The simplicity inherent in everyday life is so paradoxically sophisticated that it is enough to inspire insanity. Think of the word ‘desire’, a very simple word, derived from Latin and French; it means “to yearn or to long for”. This word is easy to spell, easy to understand and very fool-proof in its use. However, this is only a deception, a mere facade that hides the gravity that this word holds in an individual’s way of life. Desire is the catalyst to almost any and every action by an individual, it goes without saying that an action is determined by a desire. However, in order to fully understand the gravity of desire we must first undertake the quest of meditating on the causes of desire, if there are any.
To desire something, first you must lack it. In order to want or need something, the necessity or the desire must be there. The necessity is always inspired by a division or a feeling of incompleteness; you must first have a lack in order to have the desire for the fulfillment of that lack. Say you’re moving from A to C via the road B. A is the lack of something, C is the fulfillment of that lack, and B is the desire for the fulfillment of that lack. In order to get from A to C via B, you must have A, it is a necessity for the lack to exist if you are to have the desire to fulfill that lack.
Let’s consider A for a second, the lack of something in an individual. To lack something is to feel incomplete; it is to be in parts and to desire to become whole by either bringing those parts together or finding a part that is missing. Now incompleteness is usually felt in the body or the ego. The ego desires something and we give in to that desire, same with the body. We feed a void created either physically or mentally. We shall call the ego and body, desiring machines. These desiring machines both have a certain rank; one of them is more important and more real than the other. The Body as a desiring machine when kept under control has the importance of keeping you alive and able to get from A to B. So a moderated bodily desire is harmless.
The ego desiring machine however is faulty. First and foremost what I mean by the ego is your perception of yourself, you’re view of who you are; your character. These perceptions of your personality arise from experiences. Experiences are created by certain choices an individual made in the past which lead to an outcome that was worthy of remembrance. First you need to remember who you are, which is created by what you did. Memory is mandatory for the creation of an ego. You did things a certain way in the past on account of habit and you saw patterns in this way of behaving. These patterns constitute the build up of your character, i.e. I am a person that sleeps late and wakes up early, I am lazy, I am smart etc. So you could say having a personality is like creating a theory. Most theories are created by observations about certain patterns happening a certain way in the past and making the assumption that these patterns will continue to happen the same way in the future. If theories are based on assumption of the relativity of past to future and the same causes are also the causes of the personality, then the personality likewise must be based on assumption of the relativity of past and future. Like causes create like effects. The ego thus is nothing more than a fabrication that is only able to stand erect on account of probability rather than certainty. To be more blunt, the personality is negligible and fictitious; you can be whatever and whoever you desire, because who you are now is nothing more than what you created.
If the personality is based on an assumption its existence is only a probability and not a certainty. If its existence is a probability and not a certainty then the personality has no objective or constant existence. The word existence is used rather vaguely so I will try to explain what I mean by existence. Existence here is viewed as the ability to be recognized as being the way it is without the presence of doubt, in other words an indubitable presentation of a particular phenomenon or object. So if you saw the ego and said yes that is the ego and it can’t be anything else, then the ego has a constant or objective existence. Existence thus is an indubitable state of being. In this little text there will two types of existence referred to, imaginative existence and objective (constant) existence. Imaginative existence is a chimera-like state of being of a particular object, in other words a particular creation with parts that have objective reality, as in the case of a Unicorn. A Unicorn is only real in the imagination; it has imaginative existence and consensus, not objective existence. This is because the Unicorn has the body of a horse and the horn of a rhinoceros, its parts exist as constant but the Unicorn doesn’t. The other type of existence is objective existence, this is the state of being of objects independent of the mind in that whether the mind was involved or not, these objects would still continue to be. For example, I know that my computer exists independently of my thought of it, when I close my eyes it will remain there and when I open them it won’t disappear, same with people and other objects outside the mind. I won’t go into detail as to the philosophical problems with the mind/body relationship or the implications of solipsism; I’ll leave those long and compact arguments for another time.
Now the personality has distinct imaginative existence mixed with the probability as opposed to certainty of the future to continue as it has done for the past several or more years (depending on your memory of yourself). In other words the personality is nothing more than a creation or a chimera, and also a bad one at that. If the personality is merely a creation, and the desires that you hold so dearly, and so solemnly, the ones you aspire towards constantly are nothing more than a creation of an unstable phenomenon, then you are in deep shit.
Picture this; you create a machine to control you. This machine is faulty but it continues to control you and creates desires out of its malfunctioning. Your life becomes miserable, a drag and above all you have an infinitely deep hole that you are unable to fill on account of the endless faulty desires that arise from this malfunctioning machine. You can’t cope with anything because a faulty solution maker will make faulty solutions.
Some machines are so sophisticated that they appear to give excellent solutions, in the form of desires, to every problem that arises, and after much anguish they do. The desires are so seductive that you are unable to cope with the gravity of their persuasiveness; you instantly stop and fall into a hypnotic state. You get a thought that comes from this machine which is so powerful that you are lost in it, you become identified with that one particular thought and now it has captured you with its sophistication — you think you have solved the problem. Once the desire has been fulfilled, something else goes wrong and yet again after much anguish another desire equally strong is created for the solution of the new problem that in turn captivates you, and you continue like this for eternity. It is a painfully persistent cycle of misery mixed with desires, with more misery, with more desires, etc. until you stop and realize that, “shit it’s broken, I broke it and now it is fucking me up”.
To find that your desire-producing machine is broken is like finding a needle in a haystack. For some people it takes many lifetimes — if you are comfortable with the idea of reincarnation. It is difficult to spot on account of your creating it and then forgetting that you did. After a while you begin to accept your creation as being reality, as it is the only thing you have known since you could remember. A person who creates delusion and forgets that he created it, after a while begins to accept the delusion as reality.
The beauty is that it is necessary for us to create these delusions. Many people have lost their minds in the search for the absolute. The mind would rather you were in utter delusion and functioning well enough to get from A to B, rather than going bonkers. So the ego is handy, it does serve a purpose, the purpose of keeping you alive. However, we’ve come to a stage in our human evolution that it is no longer necessary to try and remain alive, life has become easier and easier when it comes to survival. Now we face a new problem, the problem of infinite dissatisfaction.
The problem of infinite dissatisfaction is inspired by the never ending faulty desires of the self-created personality. Now we are in a state of misery; we can never be blissful. The irony of it all is that this misery will be completely and utterly oblivious to you unless, somehow and by accident, that same broken machine accidentally creates the desire in you for the escape of this vicious cycle. The paradox is that we are counting on the wrong machine to create the right answer. One might say that it is a beautifully scripted play, a drama beyond any Euripides or Sophocles play.
Our only means of escape from the cycle is in the eternal cause of the cycle. It is like relying on an extremely compulsive liar to tell the truth. The probability is ridiculous but the phenomenon is exquisite, the beauty is infinite but the wait is excruciating. This, folks, is the paradox of desire. You are trying to escape from an inescapable trap by relying on the thing that put you in there in the first place. This is the elegance of desire; you can’t trust it but you have to in order to be in bliss.
As a final note remember that:
“If you understand all the above on an existential level, then you are already on your way to the absolute. The journey may be difficult, but the destination is better still.”
incognitio
Pages tagged "inescapable" said,
February 10, 2008 at 8:13 am
[...] bookmarks tagged inescapable On the Irony of Desire saved by 2 others punker4mcr bookmarked on 02/10/08 | [...]
Babaloo Reinhardt said,
March 30, 2008 at 3:01 pm
This is interesting. Deleuze also talks about desire and Desiring-machines but not in terms of ‘a lack.’
According to Deleuze:
“Desiring-machines are binary machines, obeying a binary law or set of rules governing associations: one machine is always coupled with another. The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature: “and…” “and then…” This is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast - the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flow.”
For Deleuze desiring-production is the production of production, hence, not defined in negative terms of lacking but in positive terms of producing.
In terms of the ego and the faultiness of the machine Deleuze also has some interesting things to say:
“Producing, a product: a producing/product identity. It is this identity that constitutes a third term [Deleuze always likes to add third, fourth, or more, terms to the frustration of the reader] in the linear series: an enormous undifferentiated object. Everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place - and then the whole process will begin all over again. From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through.”
The codification of the mathematician/scientist (the object), the psychologist (the ego), the theologian (God), the philosopher (Reality), strangles and ‘messes up’ the flow by organizing it. Yet, even this codification is the cipher-ing and siphoning off of partial objects by partial objects, that which is Codifi-ed is still, stopped in its tracks. Instead of “infinite dissatisfaction” being the problem, for Deleuze the problem is that of infinite satisfaction - nothingness. This should not be confused with a simple binary system whereby the one thing cannot be experienced without first experiencing the other, like to experience joy one must have first experienced misery, but rather, misery is itself a flow that joy plugs into and cuts off - misery becomes part of the product of joy.
All of this is summed up in Deleuze’s famous statement “it is better to be a schizophrenic out for a walk in the park than a neurotic lying on an analyst’s couch.”
Also, these terms sound a little abstract yet Deleuze meant them most objectively. That is, the desiring-machine is literally a machine, not figuratively or metaphorically but an actual machine.
“Desire does not express a molar lack within the subject; rather, the molar organization deprives desire of its objective being. Revolutionaries, artists, and seers are content to be objective, merely objective: they know that desire clasps life in its powerfully productive embrace, and reproduces it in a way that is all the more intense because it has few needs.”
Finally, according to Deleuze ‘lack’ is created. Lack creates empty spaces and production cannot be based on a predefined lack, lack ‘infiltrates itself,’ and organizes itself in terms of a pre-existing organization of production.
(I have not proofread this so please overlook any spelling and grammar errors)
incognitio said,
March 30, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Very fascinating. I didn’t want this to be about philosophy, but I’ll reply to it and see where the thinking takes me.
It seems Deleuze had the same thought but from a different and altogether more sophisticated angle. It is true I approach it from the ‘lack’ side, because it is perhaps more common sense and easier to understand. This line however should explain quite a bit about where I am coming from without really having to read the rest:
‘The problem of infinite dissatisfaction is inspired by the never ending faulty desires of the self-created personality.’
For me it is a problem simply because it is infinite, and also in a state of dissatisfaction. Further, the desires are faulty because they come from something broken, by broken I mean not solid or holding, or rather not reliant upon. This is because when I think of a ‘thing’ or a machine so to speak, something that produces, I think of it as stable and able to do its job properly. Any ‘thing’ or machine, that does not produce its function properly is simply broken or faulty. I maintained that desires came from a lack, and so a desire’s job is an aim towards its fulfillment. A desiring machine then, that does not produce desires that eliminate the lack; that desiring machine is, for me, broken.
Now I have shown that this desiring machine (ego) is something self-created or self-imposed and not solid. Thus, you will find that sentence an closing in of the variables into this one ‘thing’ or entity that chooses the rest, called the ’self’, which even chooses itself. So the next question then to arise is where or what is this self that the machine comes from or is created by? (I perhaps should have dealt with this issues at the time of my writing this post, but I do not believe that I was mature enough in my thought back then) In here then we can see a glint of Sartre although I do not adopt his thought, back then I knew little about him. I would contend that it arises from nothing, simply put it arises out of nothingness. The production of my personality, comes from the nothingness that is the choice of my actions. The arbitrariness of where I chose x or y; where x or y are variables without any value, value in the sense of better or worse (even though actual examples are hard to find at our current stage of life, one can still imagine a time in childhood, or before, when one knew not what was right or wrong until mother/father came along, thus x was just as valuable as y: not valuable). It would seem then that I presuppose that which I try to speak about. I presuppose the choice maker, when speaking about the choice made by the choice maker. This is simply because I have no clue who the choice maker is or what it is, because if I did then I would be enlightened and probably wouldn’t feel the need to explore for it; or even write this post.
Anyways, back to your comment I find this line very astounding:
‘Instead of “infinite dissatisfaction” being the problem, for Deleuze the problem is that of infinite satisfaction - nothingness.’
(He is truly a tough thinker to get to grips with, and I have not done enough reading on him to even begin to claim that I know what he is contending; so I might make some mistakes with the questions I ask or comments I make about your comment regarding him. Ignore them, or correct them, if that is the case.)
Even in constant production, which is what I understand about the meaning of infinite satisfaction or the molar organization as he calls it, I find it difficult to understand what the point of reproduction (by the subject) is? Why the artist or revolutionary needs to have a desire to produce something without the need to produce something.
I wonder though, what is meant by satisfaction here, because for me it is difficult to contemplate one extreme without the presupposition of the other. What can we mean by satisfaction without dissatisfaction? Then again, what are we satisfying when speaking of infinite satisfaction? What is before this infinite satisfaction, and can we mean anything by further adding that it is absolutely infinite instead of regressively? It is difficult to grasp this from a positive perspective of production or satisfaction, by eliminating the negative perspective that I try to begin from that is the ‘lack’ or dissatisfaction. I find dissatisfaction irreducible from satisfaction, and vise verse.
I do agree though about the nothingness; because even in the ‘ego’ I spoke about, I tried to show that it sprang out of nothingness, and so the production of the lack (the ego desiring machine), which motivates the desire, is still rooted in the same thing as it is for Deleuze - nothingness. What I mean by production of the lack, is simply the same as saying the production of a desire, because for me all desires presuppose a thing that is desired, and if one has that thing that is desired, then one has no desire for it. This is what I mean by a lack of something. Then you have the anomalies of things such as money, power, fame, etc. that are simply beyond fulfillment, where one can’t have enough of them.
I am working on a new post to further explain my thoughts on this, that will be a little more philosophical and less spiritual or dogmatic - or so I hope; I expect your comments to help in its evaluations =), you’ve been of great help lately man; made me think things through a lot more and that is very important for a thinker. Thank you.
Anyway, I should get my hands on some Deleuze texts when I get the chance, he seems very fascinating. I hope what I wrote made sense, always let me know, it’s still a little new, or rather old to me, so it will take a while to attain very good clarity. So ask me if you feel that I have not explained something properly or feel that I have left something out.
Babaloo Reinhardt said,
May 26, 2008 at 9:22 pm
I am sorry that I haven’t replied for a while but I have been offline for a few months (while feli and I moved places - I am in germany now and able to get online sporadicly).
Anyway, to be sure I do not think that I have done Deleuze credit here and I would suggest reading the ‘anti-Oedipus’ when you get the chance. I most certainly find it confusing and strange, and have, myself, only interpreted some of the bit I think I understand (and, maybe a little superficially). When I spoke about ‘infinite satisfaction’ being a problem for Deleuze I see it as the point at which nothing more is produced. In fact, my use of the word satisfaction was misplaced because ’satisfaction’ and ‘dissatisfaction’ are words already loaded with connotations of a lack. Satisfaction is then the point of stoppedness, dissatisfaction is then a sort of condition for production, a sort of transcendental concept. It does not lack but is simply fat with productivity.
I have to leave it there, running out of minutes.
incognitio said,
May 27, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Everyone in contemporary Philosophy seems to be using Kant’s transcendental analysis. I have just started reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, so I feel a little behind, a little prior to the ‘major’ enlightenment so to speak. With your closer redefinition of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, I can see a way into Deleuze and his thought regarding desire. However, I will not rush, I shall give the anti-Oedipus a try in due time and see what it has to offer, cheers for the suggestion.
I hope you and feli are settled in your new place, and all is going well.
Babaloo Reinhardt said,
May 27, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Why thank you. We are doing fine.
The ‘Critique’ is for sure essential reading, though, I think the only thing one need to know about it (initially) when reading Deleuze is the idea of ‘conditions for.’ That is, Kant is interested in the prior conditions that make experience possible, such as the concept of time and space; these things for Kant are before experience and, in fact, cannot be experienced at all. In other words, if one is to experience things in space one must first have a conception of space; without this there can be no experience of objects in space - and, hence, no experience of objects full-stop.
Kant is Deleuze’s nemesis in many ways, yet, it is this questioning of the conditions for such and such that connect Deleuze and Kant. In the case of desire you are quite correct to state that it would seem to be a lack that is the condition for making desire possible. In fact, I think most philosophers would agree, or have at least defined desire in a similar way. And this is why Deleuze is such a unique thinker; he seems to start with an age old question as if no one had ever even thought about it before.
For ease and comfort I am tempted to say that Deleuze is simply wanting to start from a less negative point of view of the human condition; that is, I would like to say that Deleuze would agree that from a particular perspective desire is based on a lack, but, he finds this a little negative and therefore wishes to conceptualize it differently, in positive terms. However, this is not really the case (although, to a certain degree it is true that Deleuze had something of the affirmative philosopher about him).
To be sure, it is best to remember that deleuze is not an existentialist (this may be obvious but there was some contention about it in the Greenwich Deleuze research group), and therefore he has more freedom (o, the irony) to play with determinism. Sartre would never have been able to define desire in the way Deleuze did because there is a sense of ‘natural’ law about it. The mother and child are in a binary system - a natural binary system, and the coupling of the mouth and breast is a ‘natural’ flow, a flow that desire enables; the flow is then circumstantially cut off by another flow, say, a plastic toy. It is the cut off point that is desire (in a sense).
I haven’t got my copy of the anti-Oedipus with me but there is something in it about an anorexic. If I remember correctly Deleuze says that the anorexic has a faulty desiring mechine, or something like that; the anorexic isn’t sure whether the “mouth is a talking machine, an eating machine, a shitting machine, etc.” Here there is a lack of desire (not desire as a lack); a confusion as to what the mouth-machine is for. Desire produces the flow between binary machines such as the mouth and a plate of food. The key here is that desire produces production, produces a flow, not desire. The desiring machine for Deleuze is simply coupling two continuous flows - natural flows, natural binary machines.
Lack is created, but does not create anything other than empty spaces. Nothing can produce nothing but more empty spaces. It is a little like a bubble that is being squeezed in the middle, the space inside the bubble shifts from here to there but nothing new is produced by it. And even here, the bubble is not produced through itself, one creates the lack by clearing a space in actuality or in a conceptual field, but these spaces are a cutting off of the natural flow.
If it is the case that desire is the condition for production, that is, there would be no production without desire, what is or are the condition or conditions for desire?
Let us try to look at something a little more concrete and try to better understand how Deleuze would reply.
Let us take something simple, such as (and we shall be careful to distinguish between need and desire) I am thirsty. I desire a drink of water from the bottle on my desk. My mouth is a drinking machine and the bottle a water dispensing machine. In traditional terms I feel a lack of water, and so I desire that I fulfil that desire by filling the empty space, the lack of water, with a water-shaped object (this does not have to be a real object, I could be lacking love and then the love shaped hole will be filled by something a little more abstract). It is this lack which compels me to drink. And this lack is what desire is based on and it is desire that produces the action, the movement, or whatever.
Now, how would Deleuze see things - assuming that this cannot be the way he sees it? I think maybe Deleuze’s answer is that there is a natural drive, and, I think, this is where things have been confused.
I have two options, to drink or not to drink (assuming that I do not need to drink) and neither this option or that option has any real value, neither express a lack I simply choose one forcefully. There is a productive drive (which is basically desire) pushing me towards this or that flow - which flow I connect to is neither here nor there (but probably based on custom and habit).
The drives we have are all based on history and society. Deleuze blames capitalism (to a certain extent) for propagating the myth that desire is a lack, because, if desire is conceived as a lack capitalism teaches us to consume; we must consume to fill the void, Nike trainers, Play station 3, the supermodel girlfriend, capitalism tells us that we are lacking all over the place and, as desire is based on a lack, we should consume all those things which we are lacking in order to fill that lack, that empty space that we have been told by Freudian capitalists is eating away at our very souls. This is discontentment, this is dissatisfaction. And that is why Deleuze says that the artist is ‘content’ to be objective, merely objective. The artist does not paint because he is lacking ‘paintings’ or lacking ‘painting’ (to speak even more abstractly) but simply that he has chosen to plug himself into that flow; the artist is driven to paint.
There is, of course, an object that is missing, such as the water, the painting, the food, etc. but these objects are not the foundation for production. These empty objects, that is the lack of this or that, are only relevant on reflection, in an abstract sense. Deleuze is trying to escape idealism and return to objective being.
Now, I see the problem, do we desire to return to objective being because we lack it? No, we are driven towards it. This could be simply because we have read A-O. And this leads me on to Deleuze’s book called ‘the Fold’ about Leibniz. It deals with the problem of the self being like a pendulum going from this option to that and all things are changeable, until the subject is inclined towards a particular option that it folds itself into.
I will not go into this now, I have run out of steam. This probably hasn’t helped, I have probably just reiterated what I said before.
incognitio said,
May 28, 2008 at 9:39 pm
No, it has helped me understand him much better, and I do see some presuppositions that I brought when speaking about desire. I also see some changes I can make with his help.
However, there’s a lot that I wouldn’t agree with him about. His affirmation, if I am right, has become a negation of something else, simply society and capitalism, and I really hesitate to take this down that road, simply because I am not invested in it in our current discussion. His system can definitely work in its own terms, but so can an antithesis of his system where desire is a lack, if we better define lack.
I am going to steer this away from production for a bit and just deal with desire and this notion of the lack; make that my starting point. I think I wrongly, hurriedly and prematurely spoke about production in my post, in a way that whatever desires are, they are always produced from the self or the person. This was to speak about arbitrary desires, not desires that are essential. We must distinguish between essential and arbitrary desires. The former are for life and survival, the latter are for the personality/self. I would say that I have stayed with Idealism, favouring the subject above all else.
Essential Desires:
If we view lack not simply as something missing on its own terms, but as something that signals a sort of essential-ity, or need-ness for something else (e.g. survival, or an ‘x’ state), then we can view desire as something produced by a lack (a need ‘for’ something). Lack becomes a ‘need for’ something as opposed to something is missing, and this in turn becomes a precondition for desire. Then we can redefine or better define lack as something showing the need ‘for’ something as opposed to the missing of something; in other words, let’s via lack as ‘a need for’ as opposed to ‘an absence of’. Lack would be something that signals a need for a movement from one state to another through an intermediate object or thing etc. .g. from the state of being alive to the the state of staying alive via a middle things that will satisfy the latter; or even dying sometimes. Desire then we can call a tendency or movement towards something (a state) through a need for (lack) something (object or anything) that is ‘for’ something else (another state), all this is made possible by a drive. In a sense we move from one state to the next via an intermediate which is the object or thing that causes that state.
The reason for this movement we find in the reason for the essential-ity, I think the term that comes to mind is survival or push towards life, or conatus as Spinoza might contend and I would agree. I would also agree on the drive part with Deleuze and that a choice between x and y is often, if not always, arbitrary simply because we can choose either; but I also believe that in some cases of choice, contra to what I said before, one is pushed from within to choose one over the other. I would then alter my last reply, and say that not all choices are chosen arbitrarily, but some we are pushed to choose because of a desire that functions in terms of a lack, and an innate survival instinct or drive serves as a condition for possibility for the desire that holds sway over these choices. So we have a condition for possibility for the lack or need for something that condition is the drive, and also a condition for possibility for the desire which is the lack; both are linked by this drive towards life.
Thus, we can say that the lack is not something missing alone, but something that is a precondition for a movement from one state to another (lack is rather a need for, as opposed to an absence of), and that movement can only happen if we entertain a certain push or will towards that movement. This push or will signals an existing condition for possibility for any desire that’s not arbitrary, but is rather an internal movement towards a choice. This push is made manifest only by an inclination towards survival or towards a particular state of mind; I would agree with Spinoza and conatus.
Thus, in terms of water; the bottle on my table would only be desired by me if and only if I was actually thirsty or wanted to drink. Why am I thirsty and want to drink? To survive. However, this is insufficient because I can choose not to drink it and eventually die, even though with a lot of effort and strain; so it must be a drive that pushes me to drink over not drinking, otherwise not drinking would be just as easy as drinking. The truth is that the effort and strain in not drinking when we’re thirsty must reveal something to us, that we ‘need’ to drink, this ‘need’ is the essentiality I spoke of before, although I wouldn’t call it habit or custom. That would ignore the fact that babies get thirsty and babies need drink, and will drink if given water or if they stumble on water as if by automation. Babies as far as I’m concerned are not in habit just yet, although I wouldn’t know what goes on in the prior to birth in the womb, what habits and customs are formed in the womb. The latter may well be possible; I wouldn’t know. I would call this innate as opposed to the Humean approach of calling it customary, just for safety.
Inessential/Arbitrary Desires:
From this then we can see why Art is not really something desired for survival but in its own terms, because people do need to do art, but do it anyway for the pleasure of it, for the state of mind. Thus, we can distinguish between a desire from conatus and an arbitrary desire from a state of mind (a personality or self) for another state of mind that is pleasurable to the previous. My problem arises in this section, of accounting for the self or the state of mind that produces these arbitrary desires. Mixtures of these desires can be possible, e.g. wanting to be an actor for money and a great life but also because you simply like acting and want to act. I would not polarize them, I think humans are too complex for that. I would contend though that some desires we are pushed towards by our drives and other desires we embrace arbitrarily.
I wrote this very quick, because I was a little tired and really wanted to reply to you as your post made me think so let me know if I missed something. It’d be good to keep this back and forth movement and conversation, can help growth and reveal presuppositions, as it has done many times before (hehehe did you see a little induction there
lol).
I will definitely have a look at what his book emphasizes and how his system works more in depth. It sounds very interesting, could help me look at things from a different perspective and maybe help get rid of some presuppositions.
Babaloo Reinhardt said,
May 29, 2008 at 10:46 pm
When I used the bottle of water example, I was hoping to distinguish it from a need by stating that I was ‘merely’ thirsty, that is, not dying of thirst. But, even in this mitigated form thirst is a physical compulsion; hence, it was a bad example from the start. But, it has helped, unwittingly, to distinguish between two sorts of desire (as you have so deftly pointed out): essential and inessential desire.
It would appear that both of these desires are based on a lack (and, don’t get me wrong, I am struggling with the Deleuzian alternative myself; I haven‘t any Deleuze text here and the internet is useless): I lack the life-sustaining object, I lack food water, I lack culture, I lack this and that. This conception of a lack does indeed seem to be the condition for making desire possible (as Kant would put it). How could it be otherwise? If I didn’t feel the absence of this or that how on earth could I be compelled to act. (The essential desire) If I didn’t conceive of there being a lack of water would I ever drink. I could accidentally drink something, but that would be far too hit and miss and humanity would die out pretty quickly.
(The inessential desire) To give a personal example, the other day I borrowed a bike and went for a ride. It was enjoyable (I haven’t ridden a bike for over ten years), and I thought that I should like to get a bike. I desired to own a bike, that is. The lack of ‘bike’ is the desire for a bike (as long as that lack is uncomfortable; lacking pain is not the desire for pain, for, this lack does not produce uneasiness). This is desire with an object to be consumed. Nothing is produced by either desires, the water case, or the bile case.
This is all very well and good, but, I think that Deleuze is really asking that we re-conceptualize desire in positive terms. We could, of course, stick to the above conception - but, why would we want to?
Now, there is a new question: what do we gain from conceptualizing desire as a lack? And, moreover, what does Deleuze gain from not conceiving it in these negative terms?
Well, if we conceptualize desire as a lack then it would seem that we will be perpetually ‘dissatisfied.’ If we conceptualize it not in terms of a lack then we find that we are positively active, a machine plugged into another machine in a constant state of, not dissatisfaction or even satisfaction, but rather, positive production.
And thus, I think that this is maybe where there has been a break between your post and Deleuze; that is, Deleuze is making ethical suggestions. For Deleuze, issues such as capitalism, communism, production, society, etc. must absolutely be used when giving account of desire - for, life, the very life that we live, cannot be made abstract, according to Deleuze. When I ‘think’, it is ‘for something’. Thinking is a productive force, and production is Reality.
It is through conceiving of desire as a lack that we think of consumption as the objective of desire. For Deleuze this is simply not the case. There need be no object of desire to be consumed, merely a continuous flow of productivity to be plugged into. Getting well away from needs (they do fuck things up a little) one could say that all arbitrary desires (to borrow your terminology) aim at production, there are no objects of arbitrary desires only the drive towards production. All other so called desires that are based on a lack, such as the bike example, are not really desires but consumptions. The lack is not the foundation for desire but the foundation for consumption.
Now, this is where we find a bit of Kant. One may suggest that desire as a lack is the necessary way to conceive of desire. That is, it is essential that we conceive of desire in terms of a lack. Deleuze is simply stating that there is no such necessity to conceive of desire in these terms. And not only that, but, conceiving desire as a lack is actually detrimental to our lives. In a sense, things such as the water bottle example are examples of needs, and needs may be conceived as a lack because needs have an object to be consumed. But it is due to capitalism that desires have been given the false status of needs.
So, we must sacrifice temporary satisfaction for the sake of abandoning dissatisfaction. This is a bitter pill because satisfaction through consumption of unnecessary objects feels quite nice. But maybe it is worth it for the aim of getting rid of dissatisfaction.
Again, I think this is the crux of our discussion. On the one hand we have this kind of ontological question: what is the being of desire? in this case Deleuze may say (I am only speculating here, I surpassed my own understanding of Deleuze a little while ago [and even those bits that I think I understand are iffy]) that the objective being of desire is production. The ‘absence-of-object’ is only abstract, nothing really. On the other hand we could start with the preconceived notion of desire as a lack and simply look through it. In this case the question is: what does desire as a lack actually mean? how does it work? etc.
To be sure, I don’t think that Deleuze is making any ontological statements about the nature of desire. In fact, I do not think anything can come from making such statements at all. There is no necessary conception of desire, but, different ones; and, due to the problems of that concept of desire as a lack, there are bad ones and good ones. That is, desire as a lack is not a transcendental concept, it can be otherwise. And if one sees problems with this concept one can always find new ways to conceive of it.
Something on your later comments.
You rightly stated that the choice to drink cannot be based on custom or habit; I fully agree, but as I have explained at the start of this post, the water bottle example was poor and I meant it in a mitigated sense; such as, being thirsty and having the choice between going to the pub or the coffee shop - it may be essential that we drink, but not essential that we drink beer or coffee. In this instance (and be sure that this is completely my fault for not making it clearer in the last post) the choice to plug into this or that flow is arbitrary, and, hence, probably based on custom or habit. For instance, if it is 9 o’ clock in the morning custom may dictate that I go to the coffee shop; whereas if I am an alcoholic habit my determine that I go to the pub (even if it is 9 o‘clock in the morning) - there could be some physical need playing its part with the alcoholic, but you get the point.
Also, you stated that “some desires we are pushed towards and others we embrace arbitrarily.” And I am really beginning to wonder about this and I will try to post something on “fracture mechanics” about it - I have this strange idea that Sartre was really a closet determinist.
P.S. I removed my one and only post from ‘fracture mechanics’ and it also removed your comment; this was unavoidable, so, sorry about that.
P.P.S With regards to the ‘back flips all round too’ video I posted on ‘My Pig-Spirit’ I simply played the film backwards. I’m not really jumping ‘off’ the sofa, but ‘on’ to it.
incognitio said,
May 31, 2008 at 8:07 pm
I have a lot of understanding to do before I go down the road of production, which is why I wanted to steer away from it. Simply because I think from what I have been getting from you, that his notion of production has a peculiar relationship to time. As far as I’m concerned, all production presupposes in some way or other, the notion of time, which is why I hesitated to speak about production. It is interesting how he approaches things from the objective perspective as you say, and has no need of the subject. I will enjoy reading him.
On the spiritual perspective, I think the importance of the subject is essential and so it would favour the approach I have taken. As of philosophy and the epistemological value of speaking of desire from an objective standpoint, there’s still a lot of thought that I need to put in it; I haven’t even read any Deleuze yet, so all in good time.
It’s very interesting however, how there’s a close relationship between spirituality and existentialism, as they both start with the importance of the subject, in fact the inevitability of the subject.
As of Sartre, I was thinking the same a little while back, about him and determinism. I would have approached it from the point of facticity, and the function that facticity has in his philosophy. I think, and De Beauvoir aided in the supplement, that he placed too much on this notion of facticity and it crucified him needlessly. I’d be good to hear what you think.
Babaloo Reinhardt said,
June 3, 2008 at 10:56 pm
I have posted a reply to this on your Greenwich forum because I think that I have strayed too far from the original spirit of your post. However, I wrote it in reply form so it is in some way relevant to the subjects discussed here.
I have just read over your initial post again and I am not entirely clear on a lot of it (which is why I may have got a little sidetracked. It seems that I have gone too deeply into the concept of desire being a lack and missed the point of your original post). However, I find the notion of being miserable and not knowing it fascinating. I have always resisted this concept for its Freudian connotations (the idea that a feeling can exist independently of the awareness seems plainly absurd). However, this idea that the possibility of bliss can be forgotten or lost in favour of a mitigated form of happiness (via desire) that is not really happiness at all is interesting. One cannot tell someone that they are really unhappy, because this wouldn’t be true; however, one can show that there is the possibility of a greater happiness out there which once attained will reveal that old happiness as not happiness at all, in fact, a miserable state of affairs.
some questions:
What does the alternative look like? How would this bliss manifest itself? Do we stop desiring (in the lack sense)? If the desiring machine is faulty does this imply that there is a fully functional desiring machine that it can be compared to? Is the alternative to the faulty desires based on the self-created personality an objective determinism?
incognitio said,
June 4, 2008 at 9:04 pm
You’re taking me back a long time, in fact, I don’t even remember how long ago it was when I thought of this; much has changed too. Nonetheless, I’ll try answer as best I can. (God, I just read over my post again, it was truly a long time and there are so many spelling and grammatical errors - I am abashed.)
OK, I’ll take your questions one at a time…
The Alternative:
To be honest the alternative of this would be something I have not even pondered on. To me this is the only way of creating a personality or an ego, short of utter determinism,. We shouldn’t be apathetic to Freud however, there is some empirical evidence at present regarding the existence of the unconscious, or at the very least, the sub-conscious (for more detail have a look at some Terror Management Theory empirical work). Anyways, the alternative of this would be something in terms of biology and a very hard and Richard Dawkins type-materialism, whereby your desires are ruled by your genes and memes. I didn’t want to go down that road, to me there is possibility for bliss and freedom, or capacity for choice in the human being (which is why I admire Existentialism, and why I am so attached to Spirituality - not Religion, I am with Nietzsche, ‘God is dead’, when it comes to religion
). It is a major assumption of mine: that the human being has choice over his situation. So the ego, instead of being written in your DNA, it is created by your experiences, choices and memories.
The Bliss:
First of all, what is bliss? It would be a state without an opposition: unlike happiness whose opposite is sadness or unhappiness. Bliss has no opposite, it’s only opposite is its not being present, no-bliss. Why does bliss have no opposite, because bliss is not an engagement with desire, I would say bliss is the state of no desire, the state where basically everything is as it should be, there is no ‘lack’ (in the way I used it in the text, un-philosophical/spiritual way). Bliss is a state of nothing is missing, everything is here and as it should be. Now the way this manifests itself is not through attainment of a desire for something that you’ve always wanted and now its here and so you’re complete, rather its that you’re complete regardless - because once you get that thing that ‘you’ve always wanted’ you’ll realize that it wasn’t it, simply because it was a desire created by the ego, which is not stable. A desire made from stability is the way to bliss, and the only thing that’s stable in a human being’s mind, is not his thoughts, but the silence between his thoughts, and that silence between the thoughts is the state of everything is as it should be, the state of nothing more, all is here. If we think about it, you need to think to realize that something isn’t there, that’s the silence is peculiar in this way, it’s like the only escape from yourself. The beauty however is that we’re so attached to thought, that we think thought is where we are, and we completely forget about the silence, we’ve shifted our locus for identity from the silence to our thoughts. We’ve forgotten that thoughts are just our tools and made them our identity, not realizing that identity needs to be something stable and in-destructive, something of the form of A = A. There is nothing in thought that can give us that, the only thing in our minds that is not changing is the silence between the thoughts. Bliss is the realization of this, the point where we’ve said, aha I don’t need anything because it’s all here already, in the silence, and this move is tough to make, I still can’t make it properly (I’ve had moments of it though - it took me like 3/4 years). Bliss is peculiar because it awaits a calling in you that says, “OK I desire to desire nothing”, I desire to stop wanting something and be complete in myself as I am now, this completeness is paradoxical because it can’t ever be so in your thoughts, it can only be so in the absence of thought, in the silence. What this silence does is create a space between the flux movements of thought and the movement from one state to the next, leaving you with somewhere to rest and regroup. The metaphor I like to think of is the pit-stop in a race, somewhere where you can just rest and fix up your machine/car before you get back in the race. The fixing up is the realization that you need nothing, you have it all here in the silence. (I understand that this is very difficult to grasp, it’s equally difficult to communicate, next time we meet I’ll speak to you about it and maybe be a little more clear - I’ll try and show you.)
The fully functional desiring machine:
Concretely speaking, I would say, there is no such thing. The mind is by necessity flowing, it always moves from interpretation to interpretation, from thought to thought, and with it the ego will move too, and so will your desires - the mind is simply in flux. All egos are faulty desiring machines, simply because they come from instability, from experiences and memory, it’s just as likely that you will continue to sleep late for the rest of your life as it is that you won’t. The only thing to me that is actually stable in the mind is the silence between your thinking; there we can find something stable and say that is me, my identity, and there you can find bliss, a state of nothing is wanted or needed more, all is here- because as soon as your mind kicks in, there is something it needs, or something it needs to talk about/express or interpret.
To the last question
I have answered it in the first; I would say it would be a state of no subjectivity and so it would completely divorce itself from spirituality; spirituality, as you made me realize, needs the subject and her freedom. So yeah, an objective determinism, no possible way out of thoughts and desires and the cycle. This also made me see close ties between the spiritual and the existential.
I hope this is a little more clear, let me know… Thanks for your questions, you’ve brought me back to something I’ve left dormant for a while. I’ve been focusing on philosophy too much, I’ve left thinking about spirituality a little behind.
incognitio said,
July 9, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Bliss must not be mistaken for contentment either, for contentment means that I have everything I have ever wanted/desired, it has a prerequisite step of desire being fulfiled. Bliss does not have this condition lurking in its foundations, bliss in a sense ignores desire; bliss negates desire, without fulfilling it, whereas contentment demands fulfilment of desire as a step prior to itself.
Let me know if there’s any more clarity that could be added.