two childrearing books

As every alert parent knows, there are two essential child rearing books – Doctor Spock, in the most revised edition, and Gilles Deleuze’s Logique du Sens. Jonie Mitchell’s lines come to mind: “papa gave me the sugar/ momma showed me the deeper meaning.” Such is the case here. We use Spock to gain ersatz certainty in response to various problems that pop up in the schedule of duties (eat sleep poop radiate an adorable aura that touches every heavenly orb) that have been impose on baby – and we use Deleuze to understand why, after a lifetime of ironies and distancing techniques, we find ourselves spontaneously cooing chou chou and petit lapin to our bundle of joy. It is a world of diminutives, a real microverse, and we are just realizing the extent of our contract with Wonderland – which is where the L.d.S comes in to describe its extent and limits.The Logique was presided over by the spirit of Lewis Carroll, while Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is governed by the harsher spirit of Artaud. Lewis Carroll gives us the sugar, Deleuze notes, while Artaud gives us the deeper meaning. In his asylum in Rodez, Artaud tried to translate Jabberwocky – and in that moment emerged something that was less a crossroads than a car crash. For though Carroll’s made up language and Artaud’s schizo talk, which had infected his poems since the breakdown of 1938, might seem similar, in fact they repulsed each other.

Artaud intensely disliked Jabberwocky. Deleuze explains why – and in so doing the Deleuze reader gets a sense of the fact that  the malentendu between Artaud and Carroll stnds at the center of Deleuze’s philosophy. Deleuze quotes Artaud’s letter about Jabberwocky, which for me, now, defines the difference between parenthood and the perpetual bachelorhood of philosophy:

“I don’t like either the languages of the surface, exuding happy leisure time and intellectual successes; the former rests on the anus, but without putting in the soul or the heart. The anus is always terror.”

The anus in the microverse of the diminutives is less terror than clockwork, a mechanism for measuring the new born’s absorption of milk, as well as a mess you clean up without really thinking too much about it after a while. You don’t change diapers in fear and trembling.

Myself, I’ve long been on the fear and trembling side, and now I’m on the other. It is a relief to change diapers for once. And it makes the petit lapin happy, too!

identification and self interest

Benjamin, during the period in which he was working on Baroque Drama, jotted down some observations about identity and philosophy. “The principle of identity is expressed “a is a”, not “a remains a”. It does not express the equality of two spatially or temporally different stages of a. But also, it cannot express the identity in general of a spatial or temporal thing, then every such identification would presuppose identity. The ‘a’ whose identity is expressed in the relation of identity is thus something beyond space and time.” (GW VI 28)

Locke tried to make the transition from “is” to “remains” without an appeal to substance. In doing so, he released the power of identification – and the enigma of the process of identification. In a sense, Locke not only provides us with a code to the ideology of early capitalism, but also, unwittingly, with the dialectic that undermines it.

As Pierre Force has noted, Rousseau, in The Second Discourse, devises a new use for the term, identity – he makes it into a process of projection, and thus is the first to use  “identification” in the psychological sense that became part of the ordinary language of the second half of the twentieth century.

“Even should it be true that commiseration is only a feeling that puts us in the

position of him who suffers – a feeling that is obscure and lively in Savage man,

developed but weak in Civilized man – what would this idea matter to the truth

of what I say, except to give it more force? In fact, commiseration will be all the

more energetic as the Observing animal identifies himself more intimately with

the suffering animal. Now it is evident that this identification must have been

infinitely closer in the state of Nature than in the state of reasoning.”

The issue of personal identity travels to France by way of Locke’s translators and readers – such as Condillac. But Rousseau’s idea of an identifying self is a definite marker, an intersigne on the way to understanding character under capitalism. That is, to understanding how character can unfold itself in seemingly disparate semantic segments to occupy a certain space of symbols and capacities in those societies that we name by using a temporal adjective as a noun for a condition – modern – as if the modern had been hived off a world clock and existed in a new framework altogether. Personal identity is not only consistent with the Lockian principles of property and self-interest, but also with the kind of identification that, as Rousseau saw, makes the discourse of self-interest, in a sense, impossible. Rousseau’s discovery is made in spite of Locke, but we can see it working its way through that English plain prose as he comes to terms with the seemingly esoteric problems posed by imagining metempsychosis.  Just as selfishness can become an acid that so dissolves the self that one is left with an absolute Berkeleyian idealism, personal identity inevitably begins to pose the problem of the maker of persons, the cause, the projector. When the critics of modernity, operating under the unconscious conviction that they live in the modern, face this bifurcation, they tend to make a temporal move – to place those schemas of identification under the rubric of the pre-modern, as though the pre-modern was some head on, self evident phase before the modern – rather than the product of the later. But I propose that viewing the pre-modern as something generated within modernity, and not as a byproduct but as a shadow and double, an emergent and undeniable force in the matrix. 

Suckers unite!

It occurred to me in the hour before cock crow – which in the 12^th arrondissement is around 4 a.m. – that the whole corrupt train of our present social arrangements can be summed up by the value placed on “suck” – viz., this sucks, he you or they suck, it sucks. As we all know, this means that “it” is a disaster, he she or it is a cretin, and that low quality is the name of this game, if you want to play it. But, as Adam placidly – or, sometimes, fiercely – sucked on my little finger, giving us a respite from his desire to try out his new lungs (in top shape! And what volume for a seven pound five ounce boy!), I realize that this is all wrong, backwards, and senseless. It sucks should me, it is heaven. Real communism, utopia, the singularity and nirvana can all be summed up by, it sucks. We long, we little monkeys, not for nothingness, but for the attaching interface of lips and tongue, ahold of something. And yet – sucking is not eating or breathing,  it is not processing something. Amateurs think that sucking has a physiological use  wholly satisfied by breastfeeding, but an hour or two or three with a newborn will show these folks the error of their ways – sucking is needed for breastfeeding, but it is desired in itself, and continues after breastfeeding palls. Sucking is pure superfluity, pure luxury, pure excess. It is beyond something, and it disdains nothing.

Of course, any sophisticated 12 year old can tell you it sucks alludes to something genital and nasty. However, like many of the malformed views of 12 year olds (cool is cool! you are either in the in crowd or you are nobody!), this isn’t really sophisticated at all. Alas, the views of sophisticated 12 year olds rock and rule our world, become our norms, and lead, as I said above,paragraph one, sentence one, I believe, to the catastrophic decline of our society. What the 12 year old is in flight from is the surge, the primitive surge of sucking in which we are all one, a common humanity of suckers. Having gone through housetraining, school and hierarchy, the fact that we come from sucking seems too dreamlike, too nightmarish a truth. And yet there it is. We come from sucking. We all share sucking.

And this lead me – perhaps unwisely, since I have spent much of the last 48 hours catching very little sleep in a chair designed by the Marquis de Sade in a hospital room – to my revelation. The society I want to fight for exists in the shadow of the slogan: I suck, and I want to suck even more! Or, to expand beyond the trivially egotistic: it sucks, and I have never heard a more glorious truth! Only a solidarity among suckers will change the momentum of our decline. I am of the sucker’s party, and proud of it!

Adam Daedalus Rigaud Gathmann, born October 21st, 12ieme arrondissement, Paris

from the Mundus Intellectualis to the pornographic sofa: Locke on personal Identity, 3

Character is the adventure of personal identity.

Here's a maxim I can stand on. And kick against. Because maybe it isn't. The problem with a maxim is that it locks its truth inside it and loses the combination. Or rather, that combination becomes the truth. It is as though a safe became the treasure for which it is designed to be the receptacle.

So to start over…

Locke’s chapter on Personal Identity was added to the Essay in 1694, the scholarship says, at the request of William Molyneux, the Dublin savant. Indeed, in the famous letter in which Molyneux propounded the problem that has been named after him – that of a man born blind who suddenly receives his sense of sight, and whether he would know shapes and colors – Molyneux also suggests that Locke expatiate a little more largely on the principium individuationus, the seed of the chapter on personal identity. Locke replied with some reference to Malebranche, and Molyneux in turn advised on engaging against the fantasies of Plato and Malebranche.

So much, then, for the intellectual history. We have philosophical topics and philosophical names, and it would seem, as we con Locke’s chapter, that we should remain within these bounds.

Yet the afterlife of this chapter on personal identity has certainly moved beyond those bounds. It is not for puzzling out the question of metempsychosis (or as Mrs. Bloom, another Dublin savant, puts it in Ulysses, met him pike hoses) that the chapter draws our attention, but instead, it is because we seem to touch, here, on a piece of code. The code for the new individualism. The code for a new secular perception of the self, bounded and founded in the consciousness, which is an odd physical thing – sometimes no bigger than the light snore of the dozer, sometimes a giant claim on cultural continuity going back millennia.

Consciousness, as Locke recognizes, is a precarious foundation for any kind of order. And one way of looking at the various perspectives on the continuity of the person that he unfolds is to think of how personal identity is about identifying persons. This, of course, is one of the great programs of the enlightenment, but in 1694, Locke surely could already see the need for it.

We have a fictional example in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders of this problem of identifying persons. Moll’s adventures have barely started – two husbands, two children left with their grandparents, one dead – when Moll decides to start over. Her second husband has fled to France; technically, she is still married to him, but she assumes their separation is for good. This means that her status in England is in suspense:

“Upon these Apprhensions, the first thing I did, was to go quite out of my Knowledge, and go by another Name: This I did effectually, for I went into the Mint, took lodgings in a very private Place, dresst me in the Habit of a Widow, and called myself Mrs. Flanders.” [  77]

And so it happens that the anonymous author of the Life of Moll Flanders, Defoe’s fictional figure, tells us that she is also an imposter. She assumes, as it were, another dimension of fictionality. Is it possible – such runs the idle ontological question – for a fiction to develop a fiction? The ontological question abuts in romanticism – where the fiction and the encyclopedia converge – and is mined throughout the twentieth century, where from Pirandello to Flann O’brien, fiction is an entrance to the infinity of bluff.

In the early 18^th century, however, Moll Flander’s renaming is the entrance to adventure. Locke of course was familiar with adventure under the guise of enterprise. According to Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, he invested in an adventurer’s company that proposed to settle the Bahamas –and by that investment became an “adventurer”.  Adventure befalls not only persons, but properties – for money has the peculiar quality of adventuring in the world. In the eighteenth century, this commodity fetishism generates a rich sub-literature of commodity erotica – sofas, pillows, coins and other baggage that recount histories of seductions and sexual adventures that occur in their proximity, or with their aid.

Locke, however, comes to a more puritan and less rococo conclusion:

“Let any one reflect upon himself, and conclude that he has in himself an immaterial spirit, which is that which thinks in him, and, in the constant change of his body keeps him the same: and is that which he calls himself: let him also suppose it to be the same soul that was in Nestor or Thersites, at the siege of Troy, (for souls being, as far as we know anything of them, in their nature indifferent to any parcel of matter, the supposition has no apparent absurdity in it), which it may have been, as well as it is now the soul of any other man: but he now having no consciousness of any of the actions either of Nestor or Thersites, does or can he conceive himself the same person with either of them? Can he be concerned in either of their actions? attribute them to himself, or think them his own, more than the actions of any other men that ever existed? So that this consciousness, not reaching to any of the actions of either of those men, he is no more one self with either of them than if the soul or immaterial spirit that now informs him had been created, and began to exist, when it began to inform his present body; though it were never so true, that the same spirit that informed Nestor's or Thersites' body were numerically the same that now informs his. For this would no more make him the same person with Nestor, than if some of the particles of matter that were once a part of Nestor were now a part of this man; the same immaterial substance, without the same consciousness, no more making the same person, by being united to any body, than the same particle of matter, without consciousness, united to any body, makes the same person. But let him once find himself conscious of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor.”

and the rightwing utopia project in honduras goes on...

Sadly, my moral feelings, here, are pitted against my stomach. The founder of Whole Foods, John Mackay, and a libertarian freakheadnamed Michael Strong are trying to found libertarian zone cities in Honduras onuninhabited land – sort of like going back in the time machine to the days when monopolies like the East India company ruled over populations.

Of course, the land is actually inhabited – oh, inconvenient! But as it is inhabited by poor Afro-Caribbean peasants, you can drive them out with minimal bloodshed – a few murders, rapes, and the burning of houses ought to do. The murders have started: Antonio Trejo Cabrera, a lawyer who charged various Honduran legislators were bribed to pave the way for these new libertarian utopias was gunned down outside a wedding, on September 23^rd. Michael Strong, who knows that the age demands the mushmouthed Romneyism we all enjoy, expressed his shock at the murder  in the following words:

"We believe that Antonio Trejo, had he lived long enough to get to knowus, would have concluded that our approach is 100 percent beneficial toHonduras and Hondurans. We are saddened for his family and understand what atragedy this is for trust and goodwill in Honduras," Strong said in astatement to The Associated Press.

Ah, if only Strong had added a Palinesque You betcha to his so horrified remarks!

So I’d suggest wearing a Trejo t-shirt next time you shop at Whole Foods.

Locke on personal identity 2

So what does? How is the personal life identified? 

This is an agitated question, and it is expressed in an agitated text. Locke, normally so normal-mouthed, makes a pre-Voltarian move in the midst of this chapter by including the story of the rational parrot. Nothing prepares us for this story – the movement of the text has been straightforwardly argumentative until we suddenly receive an anecdote that takes up its own section, concerning a parrot who, according to a high and credible source, apparently spoke with understanding. The purpose of the rational parrot is, in a way, to parody – parroty – Descartes’ vision of the rational difference. Locke hopes to loosen our sense of rationality as the key to personal identity, because he wants something that loops through the conscious and the unconscious. He does not want his waking Socrates to be different from his sleeping Socrates. He faces this problem in a different spirit than Chuang Tzu:

“Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.”
Instead of the transformation of things, Locke is looking for the thread upon which things can be transformed. And yet, like Chuang Tzu and the butterfly, as he does so, he keeps pressing against an infinite regress -  not of butterflies and humans, but within his notion of the human:
“…to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for; -- which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls self: -- it not being considered, in this case, whether the same self be continued in the same or divers substances.” 
The game is afoot with the phrase: “it is impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive…” Because that second order perception must, then, be perceived by a third order one, and so on. How long does this infinite series of acts last? How long does Chuang Tzu dream he is a butterfly? It seems, here, that personal identity is threatening our hard won sense of the identity of the body, in as much as the person in the body-person act seems to exist in a time that is not coordinate with the “same time, same place” time of the body – it seems, rather, to exist infinitely and instantly at the same time.
But Locke does not choose to pursue these complications. Rather, he chooses to face the Transformation of Things with a different problem: that of the interruptions of forgetting and sleep. Sleep of course poses some problems for Locke’s notion of consciousness: do we perceive we are asleep when we are asleep? And do we perceive that we perceive it? Certainly we build around our sleep, we fall asleep, we say, I was asleep. But Locke approaches the interruption of consciousness from a different angle than sleep – a more difficult state to claim: that of forgetting. We forget. We don’t, here, even know that we forgot. Until we are reminded, somehow. Unlike sleep, forgetting has less certain rituals associated with it.  Locke wants to circumscribe the question posed by forgetting to personal identity to one having to do with identifying the person with substance, or identifying the person with consciousness. The latter is Locke’s choice. This is how he deals with the problems it poses:
“But it is further inquired, whether it be the same identical substance. This few would think they had reason to doubt of, if these perceptions, with their consciousness, always remained present in the mind, whereby the same thinking thing would be always consciously present, and, as would be thought, evidently the same to itself. But that which seems to make the difficulty is this, that this consciousness being interrupted always by forgetfulness, there being no moment of our lives wherein we have the whole train of all our past actions before our eyes in one view, but even the best memories losing the sight of one part whilst they are viewing another; and we sometimes, and that the greatest part of our lives, not reflecting on our past selves, being intent on our present thoughts, and in sound sleep having no thoughts at all, or at least none with that consciousness which remarks our waking thoughts, -- I say, in all these cases, our consciousness being interrupted, and we losing the sight of our past selves, doubts are raised whether we are the same thinking thing, i.e., the same substance or no.”
That we are always forgetting intrudes a startling psychological fact on the human scene: what are we always forgetting? We are always forgetting most things. The perception of our perception of perception; the knowing of the knowing of our knowing; the past; where the ball rolled under the sofa when we were three; being three; being fifteen; yesterday; what happened half an hour ago. Yet this list of what we are forgetting makes sense only if we are forgetting it. We, in a sense, own this forgetting. It is a fact of our consciousness. What is important to Locke is that the question of whether we are of the same substance is not pertinent to the matter of that thread which winds through our repeated, our perpetual disappearing acts:

“The question being what makes the same person; and not whether it be the same identical substance, which always thinks in the same person, which, in this case, matters not at all: different substances, by the same consciousness (where they do partake in it) being united into one person, as well as different bodies by the same life are united into one animal, whose identity is preserved in that change of substances by the unity of one continued life. For, it being the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself, personal identity depends on that only, whether it be annexed solely to one individual substance, or can be continued in a succession of several substances.”