Anguish, Boredom, Jouissance:
The Unbearable Push and Pull of Presence and Absence
Intro
Having read Aum’s essays,Sartre’s Anguish (SA) and Boredom is the Root of all Evil (BRE), and having thought on similar subjects for a large part of my intellectual life, I now realize the extent to which Anguish, the result of Presence and the Freedom, responsibility, and the sense of groundlessness in the face of it, and Boredom, or its flight from Absence, define the creative mind –in this case, that of the writer. His project, for instance, starts like most: with a blank page and a profound sense of terror. He has ideas -or a kind of vague ethereal flux in his head. He has a reason to write. But without a guarantee of success or a clear guide of how to get there, the choices to be made can be daunting. Still, he persists. Why? He slumps before the page, a reflection of his possible emptiness, and asks the questions. How will he fill it? How will it all turn out? Will he go through all this only to prove he has nothing? That he’s too old, or too burned out? Or, even worse, that his brain is pickled from too much 70’s, beer, and Jager? And success only presents another problem: a kind of absurdity. The pleasure in writing, for him, comes after the work is done and the brain chatter has been emptied onto the page. It’s a birthing process. And the pleasure that brings him back is the elation and joy of having expelled his creation: that afterglow of purity. But why go through the effort of creating something so that one can engage in the catharsis of spilling it back out so that one can, in effect, return to the previous state? Wouldn’t staying that way in the first place do as much? Clearly, there’s a kind of tension at work, a push and pull of Presence and Absence that may well lie, in some fundamental way, at the bottom of the unbearable, that which Lacan refers to as Jouissance.
Therefore, the intent of the following is to expand on points made by Aum in his essay on Anguish, find connections (through the underlying nothingness) to points made in his essay on Boredom and define Anguish and Vertigo as a byproduct of flight, then tie it all together into the push and pull tension between Presence and Absence: the jouissance: the mixed package that constitutes our existence.
First of all, we should note that much of what Aum is writing about in SA is actually a concept, the Vertigo of the Possible, which first emerged in an earlier work, The Transcendence of the Ego(TE,pp. 99-100). In it, Sartre writes:
However, this is not to correct Aum since Sartre, himself, went on later, in Being and Nothingness (B&N,p.29), to use the concepts interchangeably:
Here, Sartre appears to be playing loosely with the two terms. But he is clearly referring to the earlier definition with the use of the term vertigo. It is also important to note that in the first one, the phenomenon was referred to as underlying “psychasthenic ailments” (understandable since TE was a little more focused on psychology while B&N reached further into the philosophical implications of it), while in the latter, he appears to be distinguishing it from anguish in the phrase “Vertigo is anguish to the extent”, which suggests he saw Vertigo as a kind subcategory of Anguish. Lastly, in the glossary of B&N (p.547), Anguish is described as:
I need not finish the last part, because to do so would be redundant as it has already been quoted, including by Aum. And Aum clearly seems to have a deep grasp of the concepts. So I am not out to spark a hermeneutic debate as I’m quite certain I lack the resources (including the time to get more) to win. My point, and I cannot emphasize this enough, is not to contest Aum’s terminology, it is merely to lend credibility to the distinction I’m about to make. It seems to me that Anguish can be thought of as a more general state (almost metaphysical) based on Sartre’s “phenomenological ontology”, while the vertigo of the possible (chronologically a stepping stone towards Anguish) can be thought of as a sub-category of it involving a more pathological aspect. To illustrate, we return to our writer and his drinking habits. Should he attempt to quit doing so and, after a few days of sobriety, he begins to see how vaporous, ungrounded, and non-binding his commitment was, and is, that would be Anguish. And in this sense of the term, Aum’s (and Sartre’s) use of it was spot on. On the other hand, should our writer’s backslide result in a blackout during which he posts on his favorite message board, and wakes the next morning with a feeling of panic about what he said, should he check his e-mail to see if he’s received the dreaded PM he knows he will not be able to read for several days, then that is the vertigo of the possible.
Furthermore, for the sake of what will follow, it helps to attribute the vertigo, mechanistically, to the brain’s natural tendency, when confronted with a circumstance, to offer up to the mind, without discrimination, an inventory of possible responses. The brain, at its deeper, infrastructural levels, doesn’t make decisions. Therefore, it would stand to reason that, as a possible evolutionary adaption, the brain, when the mind is deciding how to respond to anything, would lay all available cards on the table -even if some of the cards might not seem rational. Furthermore, it would stand to reason that the option that is under a strict prohibition would be the greater cause of anxiety and, therefore, hold a special status. In other words, the option is given prominence by the very prohibition that seeks to subdue it. We see a similar pattern in the approach of our writer. Faced with the blank page, and with no set idea of how to fill it, he must generate brain chatter that he then must empty onto the page. Sometimes it may come out loosely centered around a given theme or idea; and at others it may come out random and disconnected. But either way, once it’s all “piled upon the table” as it were, all that is left for him to do is sift through it, keep what useful, discard what is not, and then organize it into a final product. And, of course, some of what he may have to sift out will be directly opposed to his taste and even cringe worthy. As Picasso says: taste is the enemy of Art. But it it can also be its benefactor. He must basically act as editor in the back and forth process between creation and editorial discretion. And while the writing process is much slower and more deliberate, the same principle can be seen at work in the Vertigo. The individual confronts a situation in which choices must be made. The hard drive of the brain throws up recorded options for the mind to calculate thereby forcing the mind (or self) into the role of an editor with a brutal deadline until a decision is reached and acted upon. The Vertigo, then, can be seen as an unfortunate side effect of this process: collateral damage.
That said, I take the mechanistic tact for the sake of utility. It seems to me that the main vulnerability of philosophy (or more specifically, continental philosophy) is exposed when it is taken too literally. This is why its detractors can engage in the operationalism of acting as if, by taking it literally, they have exposed it for its falsehood and charlatanism, that is when all they have really done is tell us what we already knew. We know, for instance, that there is no ubiquitous diabolical entity like the simulacrum. We know that Baudrillard is more of a sci-fi writer that happens to be writing philosophy. It’s not something we can empirically observe, but can only infer from what can. But we know these models give us a way of looking our world. Hard facts are not what we’re after. If they were, we’d be scientists. And we’re clearly not that. We are, as Rorty puts it, engaged in an armchair discipline. What we are looking for is a different perspective: models that allow us to look at the world in a different way. And it is likewise for being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Even Nothingness is something we cannot look at scientifically. We can only infer it from the fact that we exist (that is as compared to not existing) in the way we do, as compared to all the other ways we could, but don’t -that is to say: from Absence. Nothingness, whether it exists or not, need only consist of the metaphors we use for it: emptiness, space, absence, and, for our writer, the blank pagesize=50[/size].And for this reason, to pre-empt any attempts to undermine the point with a of lot nit-picking over the issue of the existence or non-existence of Nothingness, we shall work from the terms Presence and Absence. Of course, the term Presence, or its parallel, Being, presents no problem. However, the term Nothingness does. Therefore, we will focus on Absence in order to keep it out of the ontological domain where it is more contestable and keep the argument well within the domain of the phenomenological, thereby, making it more palatable to almost everyone.
However, the primary utility of it lies in some of the very practical applications of the Vertigo that centers on pathology as hinted at in TE. Our writer experiences it, in the reverse, in a mild form of OCD. Being a building mechanic (since writing and reading philosophy doesn’t pay bills -at least not his), one of his duties is to blow down compressors so as not to accumulate moisture. And one his biggest fears is that he will leave the valve open and walk away thereby leaving the compressor to run itself into failure and the destruction of an expensive piece of equipment. Therefore, as he opens the valve, he grips it tightly and does not let go until the blowout dries and he can close it. He walks away knowing perfectly well what he has done. Still, his thoughts turn on him and play a game.
Okay,they seem to say,if that’s how you remember it.
He comes to a stop as a sense of unease overtakes and amplifies into panic. He knows he should know better than to give in to the doubt and take the time to go back and check. He knows from previous experience what will follow. However, he decides that it would be better to go back than go on with the gnawing doubt. He goes back and checks and keeps checking because his familiarity with phenomenology has made him aware of the relationship between what is out there (noema) and where, for him, it can only exist: in his mind (noesis)size=50[/size]. Finally, he has to laugh at himself in recognizing that no matter how many times he checks the valve, it can become no more real than on the first encounter.
Trust your reality, he finally tells himself, it’s the only one you have.
He experiences a similar Vertigo on the drive home. As he thinks about his project, he absentmindedly turns from the opposite side of the street into his driveway. Suddenly, a panic comes over him as he envisions a dump truck smashing into the side of his car. In a reverse form of the Vertigo that edges towards Schrödinger’s Cat and multi-verses, he even begins to question whether the more catastrophic event actually occurred and, thereby, takes his pathology into the ontological domain of questioning reality itself.
This Vertigo, in the future, haunts his social relationships as well. But first, it should be explained that our writer grew up in the 70’s when, within his group, one’s sense of social identity was more rigid, when the n-bomb dropped out of his and his group’s mouths with unmitigated ease and stories of gays coming out the closet were told in the same way dark tales might be told around a campfire. And it is easy to understand why it would have been this way since everyone in his group was white, middle class, and heterosexual. It being the 70’s, not long after the civil rights movement, they simply didn’t know any better; and the pressure to conform, to not break from that identity, was strong. Luckily, thanks to our writer’s process of becoming a writer, and several years in California, he has become more enlightened, recognized his folly, and has taken a more progressive tract while most of his friends have chosen to maintain an attachment to their conservative rootssize=50[/size]. Our writer knows that being a writer, who must depend on more diverse social networks, it wouldn’t serve him to be racist or homophobic. Consequently, he has over time developed attachments to people of a variety of races and lifestyles, including a black homosexual. And when he approaches that dear friend, it sometimes happens that two words flash through his mind: the n-bomb and the derogatory “faggot”. He, of course, in a tribute to his peer, experiences a brief pang of guilt and self disgust; but soon gets over it as he buys his friend a beer. He, of course, can do this because he is familiar with the concept of the Vertigo and knows that it is only a residual result of his past to the extent that it has been inscribed, as an option, into the hard drive of the brain, and that even if there was some kind of subconscious motivation at work, it would still remain little more than an option that he chooses not to take. But it takes an even more practical turn when we consider what would happen if our writer suddenly developed Tourettes’ syndrome. What would change, concerning his guilt, if one day he suddenly spouted those words? If his friend knew the situation, and recognized the nature of the Vertigo, nothing should change –except, of course, that they might choose to meet under less public situations. This is because they both know that the transition from the Vertigo to Tourettes’ is merely one of having the possible sans the vertigo (the editor) there to stop it.
He has a similar experience with a female friend, an artist he highly respects, but with that buxom build and raw look of sex that drives him wild. Over the years, it has become clear to him that he will never have her and has long since set aside his desire for the sake of a valuable friendship. Still, the flash he gets, when close to her, is one of his hand darting towards her breast followed, immediately, by that of his other hand intervening. One would certainly hope, given the import of the friendship, that he never finds himself, standing before her, tightly gripping his forearm with his other hand. That would reveal too much, and the embarrassment of it could jeopardize the friendship. And one would further hope that, should he ever develop Tourettes’, he would maintain a policy of keeping more than an arm’s length distance.
But given the clear connection here with basic male sexuality, we have to ask if we’re not applying the Vertigo when simple Freudian psychology might do, that there is always some kind of subconscious impulse at work driven by sexuality. First of all, we should note that there is nothing subconscious about the writer’s flash. He knows where it’s coming from. Secondly, if the Freudian model were all that was needed, then are we to suppose that our flash of jumping from a high ledge and the consequent stepping back is the result of some subconscious desire to die –especially in such a way? How would evolution work with that kind of meme in the mix? We could, of course, attribute it to a curiosity about what the experience would be like. But that doesn’t require that we seek out some hidden motive in our minds. The Freudian model may explain some of it; but is it really necessary or applicable to all? And do we really need to saddle the subject of the Vertigo with shame on top the already created distress? Ultimately, we must see these issues as irrelevant since the purpose of our inquiry is not to displace Freudian psychology, but to supplement it with an alternative explanation. Whether the flash is the result of some subconscious drive, or some trivial possibility stored on the hard-drive of the brain (something, as Sartre suggests in the above quote from TE, we might pick up from reading, or some news story), we are still talking about options that have found themselves inscribed in the brain. It is, once again, a practical application.
This becomes even more significant, given the dominance of the Freudian model and wish fulfillment, when we consider the nature of dreams. Consider an episode of the sitcom Frasier in which Frasier Crane finds himself tormented by a nightly repeated dream. In it, he finds himself in bed apparently having just had sex while his supposed partner is heard in the bathroom taking a shower. He gloats, with an expression of satiation which immediately turns to horror when his co-worker, a rather effeminate male restaurant critic, comes out of the bathroom wearing a robe. Now it is important to note that the writers would, of course, be limited to the audience’s mainstream notion of psychiatry that would, in turn, limit them to a more mainstream understanding of Freud –wish fulfillment being one the best known aspects of it. And it is on this basis that Frasier begins to surrender to the possibility, based on his own effeminate habits, that he may be gay, a possibility that his father, an everyday Joe, a man’s man, and ex cop immediately, and rightly, shuts down. After this, Frasier resorts to a theory based on transference (a subconscious agenda) for which he is rewarded with a dream in which Freud enters the room, praises him for his cleverness, and then proceeds to strip down for a romp in the hay. But given our model of the Vertigo, was all this really necessary? Couldn’t we take a more immediate approach, similar to Frasier’s dad, and attribute it to the brain simply offering an option, and one that initiated a viscous circle when Frasier read something into it and responded so intensely? Couldn’t it be that the only real meaning at work is Frasier’s distress that the option even exists? Likewise, with other dreams we may have in which we do things that seem out of character, whether we’re blowing up buildings, robbing banks, killing love ones, or finding ourselves naked in a tub with our mothers, is it really necessary that we attribute it anything more to it than the brain offering up possibilities and the anxiety we feel at their even existing? And isn’t it telling to consider the reasonable proposition that dreams, much like Tourettes’, is a situation in which the editor leaves it guard and exposes us to the possible sans the Vertigo, that which sometimes even returns during the dream when we panic over what we have donesize=50[/size]?
We have now explored some of the possible manifestations of the Vertigo. And we can be sure there are more. However, in order to make this relevant to our perspective, we must now see it as a byproduct of a kind of flight. But first, we must turn from these specific expressions to the issue of Anguish itself.
size=85 I should, at this point, throw out some props to Pav for not taking my advice on the 1500 word limit as I have well passed it at 1711 and still have a ways to go. I have to wonder if my real intent wasn’t to put some restraint on myself. And his point on the writer’s tendency to “meander” seems prophetic in this case.
(2.) We note here the point made by Phenomenology: for every external event (noema) there is a corresponding internal event (noesis).
(3.) This is not to say that they remain as bigoted as they were. Social changes since the 70’s have affected us all.
(4.) Not to undermine Freud, but I base this possibility on a skepticism about the subconscious’ ability to construct such elaborate symbolic systems in order to present them as puzzles for subject to solve. In fact, I would argue that what is actually happening is that mind and brain are going through some sort of psychic inventory, randomly juxto-positioning the different elements together until it finds patterns that resonate. It’s a form of bricolage similar to that of the artist’s. However, my cynicism may not be as due to Freud as the numerous dream dictionaries that emerged after him.[/size]
Anguish, it seems, haunts every aspect of our writer’s life. Even the act of writing serves as a kind of microcosm of his general affliction. He stares into the blank page, his empty space, his nothingness, and struggles to fill it. He is well aware of the old adage that writers are notoriously lazy. He has read about the rituals they go through to get themselves to just sit down and write. But the rituals seem superfluous. When it comes down to it, when the writer does sit down, isn’t it ultimately about the will to write? And he supposes that laziness would seem a reasonable explanation, but thinks there’s something more: A kind of dread? A fear of failure? That he only stands to prove his emptiness while having to take responsibility? Anguish perhaps? There are times when the blank page seems to stare him down, mocks him like a schoolyard bully provoking him into a fight he’s been led to doubt he can even win. Yet, he goes on; why? Ego perhaps? A sense of self? Shame, perhaps, for having dared to call himself a writer and having little to show for it latelysize=50[/size]? He could go read a book, he has a backlog, many of which he has yet to touch –a source of shame in itself. Wouldn’t that be just as productive? But, for his purposes, both acts are worthless without the other. This has long been a source of vacillation for him: read or write? Input or output? And even when he settles for either, there is always the issue of what particular aspect he should focus on and the conflict of what he wants to do and what he should. When he writes, he prefers to go on his message board (it’s just much easier), when he knows he needs to work on more finished pieces. When he reads, he finds himself drawn to the challenge of philosophy, when he knows he should, to round it out, take some time to read more literature (fiction or poetry), to watch more movies or take in some art, or even turn to the intellectual stimulation of documentaries and lectures. This is especially important since he has long since admitted that he hasn’t the time, desire, or resources to become a full fledge philosopher, that he prefers to think of himself as a writer who happens to have an interest in philosophy. Allegedly, our writer would rather write a poem than a philosophical exposition, would rather quote from one his graphic guides or Philosophy for Dummies for the sheer audacity and playfulness in the face of an over-exaggerated sense of seriousness. But this gives him little consolation. Still, he finds himself drawn to the challenge of the original text. Even more damning is how he repeatedly reads the first two sections of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the most difficult parts, to the extent that he has mostly neglected the last section on philosophy for which the book is popular due its accessibility.
On top of that, our writer is actually a generalist who’s dabbled in a little of everything with enough success to encourage more experimentation. He has been a musician, poet, writer of fiction, artist, and what he is now, all of which he wouldn’t mind trying again. He has become the Kierkegaardian aesthete in the worst possible sense of the concept. The only reason he can think of himself a writer now is that time restraints and circumstances have routed him to this particular state of becoming. But nothing about it compels him. He can break away to become something else. And to make things worse, modern technology (namely computers), encourages him by giving him access to resources previously exclusive to the elite. He could, in theory, be making a movie one moment, writing a blog the next, then producing an image on Photoshop that he will use as cover for his fully produced CD. It sounds exciting enough -at least in theory; however, in practice, it can be quite daunting. Choices have to be made. And with so many decisions to make, and no fixed system to make them work, our writer finds himself haunted by a kind of postmodern malaise in having way too many options. His process, it seems, has been a long series of alternations between moments of intense focus and paralyzing indecision, elation and despair, a form of circumstantial manic depression in which, one moment, he’s full of flow and next thing he knows, it’s as if someone has turned off the tap.
Furthermore, he sometimes looks back with regret and wonders how it would be if he had just stayed a musician. Would a more focused approach have gotten him somewhere? But then the rock star lifestyle (the drugs and fast living) could have easily killed him. But because of this, he sometimes tells himself that his life would be much simpler if he just picked the one thing he values most and focus on that. But then he considers what that might be, and what he would have to give up, and, like a typical aesthete, concedes. Never mind! He then tells himself that one of the nice things about being his age, and being past point of thinking he’s going “to make it”, is that he is free to experiment. But even that gives him little consolation as he mires himself in the indecision as to what to experiment with and when. There even comes times, in his advanced age, and perhaps out of frustration, when he begins think it all a little silly or pointless. He finds himself in a situation similar to that of the main character in Sartre’s The Wall in which, faced with his impending death, he loses all sense of value in anything he previously thought justified his life.
Way too many choices: including those imposed on him by the general tyranny of the functional and mundane. When our writer was young, he use to think idealistically in terms of the tragic artist struggling under the burden of the world. But he knows better now. In truth, it’s the petty things that wear him down. Our writer, it seems, for all his wisdom, has taken the ass backward approach of coming at the hierarchy of needs from the top down, of focusing on self actualization at the expense of creature comforts. He has to live and eat. He has children, a byproduct of his need for love. And his varied interests require resources. And he has paid for it dearly to little advantage. This is why he managed to break away for 5 years to pad his resume and pursue more vocational interests which, even though he kept looking forward to getting back to the a-vocational, kept his intellectual and creative proclivities engaged enough to hold his interest. And he did like the financial gain and respect he gained from normal circles. He has, at times, longed to feel normal. Would it have made any difference had he just gone on that way? Would his life have any less meaning? It landed him a half-decent job. And given his indecisiveness, it’s not likely his intellectual or creative curiosity would have ever have earned him such pay and benefits. However, towards the end of it, he began to see it as a carrot on a stick. He began to question how much was enough and if it was really worth it given that he may or may not use the knowledge gained; that is when he knew that if he took a liberal or fine arts class he would because that was just what he did. Furthermore, he began to feel that he had somehow lost his way, and that he had somehow, if he were a religious man, failed God. But was this just a pose? Some mannerism picked up from some biography he had read on one of his creative heroes?
Maybe now he’s just being selfish. Maybe he should just give it up, go back to trade school and build a better life for his children. Maybe he, being a progressive with a Marxist lean, should put his money where his mouth is and show some care for the “less fortunate” by doing some charity work. Maybe he should just quit drinking and take care of his health. The value of surviving, in the first place, seems persuasive. Perhaps he should give up his aesthetic ways and turn to what Heidegger would call an inauthentic existence by becoming worthy of being reported in a human interest story. Surely, Dr. Phil would stand by this remedy to his Anguish. And Kierkegaard and Heidegger only add to his confusion. So what’s the point of philosophy? And why even resist the inauthentic when our writer, himself, has tried to counter his Anguish by turning to the Bad Faith of systems? He has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to balance it all out with more than his share of elaborate plans. But even when they do work, it’s always tentative because the demands, goals, and values that are left out begin to outweigh the benefits. He finds himself thinking more about what he’s missing: the Absence. He then gives it up and turns to just “going with the flow”, thereby continuing the vicious cycle. Soon enough, it proves unsatisfactory and unproductive. And he shows no hesitance in sharing the lesson learned from this and apply it to other human endeavors: epistemologies, ethical, social, and political systems. No system, he argues, can make everything work like a fine-tuned machine. It’s a form of Bad Faith. But soon enough, he’s back to scheming and making plans.
How sad, complex, and self contradicting our modern day Hamlet seems. But it shouldn’t surprise us. Given his proclivity for deconstruction of inward and outward reality, it seems no wonder that he would arrive at a point where he would begin to question the very ground beneath his feet. It shouldn’t surprise that his dread of the blank page would lead to an awareness of nothingness, or the possibility of it (a kind of nihilistic perspective), and the sense that it saturates everything and is the thin air that underlies all assumptions. Furthermore, it would stand to follow that this foundation of nothing could have gone anyway, but came to this, his world and his self as is, and will project into the future in the same unfixed way. The Anguish it must evoke, given the way it leaves it open to the freedom to choose (nay say: the responsibility) with no real cues or assumptions as to how it should be or how to go about itsize=50[/size]. What could go wrong with that?
size=85A promise he made to the creator of the board, perhaps?
(2.)It should be noted that Sartre later backed away from his earlier emphasis on Free Will. We have to take some consideration for Facticity and circumstance. I would propose that we settle the Free Will/Determinism dichotomy by thinking in terms of Influence: how our circumstances influence us and how we influence our circumstances. This, I think, offsets the Libertarian propensity toward smug indifference to individual circumstance, while leaving room for responsibility. But that is another essay.
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So we have to ask: given that we are all like our writer in creating something (our sense of self, our life, our world), and if it gives us so much Anguish, if it draws us towards decisions that could go terribly wrong, if even our right decisions give prominence to the explicitly prohibited and causes us Vertigo, and if, no matter how it turns out, we must be responsible, why even go forward? Why not give in, as Aum suggests in BRE, to idleness? Why don’t we all become like Zen monks: wanting nothing and going nowhere? First of all, we have to do something or we wouldn’t survive. But more importantly, for our purposes, the answer may well lie in the same essay of Aum’s:
Aum then goes on, true to critical reflection, to make the distinction between Idleness and Boredom. Through a process we need not describe here, he defines Idleness as the true threat to mental activity, thereby, conscious existence, and Boredom as mental activity itself and, thereby, the flight from idleness and, consequently, Absence as well. As he also says:
However, for our purposes, we shall simply look at it all as a continuum, define Boredom as a flight from Absence and thereby derive the answer to our initial question. We can now say that the reason we move forward, despite it all, is because to do otherwise would be to risk (or raise the possibility of) our own non-existence. It is, again, a flight from Absence. That said, what may serve as a more concrete parallel and reinforcement of Frankfurt and Aum’s proposition is the phenomenon of dreaming.
As anyone knows, who has taken psych 101, there are four levels of consciousness:
The Alpha in which we are fully awake.
The Beta in which we are semi-awake/semi-asleep.
The Theta in which we dream. And finally:
The deep wave Delta in which it is theorized that consciousness completely dissipates: that point where there’s no There there.
In light of Aum’s point, and the possibility of nihilation presented by the Delta, it would seem the last phase might be problematic for consciousness –especially when we consider the concept of intentionality as defined by Sartre. As he puts it, intentionality centers on the observation (somewhat hinted at earlier by Descartes’ Ergo Cogito Sum) that consciousness is always consciousness of something. This seems obvious enough. But if we follow the reasoning, by first recognizing the interdependence between the perceiver and the perceived, we may well land at a fundamental conclusion that lies at very core of our existence: that in order to exist, a thing, at bottom, must perceive that it exists. Sartre went on to pose this as evidence of the underlying Nothingness or Absence of consciousness in that there appeared an almost circler relationship between it and its knowledge of itself –an observation that serves our point. However, for our present purposes, we need only note the implied resistance to this underlying absence and how it would exist, in some fundamental way, within the very framework of consciousness.
I hate sleep! says the elder character in the movie Moonlighting, It’s too much like death.
We can now see why consciousness, as it moves from the Alpha through the Beta to the Theta to the Delta, might want to dip its toe into the water of its own nihilation by presenting to itself the store of noetic sensations (perceptions) it has gathered in the Alpha state and use them as the building blocks of its dreams (more perceptions). We can now see it as a last ditch flight from Absence before the complete surrender to it. This may be why in Beta or twilight dreams, when our conscious thoughts begin to trail off like loose vectors and begin to take more visual form, we often have the sensation of something darting at us or having a misstep that jolts us back into consciousness. Isn’t there every reason to believe that this is the reaction of consciousness in the apprehension of its own demise? A kind of hesitation in the process? And couldn’t we now see our notions of afterlives as a form of conscious dreaming that serves the same function?
Furthermore, writing, for our writer, being a bricolage very similar to that of dreams, can now be seen as a flight from the blank page, from his own emptiness, and thereby from Absence. And it can, likewise, be said of any act we engage in. When we speak, we speak to fill the silence: Absence. When we build, we build to fill a space: Absence again. When we progress and develop, we progress and develop to build a bridge beyond a gap: little more than Absence to be overcome. Every form of labor or play, every act, every step taken in the creative process that constitutes our sense of self, our lives, our world, every move we make can now be seen as an expression of flight, the flight of consciousness, as Boredom, from emptiness and Idleness, and from its own dissipation. Leibniz asks: why all this rather than nothing? To which we can now respond: what better flight from Absence?
And doesn’t this flight, lately, seem to intensify? James Burke, in the documentary The Day the Universe Changed, points out that technology, in our age, is progressing in a way similar to Galileo’s Law of Falling Bodies: at a constant rate of acceleration. He then goes on to express the concern that all of this could lead to a taste for novelty. And this observation gets some credibility from the way recent cultural trends tend to come and go quickly –sometimes within months. It’s almost as if our present flight has led us all, en masse, to a kind of social ADD. Is it any wonder that things are offered up to us in bite-size pieces so that we can consume on the go? Does it keep us light on our feet while getting and spending and seeking our 15 minutes in a world that’s too much with us? And how long before it all overheats, reaches a state of equilibrium between it and the speed of light, breaks down, and turns to pathology?
Consider another pathology: that of the hoarder. First of all, in a very obvious sense, what can a hoarder be but the ultimate flight from Absence? Sartre would say that they seek the fullness of Being (or for our purposes: Presence). But at the same time, doesn’t it seem like the hoarder is building a kind of plenum around them? Perhaps they’re pursuing the nothingness, the absence, curled inside the presence of it like a worm. And doesn’t Burke’s concern make it all seem to blend into speed smear? A steady dissolution into Absence?
Our writer’s project has become too big. He panics and imagines his little experiment lumbering, clumsily, around the room and Japanese people in Tokyo getting nervous. He wants to trim it down, but doesn’t know how. He has become, in a sense, a hoarder of his own ideas. Furthermore, he wonders if he should have thrown his whole bag of tricks in, follow the old adage of acting as if every project will be his last, or save some for later. He fears leaving himself empty for later works.
Now our perspective has taken a turn against itself. Zizek writes in [i]The Fragile Absolute/i:
Perhaps it is this feeling of purity, the feeling of absence, of that keeps the vegan away from meat. And how far is that from the rest us who will gorge ourselves at the feast, and struggle after with that bogged down feeling? We struggle as much with our minds. Aum writes:
Once again, consciousness is always consciousness of something. So when we seek to still our mind as flight from too much “something”, too much Presence, is it any wonder that the brain chatter will fight us all the way? And what of our writer for who brain chatter is his bread and butter, the very same brain chatter he seeks to empty on the blank page so that he can make room for more brain chatter that will be the source of his next project? When the first draft is all laid out, and all that is left is a process of tinker, tweak, and tighten, he engages in a process of deletion and insertion. He takes out, as it were, to create a kind intellectual Absence around what he wants to keep as Presence, only to often have that Absence serve as a provocation to add yet more Presencesize=50[/size]. And don’t we do as much when we clear and rearrange our spaces to create Absence, only to have them fill with more Presence. It’s hard to rest in a disorderly room. And you have to envy those who pull it off:
We do as much with our lives. We make time to fill it with obligations. Financially, even if we do create a little room to breathe, there’s always something to spend it on. We not only do it to ourselves, but to each other. We’ve made it social. And watching it, we can’t help but sense that Complexity and Chaos are at work: a kind of cyclic phasing back and forth between order (the product of Absence) and disorder (the product of Presence).
But perhaps we get to the phenomenological core of it when we follow Sartre into the bar seeking Pierre, and, not finding him, find a nothingness made figure against the ground our of environment, a tear in the fabric of being. And as we watch it fill back in with Presence (the fanfare of the bar, our future projects), don’t we begin to see that beyond every Presence is Absence, and beyond every Absence is Presence? Couldn’t we argue that this lies at the foundation of the general push and pull between the desire to take flight and the desire for idleness? Between Boredom and Anguish?
size=85Zizek points to another way in which technology accelerates our circumstance in [i]The Plague of Fantasies/i:
As any academic knows, the problem with writing on the computer is that it potentially suspends the difference between ‘mere drafts’ and the ‘final version’: there is no longer a ‘final version’ or a ‘definitive text’, since at every stage the text can be further worked on ad infinitum –every version has the status of something ‘virtual’ (conditional, provisional)… This uncertainty, of course, opens up the space of the demand for a new Master whose arbitrary gesture would declare some version the ‘final’ one, thereby bring about the ‘collapse’ of the virtual infinity into definitive reality.
This is interesting to us for a couple of reasons. For one, it exacerbates our writer’s plight in that now, thanks to the computer and way it offers to work, his process of deletion and insertion, the push and pull between Absence and Presence, can go on forever. It’s always there to be tailored for different circumstances. For another, the possible creation of a ‘new Master’ points to the kind of Bad Faith that the acceleration of our flight can lead to –even to the point of turning to more authoritarian means of offsetting the dissolution into virtuality and the underlying Absence. Personal experience offers some credence to this in that I tend to use the act of posting as a final resting place for my own more finished pieces. Likewise, I tend to use the 2 day limit on editing to tell me when I am finished.
(2.) This is an excerpt from my two page experiment Clutterviewtopic.php?f=15&t=176991
I apologize for the shameless plug.
Coincidentally, the same kind of push and pull as that of Presence and Absence, and the unbearable character of it, lies at the bottom of Lacan’s concept of Jouissancesize=50[/size]. We start by explaining that the word is French for sexual climax. However, for our purposes, I would propose that we look at it as closer to sexual ecstasy. First we note that sex is a form of Jouissance (the upside of it) in which we experience pleasure on the surface, while also experiencing discomfort at a less conscious level. Lacan gives the example of cutting it off just before the point of climax and the discomfort it would cause. However, I would argue that it runs a little deeper and more subtle than that. If we think about it, sex is a process of working our way to a thresh-hold that will take us out of a room that we’re really enjoying at the time. It’s like we’re moving in two directions at once. And if we follow it through to deeper and more sublime levels, we begin to truly understand the kind of subtle interaction of pleasure and discomfort involved in everything we enjoy. Think about what we do here, and why we do it. We must certainly put ourselves through a lot discomfort reading the books we do to get where we’re at. Why? For the pleasure we get (the flow) when we’re posting on the board? And even then we have to go through the discomfort of typing it out. And we see as much in our writer given all the discomfort he goes through to get the project finished. And even when we do get to the good part, it’s never like we just jack into the pleasure center of the brain. It’s always a little more complex than that. And even if it was, we would still have to recognize the faint traces of discomfort involved in the experience.
(Think a song that is so beautiful and sublime that it makes one want to fold into theirselves.)
That said, we must also note the downside of Jouissance. As Lacan notes, when subjects are experiencing many pathologies and forms of hysteria, there seems to be discomfort on the surface while there is pleasure going on at the deeper less conscious level. And this makes perfect sense. Why else would we repeat behaviors that give us discomfort if they didn’t, at some level, give us pleasure?
(Now think earworm: that song one hates, but that keeps running the chorus, relentlessly, through their head.)
Our writer, being drawn to women of a raw sexual build, that have that look of a woman who might try anything once (in other words: slutty) finds, when he is in a relationship, that he tends to spend a lot of time, when she is away, imagining her with someone else. This, of course, causes a great deal of despair. But could it be that at some level he actually gets pleasure from it, as if imagining her in a porno movie? And doesn’t this tendency create something of a Presence in her Absence –that is since she has been made the most important Presence to him? For these reasons, we must give some credence to Aum when he writes in BRE:
However, here he is talking about Agape. And in a perfect world, that would seem enough. But Eros is a different animal altogether. And while Aum is right to see something higher in Agape, we have to admit the compelling draw of Eros and passion. And isn’t there a parallel between Absence and Agape and Eros and Presence? We see the push and pull at work, in reference to Eros, when Lacan makes the distinction between needs, demands, and desires. Need, of course, is what it sounds like: the things we need (food, water, air, etc.); while a demand is what cannot be satisfied because it always points to something else. A child makes continual demands on their mother not because they want what they ask for, but because they’re after something else: love, attention, self respect, etc. Likewise with Eros in which 2 lovers are constantly making demands on each other creating a source of friction. And as Lacan points out, the attempt to constantly satisfy the demands of the other renders them incapable of taking the time and effort to seek what it is they desire –that which can be satisfied (like the Agape, for instance, that couples experience if they manage to grow old together). And note the further parallel between Demand and Presence and Desire and Absence. It is what Sartre describes when he defines love as a process of getting the other to give up their freedom by their own free will, which is an impossible project since, once they have given their freedom up, they have no free will left with which to give itsize=50[/size]. He then takes a similar push and pull into the realm of sadism in which he describes the sadist as being torn between reducing the other to an object while simultaneously seeking to maintain their personhood to sustain the pleasure of itsize=50[/size]. Zizek describes something similar, concerning Nazi Germany, in The Plague of Fantasies (pp. 69-70):
This same tension was illustrated in the movie Schindler’s List when the sadistic commander of the concentration camp (Ralph Fiennes) was inspecting the women prisoners and gently, with an almost paternal care, told one of them to stand back as he had a cold as if to impress upon those he was about to destroy that he was perfectly capable of being civil. A similar illustration was provided at the beginning of the movie Inglorious Bastards when the German officer, in search of the Jews the French farmer had stashed beneath his floor, described the use of the term ‘rats’ as having connotations that warranted respect: deviance, ingenuity, etc… In fact, the latter movie can be seen as a study in this push and pull tension in the way the Germans, fully aware of their power, went about presenting themselves as civil and cultured while perfectly willing to carry out their acts of sadism. It’s this very sadism with a polite voice that we imagine in the psychopath as they work to convince their victim that they are decent and right despite what they’re about to do. And can’t we detect that same cool tone in the troll while they proceed to rip down everything we say as if to convince us they are doing it for our own good. We see in it a perversion of tough love. But we have to ask: is it the victim they’re trying to convince, or themselves?
But more important, why? Why, for instance, did Son of Sam, in a letter to the Times claim to love mankind? It’s as if, much as the trace of discomfort is essential to pleasure, compassion is essential to cruelty: the subtle tension at the heart of Jouissance. And don’t we all exist in that same back and forth? And likewise with Eros and Agape, Demand and Desire, and, at a more fundamental level, Anguish and Boredom? And why does our writer think or write about such things? Does he see a connection? Does he see a common source for much of all human activity, along with those we might fight despicable, in the unbearable push and pull of Presence and Absence?
size=85 At this point, I should confess that the primary source of my definition is the graphics guide Lacan for Beginners (text and illustrations by Phillip Hill, 1999, For Beginners, originally published by Readers and Writers) and the various uses Zizek makes of it throughout his books. Out of all the interpretive texts I’ve read on Lacan and Jouissance, this definition has been the most useful. And since it may be a while before I work up the courage to approach the Escrits or the Seminares, I proceed with the acknowledgement that I’m working with a highly blue-collarized version, and would not presume to defend it against the understanding of someone who might have a more in-depth familiarity with Lacan. However, as can be seen , I have also inducted the term ‘unbearable’ used to define it in Zizek’s How to Read Lacan (W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 2007)
(2.)This sheds some light on the Islamic policies of patriarchy, polygamy, and the hatefulness and violence of some of their more extreme members. Given the broken down objects many of their women might become in the process, it stands to reason that the male would want to go on collecting wives after the previous one’s ‘free will’ is gone. And given the frustration of their project, is it any wonder they would turn to violence? And given the fear the thought of an independent woman might provoke in the men, we can only advise them, as free men who deal with free women, that they have everything to fear, but that they will not be able to hold them down forever, and the longer they hold it off, the worse it will be in the long run.
(3.)Unfortunately, given the size of B&N, I cannot track down the exact quotes on these two points. I can only point to the chapters they are in: Part Three, Chapter Three, Concrete Relations with Others, Sections I. First Attitude Towards Others: Love, Language, and Masochism and Section II. Second Attitude Towards Others: Indifference, Desire, Hate, Sadism.
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So? Can there be any anguish so profound? Any Boredom? Any flight as spectacular as that of our writer’s? It’s certainly killed better minds than his, and has been a source of vexation and distress since the beginning of his desire to become more like them.
Let’s assess his situation and, in turn, that of everyone since his is only an extreme version of the same creative process we’re all engaged in. On one hand, he is in a flight from Absence towards Presence in order to preserve his very existence. However, as that Presence becomes too much, as he begins to sense the decisions to be made for which he must take responsibility (for choices future and past), and some of which are accompanied by that which is strictly prohibited (the Vertigo), he finds himself turning back to Absence only to get close enough to the disintegration to turn him back towards Presence. On top of that, that Presence may well hold Absence curled within it like a worm. After all, what is a dead body in the end? This all, in turn, presents a push and pull tension that escalates into the unbearable downside of Jouissance. It’s a wonder anything gets done. And yet it does.
Our writer would do well, at this point, to remember that there is an upside to jouissance as well, that tentative experience of pleasure and that occurs in the back and forth transition. Aum tells us in SA:
Perhaps our writer should accept his bad faith and use it like a tool, spend as much time as he will devising and trying to rein it all in with his systems. It can’t hurt (it’s a creative act) and sometimes even helps. And when he has no system, no routine, he still gets things done -things that can’t be included in any methodical process. As long as he accepts the limits of it, and if he accepts the groundlessness of anything he does, how can he say that any moment has been wasted –that is since, as the protagonist in “The Wall” points out: none of it may matter in the end anyway? In a sense, that which condemns him sets him free as wellsize=50[/size].
Perhaps he should seize the Absence, take on a Nihilistic Perspective as a tool as well (as a grand narrative it would be Bad Faith), seize the groundlessness of things as an opportunity to face Presence, both future and past, and fill the gaps in ways he can call his own. What better use or justification for it all than Play: in a profound and metaphysical sense of it? Perhaps then, when the blank page is filled and the project is done, and he has tinkered, tweaked, and tightened to an optimal balance between Presence and Absence (even if it is tentative), and he has reached that delicate point in the transition when he can experience the joy of emptiness and idleness while still feeling the inertia of previous motion, he will not care what is or isn’t included; he will not care, for the moment, whether his choices are right or wrong. Perhaps then, similar to Sartre’s narrator in Nausea , he will be able to write with a tone of relief:
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(1.) Sartre has said, according to the movie Waking Life, that he has never had a despairing day in his life
(2.) This, of course, is my own revision of the clause for the sake of poetic flow. The real one was actually:
Sartre, J.P., Hazel E Barnes (trans.), Being and Nothingness, Citadel Press, New York (text)
Sartre, J.P., Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (trans.) The Transcendence of the Ego, Noonday Press, New York (text)
Sartre, J.P., The Wall, can be read on: faculty.risd.edu/dkeefer/pod/wall.pdf
Sartre, J.P., Alexander, LLoyd (trans.) Nausea, New Directions, 1964 (text)
Zizek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London, 2008 (text)
Zizek, Slavoj, The Fragile Absolute, Verso, London, 2008 (text)
Zizek, Slavoj, How to Read Lacan, W.W. Norton, 2006 (text)
Hill, Phillip (text and illustrations), Leach, David (illustrations), Lacan for Beginners, For Beginners, LLC, 1999 (text)
Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press, 2009 (text)