Monday, March 23, 2015

Toward a New Ethic of Ordinary-Life

Where is the soul located in modern society today? We posit the soul as that omnispatial, omnitemporal (non)entity which reveals itself only retroactively through our finite understanding of space-time [the Deleuzian Sense-Event]. In the scope of humanity, the soul is located in great works of art of the past, or in more personal terms in daily acts of creativity on the individual level. However, the main question should concern the gap between reality as such and the recognition of the authentic creative act: more precisely, the gap between the mind and soul. For today, when members of ISIS know their acts are made in the name of God, which is a realm of mind, the more precise definition of the soul is the belief in God in a more Kierkegaardian way, where the believer is plagued with self-doubt. This gap is known better, in psychoanalytic terms, as the unconscious: the realm of our symbolic language we are thrown into and come to (unconsciously) know in order to interact in the intersubjective world: otherwise known as language. For, as Lacan has noted, we do not speak language but language speaks us. We are concerned here with the structure of language in the form of dialectics. For example, theory (as it is now known as in the humanities departments) is the creation of abstract concepts in concrete writing for subsequent passage into the conceptual realm of (an)others mind and thus creation multiplied through the other: this is, precisely, intersubjectivity at its purest. So, then, this gap is today exploited in capitalism and keeps people (un)dead, but life is in its purest form when integrated directly into intersubjectivity without a big Other. The self is presented with, in today’s society, bombarded with a multitude of self-constituting options. Even, the imperative of the superego commands you to enjoy all the ways of self-constitution made available to us: this is the source of the pressure for meaning in every-day life. (As an aside, we can see the role of the big Other in the creative process through the abstract carrying out of the form of Justice in the case of the Marvin Gaye estate vs. Pharrell Williams et. al. Perhaps a more authentic form of justice would be a mass movement to boycott the song in question through a collective, intersubjective form of understanding.)

The pressure for meaning has its limitations, and subsequently its roots in the form of Desire (of the big Other), for Desire is by definition insatiable. As outlined by Freud, with the birth of civilization and subsequent instantiation of the law comes the desire to break said law as well, thus sets in motion the void of Desire. This unattainable ideal, manifested in the ruling ethico-political ideologies of voting, charity, and love is the predominate form of control in this globally integrated form of capitalism today. So, where then do we find the soul in the integrated social fabric of reality? Falsely presented, maybe, in a simulated form of intersubjectivity with origins in what Baudrillard calls the hypermarket. In this globalized society, the intersubjective world is dominated by consumerist ideology with direct correlation to, and origins in the global market of capital. Money seeps into the everyday and puts a value on everything: an alienating value in purely rational terms of a productive and socio-economic basis. Postmodern culture today has a high value, with pop-stars making millions, where the investments pay off by blurring any real form of intersubjectivity with hyper-real simulations: life in the movies/tv is more real than everyday life. Also, in the hypermarket the lines between subject and object become blurred in the entity of the commodity, where the consumer enters the market with his/her abstract money and attempts find meaning in society through the valuation of the object. “More money, more problems;” with anxieties and the search for the self in a society founded upon the decentered self, the consumer (fueled with the images of postmodern culture) seeks out the market to symbolically exchange his/her abstract money for objects. Objects, in the form of commodities, takes up the space of Desire only temporally. The crux of the top earning western corporations is the always devalued commodity with the next updated version creating consumer Desire: mostly seen in electronics where, for example, Apple purposely keeps technological innovations on the back-burner for the next generation iPhone. With Apple we can also see the effective marketing in the purchase of self-identity: with advertisements of hip, multicultural college students you are effectively buying the ideal of Western, Liberal Capitalism and the pre-determined role you play in said society. With the death of Steve Jobs we saw a veneration of these exploiting masterminds and another way to commodify the self in purchasing autobiographies, tweeting thoughts of remorse and identifying with the ideal entrepreneur/capitalist as the role-models in society.

Looking beyond Marx here, we can see the potential for a new site of emancipation previously in manual labour at the sites of the production process. With technological advances, and the more or less machinic manufacturing of commodities (I’d argue the exploited children/peoples in developing countries exploited today are kept more or less in the machinic state) the new site of liberation is in the hypermarket: boycotting superfluous goods or buying used goods could effectively cripple the economy of the corporate masters. With the superego command to obey and enjoy your commodity we see the societal role of the indiscrete subversion entailed with said command embodied in the Black Friday holiday sales rush. Dissent and disillusionment of the consumerist ideology has its function precisely in this mass, hysterical outburst of subversion where the consumer feels like he/she has somehow gained an edge and gamed the system. We, however, call for an authentic ethico-political act of Bartleby the scrivener1 and would “prefer not to” engage in the overconsumption that threatens the very material world we live in. For with the ambiguity in the hypermarket where the lines between consumption and production are blurred, we ultimately consume beyond the basic needs of survival: we always over-work for attainment and fulfillment of a Desire of the self as inundated upon us by postmodern culture. So, we politely say that we would “prefer not to” engage in a society left to us, and predominantly controlled by the ideals set by the baby boomer generation.

We still have yet to locate the soul of modern man. We claim the modern man is soul-less when he/she assigns his/her meaning through this postmodern culture of the big Other: thus, Nietzsche was the prophet of this global nihilism. We still see the predominancy of the dead god in the christian faith in western developed nations as a trade-off for the burden of a radical freedom needed in today’s society to confront the horrors of the world. This freedom is found in a self-identifying ethic in direct confrontation with the meaninglessness of these horrors caused by globalization, with the soul founded in the intersubjectivity of the affirmation of life (through death, via Heidegger) instead of the path of society toward self-destruction. The economic freedoms of the homeless should be venerated not taken to combat in the ‘war on poverty’. Some nostalgia is held for a former time when Alexander the Great himself engaged with the poor old philosopher Diogenes. For what if the political leaders of today took the time to engage with the homeless? We should start our engagement of our new ethic precisely in these daily events of ordinary-life: the contemplative life of the economically free, contemplative lifestyle should be venerated and we would “prefer not to” be mind-controlled desiring machines of the neo-liberal agenda which only sees profits for the few elites at top.

    -Nothing in Color
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1. See Zizek, Slavoj Parallax View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006 for more detailed account of “Bartleby-politics”.

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