I'm going to write my paper here... live, as it were. At least the germ. I need somehow to dovetail my emotional life with my academic, because the energy I seem to have for the former I need for the latter. My life needs to be my work, otherwise this is not going to work.
What is the value of disembodied communication for counteracting desire?
What is revealed in pain?
The Facebook phenomenon has something powerful in it. Through chat, online games, messages (private and public), link and media posting I can spend time with my family, friends and acquaintances regardless of our physical circumstances. My friend could be in Korea or confined by labor of one kind or another, and we can still communicate in real time. I can play scrabble with someone I haven't ever seen physically, and we can develop a relationship without ever reading each other's bodies. Video is possible beyond words, but touch is not. It is so spectoccentric that nearly every other sense is relegated to an ancillary function. Nonetheless, relationships do form, and existing ones change.
Even more than Pia's ball, the internet is not a passive object. It exists beyond me, as something to be picked up or put down, but I am shaped by my interaction with visual communication technology. The disembodied interaction of "social networking" pushes me in the direction of disembodiment: a visual and verbal conceptualization of my experience, even as it happens.This is often what detractors ridicule. When something happens to me, I begin to think of how I will reflect the experience in my status update, for example. Ridiculous as it may seem, I think immediately of my community -- spread far and wide -- and how they will view it. How I will disguise it from the uninitiated; how I will gild my feelings, justifying them to myself and others; how I will be reflected in the eyes I intend as my audience. My mind works hard on these considerations, despite whatever nominal efforts I might expend for the sake of nonchalance. Perhaps I am unique in this, in which case this is an exposition of a curious individual psychology. But somehow I think not. Somehow I think this is an observable phenomenon in others' experience as well. I can only rely on those others for corroboration, I make no claims of universality.
So to the pressing question. It has become obvious to me through various researches, professional as well as personal, that desire is the strong force of human psychology. What is desire? That force of wanting that overwhelms whatever rational or material factors seem relevant to the dispassionate observer. That wanting that makes me act, regardless of my best judgment, my strength of conviction or the knowing counsel of my peers. I will stop short of saying "against my will," because it seems in fact to be the case that my will is transformed in desire and bends like solder toward that object or objective that simultaneously takes up my entire field of vision. I have observed in myself the capacity to read hundred of pages, turning each one with care, and yet to close the book with no sense of what I have just "read". That is only one mundane example, I could think of countless others.
Perhaps all that this indicates is a weak will. That has crossed my mind more than once. I have taken steps and enacted strategies to check myself, and I'm sure that will only grow easier with age and maturity. Nonetheless, I am convinced that the power of this phenomenon certainly warrants at least a passing glance. It is obvious, at least to me, that if I were able to harness this power into those objectives that my dispassionate observers would approve of, I could spend a great deal more of my time achieving those ambitions -- without the strife and self-flagellation --that I have already undertaken at some considerable cost to myself and others.
Such is the aim of sublimation: To bend desire to the accomplishment of socially acceptable aims. Very often the exemplars of sublimation are in fact some of the leading artists and intellects of history. They are held up as accomplishing world historical events precisely because they had the passion of conviction. Luther, Leonardo, Proust, Ghandi... But I often say to myself, the biographies of these men are so often tragic. For all their power and world historicalness, they were miserable human beings. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche for example, these are not lives that I would want to lead, for all their genius and production. I have the feeling that they didn't see the choice, they didn't sign up for the trade off, somehow it all just happened to them and they could not do otherwise. However much it tortured them, however much they gave up in the gnashing process of their lives, they produced these works that exist now as what Serres wants to call quasi-technological subjects: books. Books that change lives and people. Books that have lives entirely dedicated to them. Books that create cultures, even as they are reproduced, sit on shelves, burn and soak like any other paper.
So what is it about sublimation that is still such a radical compromise? I can assume only one thing: That desire is radically insatiable. Now we're caught up with Lacan. Sublimation can make us more productive and socially acceptable, even world historical, but it can't make us happy. Or maybe happiness is just quieter. If I were happy maybe I would just busily pretty up my corner of the world and no one would ever know my name and all that ambition would seem like a silly dream. Maybe that's the ideal that never comes to sit on the couch. That's possible, but it's not the topic at hand.
Isn't there something in common here, between these exemplary books, these cultural productions and this phenomenon of social networking? Disembodied artifacts, ensouled somehow. It is not even the case that they are powerful in the sense of some source. It's as easy to pick up Untimely Meditations, read it and remain unmoved as it is to sign on to Facebook, create a profile and remain disinterested in its possibilities. These are not irresistible subjectivities, they do not insist upon themselves precisely because they are in a very real sense inert without some living person's passion for them. It seems so simple at times: we are shaped by our environment, these are objects in our environment. I might want to call them technological quasi-subjects, but that only changes the orientation of my thinking.
I have to stop there, I'm tired and it's 2am. To be continued...
February 15th:
This is the paper that came out of this. I just discovered Academia.edu, all you paper writing people should get on it. I want to read all these papers I'm always hearing about. Just because we can't get published doesn't mean we can't be read, for better or worse.
