Sartre is a Psychoanalytical Symptom

When I first read Sartre, it was like I had been an existentialist all my life without knowing it. He described the feeling, not just the reasoning, behind philosophy. Quite honestly, I have a very strong, natural inclination to dissent and whenever I feel as though I am on the conservative side of a debate, I get anxious. That is how I usually felt when trying to defend German idealism in the face of what felt like not only towering truth (ironic) but a superior position of dissention in the works of Sartre. There was a reason, however, or more of a feeling of an unfinished thought, that prevented me from becoming an existentialist outright. I found the words in the work of Slavoj Zizek, a contemporary philosopher who work aims at the revitalization of Marxist politics with an infusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a means of returning to modernism in the face of the postmodern order, existing in “postindustrial” or “postmodern” capitalism, our modern “risk society”. The similarities in Sartre’s dismantlement of universal meaning and Zizek’s analysis of our abandonment of modernity are astounding and I finally find my answer to Sartre’s existentialism.

First, there is the rather uncanny parallel between Sartre’s literary descriptions of the Nausea and Lacan’s Real in psychoanalysis. The Nausea, as described in the novel, is where the protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, experiences a distinct anxiety where he feels that objects and situations around him directly inhibit his ability to define himself.
His perception of these object and situations and ideas becomes one of sheer repulsion, where he is nauseated by some horrifyingly unknowable aspect of these objects. He describes this as he stares at a cherry tree, which I think symbolizes for Sartre the entrenched order of arbitrary meaning. The tree, as he examines it, becomes composed of all manner of vile and conventionally-recognized-as-putrid substances. He describes it with such utter and vehement repugnance it begins to go beyond description, despite Sartre’s wonderful exemplification of his literary talent when he draws this description out. The nature of this horror becomes clearly definable as it being unknowable. There are three distinct reasons why the Nausea is a perfect example of the Lacanian theory of the Real. The first is that Sartre expresses Nausea to be our universal reaction to a similar affliction of arbitrary meaning. Lacan of course describes the Real as a universal participant in our psyche in which our mind constantly grapples with our inability to relate with everything around us. For example, Lacan says that we can never know the chair as anything other than “the chair”. We will never be able to comprehend any real qualities or ever have a complete knowledge of every aspect of the chair. We can only interact with its Symbolic existence. We, the signifier, can never know the signified. This is the traumatic aspect of the Lacanian Real. If we were to describe the Real, as Zizek does in one of his many entertaining metaphors, it would be a pulsating, horrific mass that seeps. The Nausea can now be seen to consciously describe our horror of having no relationship to the Real.

Now, Sartre’s remedy for this common symptom was to recognize that there is no meaning, there is no God, and there is no Humanity. Zizek has a term for this “being of meaning”. He calls it the Big Other. The Big Other, or the Master Signifier, is the thing that overall determines the “symbolic order”. For example, the Big Other of the Medieval Ages was God. All things we related to in terms of God. Leaders were legitimized by God, both calamity and miracle was attributed to God, all art and culture was defined by God, and our interactions with all objects were through God. The tree is beautiful; it is a creation of God (yes, the relationship is better described by a semicolon than ‘because’). Sartre contended that we must do away with this Big Other, it has been our oppressor. Zizek, however, has much to say about this absence of meaning. It all begins with his critique of the modern world. We live, he says, not in a modern world but a world of postmodern capitalism. The May 1968 rebellion has been co-opted and we are now entering the “third spirit of capitalism (1)”. The free market of Marx’s era has been replaced. Capitalism is no longer a force of hierarchalizing authority. It is now a force of enabling fluidity. We are encouraged to have fluid identities and encouraged to search for our Self and do what we please in a societal perusal of what becomes jouissance (literally, orgasmic pleasure, pleasurable experience). Our postmodern identity is a perfect model for a consumer. We are encouraged to make “free choices” about what consumer items to buy and what activities to participate in and what clothes to wear, what music to hear. But that is because of the good old Marxist understanding of “commodity fetishizism”, where we attribute fantastic qualities to the products. (Aside, it is amazing the prevalence of Marx’s forecast those many years ago, especially before the idea of advertisement had really been explored). We are convinced that buying Abercrombie and Fitch clothing will turn us into the unbearably sexy image on their paper bags. We are convinced that the kind of music you listen to can describe you, whether you are “gangsta” or “indy”. But it has been taken to the next level as well. Fifty years ago, men bought cologne so as to express their masculinity. Now young men bathe is Axe body spray because that is how a man smells. Not to express themselves, the product is now what describes “masculine” thus the very concept of this idea is what is now owned. Thus is the same with concept of “cool”, you listen to “cool” music, not to express how cool you are, but to be, by definition “cool”. There is, now a ready made list of items and such to consume to define your identity as you please, which constantly growsm constantly in a state of becoming. But of course, this is another subject altogether and I digress.

Zizek goes on to describe another idea, called the “Other of the Other”. Zizek theory is that capitalism has done away with the Big Other. We live in a world without inherent meaning, without Symbolic efficiency, without any relationship to the Real. It is very much in the interest of capitalism to keep us one hundred percent unsure of our identity and our relationship to the Real so that our now “care of the self” or our search for our self simply becomes one enormous, unending, continuously changing and fluid shopping spree. We live IN A WORLD WITHOUT MEANING. This is where the Other of the Other comes in. Tony Myers in Slavoj Zizek (London: Routledge, 2003) composes it well.

“Zizek talks about a belief in an Other of the Other, in someone or something who is really pulling the strings of society and organizing everything, as one of the signs of paranoia. Needless to say that it is commonplace to argue that the dominant pathology today is paranoia: countless books and films [and Tea Parties] refer to some organization which covertly controls governments, news, markets and academia. Zizek proposes that the cause of this paranoia can be located in a reaction to the demise of the big Other:
‘When faced with such a paranoid construction, we must not forget Freud's warning and mistake it for the "illness" itself: the paranoid construction is, on the contrary, an attempt to heal ourselves, to pull ourselves out of the real "illness", the "end of the world", the breakdown of the symbolic universe, by means of this substitute formation.’ Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture)”

Zizek says we need the Big Other, we need meaning in our lives. This is why we must return to modernists like T.S. Eliot who despair at a world where we live in a meaningless “wasteland.” This is a greater subject as well but it may suffice to say that our lack of meaning, our lack of an Other, is what causes us to have Nausea, it was causes us to despair and become unsecure. This is why it is in the best interest of postmodern capitalism for us to become postmodern subjects. I jump ahead a little so we’ll come back to this.

Finally, the unifying similarity that shows the Nausea to be a symptom of lack of meaning rather than a symptom of false meaning is the similarity between “existential dread” and the psychoanalytical idea of jouisannce. Existential dread is a term coined by Sartre to describe the feeling people have when they realize that there is no meaning, that there is no Big Other. The dread is because we cannot cope with the complete freedom, the complete responsibility for everything we do. Jouisannce is a term that is predicated of the Freudian ideal of the “pleasure principle” and the “death drive”. The pleasure principle is the fact that humans prefer pleasure over pain and seek pleasure and avoid pain. This is counteracted by the “reality principle” where over time the brain begins to realize that pain must be born sometimes when necessary. Thus, the pleasure principle has a limit on it. But, the subject always attempts to transgress this limit, “go beyond the pleasure principle.” This, however, results in pain since the amount of pleasure a subject can endure is limited. Beyond pleasure is pain, and the subject finds pleasure in this pain. Lacan calls this painful pleasure jouissance because jousissance is suffering. The term expresses the paradoxical satisfaction the subject derives from his symptom or the suffering he derives from his own satisfaction. Couple this with Zizek understanding of postmodern capitalism:

“For Zizek, lacking the prohibitions of the big Other, in these conditions, the subject's inherent reflexivity manifests itself in attachments to forms of subjection, paranoia and narcissism (Tony Myers in Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003),”

and you begin to see the connection. The lack of a Big Other, leaves us as subjects COMPLETLEY free. Postmodernism grasps this, but their answer to the problem is wrong. Again Zizek:

“In order to ameliorate these pathologies, Zizek proposes the need for a political act or revolution - one that will alter the conditions of possibility of postmodernity (which he identifies as capitalism) and so give birth to a new type of Symbolic Order in which a new breed of subject can exist. (Tony Myers in Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003)”

Existential dread then seems to describe a symptom of freedom without meaning, freedom without relation to reality. We are free, yes, but we are free in the sense that we are falling through space, in no direction with no relation. At that point, hedonism seems like a perfectly fine idea. Wearing Nike clothes produced in an African sweat shop is fine because you are free without meaning, you are in space, the child means nothing to you. This freedom leaves us without the ethical conviction that “Nazis are bad”. The fact that the African child worked for twelve hours that day and his hands have been bloodied for the 25 cents he received means nothing, because there is no meaning. Jouissance comes back into the picture because what we do in postmodern capitalism is we embrace our meaningless freedom because we find satisfaction our symptom. We find pleasure in this new painful meaninglessness. We then hold on to our symptom because it is all we have left, thus transferring to “fetishism”. Like when a family member dies, we may hold on to a piece of cloth because within the cloth, the person lives on. This applies in a macro sense as well: our collective paranoia, narcissism, and I would contend to add materialism and consumerism to the list. This is your freedom: Starbucks or Dunken Donuts because beyond the taste nothing really matters.

Sartre is still a philosopher that I will cherish. His literary talent and his role as a dissident intellectual place him far beyond most other philosophers. As I have said, I believe the role of the intellectual is to BE what he believes, like Gandhi and to much extent Sartre. But I have come to realize that meaning is all we have. Purpose is all we have. And that is what postmodernism is trying to take from us. Purpose. (Matrix 2?) All of the symptoms Sartre describes are true, that is why I love his work. I feel what he describes often and I know others do as well. But what I feel when I begin to think about the world and who I am and WHY I am, I find that the source of my consternation is how thinks don’t link up, how things don’t relate. How things seem meaningless. Sartre and Zizek have lead me to discover something. I would rather die for revolution, for humanity, than live in any New York City penthouse with all material desires fulfilled as a postmodern subject, a consumer. Because otherwise, we are merely floating in space.

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What a tangled WWW we thread...

It is all so simple....Image via Wikipedia

Isolated individuals acting as networking hive of Facebooks and cell phones, spinning webs of gossamer information and desolated reality amongst thousands of fractions of humans as zeros and ones surround them.

You amputated human with binary conversations of two dimensional depth with equal perspective, as you swim through information paying as much attention to each as you do each of the falling raindrops on a rainy day.

Words, words, words as they flow back and forth, messages, information, data, you process and spit back are you really human? What makes interaction human, by God, it is eye contact, the gift of gab is as useful as one finger typing now days, all this nonsense we must speed it up, faster, more productive, get more done, we have so little time on this planet so we get things done as we waste it on the Internet. See my Face, ones and zeros, you can read me like a book, this is my identity, a Facebook.

Why stop with instant messaging what about future messaging, anticipatory responses, written in a vowel-less alphabet of pure efficient nonsense as you transfer ready-made greetings and messages and fulfill what is now the motions of a conversation, all within a second, a moment, an infinitesimal fraction of your time so that you may do other things, important things, many things and do them faster and take less time with each person so that you may speak to more people, more accounts, I have A MILLION FACEBOOK FRIENDS! NOW LET ME TELL THEM HOW HAPPY I AM!!! But pause to play the flash game that is advertising masculine scents in a bottle...

Is this what capitalism thinks a “community” is? Watch as your personal interactions become commodities...

Viva La Revolucion

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We are now living in postmodern capitalism, a world of fake and constant free choice, the choice between Wal-Mart and Target, Starbucks or Dukin' Donuts. It is a hedonistic world of perpetual desire, a world of multi-lateral, multi-national, multi-cultural exploitation.

A world where exploitation has been almost entirely exported to Third World countries while we live in middle-class here. While antagonisms continue to fester here, we have seen what the new breed of capitalism will be. The bailout was only one example of how capitalism will have to reinvent socialism in order to survive. Big corporations do not want a free-market, they want a government that minimizes their investment and venture risk, a government that is focused on protecting the property of the few. Corporations are the new face of muli-cultural perspective, globalization the harbinger of the free-movement of property and the enslavement of people.

The corporations of this country fear the fundamentalist right-wing, though they have been their tools for all these years. That is why the face of the bailout was that of the Democratic Party, those poor, boring scapegoats on which the basic function of our society now relies. If fundamentalists were to have their way, how would companies secure bailouts should their risky investment schemes fail, how would they maintain the steady, cheap labor of illegal immigrants, how would they avoid the protectionism of global trade?

They have thus turned to the liberals of this country, the sorry excuse for a left wing-representation. The liberals, as opposed to left-wingers, have become the new pillar upon which global capitalism stands. Through self-described intellectualism, liberals have cynically recognized that a truly egalitarian society is impossible and so they pay lip service to these ideals as they allow for “necessary exceptions” and bailouts to occur. This new constituency has given rise bullshit terms like “fair trade coffee beans” and biodegradable smoothie cups. Starbucks, the new liberal commercial spin still participates is the most brutal anti-union action of any American country and companies like Wal-Mart exploit the welfare-to-work programs of this country to secure indentured slaves to do subsidized work. No, we don’t live in a purely and clearly fascist society. We live in the new bastard child of neo-liberal socialism.

Socialism has been co-opted, we must examine the root of the problem, which is the coercion of labor by holding our survival as individuals for ransom and the idea of private property. We must not simply abandon capitalism and socialism, but begin the war of symbolic violence against property while practicing non-violence towards humans. Yes, blow up corporate art, deface corporate property, and trespass on corporate land. Do not enact your symbolic violence of the private property of the ones around you. Demonstrate the illusion of the private to them by destroying the belongings of corporations, entities of pure property and no humanity. This will radically reverse the trend of the modern world which will sacrifice humanity for the sake of property.

The revolution will be psychological. We must refuse to be victims of the psychological “disavowal”, where we accept these problems as the truth as a means of saying “That is enough now let me live my life.” We must not use the disavowal to rhetorically recognize the structural violence of this system as a means of justifying our passive existence in a consumerist life. We must force ourselves to recognize the harsh Real, the reality of the death and suffering that we are complicit with. We must see that we are murderers and feel this guilt, to launch us into action. We must firmly recognize our Symbolic relationship with this Real violence, so as to stand firm in the face of the usurpation capitalism (like the manufacture of Che Guevara t-shirts by Banana Republic), and use this new strength to crush the Imaginary of the American Dream.

This is a call to the left. Wake up. The time has come to radicalize, to embrace and reclaim the roots of our country, the revolutionary traditions that are the blessing of democracy. We must reclaim our history, reclaim the Constitution and radically transform it. We must write a new Declaration of Independence. Yes, most of the Founding Fathers were rich land owners, bent on protecting their own property. Remember the ideas. When ask what he thought of Western Civilization, Gandhi replied “I think it’s a good idea”. Liberals/democrats/independents, you are fast becoming the new tools of global capitalism, even as you point and make fun at FOX news and the Tea Party. Look to them with fear, they are the Black Shirts, Stormtroopers. It took only two years for Hitler to take power. We face two futures: reactionary revolution and fascism, or the complete victory of neo-liberal capitalism and fascism. Let us envision another. Do not be content with buying your coffee from companies that practice exploitation Lite, to vote for vague campaign promises of “hope” and rhetorical liberal ideals like “change”. Fight for revolution, the only change worthy of humanity. The left wing of the country must spite the new-emerging Red Scare of Glenn Beck and proudly name themselves radicals, not liberals. Don’t fear the name “communist”. Wear it with pride, in the face of propaganda. Do not be afraid to begin from the beginning, as Lenin wrote in On Climbing a High Mountain, follow no dogmatic road. But do not be afraid of “conformity”. Anti-conformity is not valuable in itself, it is infinitely regressive and equally as blind as conformity. It is a vital tool against injustice and must be used as such. This is a call to the liberals of this country to stop, set down their double whipped whappachino moacha with peppermint, put down Newsweek and think. Are you really standing up for what you believe in?

It will not be a mission of moral relativity but a time to finally take the ethical stance of “No, I will not live at the cost of human suffering, imperialism in the Middle East, dictatorships in Latin America, utter enslavement in Africa, and the death of industrial workers in Virginia and the Gulf of Mexico etc. No, I will not live at the cost of future generations as the world in which I live is sucked bare of all natural beauty and resource. No, I will not be a person who would rather ask the question of ‘What do I want?’ than ‘What is right?’ No, and I will not do so with a passive statement of my opinion. I will act. ” We must refuse to be affected by the psychological disavowal of the harsh Real, so as to live a more peaceful life, and recognize the fact that we are all murderers for the lives that we live. The revolution begins in you.

New Populist Focus for Radicals

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When George Bush Jr. won the presidency, a lot of really intelligent people looked around and asked what the hell the people of this country were thinking? They wondered if their country was truly full of stupid people, truly full of ignorant people. They sneered at the sentiment expressed by the Republican voter; "He seems like a nice guy, or someone I would like to have a beer with." A lot of my contemporaries were compelled to make some of the same statements of contempt for this feeling. I believe that this generalization is wrong, elitist, ultimately counter-productive, and that there is a need for a refocusing of left-wing populism.

The first is involved in the rather pathetic ability of the left-wing, whose ideology would most behoove the working class, to mobilize populism in their favor. There is some groundbreaking political analysis being done by a young man in California, Michael Shellenburg (as I read in Sun Magazine), who has the opinion that the reason a man like John Kerry, an intellectual and a war-veteran, could not win against a man like George Bush Jr. was that people felt (key word there) that Kerry, were the to sit beside him in a bar, would judge them on their intelligence, while Bush would judge them on their values. I think this holds enormous and powerful truth. Even though I think Democrats and Republicans are cut from the same cloth and represent the same fascist ideology of capitalism, even though I think that these two parties are different only in words not in actions, I see a new direction for Lefties in this new decade.

If perhaps, we could develop a movement that perhaps applied to working class people rather than intellectuals alone, would have more working communists and a lot less "liberal communist" or "communist CEO's" like Bill Gates. Contrary to current popular belief, communism is an ideology that maintains a majority of the homey-values of the inherent working class of America. In fact, it would maintain these values with high priority and with action, rather than with the lip-service that is payed by our current political system. Imagine a government that does focus on community, does give self-determinative powers to individuals, expands liberty, and values hard work and strong ethics for their own sake.

I have been noticing a lot of rather common patterns in our lexicon of communal and common knowledge. We hear it referred to as "common sense" as a means of contrasting with high-level intellectual discourses commonly displayed by most left-wing representatives. There is a enormous amount of powerful truths that have been left untouched by the liberals of the Democratic party and even the more egalitarian left-wing, who have turn their nose up at such vulgar excuses for reason and policy (I use the word vulgar because its Latin root literally means common people as it refers to Vulgar Latin of the common folk). Their reasons, ironically, have been rather reactionary, a capitulation to the right-wing who has ,rather unopposed, swept in an placed themselves as the representative of the down-to-earth-salt-of-the-land-hard-working-folks, even though i out of a hundred of them come from working class backgrounds and they routinely represent large business interest rather than working class interest. They have gotten very good at choosing hot-spot populist topics and then going against the stream of their ideology to convince the working class that they are on their side, ie. immigration and gun-laws or Constitutional Rights (this is so long as they can maitian a right-wing fundamentalist Supreme Court that will happily reinterpret the Constitution to give citizen rights to Corpoations that are in reality merely property entities).

Communism above all other ideologies aligns itself with common people because it means to maintain individual liberties in the face of tyrannical Capital, as it is by nature, it means to establish strong locality and community to nourish and protect that individual, it means to extend all of the fundamental thing included in the Bill of Rights and more importantly the ideas expounded (and then forgotten) within the Declaration of Independence, it means to raise the standard of living for people in general through the more efficient use of resources, labor, service, and the priority to deal with every humans' need, and finally it means to compensate every individual justly for the hard labor they do for the nation. Are these not all pillars of populist sentiment?

Communism means to protect the values of this nation. It means to actually realize the American Dream as an ideal rather than a vague and empty fantasy, it means to value hard work and personal ethics in each individual, it means to help the sick and feed the poor, it means to help the children learn to be healthy and more importantly happy humans (not just how to be adults...), it aims to allow the private practice of Church with the invasion of the public, it means to protect the individual liberties of the people like free speech, free thought, free press, free expression, and free life, it means to defend family, in contrast to the way that Capital has destroyed them and rebuilt them in a twisted and exploitable fashion, and finally it means to protect working class people, who only wish to live lives in peace and in the pursuit of happiness.

I think a new era of left-wing populism is possible. I think it will begin when the left wing reclaims the inherently Radical ideas that are responsible for this nation's founding. It can be very persuasively argued that the Constitution was written merely to protect the property rights of the New ownership class of this country, of white men and rich men, and it has been done so by the Left for ages. While we can recognize this and rejects this founding factor, we must also recognize that the people of this country are just like any other and have root in nationalism. The movement will not be a fascist one, built upon flag waving and anthem singing, it will be a people's movement focused on making life more livable in this country. And there are some ideas, especially in the Declaration of Independence, that can help take us there. We merely have to reclaim the historical precedence for egalitarianism, revolution, freedom, equality and justice for all that is within this nations founding. We need to act in a manner that actively rejects the negative factors of our founding and rather than rejecting the entirety of our founding, we need to reclaim it and make it our own again. (A great expansion on this, put in nice, big intellectual words for your convenience can be found in Slavoj Zizek's new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce somewhere near pages 130-140.)

Unnamed by W.H. Auden

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Auden: A poet for our times


I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.