Philosophy & Magical Thinking

The philosopher R. G Collingwood took magic seriously as something that was inappropriately judged in scientific terms. It was best judged alongside art as a craft with ends in view that involved the arousing of emotion. He was deriving his notion of magic from the anthropology of his day but what he was trying to say in the round was that magical thinking and practice were not 'primitive'. It was just another way of seeing the world and engaging with it that was perfectly functional within its own cultural frame of reference. It is on emotion that he is most interesting:

" ... although magic arouses emotion, it does this in quite another way than amusement [which Collingwood associates with Art]. Emotions aroused by magical acts are not discharged by those acts. It is important for the practical life of the people concerned that this should not happen; and magical practices are magical precisely because they have been so designed that it shall not happen. The contrary is what happens: these emotions are focused and crystallized, consolidated into effective agents in practical life. The process is the exact opposite of a catharsis. There the emotion is discharged so that it shall not interfere with practical life; here it is canalized and directed upon practical life." [R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, Oxford, 1938, p.67]

This is interesting because we see this contrast all the time in observing people in their relations with significant others. We also note what happens when emotion is stunted and people are trapped in an addiction to emotional states (the weekly marital argument, the addiction to the state of love, anger at the same thing every time without moving forward).

High emotions seem best directed as either catharsis (an explosion that rewires the brain or moves a person on from one state to another) or channeled, within a context often ritualised in all but obvious name, in order to let the emotion change the world in which the person lives by permitting the conditions for action or change.

One model changes the person (or forces behavioural change on the target of the emotion which may, of course, be mere bullying) and the other transforms the social and cultural, possibly material (but the jury is out on that one) world in which the person has to survive. Both are evolutionarily honed on organism survival. The explosion of emotion forces change in the world in others or in oneself while the sublimation or channeling of emotions manipulates others or one's sub-conscious into desired outcomes.

From this perspective, magic (the channeling process) is as efficacious in its way as doing art, experiencing art or undertaking psychotherapy or religious practice and more effective than science in some contexts (changing the social and cultural conditions we live in) while less effective than science in others (changing the material conditions in which we live).

Science-based politics always fails because magic-based politics will always beat it in an open struggle for hearts and minds as much as magic-based construction will see buildings fall and planes drop out of the sky. Magic will certainly not allow a man to fly despite the claims of yogis and certainly not with the efficiency of modern technologists but it will allow him to cope with, manage or exploit the social and cultural changes created by a world in which people can fly by other means.

Collingwood is not advocating that magic is real insofar as some claim that it can change material reality - there is still no evidence for this and unlikely to be any evidence at any time soon. Magic is only real insofar as it affects psychological reality which is, in fact, the reality that most accords with the really lived lives of most people in the world. Most people use technology and take it for granted but few understand it. It may as well be magical for all the actual comprehension of the science behind it.

At the outer reaches of physics and cosmology, science goes so far beyond perceived reality that its reality looks a lot more magical (although ultimately based on logic, mathematics and observational experiments) than magic does to the mind who has not simply decided to 'believe' in science (a most reasonable belief but still, for most people, a matter of faith rather than knowledge).

Magical thinking is anti-thinking from the inside outwards, constructing reality from the self, the consciousness that is embedded in material reality and is capable of flying shaman-like at any time it wishes. This is opposed to scientific thinking which is reasoning of the outwards world undertaken inwardly.

Eventually scientific thinking ends up following its own logic into mysteries that bend reality and magical thinking ends up following its own logic into realities that bend if not materiality, then society and its workings on materiality.

Science gives us the tools but magic enables us to use the tools by triggering our emotional commitment to a purpose for which the tools have a use. The magical process is an operation on 'morale' - one's own and that of others as manipulation. It is why propaganda, PR and the totalitarian cultural forms of late capitalism are 'magical'.

It is also why magical operations can construct true selves (despite the post-modern nonsense that there are no selves because rational thinking says there are no selves) that flourish regardless of social norms, far more effectively that psychotherapy's attempt to adapt the individual to society and creating a working norm that is healthy within that framework.

The shaman is often indistinguishable from the modern psychopath but his context makes him different. Our 'normal' magical rituals often have a social context that removes their efficacy because the total system disrespects the mobilising power of emotion except as manipulation from above (which has incidentally 'conceptualised' and commercialised art, its sibling, out of existence).

When the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia can buy Da Vinci's 'Salvator Mundi' for $450m simply to establish his modernising credentials and shock his culture into compliance with a new ideology, then art is effectively dead and magical thinking rules.

Magical operations are all around us, operating every day in our lives. The late Marxist attempt to theorise rationally about these operations in nonsense terms such as 'objectification' and 'commodification' utterly misses the point that rational, political manipulation of emotional content must always result in a logical dark magic to maintain emotional balance. Populism's rise was inherent in the manipulations of late liberal capitalism and predictable.

Earlier Marxists would not have used this language but they would have understood the point better ... the decadence of Marxism as it got captured by the middle classes is one of the tragedies of our time. Early Marxists would have seen each magical operation in society as a thesis calling forth by its very nature its own antithesis. Successful magical operations incorporate their own antithesis into their workings to that synthesis is part of what the operation is intended to effect.

A true magician would have understood Newton's "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" to be as applicable to his world as that of the physicist - a lesson not understood by the dark master magician Adolf Hitler and certainly not understood by contemporary pseudo-scientific materialists who take no account of a huge swathe of matter that is ignored because it cannot yet be weighed - the magical minds of men and women.

The human mind is essentially magical. Rationalist liberals hate this and want our minds to be scientific but, if they were, we would not then be human. Just as the fact of a rough 15% of the population (like me) being completely irreligious does not remove the fact of the species being, on balance, religious in its spiritual or communitarian senses (horrified as I am by what this means) so only a minority of humans are purely rational actors and there is no earthly reason why they should expect to rule over others who think in different and equally efficacious ways.

Indeed, just as the fanatically religious and the atheist, the asexual and the polyamorous, have more adjustment problems with social reality than the general majority of humanity, so the radical rationalism of futurist technologists and the lifestyle magicians are faced with the same near-outsider status. Fortunately, most people are sufficiently rational to have faith in science and sufficiently magical to run their own lives effectively in the world the scientists have made.

Anyone who wants to understand themselves and the world and to know how to manipulate the reality created by the rationalists has to learn to become a magician. This does not mean dressing up in a dark cloak and leaping naked on the Seal of Solomon shouting the names of 10,000 demons. That's just fun but probably a bit of a waste of time magically speaking.

It simply means isolating the will from the world and applying it to what you want rather than what other people have told you that you must want and then finding the techniques that tap into the enabling (usually emotional) sub-conscious, stripping away layers of social patterning in order to find out what is under there, how it can relate most effectively to 'reality' and then bending self and reality through will to create a new functional reality within oneself or as a re-patterning one's relationship with others.

The supernatural does not need to exist to make magic work but its pretend existence itself can become a tool or weapon in the process of self and social construction. But bear in mind that you are always up against 6 billion or so other natural magicians, all creating their own reality out of the material to hand. Some of those will be your enemy (snowflakes, religious fundamentalists and radical feminists are mine) because their reality must place constraints on yours.

In practice, all magical thinking is struggle for social and personal survival in which the dangers are obvious - you lose or, worse, you win, and don't stop there but try to go beyond survival to domination. And that is where every action having its own reaction comes in. The Wiccans have it right with 'Do What Thou Wilt an Harm No One' since 'bad magic' (as one A. Hitler found it) will come back to bite you because of the eventual opposition it creates. To live long and prosper, there is only ever 'white magic' ...

Frontiers 3 - Time & Reality

We have covered the probable drive to explore and quasi-colonise the solar system during the coming decades and the search for exo-planets that may, one day, in the very distant future be colonisable. It may seem odd now to consider two abstract concepts - time and reality - as possible frontiers. In practical day-to-day terms, we live in sufficient reality to serve our purposes and we experience time in a shared social setting. The frontier nature of time and reality is often, for most people, the realm at the further reaches of speculative fiction. And yet the conceptual search by physicists and cosmologists, perhaps also by imagineers in speculative fiction, is a cultural frontier of immense importance.

Einstein famously introduced the idea of a space-time that precluded any single and objective definition of simultaneity. This relativism has not yet worked its full way back through our culture as a relativism about reality itself. Yes, of course, there has been a form of widespread post-modern cultural relativism but this evades the issue. Social reality imposed by one prevailing order into which persons fitted was replaced in post-modern environments with a fragmentation that created many social fictions where there had only been one. The effect was to create a half-way house of identity politics and cultural relativism between the world of monocultures, ruling whole territories and suppressing dissent, and the reality of reality which is that individuals construct their own personal realities out of the shared reality of really existing material reality. This is now a world where the individual can believe what it is necessary for them to believe and have a structure of reality that is as unique as their fingerprint and yet one which can only be materially functional if it accords with the laws of physics that limit every social reality that has ever existed. No magical culture has fed its people through using magic alone.

The most interesting tension in this respect is between the magical thinking of human beings and material reality. The individual who is a magical thinker certainly cannot fly without the help of the technologist but vast tracts of experience can be made to fit into a magical model. While the technologists and scientists drive one frontier - the one that makes matter utile and more knowable - the magically-minded are driving another frontier - the one that can make life livable. The realities that are being squeezed between the two are those constructed out of the collapse of geographically centred dissent-resisting monocultures. The idea that monocultures can be collapsed into sets of identity without going further and seeing each individual as a self-transforming contained creator of their own reality who subverts (in time) the identity cultures as they once subverted the monocultures is the cultural frontier of our time. What we see is massive human variation emerging in ways that are not just creatively anarchic but potentially dangerous since the destructive outliers within the variation who understand technology can become murderous in their intent. They may desire to create, reversing the process moving from monocultural social reality to the realities of autonomous individuals, a culture of malignity finding and merging with like-minded malign individuals. Thus not only are socially constructed realities broken down into their components but new social constructions of reality arise out of those components, often for brief periods of time, making use of the instabilities of the current communications revolution. Nothing like this has appeared before in history.

The investigative frontier that is the scientific or philosophical investigation of time and reality (and space) has helped create this world of Heraclitean flux but the individual and bottom up social constructions involved highly volatile. In themselves they depend on belief, which may include unthinking belief in the claims of philosophers and scientists and on interpretations of what are thought to be those claims even if the scientists and philosophers have actually claimed nothing of the sort. A speculation which is logical or rational becomes detached from the original reasoning process to become a claim that becomes the basis for fear, hope, speculation, the struggle for status or resources - indeed, all those things that make us human-all-too-human. We see a lot of this in the disconnect between sober assessment of existential risk and the massive levels of apocalyptic hysteria to be found amongst the dimmer frightened rabbits who latch on to environmentalist or transhumanist movements. Rushing around like 'chicken-licken', they can make no sober assessment of either the original claim nor of the actuality of scientific method as hypothesis nor critique the use of a claim by special interests. They are, in short, at the frontier of human stupidity.

Einstein suggested that the passage of time itself is a fiction. This fictionalisation of reality is another factor that we have to take account of in describing ourselves as being at a cultural frontier as wild as the American West in its hey-day. It is our limitation, as a material creature existing as an autonomous unit within material reality, that constructs our perception of reality out of our senses and out of the structure of remembrance and of experience, created in turn out of our past sense experiences and possibly our genetics and somatics. We are stuck in a perceived reality, even as individual components, of all these social and material realities, one that is highly volatile but which we also know is uncomfortably contingent philosophically. Whatever it is we experience (Reality I) is known now not to be the reality of the external world in all its forms (Realities II, III and so on). Beyond all these realities, there is the reality of that which can never be known and which the most advanced cosmologists and physicists explore through pure number - merely creating a mathematical reality that may still have nothing to tell us about an Ultimate Reality which may not, in the end, be there at all.

The next frontier, I would suggest, is the cultural unravelling of the last true determinism - mathematical determinism - and even perhaps of the magical thinking behind accepting that cause and effect are necessarily absolutely true rather than true in our reality. This does not mean that magic is real - this is most unlikely - but only that the cultural frontier that appears to be dominated by number and logic at the high point of scientific culture, one that will get us to the stars one day (perhaps), is now justifiably capable of being critical of the ultimate reality of number and logic and so offering the opportunity to challenge its claims at those points of human existence where their technical use becomes meaningless. As the scientists try to move ever deeper into existence and into the conscious mind (expressed in advanced neuroscience), so the philosophical uncovering of the impossibility of knowing very much outside our own world carves out a subversive space that undermines science's implicit suggestion of meaning other than as an efficacious way of providing the basis for doing things in the world. If we do not want or need to do things in the world, then we do not need science quite as much as we thought. Increasing numbers of people may find it useful to stop doing and start dreaming solipsistically or in cultic shared dreams (or at least with the illusion, perhaps through shared ritual, in the existence of the shared dream).

This is the challenging aspect of the case. Let us return to Einstein who is said to have said (you can never tell with these quotations): "People like us, who believe in physics [note that word 'believe'], know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". The uncertainties of science flip the mind from the clinical atheism of traditional materialism into a form of stubborn pseudo-theology in which speculation based on the intellectual perception of reality reintroduces magical thinking by the back door - this is as contrary to the expectations of three decades ago as feminists working with faith-based groups to control sex work or Pope Francis courting another religious group, the 'scientific' environmentalists, to win his debates on stem cell research. Meanwhile those who embed themselves in the simple business of being human and constructing their reality out of the business of being human in the world, perceiving reality as something lived, tend to materialism and atheism as pragmatic realities that allow life to be better lived on a day to day basis between birth and death. The tendency of an element of the scientific community to discover naively deism, spirituality, transhumanism, eschatology, meaning and platonic wonder (all the flummery of deep anxiety) contrasts with the ordinary Joe's increasingly happy abandon of religion in favour of pleasure and experience. It is as if the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century is going into reverse in the Twenty First century at one level just as (in the developed world) the masses are finally discovering the sheer freedom of not having a priest or a magistrate breathing down their backs at another.

But one frontier is absolute. The present, which is just the remembrance of the nano-past while a finely honed somatic machine wards off threats and seeks out opportunities, cannot become the future and the past cannot be experienced but merely remembered as in the past - as a present remembrance. We live in a perpetual present where the past is simply the accumulated historic tool box of past presents and the future is a set of guesses that relies on material reality being predictable and social reality being probabilistic. The arrow of time is the sea in which we swim and there is no cultural work that can counteract this reality, no frontier at all, except speculative imaginings that paradoxically can only take place in the presents of the individuals concerned. That these speculative imaginings can now include the complexities of quantum mechanics changes nothing about the actuality of this presentism moving in one direction, even when remembering, even when in altered states. The perception is thus, once again, at odds with the material reality. We have the basis for belief starting in the very difficulty of accepting presentism as at the core of our being. Once we take our present recalling as the past and our speculations about the future as the future, we have created a past and a future and from there we have the imaginative basis for theory, ideology and religion. We are made human by our utter refusal not to invent complex realities moment from moment, building on the substrate of past experience and its predictive capacity as an evolved tool for survival.

Once we understand this, whereas making a spacecraft that can divert asteroids is a frontier, speculation about the nature of time and reality is not quite such a frontier at all. The frontier is billions of consciousnesses taking advanced and creative speculations about time and reality, incorporating them (literally insofar as the mind is embedded in the body) and constructing reality present by present in seven billion muted solipsisms embedded in a social reality that allows each component to feed off the others and feed the others in an excess of mutual vampirism. That is the frontier. We are vampires of the real, sucking the life force of the past to create the future through our presentism.

Intellectually the idea of the arrow of time as simply an emergent phenomenon arising out of a unified bloc of space time and of quantum physics strikes me as 'logical' and probably 'true' but it is irrelevant if the only thing we, as humans, can experience is presentism within the arrow, a state of being in which the arrow permits us the illusion (which is now a reality because we are constructed to convert it into a reality) of participation in the arrow of time ... which, of course, therefore exists. The experienced world may be less 'true' in one version of reality than the unified bloc but it is more 'true' in terms of what really matters. This is our own existence in the world - indeed, after all, if it has no use-value, one starts to ask why we are so engaged with constructing an understanding of the reality outside ourselves, especially when only very few humans are mathematically mentally fitted to even come close to understanding what it is they are later going to want to popularise and which the 'educated' public will take on trust with the same trust in the authority of the scientist that they once had in the authority of the priest. There is little functional difference in this trust even if we have very good reason to believe that the scientist is inherently more intellectually trustworthy than the priest. The trust, however, is relativistic and should not be accepted as absolute.

What the intellectual modelling of theoretical physics is tending towards, in terms of cultural belief, is a subtle undermining of the degree to which we can know anything for sure about or within complex systems, a move towards acceptance of the unknowability of other minds and, more debatably, one towards acceptance of the contingency of human existence and non-acceptance of any meaningful form of mental survival after termination. It also operates in favour of free will and against determinism insofar as it may be feasible that the evolved consciousness of the human being operates with a quantum unpredictable aspect. Tiny unpredictable quantum events may conceivably randomly change the things that happen in the material world of which we are part - or not! It can reasonably be argued that we are so embedded in the material world that a simpler model of cause and effect necessarily applies to us and that quantum effects would be so miniscule as to be meaningless in such lumpy creatures as ourselves. The doubt has been sown however - cultural leadership passes from the predictive assumptions of Calvinists and Hegelians to the dodgier game played by slippery Pelagians and Existentialists. This is not to say that the quantum world is not just an extension of an overall materiality in which we are all embedded but only that, whether we term things to be quantum or even spiritual, in fact they are still part of the same damn material continuum. So there we have it ... the frontier of time and reality is not to be found in the work being done to create new knowledge of time and reality but how we use these fictions to construct society and ourselves. Whatever we are in fifty years (the non-dead ones of us at least) will be partly dictated by the myths currently being created by the scientific-magicians at the farthest ends of such speculation.

For and Against Situationist Thought

Situationist thought might seem like a mere historical foot-note from Cold War history but it is worth some reconsideration now that we have seen ‘capitalism’ go through one of its periodic bouts of creative destruction. It depended intellectually on yet another attempt by mid-twentieth century Marxists to weasel out of the tough fact that their Idealist origins meant that they could never actually relate to the human condition as most people lived it – life for Marxists is an expression of theory. On the other hand, shorn of its ridiculous and patronising Marxist rhetoric, it has been 'detourned' into every avenue of commercial art, that is where it has not become the hobby of marginalised contemporary anarchists operating on the fringe of political reality - and sometimes of reality itself.

Where Situationist Thought Sits

Yet it would be foolish to under-estimate its importance. Although derived from an untenable Hegelianism, still being played out by the buffoons in the European Commission, it had one big thing to offer. What the situationists wanted to do was to make individuals, especially individuals at the very base of society, critically observe and analyse their daily conditions of life, calculate their own intrinsic desires and act on them.

Forget the Young Hegelian padding, this was potentially pre-Socratic in form, a half-way house to a proper existentialist political ethic. Perhaps they needed to claw their way out of the very ideology in which they had set themselves and just failed and perhaps we should honour them simply for trying. Their contribution to Western culture is precisely to expose the impossibility of one’s own desire being encompassed by any theory.

Debord recognized this to a degree by opposing any attempt to turn the situationist impulse into 'situationism', an ideology. Unfortunately, he failed to escape the dominant intellectual ideology of his time. One can imagine a group of Christian radicals (anti-trinitarians perhaps) playing with similar ideas, yet getting trapped into a necessary but ultimately fruitless faith in God.

The Situationist and the Left

Debord understood Sartre’s insight into one aspect of our condition – that the will to the universal, embedded in ‘official’ left-wing thought, is deeply absurd. He saw ideology as legitimated in modern society ‘by universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion’. What the Situationists expressed was a peculiar form of revolt that has resonance today. Within the Left, it was a revolt against the bureaucratic impulse of contemporary socialism and the repulsive dictatorship of Stalin’s nomenlatura. That particular argument was won in any case by history. From the Left, however, it was a revolt at the process of having one’s reality, desires and needs dictated by machineries that were no less bureaucratic than those of sclerotic communism but which were hidden within the operations of capitalism.

Later, the great left-wing weasel himself, Gramsci, managed to perform a trick whereby the official Left simply abandoned overt bureaucratism and adopted the manipulative techniques of capitalist enterprises for social engineering purposes. The Situationist impulse is thus important because the problems they identified have not gone away but have merely transformed themselves. Mow, the manipulation of reality comes not only from advertising agencies but from liberal-left infiltration of our culture.

Anti-Capitalism and Neo-Bureaucratic Socialism

What we have now is a culture of self-righteous and manipulative activists, all talking their book and using their minority power to force universalist regulation and legislation on a powerless population. From a Cold War situation of communist bureaucratic tyranny and ‘free world’ corporate drabness, we have transformed into a world of government by liberal-left elites amidst an economic chaos which they are incapable of managing.

The Situationist International was anti-capitalist (whatever that can mean today) but their revolutionary impulse embraced what they saw as the positive elements within capitalist development. Despite the bleatings of Marxist-Leninists, there are positive aspects. Capitalism, by lurches and starts, eventually provides for needs and desires far better than any other system, better than political traditionalism and provenly better than communism.

At a certain level of development, people began to have the opportunity for personal choice. This was certainly not the case in the industrial factory culture of mid-twentieth century France and it is not the case across most of the world for most of the time but, where the market (let us drop the loaded term capitalism) operates well, persons do have more choices although this does not mean that the choices are the ones we always want ... better is not to be taken here to mean good, just not-so-bad.

Puritan Reactions

There is a current attempt at a back-lash against choice from the sourer elements of the liberal-left but this neo-puritanism, which can descend to complaints about the complexity of mobile phone tariffs in a world of stupid and lazy people, deliberately ignores that late capitalism gives us other more critical choices of real value.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century in the developed west, we have been given remarkable choices over our sexual identity, who we associate with, where and how we live, what we take into our bodies and what we can say (despite liberal-left attempts to control this last). These freedoms derive entirely from our relative prosperity and so from late capitalism. The tragedy of the current economic crisis is that many people have not found a way to extend their freedoms independent of prosperity and regardless of the cynical interest of the ‘capitalists’.

This is where the situationist impulse comes in because the situationists were ahead of their time by half a century in asserting the primacy of the ordinary person’s ability to assert his or her right to choose his or her condition of life according to his or her desires - against centuries of social control. What we can continue to do is bring desire as a reality to the forefront of the population’s minds so that these desires can be recognized as good in themselves and, if transgressive against some dictated norm, inspirational towards changing the norm itself.

Sanguinetti

Instead of the liberal-left activist transforming a norm to meet abstract universalist principles over the heads of the population, the population might be liberated to assess its own condition and then demand that ‘norms’ be transformed away from the universal and back to the particular. What they can also do is what Sanguinetti and Debord did in their hoax pamphlet of 1975 where they ‘tricked’ major figures into showing their true thoughts and feelings on the murderous fascist interventions in Italy at that time.

This was unforgivable to elites – Sanguinetti had to flee Italy and was denied entry to France. Yet all he had done was to get the elite to show its true sentiments to the ruled. This should have been the task of journalism but journalists were and are fully embedded in the elite. As we have seen in the outpourings of garbage over the Ukrainian and Greater Syrian situations, the 'free Press' is little more than the 'father of lies' (on all sides).

Marxism & Value

Let us turn to what is wrong with Situationist Thought. Almost everything that is wrong with it can be put down to its Marxist origins and its easy acceptance of Marx’s labour theory of value. Everything in Marxism depends on this theory – and on its elaborations such as commodification, reification and alienation – so that any theory that did not accept it could not be called Marxist. The Situationists had to see themselves as Marxist if they were to be credibly ‘of the Left’.

In fact, value is not created by work but by perception, in a very different way from Marx’s simple view of all production being simply economic and ‘scientific’. How we perceive value arises from considerations that relate to our desires as much as our needs. The Marxist impulse is not merely to diminish these desires but to start creating concepts such as 'false consciousness' that will be the basis of the totalitarian manipulation of desire. Above all, the Marxist will not investigate and respect (and socialise) the animal core of desire and the 'divine' aspiration within it. While not going so far, the Situationists made the revolutionary step of interpreting Marxist theory in terms of experience and perception but laid claim to this being a stage in capitalism, ‘advanced’ capitalism.

Today, the capitalist seeks out and enables a creativity which would not be expressed at all if it was not for the capitalist who permits both efficient and wasteful organisation of resources. The Situationists, however, were hobbled by their need to fit in with ‘progressive’ historicism. Their profound insight was vitiated by the fact that they failed to understand that all value is based on experience and desire once very basic needs are met and that even those needs are contingent on experience and desire. In short, experience and desire (if only to continue living) are far more intrinsic to value than some gobbledy-gook that inserts the capitalist between the worker and his product. Even the form of basic needs can be dictated by perceptions and experience as in those situations where markets are perverted by taboo.

The Age of Spectacle

The Situationists assumed that we lived in an age of Spectacle that was different from all other ages. The latest adaptation of this is the current interest in the hyper-real, best exemplified by the work of Baudrillard. But they were entrapped within Marxist historical thought here as well. In fact, all ages are ages of spectacle and of simulacra because that is the central fact of the human condition. The only difference today is the sheer extent of the technological enhancement of the real that is available to us.

The human condition is always one of interpreting too much data from too many sources through perceptual apparatus that are not only limited by genetics but by history, habit and other people. Our species is constantly creating a version of reality that is pragmatically designed for survival.
Our reality at any one time is not the only possible reality. If it is true that it is constructed (as Marxists claim) from a particular relationship to the means of production, it is also true that it is constantly being recreated by the minds of millions of persons with instinctive wants and desires that are independent of those means.

This spectacle, this unified and always growing ‘thing’, made up of objects perceived and turned into value by the perceiving (detached from any underlying reality and certainly from the analysed reality of the intellectual) is a Heraclitean flux that can never be made solid or fully understood (despite the fantasies of the AI and Big Data enthusiasts).  The Marxist theory of alienation may be true analytically but it also contains an intrinsic problem that it derives from the Judaeo-Christian cultural tradition – that is, it does not want it to be true. Implicitly the Communist society is supposed, if not to abolish it, to reduce alienation of this type and yet this alienation is precisely what makes us evolve and be creative.

Why Alienation May Be A Good Thing

It may be far more sensible to embrace the flux, identify one’s own desires and then pragmatically seek fulfillment without collapsing into madness, in other words to be functionally happy within the flux by creating islands of vital personal rather than of sclerotic collective stability. Marxism is deeply conservative, terrified of change (unless a revolutionary blood-letting to end change), and nervous of emotion, desire and instinct.

Many Leftists would stand aghast at my comment and immediately suggest that such an acceptance of these things must be intrinsically ‘fascist’. So be it ... they misunderstand because they are wired to misunderstand these things. The Situationists embraced radical change in the short term, but their grand narrative still assumed that somewhere further down the line ‘revolution’ would bring some concordance between real reality and imagined reality. In this, they were wrong.

Though we may develop as a species in a robotic or purely intellectual direction over tens of thousands of years, we are defined now by having an individual reality (embracing our desires) that is disconnected from social reality ('norms’) which, in turn, is often out of kilter with the facts of the matter in the world. To seek to align our own situation with the ‘pseudo-reality’ of society by transforming the social into something that is in accordance with our own reality is absurd, utopianism of the worst sort, the basis of Hitlerism to name but one manifestation.

Utopian Absurdity

Why? Because there are millions of such realities, all competing and without any clear common class, race, sexual or other identity that is not created by the very society that we recognize as un-real. Faced with the flux of our desires and situation in a world where imbalances of power dictate the social norms which are imposed on us, where these same norms might be counter-productive to the effective management of scientific reality (as in some faith-based cultures), the Situationists have something to tell us but not precisely what they thought they wanted to tell us.

The Spectacle is not just a matter of contemplation but one of action where we, as individuals, have considerable opportunity to transform our and other lives if we only understood the degree of our freedom within our material and power constraints (so much, so Sartre).

What is not going to happen is any lasting transformation of society that is simply derived from a manipulative cadre – the sort of activist element we noted above – where a few individuals impose their phantasy on the majority without their own participation or informed consent. In practice only education (the art of questioning) and the market (the art of choosing) can liberate enslaved minds. Situationist events and cadres, in that context, are useful only insofar as they jolt us into questioning and into considering the value of our choices to ourselves.

Ideology as False God

From this perspective and as an example, AdBusters, which ‘detournes’ commercial advertising, is extremely valuable not because it will overthrow capitalism (it won’t) but because it raises questions outside of formal schooling institutions and it allows us to ask questions about our own values. However, if AdBusters simply replaces one world-view (slavery to the market) with another (slavery to an anti-capitalist rhetoric) nothing has been achieved.

The choice must include a value-driven choice for the product or service by the individual where that choice is informed and functionally useful to them. When an ideology like feminism raises questions for a woman (or man) about their relationship and offers a choice (to accept or not accept it) as well as a means of action (to act to make it a positive and effective choice), it is doing good.

But when it dictates an agenda that precludes questioning (‘all men are predators’) or forces a choice (‘sisterhood requires such-and-such an action'), then it is as oppressive as their invented Aunt Sally ‘patriarchy’. All ideologies need to be questioned in the same way. Debord’s ‘pseudo world’ of the spectacle is thus seen as a problem whereas in fact it is also a solution. There is no possible world that cannot be a pseudo world, in effect an imaginative construct limited by material reality, because the human species is defined positively by its own intrinsic alienation.

Taking Hold of the Spectacle

Once this is understood, we can abandon our puritanical moral panic about the lack of stability within existence and see the spectacle as something that we can create incrementally in our own image to the degree that we can ensure its and our functionality. What Debord is right to point out is the dangers of a liar lying to himself but, even here, we should not go too far.

A phantasy that is functional for the person is a tolerable madness. The issue is whether it is functional and not whether it is a phantasy. There is nothing wrong with phantasy at all. The liberatory element lies in an assertion (the only concession to the universal abstract) that the rights of persons to their phantasies are all equal and that the conditions of life should not include the acceptance of an unwilling submission of (or dominance over) one of another.

The lie that the liar may be telling himself is that he is happy or content when he has repressed and suppressed his true nature. An effective situationist response would be a socialized psychotherapeutic one, a revolutionary act of multiple enablings of self-assertions against the ‘given’. The current late capitalist spectacle works quite well at this critical level – the power of the consumer (which offsets the disempowered position of the employee or family member) permits an assertion of personal desire against the desire of capitalism to desire more resources.

The Hidden Moralism of Debord

A situationist economics might even emphasise the power of withdrawal of desire or the deferral of desire as a tactical act to get more of what is desired – not unlike the sexual politics within many relationships. The Spectacle is thus not the ‘concrete inversion of life’ (the Situationist view) but life itself, or rather what happens to life once individuals (who are truly alive) start to deal with one another in a constant process of gaming and trading.

Debord would have had much fun with our current obsession with zombies. This fascination is largely a construction of commercial interests but it is almost certainly hitting a sense in the population that the ‘system’ does treat them like zombies, units of production and consumption. But this does not mean that we are zombies, only that we are aware that we might become zombies. Zombies do not know that they are zombies.

Debord also argued that ‘things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy’ but he exaggerates, sounding like a Christian moralist of the late pagan era. He has no proof for his statement because he was not 'there'. The literary evidence for the claim can be shown to be flawed and suppositious. He says that ‘once an experience is taken out of the real world, it becomes a commodity … the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience’. But there is no harm in anything becoming a commodity if the trade is still good for the desiring subject. There is certainly no reason why the spectacle should not be regarded as being as real as the ‘real’ if it is felt as real by the person.

The Real

There is no real to be had in the sense that Debord is implying. Commodified experience is not only real to all intents and purposes but ‘more real’ insofar as it is the purchased expression of the fulfillment of a desire (albeit usually partially) that would otherwise not be experienced if it was not purchased. Marxism is riddled with pseudo-Judaeo-Christian moralizing about authenticity of experience and Debord cannot escape it. Here he is again: ‘our psychic functions are altered, we get a degradation of mind and also a degradation of knowledge’. He puts this down to capitalism. I put it down to socialisation under any system.

As soon as we relate to a single other person, we are beginning to see our psychic functioning altered, our mind is ‘degraded’ (meaning limited in its imaginative options) and our knowledge ‘degraded’ (made functionally useful to the system rather than ourselves). This altering and degradation increases to the degree that we are embedded in bigger and bigger institutions.

Intellectual Arrogance

We have to recognize that this ‘degradation’ applies to all human systems (not just capitalism) and that many people actively choose such ‘degradation’ as enhancing to them (our bureaucrats, corporate men and women, the military, the churches). But it is the height of intellectual arrogance to assume that such people are somehow inferior in their choice to libertarians like Debord and myself – all we can ask is that they do not force us into their mould.

Where he has an important point to make is where he says that ‘knowledge is not used [any more] to question, analyze or resolve contradictions but to assuage reality’. The ‘any more’ is highly questionable but the statement is a true representation of most people for most of the time but whether this state of affairs can ever be changed by revolutionary action is to be doubted. What the 68-ers and most Leftists of that and earlier periods did not and could not ‘get’ (because of the scientific knowledge of the period) is that this is the human species – mostly uninterested intrinsically in questioning, analysis and resolving contradictions. It is the creature that lives rather than 'thinks through' its contradictions.

Contradictions

In fact, the last thing most people want to do is resolve contradictions. Contradictions are the only way they can cope with life. No revolutionary operation is going to remove the reality of and necessity for contradiction. There is no evidence that the allegedly ‘real’ experience was, in fact, ever more interesting or pleasurable or life-changing than any acquired experience through the market. To think otherwise is a moralistic myth, an ‘ought’ from a traditionalist perspective rather than an ‘is’. It is what we think that we ought to think – no more.

Contemporary technology has made this clearer. Most desires cannot be fulfilled and will never be fulfilled wholly. The reality was always that experiences of value were few and often turned sour – think of the romp in the hay that led to a lifetime being shackled to a podgy harridan. New technologies create a culture of life-enhancing vicarious pleasure that, far from making persons less able to cope with ‘reality’, lance the boil of desire and create the language for getting some simulacra of desire into private life.

These technologies allow desires to be identified and then managed. The commodification of sexuality has included Ann Summers whose very existence has permitted sex-positive discussion between couples and has created an atmosphere of desire that counters the inability to speak of pleasure – as was the case in the past.

The Spectacle as Process

How does Debord see authority in this Society of the Spectacle? As always, he follows the Marxist pattern of making authority a thing rather than a process. There is some intention in someone somewhere apparently to maintain social control and handle threats. This is absurd.

There is no controlling mind at the centre of capitalism inventing processes for social control. It is a process in itself. Social controls are intrinsic but also subject to our own engagement in personal and so social liberation. The process includes ‘recuperation’ (the interception of radical ideas, their commodification and safe incorporation) but this is not sinister or willful. It is just natural evolution. It should be regarded as a good thing.

Even attenuated once-radical ideas (like, say, the scientific reality of human racial equality) become included within the ‘spectacle’ and the whole moves forward on the basis of its functionality and facts on the ground. Intellectuals want perfection where there is no perfection to be had. Capitalism is not degrading the life of the people. The people degrade their own lives as victims of circumstances they fail to will to change. As all intellectuals (especially Marxist intellectuals) do, Debord treats the mass of the population as fools, to be enlightened by types like himself.

What We Need

The ‘people’ (that is actual persons in the world) are embedded in a process which is ‘given’ to them but which they change each and every day of their waking lives through their actions. We do not need grumpy Marxist theory. We only need a commitment to a questioning education and the freedom to make choices for ourselves – and intervention, the legitimate role of the community as collective, to ensure that no person is hobbled from making informed choices.

Under this more moderated form of the Situation, questioning and assertive persons can create ‘situations’, reconstruct their localities, choose their relationships, engage with their environments and merge playfulness, free choice and critical thought. There will be no help from a revolutionary proletariat while any ‘art’ that thinks it will transform the conditions of humanity is living in a phantasy all of its own. It is the other way around. The transformation of society will enable an art that can exist for its own sake and is not burdened by theory or politics. Rather Wilde than Marx …

The aim of the Situationist International was much the same as mine – a world of luxury, happiness and freedom but allowing education and the market (a proper market and not socialism for corporations) to thrive is almost certainly more likely to produce these goods over the long term than reliance on a revolutionary proletariat and a bunch of artists.

Playing with Lacan ... Love, Desire & Cowardice

This post is not to be taken overly seriously. It is an over-simplified approach to Lacanian thought. I take him as the 'other' against whom I measure my argument but it does no justice to the complexity of his performance. I write performance because I cannot take him seriously as a formal thinker but only as a poet or life-dramatist arising out of the surrealist tradition. My contribution is thus necessarily merely playful and provocative despite its formalism.

Are we captured by our environment? Do we create an image of ourselves designed to allow us to operate in the world? This is Lacan's early insight - that, whether he is precisely right about its origins in our condition of coming into the world, persons construct imaginary selves to navigate reality.

The Invention of Reality

The imagined self is to all intents and purposes our reality - it is our operating system. Our self-constructed imagination of the world merely gives us imaginary selves to test out new ways of dealing with our environment. The imagined self may be functionally and pragmatically 'real' but it is not the whole story of our body's relationship to reality.

Freud and Lacan, by observation and experimentation, saw that this imagined self would see reality as material or social fact at one level but then re-interpret it with narratives that were somewhat false. The conclusion drawn was that persons need coherence and completeness in preference to truth whenever the truth is neither coherent or complete.

Falsehoods to oneself and others are thus the very stuff of humanity. It is the imagined self of the other that is the person that we will have deal with. No imagined self is a reliable guide to the world or to its own full self - Anton Wilson's biogram. It is a projection, a performance, an actor or actress.

We can re-interpret this eighty years on by considering the piecemeal nature of our sensory inputs (as increasingly revealed by neuro-science) and the instant subconscious choices that create coherence out of fragmented reality as we create our own sense of 'reality'. The self is building an interpretation of reality out of its own expectations and templated choices.

Becoming Paranoid

Barriers to reality (what actually exists 'out there') are thus two-fold - the choices made by sensory inputs (which may have strong genetic elements) and the construction of reality out of the sensory inputs (which is redraft of a previous mental draft and so dependent upon its own past). Without a conscious redraft, our mental text originates from the one with which we were born and which has had overlaid upon it all the cultural and social habits that Anton Wilson calls the logogram.

Paranoia arises when our mental text (and our description of the world is linguistic and not merely experienced) begins to redraft sensory inputs in a radical way to avoid any creative redrafting that would return us back to a right understanding of both ourselves and the world. Investment in the original mental text has become so great that reality must now change to save the text - the imagined self spins off into insanity.

In the most extreme cases, the mental text becomes the world - which perhaps is analogous to those social insanities where texts become the world for whole societies. Personal madness is the ideology of an imagined self taking charge of reality dysfunctionally just as social madness is ideology dictating social action, perhaps in excess of invented functionality. This will be dealt with below.

Lacan suggested that human knowledge itself was 'paranoiac'. He was sociologically right insofar as defining existence imposes boundaries on existence, an ordering of existence, that detaches the knower from existence itself. However, this is not a value judgement just an observation.

The Rationality of Madness

Lacan's greatest insight was perhaps to point out that madness is perfectly rational once certain understandings are in place, much as ideology is perfectly rational once you accept certain initial absurdities (such as God or scientific materialism or the 'war on women') and then link real phenomena to what is presented in the world in the light of these absurdities.

Madness is always logical in this sense. The relationship between the body (which is detached from the imagined self or ego) and the sub-conscious - an insight of Reich in his work on body armour - brings the body back into consideration as a sign and signal of not only physical but mental pain. The logic is far more hidden in neurosis than psychosis but it is there.

A physical pain might be interpreted as a mental signal that is seeking from the imagined self some reconsideration of its own mental drafting. The conditions of such a pain (if not organic) give profound clues to the nature of any redrafting of reality that is required to bring the body back into line with a workable imagined self.

Language in this respect is a mediator so that physical pain and the subconscious use of language are all appeals to the desire that the 'text' refuses to recognise. These are words that are demanding to be included in our text instead of being left to the side unused.

Language

Words and images provide a data bank for analogy - much as magical thinking uses language and imagery analogically to build alternate realities where people have more control, at least imaginatively, of their lives. This data bank can be plundered to hold the line against internal rigidities and stop the march to full paranoid detachment.

Whenever external texts are used - whether for the person or the society - we are seeing the half-way house of near-madness that we referred to in a previous posting, that point where texts and words are used both to protect society or the individual from their own true nature and to suggest adaptations to make things tolerable but not 'true to themselves'.

The words are thus never the thing, never the person and never representative of the human condition, but the free play of words permits an entity the opportunity to assert some value that is more in accord with reality (as society or person) than the imagined and constructed self of ego or ideology.

Words, gestures and images are our first line of defence (if they are our words and not the words of others) but they are also a 'false friend' because they compromise from the start with the very nature of ideology to set terms on the permissibility of our language and with the imagined self whose adaptations are to be constructed almost entirely out of inherited words and images - references back to something 'golden' that should have have been rather than what is if we were only to look and see.

Alienation

Language is at the heart of our alienation as persons. Language gets in the way of us being who we are even as it is the most effective tool for our being able to function in the world with and against others. Every time we are defined by ourselves or others, we lose something of our complex selves. Every time we define, we insult the complexity of the other person and mislead ourselves about the nature of social reality. The social sciences are the sciences of misleading ourselves in a disciplined way.

Nevertheless, the point about words is that they are not a simple matter of relationship between signifier and signified but that each word is a connection to other words which connect ad infinitum into the past. The tension between the ego-draft (or social-draft or ideology) and the alternate possible draft that each use of language implies is profound.

Every dissident thought within a society that is expressed in words has revolutionary potential because it offers an alternate reality to the 'given' draft.  Every imaginative rethinking of reality has the same potential for the liberation of the individual. Reality is symbolic. Art and magic are ways in which people attempt to circumvent language but even they are, like poetry, evasions, failures to look language in the eye and challenge its domination of us.

But, and this is where madness comes into the frame, a dissident thought or imaginative rethinking of reality that is not in accord with objective physical and relational reality beyond the social and beyond the individual is in danger of replacing the 'zombie' conditions of the ideological-social or the socialised person with a form of madness. Which makes us ask - what is madness under such conditions?

What is Madness?

The reality of madness as a biological and so physical reality, making people dysfunctional in the world and often deeply frightened and miserable, cannot be dismissed. In the individual, such madness debilitates and destroys but, in a society, it creates either an alternate ideological 'reality' (a false reality) or a form of free-floating paranoia which is where we may be heading in a rootless cosmopolitan globalised society where the ideology is to have no ideology other than distrust.

In 1968, Lacan famously said to the students: "I won't mince my words. What you want is another master". Perhaps he remembered Kojeve's lectures on Hegel and the master-slave dialectic but the point is well taken. To remove one ideological framework is to imply its replacement or collapse rather than paradise - to be liberated from a thesis, the ideologue feels he must enslave himself to the antithesis. This is no liberation, just a swapping of seats.

This gives us a clue to how we may handle symbolic reality whether as persons or as a society. The answer is a somewhat trans-human one because it suggests a conscious awareness of one's symbolic history and an active acceptance or rejection of its components rather than the assumption of it as a whole that is intrinsically right and proper.

If we learn who we are because of the defining of oneself in language by others, then, if we become that definition, we are no longer who we are to ourselves but a creation of history and the social. If we are not comfortable with this then, despite the claims of the Hegelian 'realists', we have a choice to rewrite history, redraw social relations and redefine ourselves. Our future is not cast in stone - we can re-make it through resistance to the texts that define us.

The Hidden 'Other'

This may involve asking whether significant others are oppressive or supportive and ruthlessly rejecting those who stereotype or define us to meet their own needs and not ours. The same culling may take place in the acceptance or rejection of ideas or pleasures. Why do we go to Church if it gives us nothing? Why vote if it changes nothing?

This is where Lacanian insights are useful when the question is asked to whom you are appealing when you act in a such-and-such way. If you go to church, who are you going to church for? If you vote, who are you voting for (not in terms of the candidate but the 'hidden watcher' who helped create your symbolic universe)? What are these habits and what secret anxieties to they hide?

It cuts both ways. If you ostentatiously do not go to Church or vote, who are you ostentatiously trying to tell that you do not go to church or vote? Language as change presupposes some 'other' to which talk or speech is directed. How to stop speaking to the other and engage in a conversation with your secret self does not say you will or should go to church or vote or not but it will bring the decisons into line with who you are and should be to yourself. For the record, I don't go to church and only intermittently vote when I feel it is important.

The paradox in personal and political language is that language as ego-construction and ideology blocks off reality but linguistic expression appears to be the only means of effecting any change to social conditions or to the person. We cannot live without language but the world in which it is our master and the world in which it is consciously used as our tool or weapon are very different.

The Intellectual and the Other

This applies as much to culture and politics as personal relations. One speaks if not to an identifiable other then to an 'other' who serves as reason for speech. The radical intellectual is speaking to no one that he sees while writing his article nor to every person who may read it but is speaking to an imaginary interlocutor who is a projection of himself. He is trying to order the world because he feels the need for order in himself.

After a while, the functional nature of the intellectual, as of the person, coalesces around this symbolic other who is really an avatar of himself. Indeed, with modern communications technology, we have avatars of the self speaking to yet other avatars of the self in order to communicate with the wider universe. The multiplication of self-avatars represents the very essence of a new phenomenon - the virtual society mediated by the internet.

Beyond all this lies the 'real' which might be confused with the existentialists' Existence but which is really that which lies between Existence and our own symbolic and imagined personal or social realities. It is that which is there, including the material effects of other men's dreamings, but which is not articulated to be there - it is the dark matter of being and it comprises most of our world.

We only know it is there when we consider the possibility of its being there or notice the lack behind what we see or experience as there. Perhaps its non-existence in our minds is what makes us into zombies because only non-zombies can see what exists as a function of what is not there (as a 'lack').

The Ineluctability of Political Persons

The Lacanian distrust of the 'I' statement is critical here. When someone says that they approve or disapprove of military action against (say) Syria (under conditions where their opinion matters not one jot to the action itself), then the assertion is an expression not so much of the 'I' but of something behind the 'I'.

This helps to explain one of the great truths of Facebook - no matter how much reasoning is employed, most persons most of the time 'stick with their position'. The 'position' is derived from something beyond access to new reasoning and that derivation is almost certainly embedded in some 'other' that is being identified as essential to identity.

To some extent social intelligence can be defined by the looseness of this identity - we have all seen the 'vulnerable' personality who scuttles from a robust Facebook Group debate because they think a critique of the existence of God or a questioning of the existence of patriarchy is a personal attack on them. They feel bullied because they have weak identities while their opponents are often just secure in their ability not only to challenge but to be challenged.

These 'weak identities' are matched by weak identities who are bullies - people who cannot argue through the logosphere but must attack the person. Both types - the weak and the bullies - tend to get exuded by the strong in free debate and, as in 'real life', the weak seek protective regulation to buttress their weak identities and the bullies seek regulation to enforce their world view on others.

Persons and societies will always be divided in these ways in all possible human worlds because persons and societies not only have multiple perspectives in themselves but societies have the multiple perspectives of multiple persons. The person who is militaristic may live inside a person who is socialist without any awareness of the rational problem of both existing together. Almost any set of rationalising variations is possible even if the vast majority fall into easy to accept categories that make life easier for themselves.

The ego will readily rationalise all this into something that passes for reasonable but, in doing so, it will redefine its terms to allow it to undertake this mental legerdemain and, in doing so, become more resistant than ever to reasonable criticism - precisely because the structure they have created is a paradigm that cannot afford any cracks. Like madness - as we have seen - political ideologies are always perfectly logical in their absurdities.

Ideologies

An ideology like Marxism, for example, might go through the process whereby a core inherited belief (say, the withering away of the State) and the actual practice of power require a rigid totalitarianism to hold them together. The personality type that holds together incompatible propositions by its nature is likely to feel happiest in an authoritarian ideology of this type.

The more internal contradictions in relation to the messiness of the real world, the more the collapse into Authority. The difference between the authoritarian and the liberated is, thus, the difference between seeing the accumulated history of one's situation as a 'given' to be managed or as an opportunity for further change and experience.

Institutionalisation, with its body of inherited codes and behaviours, represents both the paradise of the authoritarian and the hell of the libertarian. The first, desperate to extend order over reality, tries to impose church, state, party, marriage and law on the latter. The latter is often disadvantaged because there is no will to put in place the organisational structures required for their own survival.

This is not to say that institutional organisation is not necessary to undertake functional tasks (like provide clean water or get a plane to fly) but only that there is a difference between creating functionality for individual will or pleasure and creating functionality for symbolic representation. The challenge for the anarcho-libertarian is how to create sufficient organisation (an innoculation, if you like) against the virus of authoritarianism - and it is a challenge generally evaded and a fight generally lost from naivete and incompetence.

Markets & Love

The market brokers functionality for individual will or pleasure but the existence of authoritarians and libertarians alongside each other in the market makes the market problematic. Libertarians are rarely equal in political or cultural purchasing power - and so societies like persons are perpetually conflicted or else sclerotic.

Authoritarian obsessionalism in societies and persons tends to a living self-mortification just as a libertarian curiosity about the 'other' (a perpetual desire for the new) might lead to neurosis if the understanding of what is actually going on in the desire is limited.

It may seem odd to introduce the idea of love or desire into the discussion at this point but it is the relationship to desire that defines our accommodation to this world. The point about desire and love is that demand is never able to be satisfied once that path is chosen.

This is very disturbing to some people. It results in an unconscious denial of desire (the impulse of the so-called 'great religions' which are at the heart of the institutionalisation of culture) which, of course, is worse than acceptance of desire because it denies not the possibility of fulfilment of desire but the fact of desire itself - absurd because it is human to desire.

Displacement of Desire

Displacement of desire may result in fetishism in the person but it also has social effects in the displacement into an obsessive interest, without functional value in terms of direct acquisition of resources or power or participation as an individual, in politics or culture or sport. Above all, it tends to voyeurism or exhibitionism.

These are displaced desires for actual power or participation and are as absurd as fetishism - yet wholly necessary for those who have not been able to fulfil their desires 'in action' so to speak without the crutch of observing and commentating on the performance of others.

But if anything explains the persistent anxiety of the thinking person, it is this - the inability never to know what the mysterious other truly wants. Not knowing what the mysterious other - woman, self, interlocutor - wants is the source of passion and creativity but also anxiety, depression and indecision.

As Lacan pointed out in the 1950s, all desire has fetishistic qualities insofar as all attraction is to the components of the desired as much as to the whole of a person - a preference for redheads, say, over any other hair colour. The desire for love may be unconditional but love is directed very conditionally despite claims to the contrary. There is always something specific being desired whose direct expression is usually being avoided or evaded.

Sex and Existence

It is uncovering our real desires without the need for displacement which is interesting because we are all embedded in a world where there is no language and so no social order that can deal with sex or the fact of existence.

The only step we can take is to capture language for ourselves regardless of the effects on others. Take: 'I love you'. This is now so socially embedded in its multiple meanings that it is difficult to say for many people. There is an anxiety about misunderstanding. So, something important is often never expressed. Instead of taking the risk of saying it and then exploring the meaning through action in the world, it remains a phrase that festers in the hearts of the meek.

One approach might be to recapture this and other phrases by stating them regardless of the anxiety, shifting responsibility for the anxiety to the other person. Does this seem cruel? Not at all because the other person is free to make what they wish of the language and reject or accept on their terms - and so things can move forward. The 'sayer' simply has to accept the risk of rejection and 'rejection fear' is at the very heart of human cowardice and leads directly back to the easy fall into the jackboot and the uniform. 'Belong me into order', the frightened human rabbit says.

This is a revolutionary reversal of traditional modes in society. Instead of allowing anxiety and rational argument to thwart desire out of fear of consequences, the default position becomes the expression of desire and the acceptance of consequences. Ours may be the first non-aristocratic society where that is possible - in theory.

Final Linguistic Trickery

However, desire has become associated in our culture with an authoritarian notion of 'sin' and controlling desire has come to be an 'ethical' position yet it is quite possible, indeed probable, that 'sin' actually lies in an unnecessary state of anxiety and the failure to communicate and that the relief of tension involved in expressing desire will result in ethical consequences.

Remember - this is linguistic trickery. The revealing of desire is not the acting out of desire. Saying 'I love you' or 'I hate you' is not rape ... words are not actions, a proposition very difficult for modern liberal totalitarians to understand. To say, we repeat, is not to do - words are not things in the world. Assuming consensuality, the desire might then be acted out but the consensual nature of human relations is a given here. The expression of desire must include this courage to accept rejection.

To communicate desire and accept the consequences of rejection is truly revolutionary. It enables learning - both to find new ways to express desire and to adapt to others' different ideas of desire. It stands against authority and the 'other' as arbiter of anxiety and it enables the libertarian to draw a line in the sand against both the authoritarian and the weakness of liberal fears, against both the rat and the mouse.

Freedom = Science + Rebellion

"The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing defined"

Some things that are obvious might need careful re-stating or else there will be misunderstandings between us that could prove fatal. After all, in a time of economic and political troubles, people do kill each other over misunderstandings.

All sense perception is an approximation of that which it senses. Since each person has a marginally different biological structure to their senses and of the brain that orders the senses, then each person is:

- i) approximating objective reality (on terms by which no person can ever know that reality except as an approximation expressed through mathematics or language which pre-suppose that a community of persons have agreed on rules that 'level out' personal perceptions into a pragmatic 'normality' that need not be identical with objective reality at all),

and,

- ii) constructing reality in a marginally different way from every other person so that the reality that is pragmatically effective socially is not necessarily either objective reality or the reality of the person whose situation is (possibly radically) different from other persons.

Practically (or pragmatically), a 'social reality' (a working tool for the ends of the majority of persons in a community for the majority of the time or for the ends of a minority which has managed to command the conditions of the majority) is possible.

However, such a reality is never 'true' except pragmatically i.e. its contingency is in-built by the very biological basis of sense impression and the braibn's ordering of data. Social reality is the most contingent of the three forms of reality (objective or mathematical, individual and community) because it is vulnerable to:

- a) the varying numbers of individual realities that enter into it at any one time;

- b) the degree to which such minds are willing to suspend belief in those aspects of their own reality that do not fit with the community's reality;

- c) the power structures by which some individual persons can impose their realities in a value hierarchy against other minds' realities;

- d) changes in internal objective realities (the waxing and waning of biological strengths) and their effect on minds;

- e) changes in external objective realities (facts of nature) and in the realities of members of the community as they individually face not only changes in internal and external objective reality but ...

- f) shifts in the ability of other minds to manipulate their reality, communicate those shifts (not necessarily verbally), and become aware of their own learned experience of socialised reality and of its degree of dissonance from their own individual reality.

In other words, we must start our analysis of reality not by distrusting the relationship between our reality and objective reality (which is an individual construction derived from the interaction of our own objective biological reality with physical reality) but by distrusting the relationship between socialised reality and our own reality.

Whereas our biology and our physical world set certain absolute limits on our perception and on our ability to create a framework for our perception, socialised reality sets limits that are contingent and constantly changing in a way that is far more volatile than 'natural' reality.

This instability of the social can be summarised thus:-

- a) limits set by our own lack of awareness of our situation: the limitation of blind acceptance or irrational understanding of the degree of choice and risk involved in asserting our own reality (often based on anxiety, fear and the deliberate withholding of knowledge by others);

- b) limits set by the 'imperial' aspirations of other minds whose own realities involve the attempt to dictate their victim's reality through the use of custom or habit (see c)) or a command of physical reality (the bending of physical reality to ensure the ability to deploy 'force' or 'manipulation' [i.e. in regard to sense impressions]);

- c) as a corollary of a), the acceptance of custom or habit, what might be called the 'drag of tradition', especially strong where tradition has become part of the armoury of 'imperial' minds with a stake in promoting conservatism;

- d) the limits set by language which is a social tool and not an individual tool (except for the purposes of wilful managing or manipulating social reality) and which, therefore, defines the person, especially in the form of 'shared texts', by reinventing reality for the sake of what is 'average' or 'dominant.

Ergo, individual freedom (i.e. a right state of individual reality) requires a right relationship with physical or objective reality (including the biological underpinnings of sense perception and idea-formation) and a right relationship with the social, which is one of permanent questioning criticism of the social's functioning value to the individual.

The right relationship with objective reality is a questioning respect which encompasses a right relationship with natural laws where they are scientifically and mathematically valid and with observable social phenomena where they take on mass characteristics (such as the flocking of humans in terms of the market or the community).

This right relationship also requires a right relationship with the individual's own abilities to perceive the world correctly and to analyse it. To know what one cannot or may not know because of the conformation of one's own biology is part of this right relationship. Some distrust of the senses, within reason, is wise.

The right relationship with socialised reality is one of permanent and questioning distrust. To understand social phenomena, including the social use of language and of texts, and the use by those skilled in language, texts and the manipulation of sense perception and brain operations of their tools, is not to be construed as acceptance.

The operations of humans en masse (likened to the flocking of birds or the herd behaviour of wildebeest or the pack actions of wolves) must be understood but not taken as necessary conduct for the free individual - the aim is merely not to be sent awry or be eaten, indeed, to be cleverer than the flock, the herd or the pack.

Similarly, the superior 'fire-power' (control over objective reality) or skills of the few who command the many are worthy of no intrinsic respect but are simply taken to be a 'fact in the world' which must be worked around, undermined or defeated as suits the individual reality of the person observing a social reality that is out of kilter with itself.

It may be that an individual reality is in perfect accord with the flock or with the interests of those with 'fire power' but this can only be meaningful if a person chooses with knowledge to be a conservative or the servant of a master.

Otherwise, the individual reality (the person) has become little more than an adjunct of a socialised reality. They have ceased to exist as a person. They have become socialised reality - a passive component of it like the Borg. They have reduced themselves to the level of the animal.

Conservatism and serfdom are not irrational options. They may be objectively sensible relations if the command over objective reality by the social (either as herd-like community or as a community of betas ruled by alphas) is a fact but the 'victim' in such cases should know their vulnerability and should show their teeth as soon as objective conditions allow.

To internalise socialised reality without needing to do so is asking to be the conscripted soldier, the cheap labour, the bored congregation member ... and so the struggle to preserve a right relationship to objective reality (a respect for science and power) and to socialised reality (a resistance to its claims) is the basis of all human freedom.