a story I’ve heard from somewhere about the Buddha and a farmer. The farmer comes to the Buddha, who he heard has this great teaching, and asks him if it can help him with this or that mundane problem of his life (nagging wife, unruly kids, failing crops, etc.). The Buddha says his teaching cannot help with any of those problems. He tells him that life is full of all kinds of problems, 83 to be exact, and the Buddha’s teaching will help him with none of them. The farmer, kind of ticked off, asks the Buddha just what good his teachings are then, if they in no way answer to any of these issues in his (or anyone else’s) life. The Buddha points out that his teachings are good and only good for one still yet unmentioned problem, an 84th problem enveloping all the other 83 problems: the farmer wants to have no more problems.

In a similar way, the American Buddhist community’s task is not to be popular (i.e. prolific in a social context insofar as that context stays the same), like when the farmer asks if it can fix this or that problem (i.e. a fix for a problem only when it’s a problem), but to remain effective. By effective I don’t mean in the sense that there is any particular, conventional issue it addresses, but because it remains true to its only purpose: the cessation of suffering.

 

Choice

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in libertarian circles to adopt a rhetoric of choice (mostly in economic terms, and then largely as an issue of taxation) deliberately paralleling, and in many cases competing, with choice as an issue of women’s reproductive rights. It has the potential to digress into blue-in-the-face identity politics shouting matches, but I also think it might be a useful strategy for over-coming just this obstacle to solidarity and dialogue. If so, it’s probably not a conscious effort, in the sense that anyone’s thought of it quite this way and acted accordingly. At any rate, it’s a trend that I hope gains some traction, though not for the libertarians’ sake, but for the sake of Leftists who have yet to formulate any good ways of addressing oppression as a function of identity and vice versa without the divisiveness of identity.

 

The Mystification of Dissent

In the first half of the 20th Century, particularly after the Russian revolution, dissent in the United States was a relatively formal affair for those who wanted to silence it. Simply put, the silencing of dissent was, when it was a concern at all, really mostly a State concern. In particular, the rise of the Cold War involved a massively government coordinated campaign to gut American labour of its (usually very effective) Communist union leadership.

By the mid-1950s organized labour and anything remotely constituting popular dissent was in shambles. In the 1960s something really interesting happened though, unfortunately in either of their favour. All kinds of “revolutions” developed and the public discourse of seditious and controversial matters became arguably acceptable - not to mention all the drugs. The ’60s quickly became a caricature of itself though, even with the world riots of 1968. Without denying earnest and critically considered revolutionaries, the social movements ’60s became co-opted into Capitalist production. This was opposite of what happened to the proto-hipster (hip-cat, if you will) culture of the 1940s, which was effectively forced underground, giving us The Beat Generation.

What is interesting about this transformation is how it so strikingly smacks of Marx’s mystification of commodities. In this case, dissent itself, or at least the so-called revolutionary attitude, is commodified, turned into a veritable fashion (hence our pathetic and politically charged notion of a “fashion statement”). While Adorno prefigured this transformation in his essays on the Culture Industry, the unique commodifcation (and consequent mystification) of dissent seems to escape his analysis of otherwise innocuous cultural phenomena. I mean, political dissent is supposed to be important, at least in a way different from how Benny Goodman was perceived as important in the day to day lives of middle-class “somebodies.” Anymore dissent, by virtue of its popular form, is structured like any other aspect of our free-time. Today, in Portland, many people have taken notice that our protests regularly end just in time to go home, make dinner and go to bed, because you have to go to work the next morning - or worse yet so you don’t miss your favorite television program.

So it comes down to this question, which Marx asks of commodities: whence came the enigmatic character of American dissent and so-called revolution? How did dissent obtain its commodity-form, such that we are quite aware of its pre-determined, repetitive character, yet we act as if it were (as if we were) truly radical?