fragilekeys

SPIT IT OUT!

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To argue is to disagree about the world: what it has been, how it is, what it should become. Alongside this, a disagreement about our place in it, about who belongs where. It’s where world is no longer fact but problem. And so everything, rightly, depends on solving it – arguing it out.

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Our defense of a point is as much about us as it is about the point itself. The latter is often an alibi for self-assertion, self-defense. Weapon, shield, or both at once. This is excusable: were it not for that ‘self’, the argument would not matter. And so we are ready to argue over the most pointless things.

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What irritates us at first may later prove pathetic. What got under your skin is now easier to manage; you’ve learned something. The sliver you were neglecting to remove suddenly works itself loose. You begin to feel sympathy for the irritant, remorse for arguing. But be careful: your opponent may benefit more from your chagrin than your pity…

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Certain situations are ripe for you to play at being upset. This tends to work best when you don’t yet know it’s a play.

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A clever mix of indirection and precision, frivolity and seriousness, understanding and inflexibility. Letting much wander, stray, error, digress – yet somehow never missing the beat.

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There’s comedy in every passionate outburst, every contentious display, even in justified protest, but it’s better if this is discovered after the drama’s run its act. The actor needs a stage and an audience to rave at first – even if it’s just an audience of ‘self’.

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As the actor must believe their part, you must believe you can live better – can still stomach more of the difficult truth.

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“There is no salvation for impatience.”—Albert Camus

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In the end, if you cannot laugh at yourself, you’ve lost; but never make a mockery of yourself, or fear to stand firm in your position mid-game. Otherwise, the game will never end.

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Arguing is play-acting: to take a position for the sake of arguing. That is why it hardly matters what you say. Aggravation is part of the pleasure. It indicates a longing for genuine reconciliation. A sure sign you are not just play-acting.

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It is with God as it is with any beloved: more threatening than jealousy, reprimand, or punishment, is incuriosity and disregard. The latter can be mistaken for forgiveness or taken a sign the battle was won; in fact it’s just that the sin no longer matters, the war is now irrelevant. We fight so that we do not forget our love.

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Often, what most provokes your criticism in others has to do with parts of yourself you have refused to face so far – aspects of your own attitude and behavior you’ve yet to process and figure out. That is why you stick so adamantly to the debate, why you cannot sleep, why you fall into fits of frustration. You are about to meet a truth about yourself, about what obsesses you, but you hesitate at the threshold and blame your opponent for the barricade, as if they held the key to dismantling it. And if they do?

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Patience is the heart of life. Kafka said impatience is what got us expelled from Paradise and it’s what is keeping us from getting back in. But what could patience be without the possibility of impatience? What is action without the possibility of laziness? Ours is a world of codependent opposites that are not, however, equal – neither in worth, nor in difficulty.

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Where laziness signals incuriosity and disregard, impatience signals concern, a desire for focus and achievement. Laziness avoids to bear a difficulty; impatience is so strapped and enraptured by difficulty it cannot let it go. Perhaps the only difference between patience and impatience is – the strength of the grip.

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Arguments run the gamut from strangulation to make-up sex, bombing campaigns to merged territories. Division and union belong to a dynamic wherein the future of the world is at stake. Love may be a ridiculous game, but it would be even more ridiculous to treat it as only that. We shall argue until we are blue in the face: defeat or reconciliation.

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It is impossible to go straight to the finish line, and even if it were you wouldn’t want to, since then the contest could not be savored. Nothing makes sense without a detour of conflict – without a failure in judgment, a wrong move, an exaggerated injunction, an overblown indignation here or there. This is why you cherish your impatience so: it is your constant reminder to be more patient. To learn that the path is a good one, and goes elsewhere than you thought.

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Patience laughs at the folly of impatience, but it needs this laughter for its animating force, lest it become lazy, incurious, neglectful. That is why it must carry it like a silly sidekick wherever it goes: without it, patience would lose its why – its urgency.

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Hurry is not the opposite of focus, but its tether. It teaches it how to stop, how to be patient differently.

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If peace is just a lull between hostilities, at least hostility calls out eternally for peace. To argue, only, without violence: isn’t it already a sign hostilities can cease?

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Often, all we are really struggling for is a good use of our frustration, for deep down we know: it’s telling us what we want. And we do not want the world to go to waste.

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A hypothesis: without contention, strife, disagreement, no progress, no freedom, no light. Only the pace of the transit through them differs between us – depending on our willingness to let go, or to fight?

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What is easier, what more difficult – to hold it in, or spit it out? Either way, the right word is in search of you, and it will not let it rest until it’s heard.

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“Strange is the world that reveals its feelings about itself despite its arguments.”—Fanny Howe

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An argument is called resolved when everybody involved goes in a new, or renewed, direction. Clearer in the head, less angry in the heart. By then, these will be the only directions worth it: the only ones that could exist. Such is the virtue of a good argument: it leaves us no other option than to switch places.

original: April 16, 2015

Bataille argues that the world of work (civilized society) poses human beings as objects among others, like tools designed to have function or a goal, objects that can fall into disuse. In his view, out of all the horrors society imposes on our being, this is the worst or the core one, for it forces us to constantly and exclusively think of our being as own-being, as having a duration in time, with all the name-tags and identity-crises that follow from this concept of self.

This posing or assumption of ourselves as individual, delimited objects, determined by social work value, is at the root of our sense of subjugation and alienation, our separateness from others and from the universe. It functions as an ‘unshakable’ norm of social interaction: we are each isolated beings with our own past that we must preserve and our own future for which we must constantly take precautions. This separate being is thus conservative of itself, cautious, preservative of its ‘own’ interests above all else. To question this, like Kafka or Bartleby, is deemed juvenile or insane, a ‘giving up on oneself’, and evil. For that social self to function, it needs to ensure its ‘duration’ in time as a social object, possess and protect itself as private property. By that token, it is trained to avoid risk, outburst, excess, and instead submit to regulatory procedures. For this object is evidently a servile one: it is subordinated to the use that rational, goal-oriented, accumulation-oriented society puts it to (and not only in the sphere of employment). This separate being is then the locus of anguish over our own prolongation, the anguish of dying, for death pertains precisely to the end of duration of this separate being.

The separate being, then, is also the locus and focus of our energetic economy: the calculations we make regarding energy and time expenditures. The need to persevere in separateness effects cycles of energy, and how energy is consumed and expended, in the direction of the particular. The human body cannot act in the world of work without a regulation of energy cycles: hours of sleep, types and times of meals, exertions of physical and/or mental energy at specified times, exercise and hygiene, weekend leisure as preparation for the work week… and this is only the beginning, once we start to consider all the social-symbolic energy connected to ‘locating’ one’s separate self in the social space of other separate selves. All this regulation, the imperative to be “regular,” is geared to have us function like a “well-oiled machine,” i.e., to run the maintenance routines of selves and bodies such that the past-present-future continuum of separate, isolated beings isn’t jeopardized; so that their role- and aim-oriented lives undergo as few hiccups as possible and do not clash too often with the other isolated beings’ road-schedules, work-schedules, marriage-schedules, retirement-schedules, and so on. The goal of this maintenance is to keep our social standing and uphold the rational and logical structure of the world.

The threat that hangs over all this and under-girds it is, no surprise, the threat of death and poverty, threat of loss of standing, of sustenance, of socio-economic or physical integrity as an isolated, self-same, (and in this set-up necessarily) proud, self-displaying, self-defensive being. If we were not caught in servile “regularity,” society would not recognize us, and neither would anyone else, precisely because there would be no one, no me-separate being to recognize. We would not “be” in the sense that we are regulated to experience being; we would not-be; we would “effectively” be dead; in relation to society and history, we would be useless (the accursed share). The argument of a “necessary future for ourselves” that shackles us interminably to anguish and all the measures meant to stave it off would dissolve and disappear.

This abandonment of efforts to preserve the separate self into the future implies, however, acceding to anguish to the point of laughter, ecstasy, tears—and dying (ellipsis to Paul’s, “I die daily”). There is what Bataille calls the sovereign moment: a moment insubordinate to language, social worth, stable meaning, the duration of separate entities and integrity of the constructed world whatever its form. The sovereign moment—arising, essentially, not from labor but chance—is foreign to the activity- and maintenance-oriented regulations of self-isolating society, since here there is no longer some “one” to persevere. This loss or dissolution, halt of knowledge and function, exists for Bataille as a return to “intimacy”: the distinctions that once separated me from my fellow human beings and from the entire universe no longer hold and I communicate or rather am communication (elsewhere, loyalty). Such is sovereignty: NOTHING: the exuberance of a useless expenditure that is not regulated and, more importantly, not owned or used up by anyone. It is rather the crossing-over of consciousnesses, so that its ‘electricity’ is all there is in motion, no isolated ‘bulb’ needing to shed its ‘own’ light. Theoretically, it is the difference between a particular economy, where energy is the possession of set beings, which they expend for the sake of self-preservation, and general economy, where energy is continuous, without ownership, and can be squandered exorbitantly without any thought of saving it for any future.

Bataille’s contention is not that we jump by a leap of faith or force of will outside of our isolated being. Any attempt contradicts the sovereignty of the moment; it accesses us like a strike, like tears. In this “return to intimacy,” this dissolution, dispossession, destruction or fiery consumption of ourselves—of everything that ties the anguished being to death, since here death is nothing (and the contiguity here with sovereignty is not accidental)— there is an unleashing of energy that is unimaginable to any knowledgeable subject of action in the world, who would durate. Intimacy means the subversion, the ‘transformation into light dust’ of the separate being and all its regulations: it is thus nothing less than a testing of the limits of the possible. How far can energetic resources that aren’t yours and are beholden to no one be pushed? This unleashing of an energy is general or generic and uncontainable, for the only thing that ever contained it was what we “falsely,” normally and conventionally, held ourselves to be (and let’s not kid ourselves, this illusion is inescapable: we cannot not “traverse the fantasy”).

In the continuity of being, where our discontinuity with being reaches its zero limit and the “intimate dark” dawns; in this world where there is nothing to anticipate because death is nothing and you are nothing, “Exuberance is beauty” (William Blake) and, “What is intimate, in the strong sense, is what has the passion of an absence of individuality, the imperceptible sonority of a river, the empty limpidity of the sky…” (Bataille).

I

Louis Althusser presents his thought of a “philosophy of the encounter” as follows:

1.) Before the formation of the world (any world), an infinity of atoms rain or fall through the void. All the elements that could potentially make up a world are there before any forms; at the same time, there is nothing but the void. The atoms lead a “phantom existence” in a “non-world that is merely the unreal existence of the atoms.” What confers reality on these initially abstract elements, what gives them any semblance of “consistency and existence,” is the encounter.

2.) Nothing is more unstable and uncertain than an encounter. It may or may not happen; if it does, it may or may not last; nothing guarantees it and nothing could. In a sense, the encounter is as improbable as being born. Any formed world is like “impossible.” Because it depends on the taking-hold of encounters and their holding-together, it is always, if it is, a “pure effect of contingency.” What we call and believe as our world of necessities, of reasons, of meanings, of ends, of sociality and of laws—all of this Althusser portrays as a most precarious hanging-together that is permanently in threat of dissolving, of changing entirely and unprecedentedly, of death or disease or misfortune coming like a thief in the night to rob us of every assurance and certainty of our personhood, of life.

3.) It is thus that a philosophy of the encounter favors dispersion, disorder, nothingness, or the Nothing (which Althusser correctly connects to the Es gibt (“It gives,” “There is”)), the throw of chance. Correspondingly, it seeks to cultivate a taste for these as an openness to the swerve, to the ‘moving train’ of encounters already unfolding unexpectedly before it, to the ‘smallest deviation possible’ (which recalls Agamben’s description of the redeemed or coming world in which ‘everything is as it was, but a little different’). Taking no object, logic, law, thought, fact, or atom as its basis, principle, question, or topic of study, such a philosophy seeks only to understand and develop its affinity to the inaugural deal, the Es gibt prior to presence and placement. It affirms an aleatory materialism and the primacy of the play of atoms, while also affirming its own jump into their “fall” or “rain”—into what happens, namely: the necessary encounter of contingencies. Continue reading →