l o v e

[nomadologist]

Flows means flows of desire. You have these right?

As for the second part of your post: You might say that, yes.

 

[noel emits]

God I wish I were drunk right now. And I don't even like alcohol.

We need a d r i n k i n g thread.

 

[nomadologist]

You know what to do Or should I?

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

Zhou, "Love means never having to say you're sorry" (Hollywood) and "Love means giving what you don't have ... to someone who doesn't want it" (Lacan).

This speed-fuelled thread reminds me of Usenet in the 1990s, both the good and the bad, though I must be getting a bit slow, expanding as it has at a faster rate than one's ability to catch up with it (and all those instant one-line posts! So media saavy!).

[Nomad, Gek, I'd recommend Levy Bryant's (a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst) always brilliant blog, Larval Subjects, for Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Lacanian Clinic, But Were Afraid It Might Have All The Answers ... the best on the net].

[Gavin, I'll assume you've seen Haynes' still-unsurpassed analysis of 'chemical' capitalism-as-disease [and newage - rhymes with sewage - cults], [SAFE] through all the smog?].

Oh, Western Buddhism, yes, we've been here before haven't we - often: from the aul archive:

Buddhists of whatever ilk are libidinally invested in their own supposedly anti-identitarian Buddhist identities. By focusing on the person's effort to get rid of the illusion of the Self and attain the Enlightenment, by working for one's own Enlightenment one is simply reasserting the centrality of the Ego above everything else in the very striving for its overcoming.


The Buddhist idea is that all sentient beings strive towards happiness (Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, claims that this is not true - at least, not with respect to humans - because of the death drive: that which persists, the compulsion to repeat - a primary, constitutive imbalance in reality). Buddhism believes that reality ought to be a unified whole - in Nirvana, and the idea is that we are all now in Samsara, the wheel of life, but the goal is to get back to Nirvana by gaining self-knowledge, which is knowledge, like in psychoanalysis, that the self itself is false. But a number of inherent contradictions or deadlocks follow from this, the one referred to above, while the other is that Buddhism never addresses the question of Why did we ever think that it was true? How did we leave Nirvana?


One can see why the Dalai Lama is a much more appropriate leader for our postmodern, permissive times. He presents us with a feel-good spiritualism without any specific obligations. Anyone, even the most decadent Hollywood star, can follow him while continuing their money-grabbing, promiscuous lifestyle, conveniently accepting the basic premise of Buddhist ontology that there is no "objective reality", anything goes because there is nothing beyond one's own "precious" inner kernal of being.


Buddhism attempts to "renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination - one should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of the accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being... One is almost tempted to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist cliche of religion as the "opium of the people," as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial misery: the "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamics, while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were to live today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of the Global Capitalism ... "Western Buddhism" is such a fetish: it enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game, while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle is - what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw ... Or, to put it in somewhat simplified terms (which, however, just repeat the central ethical lesson of Bhagavadgita): if the external reality is ultimately just an ephemeral appearance, even the most horrifying crimes eventually DO NOT MATTER."(Zizek).
​

Gek, about Badiou on love, what I do appreciste in Badiou is his lucid awareness that the authentic Christian notion of love is something basically very violent and unilateral, it is seemingly totally different from the pagan notion where love is this kind of universal balance, you love the whole universe, you say yes to everything - not at all! Love - you find this in Christianity - is one-sided, unilateral. Love means "I love you more than everything": love, ironically, is precisely what Buddhists would have called the origin of evil.

[Hiccup. It's the slow metabolism, you see ... hiccup].

 

[noel emits]

Flows means flows of desire. You have these right?

Flows of desire.

Short answer? No, of course I don't have flows of desire, it's something somebody made up.

From what I can gather it's either an elaborate gag, an ingenious way to ensnare self annointed smart-arses into a systemic chinese finger trap, or just the playing out of someone's psychoses.

 

[Gavin]

[Gavin, I'll assume you've seen Haynes' still-unsurpassed analysis of 'chemical' capitalism-as-disease [and newage - rhymes with sewage - cults], [SAFE] through all the smog?].

Hah, quite the gin-joint trip... I haven't seen it but judging from the box it's the kind of 70's exploitation-horror-as-social-critique B-movies that rub me in all the right (pessimistic humanist) places. Hopefully true? Regardless, I'll put it in my Netflix-queue-to-be.

 

[noel emits]

OK - I'll be more generous. It's a model.

How different is 'desire' in this context to something like 'emergent creative principal'. Don't they describe the same thing?

x-post

 

[nomadologist]

Flows of desire.

Short answer? No, of course I don't have flows of desire, it's something somebody made up.

From what I can gather it's either an elaborate gag, an ingenious way to ensnare self annointed smart-arses into a systemic chinese finger trap, or just the playing out of someone's psychoses.

And "spirit" isn't? Sigh.

 

[noel emits]

And "spirit" isn't? Sigh.

I have not spoken of 'spirit' on this thread - leave that in the pub.

But maybe you posted before my other post and so yes, maybe it is the exact same thing - 'spirit' or Deleuze's 'desire' - they seem more or less equivalent. It just becomes about favourite terms.

Don't mean to sound antagonistic - I would like to know what you take 'flows of desire' to mean.

 

[nomadologist]

Zhou, "Love means never having to say you're sorry" (Hollywood) and "Love means giving what you don't have ... to someone who doesn't want it" (Lacan).

This speed-fuelled thread reminds me of Usenet in the 1990s, both the good and the bad, though I must be getting a bit slow, expanding as it has at a faster rate than one's ability to catch up with it (and all those instant one-line posts! So media saavy!).

[Nomad, Gek, I'd recommend Levy Bryant's (a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst) always brilliant blog, Larval Subjects, for Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Lacanian Clinic, But Were Afraid It Might Have All The Answers ... the best on the net].

[Gavin, I'll assume you've seen Haynes' still-unsurpassed analysis of 'chemical' capitalism-as-disease [and newage - rhymes with sewage - cults], [SAFE] through all the smog?].

Oh, Western Buddhism, yes, we've been here before haven't we - often: from the aul archive:

Buddhists of whatever ilk are libidinally invested in their own supposedly anti-identitarian Buddhist identities. By focusing on the person's effort to get rid of the illusion of the Self and attain the Enlightenment, by working for one's own Enlightenment one is simply reasserting the centrality of the Ego above everything else in the very striving for its overcoming.


The Buddhist idea is that all sentient beings strive towards happiness (Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, claims that this is not true - at least, not with respect to humans - because of the death drive: that which persists, the compulsion to repeat - a primary, constitutive imbalance in reality). Buddhism believes that reality ought to be a unified whole - in Nirvana, and the idea is that we are all now in Samsara, the wheel of life, but the goal is to get back to Nirvana by gaining self-knowledge, which is knowledge, like in psychoanalysis, that the self itself is false. But a number of inherent contradictions or deadlocks follow from this, the one referred to above, while the other is that Buddhism never addresses the question of Why did we ever think that it was true? How did we leave Nirvana?


One can see why the Dalai Lama is a much more appropriate leader for our postmodern, permissive times. He presents us with a feel-good spiritualism without any specific obligations. Anyone, even the most decadent Hollywood star, can follow him while continuing their money-grabbing, promiscuous lifestyle, conveniently accepting the basic premise of Buddhist ontology that there is no "objective reality", anything goes because there is nothing beyond one's own "precious" inner kernal of being.


Buddhism attempts to "renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination - one should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of the accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being... One is almost tempted to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist cliche of religion as the "opium of the people," as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial misery: the "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamics, while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were to live today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of the Global Capitalism ... "Western Buddhism" is such a fetish: it enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game, while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle is - what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw ... Or, to put it in somewhat simplified terms (which, however, just repeat the central ethical lesson of Bhagavadgita): if the external reality is ultimately just an ephemeral appearance, even the most horrifying crimes eventually DO NOT MATTER."(Zizek).
​

Gek, about Badiou on love, what I do appreciste in Badiou is his lucid awareness that the authentic Christian notion of love is something basically very violent and unilateral, it is seemingly totally different from the pagan notion where love is this kind of universal balance, you love the whole universe, you say yes to everything - not at all! Love - you find this in Christianity - is one-sided, unilateral. Love means "I love you more than everything": love, ironically, is precisely what Buddhists would have called the origin of evil.

[Hiccup. It's the slow metabolism, you see ... hiccup].

This Larval Subjects blog is excellent. Is this guy taking new patients, I wonder?

I agree 100% with Zizek's characterization of Buddhism here--there's a first time for everything!

 

[nomadologist]

OK - I'll be more generous. It's a model.

How different is 'desire' in this context to something like 'emergent creative principal'. Don't they describe the same thing?

x-post

Desire is the--impetus for? crux of? motivating force behiind?-- creative endeavors within the psychoanalytical tradition, although there are divergences within it.

I would say that for D&G, yes, desire and an emergent creative principle are similar, insofar as desire has been deterritorialized out of the Oedipal and mechanically divorced from capitalism.

 

[noel emits]

OK.

This 'desire' is the immanent motivating force behind, well everything we know, right?

Capitalism is a parasitic viral mechanism that seeks to co-opt flows of desire / the spectacle requires your attention. Attention being more or less equivalent to flow.

I would say, remaining within this model and these terms, that the solution would then be to deny the mechanism your attention. Cut off the flow.

Directing attention / flow elsewhere is indeed the thing but you must first find out where it has to go - and to do this you need to clear out a lot of other viral constructs from your system - this is what zhao is talking about and it's first principles. Otherwise you will just be thrashing around in the dark.

This could be something like finding a vocational truth, a purposeful reclaiming of identity that can contain and channel our desire / creativity. Once that is in place for the individual, the machine has no claim on desire.

 

[nomadologist]

OK.

This 'desire' is the immanent motivating force behind, well everything we know, right?

Capitalism is a parasitic viral mechanism that seeks to co-opt flows of desire / the spectacle requires your attention. Attention being more or less equivalent to flow.

I would say, remaining within this model and these terms, that the solution would then be to deny the mechanism your attention. Cut off the flow.

Directing attention / flow elsewhere is indeed the thing but you must first find out where it has to go - and to do this you need to clear out a lot of other viral constructs from your system - this is what zhao is talking about and it's first principles. Otherwise you will just be thrashing around in the dark.

This could be something like finding a vocational truth, a purposeful reclaiming of identity that can contain and channel our desire / creativity. Once that is in place for the individual, the machine has no claim on desire.

Yes, you're on the right track, but here's where schizophrenia comes in--D&G thought schizophrenics naturally have flows that radically resist the capitalism virus. Zhao was talking about a Buddhist conception of the ego that has really nothing to do with the psychoanalytical one.

The problem is, you can't cut off the flow, you can only direct it--the subject with no desire will eventually expire in a fit of thanatic passion. Ha. D&G criticized Freud's emphasis on the neurotic and posited a revolutionary new way of seeing the human subject (many would identify theirs with the 'post-modern' subject, though I would call it the virtual subject...)

 

[noel emits]

The problem is, you can't cut off the flow, you can only direct it

Yes, when I say 'cut off the flow' that's exactly what I mean - to deny the spectacle your attention. What I'm also saying is that there is definitely somewhere else you should be directing it, or not - it comes and goes - the will has active and receptive modes. So it's not simply a negation of the virus - it is then also an affirmation of the not-virus, the truth. This is a very key point.

--the subject with no desire will eventually expire in a fit of thanatic passion. Ha. D&G criticized Freud's emphasis on the neurotic and posited a revolutionary new way of seeing the human subject (many would identify theirs with the 'post-modern' subject, though I would call it the virtual subject...)

I'm much more sympathetic to Wilhelm Reich and RD Laing in these matters.

 

[nomadologist]

Very interesting people to bring up!! Can you recommend some books by them, I haven't ever read their work directly?

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

OK.

This 'desire' is the immanent motivating force behind, well everything we know, right?

No, but it's a clue to the secret of who we are.

Capitalism is a parasitic viral mechanism that seeks to co-opt flows of desire / the spectacle requires your attention. Attention being more or less equivalent to flow.

Capitalism is the frame: it doesn't, it never, gives us what we desire, it commands us - via its incessant super-egoic injunction to 'enjoy', even when 'enjoying' is out of the question - in how to desire.

I would say, remaining within this model and these terms, that the solution would then be to deny the mechanism your attention. Cut off the flow.

It isn't as simple as saying no, as engaging in 'conscious' denial. Emotions can only be overcome by yet stronger emotions.

Directing attention / flow elsewhere is indeed the thing but you must first find out where it has to go - and to do this you need to clear out a lot of other viral constructs from your system - this is what zhao is talking about and it's first principles. Otherwise you will just be thrashing around in the dark.

This could be something like finding a vocational truth, a purposeful reclaiming of identity that can contain and channel our desire / creativity. Once that is in place for the individual, the machine has no claim on desire.

Not at all: such an approach is what perpetuates, strengthens capitalism - it leads to just yet another ego-boosting 'lifestyle', yet another market niche, creating the rather sad illusion that you've 'beaten the system' when in fact you're even more colonized and enmeshed in it, a committed agent of its further expansion. Capitalism creates/created what we now term 'the individual', the construct it desperately feeds on.

 

[nomadologist]

Even in his dipsomania, HMLT has all the patience and ability to focus that I lack. How do you do it?

Whence our collective ADD?

 

[noel emits]

OK, well first of all with that post I am trying to find the common ground between some of our various favourite metaphor's here, so it's not exactly how I would normally frame things.

No, but it's a clue to the secret of who we are.

Enigmatic!

Capitalism is the frame: it doesn't, it never, gives us what we desire, it commands us - via its incessant super-egoic injunction to 'enjoy', even when 'enjoying' is out of the question - in how to desire.

Hmm, that may be its mode of operation. I'd still say you could call it an autonomous system / parasitic viral mechanism / errant meme.

Saying it's 'the frame' doesn't help to explain what it is, or what it is it's framing. Every idea is a frame.

I don't know about the 'injunction to "enjoy"', I don't think that's necessarily the case and I'm not sure how that's experienced really. I say again, what I believe 'it' requires and attempts to magnetically attract is simply attention.

It isn't as simple as saying no, as engaging in 'conscious' denial. Emotions can only be overcome by yet stronger emotions.

Yes, I am absolutely saying that there is more to it than simply saying no - you have to find something to say yes to. And maybe if it is a good 'yes' the emotions of positive attachment, satisfaction, joy, purpose, fulfillment, engagement and so on will easily be the match of any negative compulsion.

 

[noel emits]

"Directing attention / flow elsewhere is indeed the thing but you must first find out where it has to go - and to do this you need to clear out a lot of other viral constructs from your system - this is what zhao is talking about and it's first principles. Otherwise you will just be thrashing around in the dark.

This could be something like finding a vocational truth, a purposeful reclaiming of identity that can contain and channel our desire / creativity. Once that is in place for the individual, the machine has no claim on desire."

Not at all: such an approach is what perpetuates, strengthens capitalism - it leads to just yet another ego-boosting 'lifestyle', yet another market niche, creating the rather sad illusion that you've 'beaten the system' when in fact you're even more colonized and enmeshed in it, a committed agent of its further expansion. Capitalism creates/created what we now term 'the individual', the construct it desperately feeds on.

I say - stop giving out to the system and all it's random attention seeking parasitic salesmanship, find your true purpose, believe in yourself and direct your energies into something you really love.

You read - go down to ikea and buy some shelves.

Weird. I'm not the one buying into some corporate idea of 'individuality' here.

 

[nomadologist]

find your true purpose, believe in yourself and direct your energies into something you really love.

This sounds like pure Super-Ego injunction to me. Believing in self is the problem, not the solution. It is at the level of self that capitalism effectively depoliticizes the political realm using exactly this strategy you cite here.