Against Monosexual Bigotries

This originated as a response to an online posting, but then articulated out into something bigger.

It addresses the structural (socio-cultural) constraints on bisexuality in males, particularly those seen as (or accused of) cheating on their partner. I focus on males because I know the male experience better and hope that ignorances on my part do not ruin whatever I might claim for the male experience.  I have two fundamental points to make, even as this meditation tracks over several themes:

• I want to resist identifying as bisexuality any opportunistic or pragmatic bisexual behaviour especially by otherwise heterosexual (married) males;
• I want to propose as socially just and necessary the articulation socio-cultural forms of the “home” (as the main site of social reproduction in our culture) that honour the full expression of bisexuality

“Bisexuality” or “Cheating”?

Let me pretend for moment that only two kinds of men exist who seek out extramarital encounters with other perceived male-bodied individuals: (1) those who are not strictly heterosexual in some sense and would claim a genuine desire for such encounters with other men, and (2) those who pragmatically or opportunistically use non-heterosexual males as an additional sexual outlet.

The reality of (heterosexual) married life may often involve unequal sexual appetites. The stereotype makes men the horn-dogs; patriarchy makes women into virtual or actual or tacit victims of domestic rape or at the very least sexual encounters that become extremely problematic, where the consent given (by women) often seems (very) coerced. &c. Men who aren’t dirt-bags may desire to avoid such coercion and thus wind up going outside of the marriage.

In Vietnam for instance (and elsewhere I assume, but I’ve seen it first-hand in Vietnam), this “cheating” becomes formalized in male patronage at massage parlours. Wives sometimes will resort to a public social gesture to “co-sign” this: the husband declares he intends to go to the massage parlour with his friends, and the wife gently scolds him, “No happy ending.” The husband, of course, agrees to this. And then events take their course. This gesture allows the wife to save social face, allows the husband to obtain the sexual activity he desires, and the marriage (which may have been arranged anyway) does not get threatened.

In fact, both the arranged character of many marriages (or the social inertia that still exists from traditions of arranged marriage in the past), along with the actual commitment of Vietnamese parents to place to continuance and welfare of the family nest above all else, makes this arrangement rational, precisely because of likely unequal sex drives in people in the house. None of this precludes any critique the economics of prostitution in all of this, or that one might ask what social structures exist to gratify the sexual desire of wives (none would give me an answer to that). In general, we see that massage parlours subsidise marital relations in the home.

We don’t have anything so structurally formal in the United States. Prior to the Internet hook-up, finding one’s way to the Red Light district could likely seem perilous, the cost might prove prohibitive, and sometimes something like a massage parlour (and/or a brothel) did exist. The conceit involved in all of this requires in part a plausible cover: in Vietnam, one gets a massage (not a happy ending); one simply visits the gentleman’s club (the brothel) for socializing, &c. Again, I suggest this plausible cover involves face-saving in part for the wife, being able to public avow her husband remains faithful, whatever the open secret of massage parlours, brothels, and Red Light districts. And this as well, in part, because women and men have historically allowed themselves often to dismiss sex with prostitutes as “not real” (in part because “good people” scorn prostitutes as “bad women”); such sexual activity then provides mere release for the patron and a safeguard against jealousy or threat on the part of one’s partner, &c.

In this light, the putatively “bisexual” hook-up may be read in at least one strictly opportunistic and pragmatic way. Of course, this requires sufficient pragmatism or opportunism in the male spouse to not mind that the mouth he gets off in attaches to another male or that the hairy ass he ploughs seems slightly less than stereotypically feminine. This suggests, I’d venture, that getting off on oral intercourse probably makes by far the more common dalliance.

In any case, I would not call this kind of opportunistic hook-up bisexual just yet. In a similar way, some men in prison will propose that another inmate “knock the dust off” (whether that other inmate serves as a “prison bitch,” positions himself as an out drag queen in prison, a gay guy who “passes” as straight, or any other male willing to do it for whatever reason: out of curiosity, for money, for tobacco, to forestall violence, &c). These pragmatic or opportunistic sex-seekers, upon their release, my well revert to women-only status again and see nothing inconsistent about their claim, “I’m straight.” And rightly so. I would hesitate to call this behaviour bisexual just yet.

The era of the Internet hook-up particularly enables these sorts of pragmatic and opportunistic encounters. If previously, finding the Red Light district and the cost of prostitutes put up obstacles for males, now one can easily find (or can relatively easily locate and identify) any number of enthusiastic volunteers just by trolling Craigslist or similar sites or lists. Of course, one may find heterosexual hook-ups that way too, but these destroy the “plausible deniability” aspect of such dalliances.

The “heterosexual” husband who meets some random guy has a hundred likely excuses for doing so, and the spouse’s suspicion “you were having sex” likely doesn’t come up as a first response. &c. So, in this case (just as massage parlours in Vietnam subsidize marital relations), here actually homosexual or bisexual males get used in random Internet hook-ups by heterosexual males to subside marital relations in our culture. The main distinction of this, as compared to having a queen on the side (or an octoroon of yore), shows up in the wholly temporary character of the encounter. It functions like prostitution but without cash. And so, as also with prostitution, what one pays for involves not the services rendered but the “right” to walk away afterward without any demand or continuing obligation on the one rendering the service.

I remain disinclined to call any of this behaviour “bisexual,” mostly out of respect to bisexuals and the bisexual identity.

Whatever pragmatism or sexual opportunism that heterosexual and homosexual people might exhibit from time to time, we respect their sexuality by understanding it as a significant (or even core) part of their identity as a human being. So unless we extend that same presumptive respect to bisexuals, then we slander their experience by equating it with the pragmatic or opportunistic behaviour of certain (married or incarcerated) men.[1] This brings into the picture—less or more incidentally—the betrayal (the “cheating”) that such extramarital shenanigans involve and unfairly imputes it as (or it gets taking as imputing) a general character trait of bisexuals overall: a group of people historically looked at sideways as refusing to ally unambiguously with either “gay” or “straight” in the first place.

Why Hate Bi?

Our culture (we’re not alone in this) posits general a resistance, if not outright hostility, to bisexuality. Why?

I suggest one root of this comes from our (cultural) conflation of procreation and social reproduction (in the family). By social reproduction, I mean all of the cultural practices and exigencies that support and enable the production of the next generation of people. Procreation, as the literal biological reproduction of that next generation, then gets conflated with social reproduction, and thus the heterosexual family (narrowly or broadly conceived) becomes the stridently defended necessity for achieving social reproduction. Lately, the LGBT community has made clear the heterosexual presumption in this conflation as unnecessary, since social reproduction of the next generation may occur without procreation as a necessary element in any given family (e.g., because homosexuals may adopt).

This burdens the notion of the nuclear family—one the most toxic and radioactive inventions in the history of humankind, says Dr Patch Adams—with the demand that any two individuals must provide any and all resources necessary for such social reproduction (for the raising of the next generation). In days of yore (and still in many places in the world, of course), extended families provided these necessary supports. But under the nuclear family, we must stand generally on our own.

The more or less formally arranged marriages (or cultural inertia stemming from those traditions) made it unambiguously clear that marriage could not (even would not) serve as the site for the full (or even satisfactory) gratification of every human need, including the sexual—such that brothels, massage parlours, and the like became social necessities in cultures all over the world.[2]

We see this “inadequacy” of marriage as an inherent part of it—that placing the burden of fulfilling all possible human desires on a single person (the spouse) in a relationship makes for an untenable claim much less an infeasible desire. In days of yore, lords and ladies did expected neither to spend 24/7 with their mate nor that every need (sexual, intellectual, spiritual, &c) would get met by the other. Rather, these various desires got “farmed out” into the social structure per the desires of those involved:[3] the café culture of men, for instance, as a form of intellectual gratification, and the craft circles (or meetings in the home over domestic work) for women—something one still sees in many places in Vietnam (and elsewhere around the world), but not so much here. Women, paralleling the covert behaviour of males, must hire a maid to knock the dust off (literally). A woman recently confessed embarrassment to me that she even wanted to hire a maid to clean her house. The parallels (with male cheating) seem intriguing here. Meanwhile, even these days while we may pay lip services to the hopelessly romantic notion of “you and me 24/7” the reality of long-term relationships shows that what makes for a stable home-life involves ensuring the re-production of whatever “core” forms the household.

For me and my mate, for instance, this involves maintaining a certain emotional sweetness and succour that the rest of the world does not supply. I can go out into the knock-about world but then come home to a place where (as one woman professor put it) “I can feel loved.” This can form the core of our relationship, in part because we have no children.

Once we attempt to generate a social environment where the nuclear family must bear the burden for the entire social reproduction of the world along with the welfare of the child—as opposed to that truly wise African observation that it takes a village to raise a child—then we enter into a zone of inevitable desperation, which gets staved off primarily (if not only) by externalising the costs of that social reproduction onto the backs of others. The notion of “cheating” becomes rationalized because the ideology of the nuclear family doesn’t or won’t acknowledge the inability of the nuclear family to supply every necessity for social reproduction.

This must hardly seem controversial. Even the ideology of the nuclear family acknowledges that one (or now both partners) must go out of the home to work (ignoring along the way how domestic work in the home subsidises such going out).[4]

These factors, then—and especially the (romantic) ideology of the nuclear family—con tribute to the demonization of bisexuality and makes the social enactment of bisexuality (for bisexuals) problematic.

A requirement for “fidelity” in marriages (especially in the past) involved not only reputation and face-saving (as the Vietnamese examples show) but also no disruption to the fabric of social reproduction that a marriage primarily served to enact. Saying this, we must remember that marriage proposed a (sometimes overwhelmingly) extensive set of social relations and obligations; the very fact of the sometimes assumed legitimacy of adoption as a practice (as a non-biologically related case of child-acquisition in the home) shows that the primary emphasis of marriage does not centre on literal, biological reproduction but on the wider social character of marriage. With the rise of bourgeois ideology and even more so the ideology of the nuclear family, however, the demand for fidelity shifts from supporting these socio-structural aspect of marriage and devolves into something non-social, i.e., into a merely personal or individual affair. Thus, when you “betray” me in a modern relationship or marriage, I will feel entitled to break up the home and put in peril the welfare of the children for selfish reasons.

By definition, the bisexual person overtly declares a sexual orientation also towards someone not his or her spouse. Thus, bisexual people may never be rid of this suspicion that they threaten to break up the home—thus, the animus toward bisexuality, but let us keep in mind our “modern” context. In days of yore, the husband who wanted a masculine dalliance could have done so on the same grounds he might visit a massage parlour, because the “ultimate value” in the marriage involves the maintenance of the site of social reproduction (the home, marital relations) and not the “feelings” of the spouse.

These days, a spouse may fret about her husband getting something on the side (or she may be grateful for it), but that worry gets diminished so long as that urge finds its outlet in denigrated outlets (i.e., with “whores”). Again, a very great deal of this sort of thing seems to involve assuring that no wound get inflicted against one’s sense of security about the home—just as the Vietnamese wife makes the gesture, “No happy ending.” She knows better, but the social world she inhabits wants to hear her admonishment along with the reassurance given by the husband that he intends only to get a massage.

I know of one married couple (perhaps it matters that the wife hails from Vietnam) where the wife specifically commanded her husband to “go to the whores” rather than pester her for sex after the birth of their son. While many spouses might find these extramarital services disgusting or troubling—demanding instead that people should just shut off their sexual desires in some way (we might explore and wonder over the merit of such a proposal)—such dalliances do serve the instrumental end of supporting the marital setting.[5]

But with the person of a bisexual orientation, it becomes more difficult often for the ideology of the nuclear family to reassure itself. Whatever slightly queasy consolations heterosexuals might offer themselves about the unregenerate character of their spouse’s (depraved) sexuality (“men are dogs”), we at least find social techniques and institutions that service those urges, as described above. This provides (or can provide) some domestic peace of mind.

But when one lives constantly with the awareness that one’s spouse has a whole other portion of their sexuality that the domestic (marital) setting cannot address or even honour (except by demanding one nobly not indulge in it), then it becomes much, much harder to feel reassured that extramarital resorts will defuse, rather than exacerbate, that desire. True, a husband might fall in love with a prostitute, but the odds remain statistically much lower that she would actually run away with him as compared to the same risks with a mistress. In a way, the prostitute and the wife become allies of a sort in the perpetuation of the domestic sphere—the wife “permitting” her husband the dalliance, and the prostitute “guaranteeing” not to run off with the husband.

Not so much, then, when the husband trolls amongst the enthusiastic male volunteers on Craigslist. Moreover, it must finally seem a very tenuous proposition to pretend that this kind of “random hook-up” would actually and for all time satisfy a spouse’s authentic bisexual strivings.

The Absence of Sociostructural Support for Bisexuality

At root, then, the (bourgeois, or “nuclear family”) demand for monogamy becomes or remains expressly hostile to bisexuality. It implicitly demands (and trumpets as highly noble) the total denial of it as the partner simply never practices that bisexuality, on the one hand, or it at best only “allows” or “suffers” “casual hook-ups” as an “outlet,” as if that might ever hope to meet in the long-run a genuine desire on the bisexual’s person’s part. It seems precisely this kind of “casual only” restriction created some of the social pressure at work during the early phases of LGBT liberation—the ultimately unsatisfactory character of this restriction (for those who found it unsatisfying) helped to drive a more visible social demand for sociocultural structures that would permit the expression of homosexual social identity. These days, neither homosexuals nor heterosexuals would accept that the expression of their sexuality must limit itself only to casual “Park encounters” or “Internet hook-ups,” yet the dominating norm of our culture—the ideology of romantic “marriage”—tacitly demands exactly hat of bisexuals.

Insofar as the norm of human relationship manifests as serial monogamy with cheating, this amply represents the only “allowable” form open to bisexuality and thus serves as an indirect proof, if we wanted it, that human beings are actually bisexual at root. What I must emphasize here, however, involves exactly the wording serial monogamy with cheating, because “cheating” has negative connotations. Whether imagining marriage in an “old” sense (where social techniques and institutions existed to accommodate “cheating” in light of arranged marriages) or according to our current ideology of romantic relationships (where “cheating” gets valued as the veritable kiss of death), either way “cheating” retains its negative connotations. In the old sense, the “worst” form of cheating meant (literal) divorce, with the breaking up of the family and all of the social obligations the marriage entailed; these days we still have this, of course, but any form of extramarital dalliance may get construed as world-ending and destructive. Nonetheless, as human being work their way emotionally through life, this “cheating” turns up from time to time, and apparently (again) as the norm of human relating: serial monogamy with cheating. But this discourse requires only bisexual people, in every relationship (with only one other person), to resort to heating for total fulfilment of their identities. In principle, whatever the case in practice, the heterosexual or homosexual person might find sufficiently ideal satisfaction in the one partner a relationship limits them to, but that structure demands, by definition, that the bisexual person disregard an entire portion of their sexual identity.[6]

To more fully honour bisexuality would require the integration of spouses of both sexes into the picture. I do not mean to equate bisexuality and polyamory—polyamory seems to me a domestic social arrangement whatever the affects of those involved, whereas bisexuality points to a sexual orientation. Nor do I suggest that bisexual people cannot find happiness “one sex at a time” in domestic settings. I suggest, rather, that by definition the available domestic structure of the monogamous nuclear family precludes support, within the family, for the full range of bisexual sexual identity. I suggest, rather, that we might interrogate whether any socialized practice amongst bisexual people to establish domestic partnerships with “only one sex at a time” does not itself already imply a rational or sensible response to a piece of cultural prejudice against bisexuality—a prejudice, again, that mistakes the character and content of the (monogamous) family as the (only type of) site necessary for social reproduction.

Homosexual males have for a long time now pioneered the combination of the “established home” in conjunction with openly toying round with other males, if not actually bringing them home for both spouses to enjoy. But this eminently sensible solution, which accepts at face-value the habits of male sexuality to the extent that culture shapes them, does not particularly lend itself to the introduction of a permanent third party, and especially not a female one. A bisexual male in this scenario might well find himself on the receiving end of suspicion often. &c. And if I emphasise the homosexual case here, I do so because the corresponding case in the heterosexual realm—that a wife would accommodate her husband’s male spouse to live openly in the home with them—seems already wildly beyond the pale of consideration. We might imagine scandalised Jerry Springer show about this topic before any “level-headed” consideration of the option.

It seems obvious that any real cultural support that domestic settings might extend to bisexuals cannot get around opening it up to a kind of polygamy. If in days of yore, it helped (in extended families) that one could move amongst multiple domestic sites (i.e., from one’s parents to one’s uncle’s, &c), we might considering dropping any requirement that a triple (the three-part version of a couple) must all live in the same space, but only if any other “external” space really constitutes an acknowledged part of the “home”. If the “bisexual spouse” must live outside of the “marital home,” then the status of the one on the outs seems little more than the same level of a “mistress” with all of the socioeconomic problems that entails.

From all of this, we may see that the hostility expressed by the dominating discourse toward bisexuality forms something of a tautology or self-fulfilling prophecy. Society fails to provide adequate social structures for the fulfilled expression of bisexuality, and then demonizes bisexuals for resorting to the one route currently available: “cheating”. Moreover, the availability of the Internet “bisexual” hook-up, which more or less adequately suffices for lusty (monosexual) male “spill-over,” does not suffice or make a valid “solution” to the full and complete expression of bisexual sexual identity for those involved in the ideology of romantic relationships in our culture. The demand to satisfy their longing for identity in such a way fails on human grounds.

Re-Envisioning Marriage

This all points to the necessity of re-distinguishing the function of “marriage” (as a social structure for the social reproduction of culture) apart from the sort of affective ideology of the nuclear family currently in vogue. I feel certain that, in the old days, a wife might quite openly keep her lover in the mansion with her, just as husbands dallied with serving-maids and the like. By this, I mean to say that because very few people had any silly or naïve fantasies about the function of “marriage” socially, then the working out of one’s sexual urges (along with any silly or naïve “ideals” about marriage) got subordinated and were set side when it became necessary to do so in order to ensure the actual social reproduction intended in marriage.

I cannot stress enough the “social” aspect of this social reproduction. The old adage, when you marry you marry someone’s family, offers no mere proverb, and out of this recognition arose (in some cultures) the prohibition on divorce (except for in the most extreme of circumstances) because marriage entailed an intensive and extensive set of social obligations to others that would also sever if a divorce occurred.[7] Thus, in these cases tremendous pressure can get brought to bear to make such marriages “work” whatever that takes: up to and including the husband mounting the pool-boy and the wife enjoying the company of her handmaid. &c.

In the main, this social aspect of marriage has fallen away in our culture; marriage has become (in our culture) a fundamentally private affair, and the articulation of the ideology of the nuclear family shows what a toxic idea that amounts to. But if we would accept the dubious premise of this ideology, which certainly offers an incoherent misprision of the function of marriage in the first place, then we should be willing to “adjust the definition” again—because our current ideology represents an adjustment of the “definition” of marriage in the first place.

The marriage equality movement represents one direction of this redefinition, but its critics have rightly observed that broadening “one man/one woman” to “one person/one person” leaves wholly intact a sort of heteronormative structure of marriage, i.e., that marriage remains always a folie a deux (or a folly of two families), and never more. We may say that the dominating discourse takes a monosexual view of the matter, where monosexual means the either/or of heterosexual and/or homosexual.[8]

Meanwhile, if we understand or imagine the “home” as the site of (desirable) social reproduction, then it would seem we should not a priori rule out any structure that supports that desirable reproduction.[9]

By desirable reproduction, I do not mean only the sexual reproduction of the next generation.  We see with utter clarity that all throughout culture each “home” does not consist always or merely of “parents and children”—many homes have all sorts of variations on this while still remaining culturally legitimate. One may see this in a homophobic context. Rom a case where the State of Michigan sought to limit and denounce adoption by LGBT community members:

But on cross-examination by the ACLU’s Leslie Cooper, [anti-gay adoption witness] Regnerus’ testimony quickly broke down. Cooper forced Regnerus to admit that he had sought to conceal the role of conservative funders and of his religious faith in influencing his research, both of which were later revealed with smoking gun evidence from his prior words. He acknowledged that he was “not a fan of same sex marriage” before he started his research and that his opposition to it was not primarily based on his research conclusions. And he had to concede that he had singled out gay couples in opposing their right to marry based on alleged family instability: aware that African-Americans, the poor, step-families and divorced people are all at higher statistical risk of marital collapse and family instability, he nonetheless had no strong opinion on whether those folks should be banned from marrying—just gays, strongly suggesting his views are rooted in bias above all (¶7, see here, links in original, emphasis added).

I do not cite this in order to demonize any of the families of African-Americans, the poor, step-families, or divorced people, but only to underscore how these structures of social reproduction do not get branded otherwise, as Regnerus’ bigotry against LGBT people makes clear. He accepts the legitimacy of family instability in divorced families, for instance, as no grounds to deny marriage or adoption even though a consistent argument would demand it—just as any insistence that marriage only serves the purpose of procreation would require, then, the annulment of all marriages with people incapable of procreation. Regnerus’ bigotry also points then to the desirability of divorced families, so to speak, so far as the “cunning” of neoliberal capitalism goes. [10] The demand for social justice, of course, requires the amelioration of the social factors that lead to family instability or any sort, and while we work toward that end, we need not pretend such unstable sites of social reproduction  lack social legitimacy.[11] On the contrary, we might well worry why our unjust social order and how it benefits from it.

Meanwhile, homes with children do not comprise the end of what we might consider as part of the network of site(s) that support social reproduction. Other “familial supports” exist that do not have children: unmarried aunts or uncles, sexually non-reproductive grandparents, the gay couple next door, the bachelor one floor down, & so forth may all figure in some way into the kinds of support structures that make possible (that subsidise) socially reproductive conditions in a given “home”. Just as patriarchal (sexist) economics bracket out the work of women in the domestic sphere as “not work,” to consider a site of social reproduction as extending only so far as the boundary of the “home” not only provides an egregiously propagandistic picture, it also proposes an unnecessarily artificial one. Since it takes a village to raise a child, we see how families (even in our ostensibly stand-alone milieu where marriage gets divorced from the wider social networks it once got embedded in) do indeed construct a sort of village as best they can: precisely this network of unmarried aunts or uncles, friends next door, &c, who further supply as much as they can the necessary supports for social reproduction.[12]

We may say then that the myth of the domestic hearth—a major part of the ideology of romantic relationships—simply refuses to take cognizance of any of the support structures for social reproduction. It asks us to insist on thinking about social reproduction strictly in terms of the “home” and not the “village,” even though (1) villages remain necessary for social reproduction, and (2) we do in fact construct villages, without acknowledging them as such.

We could call this myth a “lie,” but as Jung states in in too many places to cite individually, we would deceive ourselves to call myths lies in the sense of falsehoods. We may look, instead, at the “work” that such lies do, along with the consequences of them. And in the present case of an ideology in our social world that construes the “home” (not the “village”) as the recognised site of social reproduction—even in the cases of poor families, step-families, and divorced families, &c—then we may see in this a larger-scale echo of the sort of “subsidy” that brothels, massage parlours, and (male-male) Internet sexual hook-ups provide for the maintenance of marital relations.

In other words, in the same way that brothels, massage parlours, and (male-male) Internet sexual hook-ups function to subsidise marital relations without enjoying recognition as such (and in fact carrying instead a “negative” connotation), we may see that the “villagification” of the “home” subsidises the domestic hearth without acknowledging those contributions as such as part of the “home”. The Vietnamese wife disavows an expressly denies, if you will, the integral (not incidental) role of the masseuse’s sexual services in the maintenance of her domestic space, just as the married couple disavow and expressly deny the integral (not incidental) role of any villagizing that occurs as making possible their own domestic sphere.

I propose we imagine this as insisting on a rigorous distinction where one does not actually prevail, and moreover a distinction that has two basic “gestures”—one that incorporates (or allows or acknowledges) and another that expels (or disallows or refuses to recognize). What I would emphasise in this particularly: whether one allows or disallows involves a choice. Thus, as the Vietnamese wife desires to keep the masseuse/prostitute out of her domestic space both imaginatively and literally, so does a couple making a “home” desire to keep the “village” that supports it external to it both imaginatively and literally.[13] In principal, nothing absolutely prohibits a wife from allowing a masseuse in her home, though social pressure obviously and heavily constrains the weighting—yes or no—of any choice involved. So too, nothing absolutely prohibits a “home” from acknowledging any factors externalised from that home as integral (not incidental) to the successful maintenance of that home.

I can imagine someone saying that couples who make a home very often recognise in some way the support structures that allow their home to continue. For instance, they offer money (to baby-sitters or day-care providers) as a form of acknowledgment, or they simply express their gratitude to the unmarried aunts or uncles or neighbours downstairs. The presence of money points to a formalization of social relationships, but leave this aside. What none of this embodies involves  an acknowledge of these “others” as “members of the home”. Just as in the case of prostitution, where the exchange of money signals an end to all obligation (so that one may walk away), the money paid to child-care providers or babysitters similar signals and demarcates the extent of any involvement. It signals, “We are done and paid in full, an may make no further demands upon one another.”

Precisely on this ground does the villagification of the home get erected, such that those who inhabit the village have no claim on the “home,” which of course directly contradict the social arrangement of most historical villages. An exchange of money, again, makes for the currently conventional way to signal this separation, and thus the prostitute does not stir up trouble by showing up at the wife’s house. &c.

As such, it seems that the marital sphere literally cannot recognise the massage parlour, brother, or male-male Internet hook-up except in an unfavourable comparison. At the end of the day, the marital sphere insists, “You have no claim here.” And this same social dynamic informs the more general distinction between the “home” and the unrecognised village that subsidises it. At the end of the day, the “home” insists to the village, “You have no claim here.” Whether anyone or any entity finds this agreeable or not, it points to a social inequality which comes also with a note of denigration. As the wife may access a discourse that permits her to way superior to the masseuse, so do the same dynamics permit those making a home to feel entitled vis-à-vis any support structures (the village) that supports their home. This needn’t manifest only in a scornful way: the wife might feel scorn or pity or sympathy or even gratitude toward the masseuse, but this does nothing to challenge the demarcation, inequality, and separation that the social structure insists upon.[14] In fact, were the wife to bring the masseuse into her home, she might very well suffer social repercussions. In parallel, the couple making a home might feel superiority or entitlement or compassion or even gratitude toward the villagers who help make possible their home, but this does nothing to challenge the distinction insisted upon by home and village itself. And were the home-makers to bring villagers into the home (as acknowledged home-makers as well), then not only might they experience social repercussions, even more threateningly, those villager would have the right (therefore) to make demands on the functioning of the home. Imagine how affronted most people would feel if the plumber they’ve hired insisted on giving advice about how to raise your children.

Addressing the Problem of (the Discourse of) Monosexualism

I say all of this to point to a key resistance on the part of “marriage” (the “home”) as far as bisexuality goes.

The (romantic) discourse of monosexualism wants to insist that the “home” can deny the presence of the other-gendered spouse within its domestic sphere, so that at the end of the day, it may insist, “You have no claim here.” It wants to insist that any gratification of authentic bisexuality must locate its practice outside of the “home” and only in what social forms it finds available: all of which currently amount to “cheating” with a pejorative connotation.

The (Vietnamese) husband who goes to the massage parlour, as also the (pragmatic or opportunistic heterosexual) husband who indulges in male-male Internet hook-ups (or sex in prison), may avail themselves more or less satisfactorily of these resorts because the need that drives them attaches primarily (if not exclusively) to sexual pleasure alone, however much of  a “taste” they ultimately develop for these things.

The full expression of bisexuality—as the expression of the monosexualities in general—does not involve only (or even primarily) sexual gratification. In the original post that inspired this entire meditation, the pathos emphasised there focussed on the otherwise not honoured sexual longings of bisexual men, but one might imagine instead a scene where a man meets with another man (or a woman meeting a woman of course), simply to experience being held, or to go out in public to a restaurant to enjoy a romantic meal without the evening ending in grunting and sweatiness and full-throated cries.

Again, the point here does not involve whether bisexuals can and do currently (and cleverly) figure out how to live fulfilling lives under these  constraints, but rather to point out the roots of the socio-structural constraints in the first place and to question their supposed necessity.

Just as white supremacist culture “counts on” or expects people of colour to conform to the (socially unjust) range of culturalities (made) available to them—lest the “uppity” ones suffer the consequences of mass incarceration, entitled racism, the smug arrogance of white privilege, or outright murder heinous dirt-bags like Michael Dunn and George Zimmerman  demonstrated—so also does monosexual culture expect bisexuals to “politely” assimilate to the available culturalities, lest they too run afoul of various social punishments, repercussions, up to and including physical violence and murder, of course.

What this points to amounts to a pernicious distinction, proposed and enforced by Power, that sorts individuals between “conforming” and “uppity” types, more or less prising and rewarding the former while marginalizing and punishing the latter. I can hardly fault individuals for winding up in the “conforming” category, since the alternative tends with increasing violence toward the very denial of the possibility of life itself. And the history of both formal and informal violence against people of colour and LGBT people seems like a loud warning against any lone individual not acting collectively (because the exposure as an individual remains that much greeter). To insist upon sociocultural structures to support the full range of bisexuality, and not only to patronisingly allow and praise the “conforming” bisexuals while continuing to marginalise and persecute the “uppity” varieties, itself amounts to a call for uppitiness.

Opponents of the slippery slope will already infer from this that the one-on-one notion of marriage itself must give way to more multiple configurations, so that we shoot immediately past any platform for bisexuality per se and on into the realm of pansexualism and polyamory. Besides that this hardly worries me, I also think this amounts to a reactionary dodge. We might as well reprise the bigoted slogan that if we allow “gay marriage” then people will want to marry goats next.

If we can speak of staging-grounds or way-stations for social justice, to overcome the cis-gendered bias in culture would not suffer (I’d think) by also seeking redress for those who find themselves caught—happily or not—in the zone where homosexuality and heterosexuality both have appeal. I suspect that any advance we might make in creating social structures to support bisexuality would frame and help (on-going) efforts to critique an address cis-gendered biases. And any critique from that domain would improve any advances and proposals for “bisexual social structures”. Also from those in the asexual community who change the valence of this dialogue by just as fundamentally questioning assumptions in the discourse.

To say this acknowledges that addressing the discourse of monosexualism for the sake of bisexuality does not point to the end of the road. I would sooner have any broadening of the understanding of “marriage” (as the site of social reproduction) not fatally or by default become vulnerable to the critique rightly levelled against problematic aspects of marriage equality: specifically that the form that marriage equality has taken rewards only conforming but not uppity homosexuals .

To introduce social structures that acknowledge another-gendered spouse in the “home” does not hinge a numerical increase, such that such an acknowledgment becomes the ground for “having to tolerate” marriages with seen people in it or more. It may serve as an argument for the workability of polyamory, but it really acknowledges the inclusion of a type (rather than an increase in number). The “problem” of multiple spouses in any case already has manifold solutions from around the world, as polygamy and polyandry historically attest. The specific change that “bisexual marriage” proposes—or, rather, a marriage equality that recognises the already existing human right of bisexuals to marry in a way amenable to their sexuality—amounts to something different than a difference of number.

Opponents of this notion will happily conflate this difference of type as a difference in number (polygamy, polyandry, or polyamory) but this again jumps the gun.

We can imagine, for instance, that the radical change “bisexual marriage” might demand would involve a distribution of the site of social reproduction. Nothing demands in any such arrangement that everyone must cohabit, so that we see precisely what gets fundamentally drawn into the picture involves an extension of the acknowledgment of what constitutes the “home” as occurring in two places at once. And although I (as the bisexual person) ivied my time between this house and that house, for legal purposes those two spots comprise one home. Not only socially but also legally do our social practices need to accommodate this reality (with respect to property taxes, marital tax breaks in different states, &c). It would seem that people have negotiated some of this already insofar as divorce does generate divided living situations, but obviously any sort of accommodation that might come from my proposal would not have the “hostile” element of divorce or the (now admittedly less stigmatising) connotation of divorce.

Conclusion For Now

Toward the end of the foregoing, the topic begins to expand out perhaps to an excessive degree. Hopefully, at least a couple of minimums nonetheless remain clear.

First, I hope to have made clear not only that we should not let the identification of bisexual behaviour by heterosexual (married) males as bisexual go by unchallenged, but also the way that such bisexual behaviour subsidises heteronormative pretences of the “home” (as the preeminent site of social reproduction). Just as the wife and the prostitute engage in a sort of uneasy collusion—one where the wife may allow herself to scorn the prostitute as her social inferior—so we may see the same pattern at work here, where the wife may place blame for his “cheating” on the morally depraved homosexual who services that (reprobate) husband. This gesture of scorn itself, of course, rises as a function of patriarchal sexism. It misses the source to “blame” the wife for paying forward this blame to either the prostitute or the homosexual.

Second, the monosexual milieu of the “home” rests on a myth of the domestic hearth that itself simply fail to recognise the supports and subsidies provided by the “village” around it. Social justice demands then the articulation of socio-structural forms that accommodate bisexuality. This does not necessarily entail only to permit another person into the “home” (though for some individual families they might desire exactly this), but rather a social articulation of “home” that acknowledges as part of the home what currently gets rigorously cast out of the domestic sphere. It means, to give simply what the “home” considers as one of the most “alarming” consequences of this, acknowledging that another spouse has a claim to demand certain forms of child-care and child-rearing. It means, most simply, to treat another person as a spouse and to articulate social structures in the world that allow bisexuals (whether they ever fully resort to them or not) to have them as readily to hand as currently monosexuals do with regard to their own (sexual) identities as they live their lives.

Endnotes

[1] Here we would find the witticism about marriage and incarceration as identical.

[2] Again, we may well critique how these institutions and customers and wives look down socially on those who subsidise marital relations; I simply note the social pattern they generate.

[3] Of course, in a patriarchal culture, this means more articulation of necessities to fulfil male needs than female. A more desirable culture must redress this inequality.

[4] This outside/inside distinction articulates in the rural (or farm) model of the nuclear family as becoming embedded in a wider experience of extended families or sociability. But once you have one farmhouse with thirteen kids in it, arguably this already makes its own village and no longer reflects, strictly speaking, a nuclear family in its now-conventional sense.

[5] I have to say, the objection of a spouse that husbands engage in “disgusting” behaviour with whores has to amount to the trivial objection. The denigration of sex-workers, as an obviously needed part of a relatively unjust social structure, should prevent us from letting such “middle-class” prudery frame the issue so that we may focus on the class-injustice involved in requiring certain women (and men), almost always of lower-class origin, to have to experience exploitation in their circumstance. I don’t doubt that the history of this has many marks of negotiation, resistance, and demands to the pimps and madams of the world to secure better working conditions for this useful service. If we must have such more or less covert sex work to subsidise marital relations, then let us advocate fair pay, safe working conditions, and even social respect to such workers, rather than attending to pearl-clutching and groans of “whore!” from scandalized marriage-mongers.

[6] I do not mean a bisexual person cannot make this work. How person (of any sexuality) negotiates a satisfying relationship remains far too full of details to tidily generalize. But however a given individual works these details out, this does not change the demand, made by the exclusively monogamist ideology of romantic relationships that dominates our culture, to exclude a portion of one’s sexuality from expression, whether that portion makes for a tiny percentage or huge percentage. People very cleverly find ways to inhabit unjust social structures; that cleverness does not provide an argument in favour of the unjust social structure.

[7] The distinction between matrifocal and patrifocal cultures seems to introduce an important distinction here. In some matrifocal cultures, wives might divorce their husbands to the drop of a hat, but this in part because the wife’s familial structure permitted such a severing.

[8] Since it takes a village to raise a child, and since capitalism destroys villages, we cannot rationally expect (without a revolution first) our current social ethos to permit the necessary preconditions (a village) for the raising of children. Or widening the critique, we may interrogate the desirability of villages as forms of social reproduction in the first place while attempting to articulate some desirable structure in our own culture, as opposed to the wholly unworkable and undesirable nuclear family. We can object that social reproduction will itself never cease to be a problem, or something that will forever require critique itself. The possibility of socially just social reproduction might seem merely unimaginable in principle. &c. I don’t think so, since the problem of social reproduction arises in preferentially privileging forms of it, rather than the existence of it per se.

[9] Thus, adoption by the LGBTQ community does indeed become an elemental issue and brings with it all of the problems associated with adoption as well. By such problems, I mean those fundamental to adoption itself—such as the increased risk of suicide or suicide attempts by (transracially) adopted children or the structural function of adoption as a means for securing middle-class respectability on the backs of those forced to shoulder the costs of that—and not those issues raised by fraudulent or bigoted opponents of “gay adoption”. Such people, as a matter of deliberate social strategy, falsify or simply concoct evidence to suggest that children raised by LGBT parents suffer various (psychological) disadvantages.

The strategy is for sociological experts to sow just enough doubt about the wisdom of change such that preserving the status quo seems the only reasonable path. As the New York Times recently reported, in 2010 the conservative Heritage Foundation gathered social conservatives consisting of Catholic intellectuals, researchers, activists and funders at a Washington meeting to plot their approach. The idea was for conservative scholars to generate research claiming that gay marriage harms children by placing them in unstable gay homes and by upending marital norms for straights. A solid consensus of actual scholarship—not the fixed kind being ginned up at Heritage—has consistently found that gay parenting does not disadvantage kids, and no research has shown gay marriage having any impact on straight marriage rates. But trafficking in truth was not the plan. The plan was to tap into a sordid history of linking gay people with threatening kids, and to produce skewed research that could be used as talking points to demagogue the public (¶3, from here, links in original).

^[10] I say the “cunning of neoliberal capitalism” not the “logic” of it, since using the word logic would ascribe a rationality to the irrational faith and activity of (neoliberal) capitalism.

^[11] In point of fact, one might argue it remains unfortunate they do have social legitimacy not because this normalizes “substandard” familial conditions but because it distracts us from recognizing that those “substandard familial conditions” form a necessary pillar of unjust white supremacy.

[12] The nasty history of heterosexual adoption (especially since after World War II) makes unambiguous that couples needn’t make their own babies to count as constructing or providing a site of social reproduction. Thus, barren people might raise children. At the same time, the provision of children (theoretically the objects of social reproduction par excellence) to any “home” structure capable of supporting them points exactly to the need for an adjusted notion of marriage, precisely as proponents and opponents of marriage equality claim. I would say, rather, that the “adjustment” has already occurred and that social recognition of those adjustments come to the fore as necessary. To the extent that children benefit from the tax status of married spouses, why must their welfare lose those benefits because their parents’ divorce? Child support supposedly offers some amelioration of this fact but why the subsidy must shift from a “tax break’ to the “male progenitor” remains logically obscure. &c. Meanwhile, the fact that adoption becomes a problem for opponents of marriage equality fails as an argument against marriage equality. Where marriage equality occurs, trolls will often pass laws making adoption impossible, &c. This, of course, when they don’t simply make up fake research to use to lie in court. So the “redefinition” of marriage that marriage equality purports does not automatically entail change vis-à-vis adoption, even s worriers over slippery slopes insist otherwise. Opponents who complain, for instance, remain unwilling to annul marriage licenses to barren couples or those who have ceased to procreate; quite the opposite: our Occidental discourse articulated the social practice adoption as we now have it in response. And so the bad faith in saying that homosexuals can’t marry because they can’t reproduce already refutes the opponent’s claim that the “rights” of the (heterosexual) nuclear family somehow legitimizes (or—cart-before-the-horse-style—actually itself gets legitimized in the first place by) adoption. This remains unclear and muddled because the premises remain unclear and muddled.

[13] Precisely in the zone of child-care this explicit separation readily gets blurry: a babysitter may come into the home, a day-care provider might come over for dinner, &c. By contrast, to imagine as welcome any sort of incursion into the “home” by an employer other than the provision of a pay check—as for instance when an employer attempts to fire employees who even smoke in their own homes—starts to sound far-fetched.

^[14] I would say it makes any feeling of solidarity fundamentally self-deceptive or illusory.

NOTES ON A TRANSFORMATION: An Application of Chaos Theory & Depth Psychology (2014): Part XIII – Conclusion

“Believers make liars,” except that, as Jung (1956)[1] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[2]

INTRODUCTION

Recently (and currently), I experienced (and continue to experience) a “re-centering”[3] of my identity, by which I mean that patterns and behaviors in my life changed (and continue to change).

Over the course of some fourteen posts (thirteen as it turns out, the number of transformation in the Tarot deck, coincidentally), I have described the various inputs that brought about this change, analyzing them through a lens of chaos theory and Jungian depth-psychology, only in part to further articulate the roots of the change (for myself) and more to provide a descriptive model of the experience that might prove useful (for others). This thirteenth post summarizes the series overall.

CONCLUSION

Laszlo (1991)[4] describes how “the term bifurcation, in its most significant sense, refers to the transition of a system from the dynamic regime of one set of attractors, generally more stable and simpler ones, to the dynamic regime of a set of more complex and ‘chaotic’ attractors” (6); so he uses bifurcation specifically to refer to transformation as I have used it. These bifurcations or transformations have different dynamics, from subtle (smooth and gradual), to catastrophic (abrupt and a product of excessive system stress), to explosive, due to “sudden and discontinuous factors that wrench the system out of one regime and into another” (6). Having settled into  new dynamic regime—a new orbit—the system may fluctuate “between discrete values in the regime (known as a Turing bifurcation), or the system may fluctuate wildly among many values … ( Hopf bifurcation)” (6). Or “the bifurcation may be simply a transitory stage by which the system passes through a regime in order to find a new area of stability, in which case the bifurcation is a “window” to a stable dynamic regime for the system” (6).

Laszlo summarizes this process of transformation generally:

The system proceeds in its stable state along well-formulated trajectories, until one parameter exceeds a threshold limit. At that point, the trajectory forks and the system enters a region of [its operation] where it behaves differently and assumes new and different values. It follows another trajectory, dancing to the tune of new attractors. It is important, however, that in the course of their evolution, [these sorts of] systems describe a trajectory in their [area of operation] marked by a definite pattern. When bifurcation occurs, the fact that we cannot predict the exact trajectory it will take does not prevent us from seeing and predicting basic patterns that the evolving system will display over time (6).

Laszlo’s use of the word ‘predict’ here seems dubiously founded, but an ideological part of his exposition involves the notion that we may not only better describe transformation in the world through chaos theory but also that this better understanding will open a window to some degree of effective intervention by human beings into chaotic dynamics. Again, this seems a wildly premature claim,[5] but if we set that aside, his abbreviated description of the course of transformation encapsulates well enough my longer description in the Chaos Theory sections of this paper.

However, the emergence of the solar hyena itself gives cautionary evidence against Laszlo’s use of the word predict. I have said enough of my autobiography already not to reprise more of it in a summary; rather, the factors themselves involved consisted of:

BEFORE GOING TO THE CONFERENCE:

• The many vicissitudes and experiences in my life that constellate around the symbolic Scorpio/Sagittarius dichotomy, both consciously and (by hypothesis) not
• the figures of atheist as mystic, anarchist as citizen, animal as social presence, and sodomite as human being
• the long, slow, diffuse arc of role-playing hyenas online (as an anthropomorphic hyena) and offline (as a gnoll paladin)
• the broken symmetry of my broken car and loss of income

DURING THE CONFERENCE

• the (seriously playful) re-visitation of the language of spirit guides and other notions gleaned during the spirituality panels,
• my focused examination of and blogging about the Sun card in the Tarot (along with the surrounding Star and Moon and Judgment cards),
• the opportunity of silence and explicit introversion provided by the guided meditation,

I’ve arranged these factors more or less chronologically, to suggest how the old paradigm (the previous dynamic regime) became stressed by the broken symmetry in the middle and then, through the “window” of the dynamics offered at the conference constellated around the symbol of the solar hyena.

In retrospect, it becomes tempting to ascribe a necessity, an inevitability, to the form the symbol took, specifically a solar hyena. But if one would underscore heavily all of the hyenas in the past—especially the gnoll paladin, as a clear sort of “first draft” of the symbol itself—we would have to explain why other creatures that I have played could not or did not get drawn into the critical moment of fusion. It becomes fantastically simple to lose sight of the fortuity that attached all I attach to the hyena in the first place and, had I decided (for instance) that the red panda did a better job of encapsulating what I ascribe to the hyena, then I should have wound up with a solar red panda instead, the argument would go.

But rather than fruitlessly quibbling about this, it seems to me the far more relevant fact revolves around how we (as human beings) organize our past into narratives. If the hyena serves as a kind of repository for all of the attributes I give to it, then that came about because I decided to make that narrative. I entered that idea—that complex—into the ambit of my thinking, and then (of course) it had its own life, in various roleplaying incarnations, &c. In this sense, the hyena has nothing of “a past” about it but exists wholly in the present.

At one point, I would have said, “I smoke, because I’m addicted.” I appeal to some (theoretically) immutable fat in the past, my addiction, s my rational for continuing the addiction now. Instead, I might say, “I smoke, so that I may remain addicted.” And immediately, by throwing my rationale into the future (rather than the past), I already begin to (literally) feel different about smoking. So, if someone in treatment say, “I hate myself, because my mother didn’t love me,” perhaps we might rearrange that: “My mother didn’t love me so that I would hate myself” (or some other kind of transformation. Once again, almost immediately, a different affect comes along with this modified sentence—s palpable a demonstration that what we say matters as one could want, if proof remained necessary.

So, of course those events which organizationally occurred previous to now, i.e., the entire history of the universe back to the beginning of time itself, will conventionally get turned into narratives that use “because”. “I feel this way about hyenas, because …” but the narrative I have about hyenas exists as a factor and influence only in the now, an so I might just as well change the sentence’s claim, “I feel this way about hyenas, so that …”.

The palpable, visceral affect of difference that this alone brings about—try a few sentences on yourself; “I eat because I’m hungry” becomes “I eat so that I my become hungry again”—already points to a significant factor in meaningful change, I suspect. So whyever I decided hyenas mean this or that, the more important emphasis comes not from the “because” of that and rather the “so that”: the purpose to which I intend to put that narrative. And this seems especially true—as addicts might attest—in those cases where the “because” puts us into situations where we feel stuck. We see, in fact, that saying “because” makes us stuck in the first place. It sticks us.

In principle, then, I reject resolutely any rooting around in my childhood for any cause of behavior. Of course, everything within my psyche occurred in a past (not the past); those traces inhabits my psyche as complexes, with arcs of development of their own, but this does not oblige me to say “because” in the face of them.[6] We all know the faultiness of memory, but even if we remember perfectly, I still spin myself a yarn when I say, “Because of this, I do that,” using some past trauma or whatnot as my rational, one might even say excuse.

To say this does not invalidate all of the narratives I have spun out in the above analyses, hunting for threads of living symbols and complexes, and whatnot. Jung’s psychology makes clear that the Self, not the ego-consciousness itself, writes the narratives. I may have named the hyena as a certain kind of sign, but that then developed along its own lines as well. I didn’t name my Scorpion and Centaur as such until the mid-1990s or so, but they’d been wreaking havoc for a long time and then continued to do so under their identified names, along their own lines. &c. What I resist by saying I reject the “because” involves not pretending that the past consists of something I can do nothing about. The idea o original sin simply formalizes the notion in a disgusting an totalizing way. And perhaps this makes clear why Christians so often act like monsters and jack-asses—“I sin, so that I may be forgiven” promises such sensual pleasure even as the excuse for the sin gets thrown back on the past, “I sin, because no man is righteous”.

The history of art (and popular music) shows multiple examples of artists who brought together any number of preexisting cultural forms and tropes and styles, &c., and brewed it into something that changed how we understand what we may do with art and often creates new genres of art in the process: Shakespeare’s articulation of the sonnet, for instance, or Ridley Scott’s (1979)[7] haunted house story in space—thanks massively to HR Giger’s (1979)[8] fantastic work, of course—or the Wachowski’s (1999)[9] visual seduction in The Matrix.[10]

That kind of constellation that transforms a diffuse dynamics of “chaos” into a recognizable “it” in its dynamics describes the effect of the solar hyena’s emergence as well, but instead of functioning in the social world of the public, it offers a “strictly personal” version of aesthetic realization. I would take it as proof—at least at some points in our lives—that the aesthetic impulse itself, art in general, forms a crucial part of the human identity. Schiller seems to speak at great length about aesthetic education, and I see why. The aesthetic impulse represents the personal form of what we know in the social (public) world as art.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[2] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

[3] One might typically hear “re-centering” but I do not believe that the circle represents the correct geometric metaphor; rather, as in planetary orbits, the ellipse does, which has two foci that influence the course of the orbit. As just one partial illustration of this, I wrote elsewhere:

This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

Murphy (1991)* puts this another way: “The struggle is not to abolish any type of centering, but to recognize the relative nature of centers and their dynamic relationship with margins” (51).

*Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] Laszlo, E. (1991). The age of bifurcation: understanding a changing world. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach.

[5] And thus a dangerous one. Already the economic technocrats flounder blindly in the dark at the “helm” of the economy. It might seem like a random policy change could turn out as effective as one supposedly rationally arrived at. One senses that attempting to apply chaos theory at the scale of whole human systems would result more in chaos, in the popular and undesirable sense.

[6] If only it were always so simple, of course.

[7] Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation., Shusett, R., O’Bannon, D., Carroll, G., Giler, D., Hill, W., Scott, R., Skerritt, T., Weaver, S., Cartwright, V., Stanton, H. D., Hurt, J., Holm, I., Kotto, Y., Vanlint, D., Rawlings, T., Goldsmith, J., Brandywine (Firm)., & Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, I. (2003). Alien. Director’s cut. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

[8] Giger, HR (1989). Giger’s alien.

[9] Warner Bros., Reeves, K., Fishburne, L., Village Roadshow Pictures., & Silver Pictures. (1999). The Matrix. Burbank, Calif.: Warner Home Video.

[10] How delightful I’d find it to have someone get irked I’d like Shakespeare, Alien and The Matrix—my point remained only to show how  form or genre may pop into focus in the general imagination.

BOOK REVIEWS (2014): Philip K. Dick’s (1969) Ubik

Summary (the TLDR Version)

How someone misreads a book says a lot about them.

Framing/Background for Replies

If you’ve read this section previously, you can skip it.

Two years ago in 2012, I set myself the task to read at least ten pages per day; last year, I did so. Continuing from then, I now have the task to read fifteen pages per day,[1] and I’ve added that I will write a book reaction (or reply) for each one that I finish (or give up on, if I stop).  I plan also to devise a way to randomly select books to read (given certain constraints) from the public library; this, to avoid the tendency only to read books that pique my already existing interests.

These replies will not be Amazon-type reviews, with synopses, background research done on the author or the book itself, unless that strikes me as necessary or if the book inspired me to do so when I read it. Rather, these replies amount to assessments of the ways I found the book helpful somehow. More precisely—and this describes what I mean by a reply, as opposed to a reaction (review) or a response—I try to focus in these pieces on what I could not have said (or would not have known what to say) except that the intersection of this text and my consciousness brought it about.

Consequently, I will sometimes say stupid stuff, poorly informed stuff, &c. Some in the world expect everyone to possess omniscience and won’t bother to engage in a human dialogue toward divining how to make the world a better place. To the extent that each reply I offer provides a I found this helpful in this book, then it becomes up to us (you, me, us) to correct, refine, trash and start over, or do something else we see as potentially helpful as part of attempting to make our world a better place. If you won’t bother to take up your end of that bargain, that signals of course part of the problem that needs a solution.

A Reply To:  P.K. Dick’s  (1969)[2] Ubik

This makes for the second PKD book I have read (see my reply to Man in the High Castle here) on the strength of both Stanisław Lem’s contention that Dick is a writer of ideas (albeit often too sloppy) and also an acquaintance whose sensibilities arise out of thoughtfulness even as they differ from mine aesthetically.

One description of Ubik runs:

Philip K. Dick’s searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation (the latter available in a convenient aerosol spray) is a tour de force of panoramic menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.

LeGuin, who either went to school with or knew PKD, uses the word sin to describe a key element of this book. And critics Lacayo and Grossman describe it as “a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you’ll never be sure you’ve woken up from” (from here).[3]

I can say this much about Ubik—Dick managed to put it together less sloppily than Man in the High Castle, which meanders about aimlessly for a very good portion of the text and not toward much of an end finally. In that book, the moment with Hawthorne Abendsen (author of the book-within-a-book The Grasshopper Lie Heavy) when we find out that “our” world actually happened, so that everyone in the book’s world gets de-centered into some nebulous existential uncertainty, does work with some degree of spookiness, but this does not ultimately offset the investment required by the reader to get there, I’d assert. Of course, literary critics might find clever ways to excuse this, but what they will primarily describe amounts to the reader’s experience of the book, rather than the construction of the book itself. It seems, more, that Dick provides, essentially, a short story that has bloated out with a mass of preliminary material that neither adds nor detracts—because it does not connect finally—to the preceding material.

Call this a tendentious reading and let it lie for the moment. Ubik also has problems with plot, but in a different way. It clearly sets out on a definite trajectory. Runciter’s organization has taken a hit from his enemy/competitor Ray Hollis, and something needs doing to correct it. A group of specialists set out to do so, and simply stumble into a trap (as it seems). Now, one may call this plot trite, trivial, or whatnot—a who-dunnit with some telepathy thrown in—but it at least has the impetus of a plot. And the point of view embodied in the text after the attempted assassination of the group, as the survivors drag toward their spacecraft to escape, has a nicely confused “haze” to it that matches the (presumable) confusion that one might experience following an explosion. It reminds me of that moment in Klimov’s (1985)[4] Come and See, when a bomb’s detonation renders the protagonist mostly deaf, and the sound in the movie cuts mostly out.

After this, however, the book drops away all of these narrative conceits in an unsatisfying way. Of course, with PKD one expects shifting realities, but a reader may discern the palpable difference between a reality shift and simply negligent plot construction. I could point to the figure of Mick Stanton as the most obvious case—a trillionaire, introduced into the text for no reason except to tempt Runciter into travelling to the Luna. In Dickens, this might enter the text as one of his quick character sketches, but usually those vivid asides do not influence any substantial course of the action. Here, the figure of Mick Stanton makes for the central raison d’etre of the quest to Luna, and his name gets mentioned, perhaps, one more time in the book after Dick resort to this conceit.

Partly this occurs because Dick drops the even larger conceit of a conspiracy by Ray Hollis—Stanton being either the lie or the patsy in Hollis’ scheme. This part of the plot, which largely disappears anyway while the main focus of the text concerns the explosion’s survivors trying to cope with whatever world they find themselves in, returns when it gets suggested that one of the psionics in their group has made the whole thing possible. But this too turns out only a feint, and the “real” enemy finally makes a showing too close to the end of the book. With the abrupt appearance of the actual antagonist, Dick also quickly wheels in what mythologist might call the helping animal (in the form of Ella Runciter), and then Dick finishes off with one last facile twist (doubtless because he cannot help himself) to suggest that everything we think we have read actually should have an opposite valence (that Runciter has died after all and the “other world” had reality or some other arguable variation; Dick does not provide enough textual grist to decide this).

Call this a tendentious reading an leave that aside for now as well. The problem at work here involves a contract with the reader—and I will leave aside for now any grand claim of trying to inculcate or indoctrinate readers into a new form of reading as a strategy or aim of Dick’s books. He does not seem an attentive enough writer to warrant giving the texts that much credit, even if a reader can generate such a reading for herself. In the conventional (by which I mean merely typical) sense, readers to some degree enjoy being tricked by a twist, but at the moment it happens, she should feel invited to revisit all of the text and have moments of, “Oh, so that’s why that happened” and the like. Dick does not provide that, neither in reflections on the part of characters in the text nor in any critical mass of previous narrative that supports indulging in such reflections.

It will, of course, become difficult to distinguish between a text that simply as a consequence of its sloppy construction provides a reader the experience of having thwarted expectations or that as a matter of authorial intention deliberately does so. Any claim to existential horror, for example, seems to presuppose a deliberate depiction, because for us (as human being) if we woke up tomorrow and discovered everything we knew had ceased being the case (or even if we simply had a sufficiently long moment of it) this would unsettle us (I assume) to a great degree. But we don’t get that in Dick’ book. The “horror” Joe Chip experiences arises from the increased entropy rapidly destroying him (the col and the weight), especially as he tries to climb some stairs (another vivid passage in the book), or in the merely suggested horror of Wendy Wright’s and Al Denny’s deaths, which purport to unsettle the reader (Denny’s death more successfully, since the reader gets plead in the position of an auditory witness to it).

So, any existential horror does not center on the shifting reality in the book. It begins to seem as if this element of the book remains s gratuitous and unconnected to the main plot as Mick Stanton (or Ray Hollis for that matter). Thus, we have a narrative that functions approximately 90% of the time as an “I woke up and it was all a dream,” which (again) violates the typical contract with the reader. And, I would add, in the canon of a writer who seems very concerned with reality, to simply allow the “unreality” of a dream to persist in the ethos of such a world uncontested seems especially poor work. At a minimum level, whatever the characters experience, the reader carries forward (as a virtual creature “in” the book) all of the experiences, the realities, of the book s experiences, and thus realities. Saying to the reader, in effect, “Forget all that, attend to this,” cannot function in a satisfying way, because it simply gets it wrong. No authorial feint can complete banish the reader’ (experience of) reading, however sloppily or attentively the reader has read.

However, even Dick betrays his awareness of not making good on the “world mechanics” he proposes in this text. If the existential horror does not center on ‘what is reality” but on the presence of “accelerated death” (entropy), on embodying the “malevolence” of the universe (or nature) in the form of a petulant (deal) adolescent named Jory, then he does not do so consistently. More precisely, he seems not to have clearly thought through how to deal with the “pace” of the regression or entropy going on in the text. While at one point the regression comes very swiftly (and time seems to go backward at the rate of years in a matter of minutes) at other times—merely for the sake of the plot, obviously—this rate of change slows down, or essentially stops. I may get this detail slightly wrong, but the error remains inessential: if the car Joe Chip has driven regresses from a 1939 LaSalle to a 1929 Ford of some sort in a matter of minutes, his desire to get up in the air in an airplane and fly for three days must seem like a death wish, since it could only happen that the plane will regress in mid-flight (to an early wright prototype?) and thus crash to the earth in a fiery unpleasantness. At some point, Joe Chip wonders in the text (perhaps wondering aloud on Dick’s behalf) how the plane lasted as long as it did.

The weak justification offered comes from the antagonist, or at least we have little choice but to infer it from him: his appetite waxes and wanes. His desire to eat half-life energy varies. But what makes this so unsatisfactory involves precisely the readers counter-factual to this explanation: that the rate of decay caries and correlates according to what Dick elects to do plot-wise. It represents a kind of joke or mere inconvenience when the car Joe wants to sell regresses from a (valuable) LaSalle to a (worthless) Ford in a matter of minutes, and then is a matter of convenience that the plane does not regress (seemingly at all) over the course of three days travel.

Lots of other mechanics in the novel seem problematic or unclear, but this becomes less of a problem because Dick does not seem necessarily to violate them. The claim that Ella will reincarnate certainly wreaks havoc on most of the claims to “existential horror”—if half-life turns out as something undoable, then the sort of grinding destruction the book asks us to find horrifying turns into a necessary (if unpleasant) step toward re-life. the justification that Jory embodies a problem one cannot simply avoid makes a bit more sense (because Jorys “exist” in all half-life mortuaries), but as a psychic entity, one could imagine inertials capable of blocking his psionic villainy. Moreover, while a sort of embodiment of the Second Law of thermodynamics, human life itself represents a reversal of entropy, and so already we have a conceptual “ward” against entropy, but this does not appear in the book at all.

No wonder that Lem at least guardedly praises some of Dick’s work, because Lem delights in pitting his characters against the unknown and then making them reflect on the experience of hearing their own echoes (and mistaking them for reality). Lem, however, embodies this theme in his text consciously and with narrative consequences. The confusion of a character (often the protagonist) facing the Unknown mirrors the reader’s experience (or allows the reader to inhabit that confusion). We see this perhaps nowhere so pointedly as in Lem’s (1961)[5] Return from the Stars, where an astronaut returns to Earth after 127 years to find it transformed into an unrecognizable “utopia”; his confusion while first wandering around on earth exactly mirrors our own s we encounter the text, &c. One might also note Lem’s (1959) “Ciemność i Pleśń “(Darkness and Mustiness), “about the creation of Whisteria Cosmolytica which is described as ‘a microbe annihilating matter and drawing its vital energy from that process’, creating a grey goo scenario,” though I do not think it possible Dick might ever have known of this text. Though the only US science fiction author praised by Lem, “Dick, however, perhaps due to his mental illness, believed that Stanisław Lem was a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion, and wrote a letter to the FBI to that effect” (see here).

All of this said, one may wonder at the grandiose pronouncements made about this book (or Man in the High Castle for that matter)—less that people found them enjoyable reads, and more the bizarre claim that they warrant designation as craftily crafted literature. I find the charms of dick’s books (so far) largely accidental and the language of them never compelling except in two spots so far, and one of those I quickly recognized as a quotation from Shakespeare instead. The other pops up just before it in a narrative feint that Dick (once again) never follows up on. Related to the disappearance of the super-psi S. Dole Melipone (which I persist in believing is an anagram of something—or somehow related to the Greek Muse of Singing),[6] and the visitation in one character’s dream of two menacing figures (who never come back again either), the figure(s) say and the psionic replies:

“I can’t be myself while you’re round,” her nebulous opponent informed her. On his face a feral, hateful expression formed, giving him the appearance of a psychotic squirrel.

In her dream, Tippy answered, “Perhaps your definition of your self-system lacks authentic boundaries. You’ve erected a precarious structure of personality on unconscious factors over which you have no control. That’s why you feel threatened by me” (47).

Speaking frankly, Tippy’s answer here resonates as much with more consciousness of language as dos the Shakespeare quotation on the next page. Put another way, I would suspect it does not originate with Dick. And in fact, the phrase “precarious structure of personality” occurs in Young’s (1949)[7] review “Hell on Earth: Six Versions”, which begins:

The precarious structure of personality and the extrusive urge of religious experience, features of existence at any time subject to perplexity, assume desperate proportions in a world committed, as ours has been for thirty-five years, to crises involving mass destitution and death” (p. 311, see here).

I feel confident stating that this contributed as a source for Dick’s book, not just because of the phrase but the obvious content of Young’s article. Because I do not have access to the whole of Young’s review of the six books in question, I leave further source research to anyone who cares to search for it.

Dick doesn’t seem a writer who lavishes attention on his words—so much so that someone else’s words (Shakespeare’s, Young’s) stand out as distinctive. And, of course, what constitutes “literature” may seem a contentious issue. As Baldridge (1994)[8] makes clear, however, referring to Eagleton’s (1983)[9] Literary Theory: An Introduction:

[Eagleton writes,] “literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist” but is rather “a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time.” Thus, when he goes on to say that the “value judgements [by which literature is constituted] have a close relation to social ideologies,” I think we may take him to mean that decisions about what a given culture defines as literature tend to be saturated with political implications and that therefore works denominated as literary can often be examined in a  manner potentially revelatory of the culture’s ideological assumptions. I don’t think he means to contend that literary texts are always and everywhere supremely privileged windows into the workings of hegemony or that other, nonliterary texts would be chronically incapable of exposing such social processes to better effect” (f42, p. 195, italics in original).

By this, we may understand that delivering the laurel of “literature” to Ubik points to a political desirability for doing so, by which I do not at all mean such critics do so in the manner of a conspiracy, but simply (or complexly) as a function of the ambient discourse.

It seems significant then that critics should count the book as embodying a nihilistic and existential horror, despite the fact that reincarnation remains a suggested possibility in the book: a remedy for the existential horror at work in it. This amounts to overlooking the religious element at work in Dick in the first place, where religious means our human relationship with the transcendental, and which has specifically Eastern elements in Dick’s book: the Tibetan Bardo Thödol (or Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State)[10]. With Dick’s allusions to Jung (both here and in Man in the High Castle), the psycho-religious element gets further grounded.

Obviously Dick has read Jung to some extent. He sets the mortuary in Switzerland in Ubik, and offers a Carl Jung Hospital somewhere in it.  And though the “precarious structure of personality” occurs literally in Young’s piece, whether Young—shall we call it a happy coincidence, or a piece of synchronicity that “Young” is the English translation of Jung’s name?—found his own inspiration in Jung’s work, who might certainly have written, “You’ve erected a precarious structure of personality on unconscious factors over which you have no control”. Jung also somewhere—I can no longer remember where—proposes that our psyches might actually extend out beyond our bodies in a literal way (if I read him correctly), which points again to Tippy’s assertion, “Perhaps your definition of your self-system lacks authentic boundaries.”

We may imagine this disregard arises from a rejection of the Eastern sources Dick refers to. Thus, the alternative variety of “salvation” locatable in the text becomes Ubik itself. Before saying more, I want to contextualize this.

Dick’s former wife Tessa remarked that “Ubik is a metaphor for God. Ubik is all-powerful and all-knowing, and Ubik is everywhere. The spray can is only a form that Ubik takes to make it easy for people to understand it and use it. It is not the substance inside the can that helps them, but rather their faith in the promise that it will help them” (from here, emphasis added).[11]

This platitude (that faith in god, not god saves you) remains unassuming enough, but it does at least line up with the dominating Judeo-Christian discourse the book drops into. More than this however, we should not forget the image on the cover of Ubik (of the spray can) and the text still on the back of the book, “salvation (… available in a convenient aerosol spray”). Contrary then both to Dick’s intentions as well as statements made by his former wife, the discourse about salvation from existential horror remains centered on the notion that technology shall save us. Moreover, as Baldridge (1994) points up, in his criticism of the Foucauldian conception of power:

Thus where Foucault asserts that “power is not built up out of ‘wills’ (individual or collective, nor is it derivable from interests,” a Bakhtinian perspective would insist that, after all, someone writes advertising copy, political speeches, product labels, and popular jokes, even though those people will never be known to us and even though their productions are shorn of all ostensible marks of individual authorship and mass-distribute throughout the culture” (106–7).[12]

All of this seems more interesting than Dick’s book, by which I mean: the book may occasion a discussion of these things (as my reply suggests) but primarily (if not only) because the reader does the bulk of intellectual heavy lifting. Thus, it is not Ubik (the book) responsible for the reader’s experience (salvation) but the reader’s belief in Ubik (as a work of literature).

My analysis keeps shifting from a consideration of the reader (the individual) and a consideration of the politics of reception surrounding Ubik, its (willful) misreading as a nihilistic tale (the phrase “metaphysical comedy of death”) of unrelieved existential horror whose only succor comes from technology (the phrase “salvation [the latter available in a convenient aerosol spray]”). The remainder of the ad-text simply lies; we find here no “tour de force of paranoiac menace and unfettered slapstick”—Lem’s (1961)[13] Memoirs Found in a Bathtub represents a more deft example of this—and no one departed out to “shop for their next incarnation” or anyone especially running ‘the continual risk of dying yet again” since whether people have already died or not serves as a crucial ambiguity.

It may seem facile to compare Dick to Lem. Certainly, familiarity with both books justifies Lem’s assertion of the poverty of science fiction in the United States—particularly if we take the critical claims made for Ubik into account. If we need acclaim from some authority, Theodore Sturgeon  declares it, “A well-wrought nightmare indeed”—underscoring its entry into the “nightmare” category Dick’s work gets place; again, the Grossman’s contention that Ubik offers  “a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you’ll never be sure you’ve woken up from.” (By the way, I remain sure I’ve woken up from it, Lev.) And Lem says his project involves: “grim humor” and a tacit (satirical) rejection of:

“totalization of the notion of intentionality”. Explaining the concept, he further writes that everything [that] humans perceive, may be interpreted as a message by them, and that a number of “-isms” are based on interpreting the whole Universe as a message to its inhabitants. This interpretation may be exploited for political purposes and then run amok beyond their intentions (from here).

Notwithstanding the important distinction between Lem’s political aim and Dick’s religious (or spiritual) aim, the co-opting of Dick’s book into a technocratic interpretation—even when we construe it as one that purports an anti-commercialism—undeftly and ineptly does the necessary work; the reader must supply (or wrongly supply) the necessary material that the book lacks. One suspects that perhaps behind all of the veils that Dick cannot help deploying, he nonetheless seeks (and even seems to claim to find, I’d say) the ground of reality, even if the human protagonist stuck in the middle of things can only state that ground as a hypothesis: an Eastern philosophy demonstrates.

In that case, any rejection of technocratic optimism that Dick offers as a satire easily allows itself to get misread by labeling his books postmodern, where the contestability of the text becomes absolute. But even Dick’s text seems locked in an inability to plainly assert, as his ex-wife does, that not Ubik itself but faith in Ubik matters. This will-to-reality, which the realist underpinnings of the novel makes fall into place very easily,[14] renders highly problematic the sorts of ambiguities Dick seems to want to maintain. Unlike Borges or Gogol or Lem or Faulkner or other exemplars of indeterminate fiction, Dick only erratically makes indeterminating gestures, perhaps because his commitment finally does not remain to thorough-going consistency (much less sufficiency) in his text, but allows himself an easy way out unmotivated within the text itself.

Why must Ella invent ubik to combat Jory if reincarnation occurs, for instance? The fact that Ella gets to reincarnate wreaks the same kind of havoc on the satire or surface of the text that Huxley’s daffy introduction of an isle of geniuses into his (1932)[15] Brave New World does. One may forgive a human being (an author) for wanting some relief, but readers needn’t accept the consequences of that desire in a text when it effectively destroys it. It amount to  sort of narrative question begging.

But these ineptnesses on the level of craft get fetishized on the (political) level of criticism, if only because critics must make up excuses for them in order to make a novel’s is course genial or amenable to the dominating discourse.[16] One might even read the “covert” Eastern aspect of the novel, as an actual or literal escape hatch that the dominating (Judeo-Christian) discourse “contains” within it. We get with this very close to the issues raised in Baldridge’s book, wither resistances to Power amount to nothing more than certain kinds of articulations of Power that Power actually subverts or co-opts—a point Baldridge refutes, insisting that meaningful resistance remains possible, and that claims otherwise form an essential backbone to political neutralization. Thus, certain kinds of Foucauldian insistences on the nature of Power serve precisely as the kinds of gestures of Power that serve to neutralize.

But all of this, again, seems more interesting than Dick’s book. As I said of Man in the High Castle, “Someone should rewrite this book with more thoughtfulness in order to actually do justice to the claims made about the ideas insufficiently articulated in this book.”

Endnotes

[1] More precisely, I will continue to read my usual ten pages but I will also read five pages per day of Burton’s (1620) Anatomy of Melancholy, a gigantic book that at five pages per day I will finish reading near the end of December 2014. I have wanted to read this book for a while, but various features of it make getting through it a challenge.

[2] Dick, P. K. (1991). Ubik. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, pp. 1–216.

[3] The purpose of this list, which does not seem improved by a measure of self-consciousness regarding the fatuousness or dubiousness of such lists, involves naming the 100 best English-language novels since Time magazine got published. Amongst the nearly-rans, the authors remark: “Dawn Powell, Mordechai Richler, Thomas Wolfe, Peter Carey, J.F. Powers, Mary McCarthy, Edmund White, Larry McMurtry, Katherine Ann Porter, Amy Tan, John Dos Passos, Oscar Hijuelos—we looked over our bookcases and many more than 100 names laid down a claim. This means you, Stephen King” (from here).

[4] Byelorusfilm (Firm)., Klimov, E. G., Adamovich, A., Kravchenko, A., Mironova, O., Laucevičius, L., Moskovskai͡a kinostudii͡a “Mosfilʹm.”., & Kino International Corporation. (2003). Come and see: Idi i smotri. [New York]: Kino on Video.

[5] Lem, S. (1980). Return from the stars. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

[6] The invocation of “Serapis” (in the text as Sarapis) no doubt figures into things somehow, at least if only in passing. The thread doesn’t seem worth pursuing, because Dick does not pursue it. It becomes (seemingly) just another convenience or contrivance of the moment that appears to have no consequence in the text.

[7] Young, V. (1949). Hell on Earth: six versions. Hudson Review, 2(2), (Summer, 1949), pp. 311–318.

[8] Baldridge, C. (1994). The dialogics of dissent in the English novel. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England

[9] Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary theory: an introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[10] I’ve no doubt that the inauspicious red light referred to at times comes from the Tibetan text or tradition. It doesn’t even seem necessary to confirm.

[11] With appropriate irony, the link to Tessa Dick’s claim has broken; the quotation remains available on Wikipedia (here).

[12] The passage continues: “The fact that hegemonic discourses do not arrive on our doorstep with a signature at the bottom does not prevent us from conceptualizing our agreement or resistance to such vocabularies in broadly conversational terms and aiming our response toward an imaginatively constructed human speaker or speakers whose words have reassured or disturbed us” (107).

[13] Lem, S. (1973). Memoirs found in a bathtub. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

[14] To say nothing of its embodiment in language, which has  very strong realist epistemology as well.

[15] Huxley, A. (2004). Brave new world: and, Brave new world revisited. New York: HarperCollins.

[16] (A critical critic might make such excuse in arguing the novel resists those discourses.)

NOTES ON A TRANSFORMATION: An Application of Chaos Theory & Depth Psychology (2014): Part XII – Complexes & Persona

“Believers make liars,” except that, as Jung (1956)[1] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[2]

INTRODUCTION

Recently (and currently), I experienced (and continue to experience) a “re-centering”[3] of my identity, by which I mean that patterns and behaviors in my life changed (and continue to change).

Over the course of some fourteen posts, I will describe the various inputs that brought about this change, analyzing them through a lens of chaos theory and Jungian depth-psychology, only in part to further articulate the roots of the change (for myself) and more to provide a descriptive model of the experience that might prove useful (for others). As such, everything autobiographical in this post I consider trivial; its significance resides only in its illustrative value for you (the reader) and for the model.

This twelfth post continues the exposition of Jungian depth psychology and relates complexes and the person to my notion meaningful change or transformation.

Complexes & the Persona

This provides a rather apt segue to Jung’s notion of complexes. Having read a lot of Jung, I have strayed across this notion many times, but I have yet to read (I believe) his more formal articulations of the notion. In fact, in his earliest psychiatric work, he begins to sketch out the way complexes intrude on consciousness during word-association tests. In his ongoing work, as he encountered again and again similar structural presences in his clients and patients, he gradually elaborated the most determinative of these as archetypes. And at the time when I originally wrote this, I’d yet to finish the papers collected in his Experimental Researches, which includes a 1911 paper “On the Doctrine of Complexes”. My reply to that book (see here) consists largely of tracing the development of this notion of the complex.

To put this all too briefly, one may analogize how complexes “live” in the personal unconscious while archetypes “live” in the collective unconscious. Critics of Jung want to get ontological about this, but his proposal here serves simply to maintain a distinction in human experience between the sort of hijacking moodiness or possession that complexes affect in us compared to the sometimes earth-shattering or psychosis-inducing eruption of archetypal material. When I tried to quit smoking and found myself harassed (by a pat of myself) into having a cigarette or, more strangely still, when habit would have me simply light a cigarette and start smoking it without even noticing, we can ask the question, “Who lit the cigarette?” It (literally) feels inaccurate to say “I” did, especially as I want to quit smoking. Those who have wrestled with addiction know very well this apparent “other” who from time to time hijacks the would-be recoverer’s will. Or those who drive home when completely blacked out; again, “Who drove home?” In even more extreme cases, multiple personalities and fugue states may go on for days, weeks, or even years. On a much more mundane level, again, we pop out of bed, ready to take on the world, and then four hours later remain still in our underwear watching kitten videos on the Internet; here again, who intervened on our committed desire to make a difference in the world that day?

Again, to discuss whether complexes have some sort of ontologically autonomous existence apart from us bogs down in unnecessary controversies. Jung proposes this language as a way to understand  human experience. I doubt that he would have ever morally excused someone’s actions simply because they issued from a complex; complexes don’t get you off the hook, no more than being blacked out while driving will get you off the hook if you run over someone, but it does mitigate or moderate the consequences.  If you say something that activates one of my complexes and I snap at you, I still get to bear the consequences of that, though you might show kind enough to take into account that my mood made me (regrettably) react like I did. Some framing terminology (from here) may help:

Affect-ego: the modification of the ego or “I” by an emerging strongly toned complex. With painful feelings the modification can bring about a restriction, a withdrawal of many parts of the normal ego.

Complex (or “feeling-toned complex”): from a term borrowed by the German psychologist Zeihen and used by Eugen Breuer, then Jung and Freud: a cluster of emotionally charged associations, usually unconscious and gathered around an archetypal center (and so a blend of environment and disposition). Repressed emotional themes. Complexes were first noticed by Aristotle, who in his Psyche called them part-souls, and behave like little personalities (and have unconscious fantasy systems), often even after partially incorporated into awareness. A more powerful complex will either blend with one less powerful or replace it, and its constellating power corresponds to its energy value. [4]

Complexes are the contents of the personal unconscious, whereas archetypes, their foundations, are those of the collective unconscious. Complexes, found in healthy as well as troubled people, are always either the cause or the effect of a conflict. The complex arises from the clash between the need to adapt and constitutional inability to meet the challenge.[5]

Ego: the conscious self; the “I”; the central, experience-filtering complex of consciousness (in contrast to the Self, the central complex of the collective unconscious)–and the most stable complex because it’s grounded in the body sensations. A relatively permanent personification. The most individual part of the person. The ego divides into the ectopsyche and the endopsyche. It’s an object in consciousness as well as a requirement for it. Its two main constituents are bodily sensations and memory.

What I want to emphasize here involves the self-evident notion from the above of the multiplicity of complexes.  Thus one arrives at the notion in Moore’s (1982)[6] The Planets Within or Jean Shinoda Bolen’s (1984)[7] Goddesses in Everywoman and (1989)[8] Gods in Everyman, even as these seem more like archetypes than Aristotle’s little personalities. If one risks godlikeness (as described above in the section on “Archetypal Emergence”) in the identification of one’s ego with archetypal material, with complexes identification tends to get experienced as possession.[9]

It seems helpful to connect the sorts of factors listed above with Jung’s notion of complexes, or at least the parts that proceed the period of symmetry breaking.  Doubtless, the most embodied complexes in this sense involve those listed as the figures of atheist as mystic, anarchist as citizen, animal as social presence, and sodomite as human being—all of which in some way fly under the banner of a sentence I read as a closeted sophomore in high school in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground: “man does things against his self-interest in order to maintain his identity” .[10] One could just say the Scorpio itself already symbolizes this arch-contrarian in me but the Centaur has his stubbornness as well. More discrete from myself, on the one hand, and yet also for that reason more developed, on the other, all of the major and minor roleplaying characters I have run round in my head aggregate to themselves and thus also form to some extent complexes as well. Certainly, in its own way, the evolution from the first major character I developed as an adult for roleplaying (Bronwyn) to the figure ultimately of the gnoll paladin serves as its own pseudo-autobiography as well.

And so, similarly, when I began to wear a snow leopard tail in public, this at least theoretically asserted the possibility of manifesting more than one identity. I explicitly imagined that, at time, having a “snow leopard” response as an alternative to whatever I would have otherwise uttered or come up with would mark an additional piece of social flexibility for myself. However, just as one discovers rather than invents symbols, I may have mistaken this change in my persona to develop into something like a complex, which did not happen. No more, then, in a similar way does adding a hyena tail to my (new) now leopard necessarily presage more than a change in my persona. It functions like the sort of addition of tails that the Japanese kitsune exhibits in folk-lore: growing (or obtaining) a new tail each time it experiences a  significant spiritual experience.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[2] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

[3] One might typically hear “re-centering” but I do not believe that the circle represents the correct geometric metaphor; rather, as in planetary orbits, the ellipse does, which has two foci that influence the course of the orbit. As just one partial illustration of this, I wrote elsewhere:

This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

Murphy (1991)* puts this another way: “The struggle is not to abolish any type of centering, but to recognize the relative nature of centers and their dynamic relationship with margins” (51).

*Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] In his early experimental researches in particular, as the compiler of this website notes, “Jung thought women’s complexes usually simpler and more often erotic than men’s, which focused on work and money.” Jung certainly waxes along these lines in Experimental Researches—not an aspect of his work I have an interest in perpetuating..

[5] The author here adds, “They originate in childhood, and their first form is the parental complex.” This must get framed as a hypothesis, yet another explanatory framework—that our complexes originate in some form from past features. For Freud, this origin and etiology seems to have had an absolute, ontological quality; if Jung takes up the idea, it has more of a phenomenological emphasis. But even in this, In Cirillo and Wapner’s (1985)* very aptly named Value Presuppositions in Theories of Human Development, they point out that even the fundamental idea that we start in some kind of simpler or chaotic state and only gradually “develop” represents an untested hypothesis, that such a presupposition provides a way of thinking about how human beings experience time, but doesn’t automatically provide a priori some reason to assume that earlier represents something inferior, that later represents something superior, that normal development even exists or that we should regard certain kinds of development as abnormal or aberrant. While we might, then, look to the very distant past for clues about our current problems, that very past itself has gotten constituted by us in our now; hence the saying, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood”.

* Cirillo, L, and Wapner, S (1985). Value presuppositions in theories of human development. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.

[6] Moore, T. (1982). The planets within: the astrological psychology of Marsilio Ficino. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books.

[7] Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in everywoman: a new psychology of women. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

[8] Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in everyman: a new psychology of men’s lives and loves. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

[9] Again: by the sort of automatic, unconscious, or habitual action described regarding addiction above, or in the more mundane way as possession by moods and so forth

[10] Memory playing the tricks it does, I have long felt sure this represents the exact sentence as I encountered it that mind-blowing night as I sprawled in a cooling bathtub reading the book all at one go, but in fact I cannot locate this sentence exactly or even exactly where it would fall in the text. A charming thing, given how vividly I remember the actual experience of reading the book.

BOOK REVIEWS (2014): CG Jung’s (1981) Symbols of Transformation

Framing/Background for Replies

If you’ve already read this section, you can skip it.

Two years ago in 2012, I set myself the task to read at least ten pages per day; last year, I did so. Continuing from then, I now have the task to read fifteen pages per day,[1] and I’ve added that I will write a book reaction (or reply) for each one that I finish (or give up on, if I stop).  I plan also to devise a way to randomly select books to read (given certain constraints) from the public library; this, to avoid the tendency only to read books that pique my already existing interests.

These replies will not be Amazon-type reviews, with synopses, background research done on the author or the book itself, unless that strikes me as necessary or if the book inspired me to do so when I read it. Rather, these replies amount to assessments of the ways I found the book helpful somehow. More precisely—and this describes what I mean by a reply, as opposed to a reaction (review) or a response—I try to focus in these pieces on what I could not have said (or would not have known what to say) except that the intersection of this text and my consciousness brought it about.

Consequently, I will sometimes say stupid stuff, poorly informed stuff, &c. Some in the world expect everyone to possess omniscience and won’t bother to engage in a human dialogue toward divining how to make the world a better place. To the extent that each reply I offer provides a I found this helpful in this book, then it becomes up to us (you, me, us) to correct, refine, trash and start over, or do something else we see as potentially helpful as part of attempting to make our world a better place. If you won’t bother to take up your end of that bargain, that signals of course part of the problem that needs a solution.

A Reply To:  CG Jung’s (1981)[2] Symbols of Transformation[3]

One usually doesn’t get the subtitle of this book (“An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia”) along with the main title (“Symbols of Transformation”), but it doesn’t hurt to keep this in mind. Thus, while the Miller fantasies (upon which Jung bases his book-length analysis) seem wholly egotistical—even self-aggrandizing in the way that Daniel Schreber’s (1903)[4] Memoirs of My Nervous Illness seems—Jung’s purpose remains more directed to understanding the mechanism or process of transformation that the fantasies exhibit. Thus, he writes (in a lengthy paragraph):

That the root-cause of the poem has been shown to be the love-episode [of Miller] is an explanation that does not amount to much at present, for the question of purpose still remains unsettled. Only the discovery of the purpose can provide a satisfactory answer to psychological questions. Were there not a secret purposiveness bound up with the supposedly devious path of the libido[5] or with the supposed repression, it I certain that such a process could not take place so easily, so naturally, and so spontaneously. Also, it would hardly occur so frequently in this form, or in some other like it. There is no doubt that this transformation of libido moves in the same direction as, broadly speaking, the cultural modification, conversion, or displacement of natural drives. It must be a well-trodden path which is so habitual that we hardly notice the conversion ourselves, if at all. Between the normal psychic transformation of instinctual drives and the present case there is, however, a certain different: we cannot rid ourselves of the suspicion that the critical experience—the singer [in Miller’s fantasies]—was assiduously overlooked; in other words, that there was a certain amount of “repression.” This latter term should really be used only when it is a voluntary act of which one cannot help being conscious. Nervous persons can successfully hide voluntary decisions of this kind from themselves up to a point, so that it looks as if the act of repression were completely unconscious. The context of associations provided by the author herself is so impressive that she must have felt this background in a fairly lively fashion, and must have therefore have transformed the situation through a more or less conscious act of repression (¶91, emphasis added, italics in original).[6]

Such repression in this sense would lead “to regressive reactivation of an earlier relationship or type of relatedness, in this case the reactivation of the father-imago” (¶92). Such activated unconscious contents then get projected; “they are either discovered in external objects, or are said to exist outside one’s own psyche” (¶92), generally without the individual having any awareness of this projection. Yes. And then, in contrast:

If, however, a projection like [Miller’s] hymn [of creation] came into being without an act of repression, i.e., unconsciously and spontaneously, then we are confronted with an entirely natural and automatic process of transformation. In that case the creator-god who emerges from the father-imago is no longer a product of repression or a substitute, but a natural and inevitable phenomenon. Natural transformations of this kind, without any semi-conscious elements of conflict, are to be found in all genuine acts of creation, artistic or otherwise.[7] … Just as in natural birth no repression is needed to bring or “project” a living creature into the world, so artistic and spiritual creation is a natural process even when the figure projected is divine. This is far from being always a religious, philosophical, or even a denominational question, but is a universal phenomenon which forms the basis of all our ideas of God, and these are so old that one cannot tell whether they are derived from a father-imago, or vice versa. (The same must be said of the mother-imago as well.) (¶93).

Jung’ argument here represents an and/both, not an either/or—and a logically necessary one at that, since in order to repress something in the first place an emergence must have occurred. Assuredly, he intends to contrast this emergent variety of transformation with the sort of explanation offered by Freud and the Freudian school, and it hardly seems objectionable to acknowledge in an attempt at psychological explanation at least two recognizable kinds of human experience, rather than shoehorning everything into a single mold. Jung allows cases of repression in Freud’s sense where they apply while also noting a case like Miller’s, where the emergence may less fruitfully described in terms of repression and more in terms of emergence, or transformation.

Part of what lies at the root of this concerns Jung’s objection to the blanket application of regression as infantile. Reacting passionately to the notion in a passage that should contextualize any remarks by critics of Jung who invoke wholesale critiques of his work over his use of the word ‘primitive’, he writes:

But one must certainly put a large question-mark after the assertion that myths spring from the “infantile” psychic life of the race. They are on the contrary the most mature product of that young humanity. Just as those first fishy ancestors of man, with their gill-slits, were not embryos, but fully developed creatures, so the myth-making and myth-inhabiting man was a grown reality and not a four-year-old child. Myth is certainly not an infantile phantasm, but one of the most important requisites of primitive life (¶29).

We see in this, then, how the use of the term infantile itself represents an illegitimate or usurping gesture of power that manifests elsewhere in the Occidental world in all of its orientalist ways.[8]

At this point in his exposition, Jung alludes only sporadically to his notion of complexes. He notes that the myth-image (he says “God-image”) appears to one’s consciousness as autonomous, so that we will never determine “whether the [myth]-image is created or whether it creates itself” (¶95).[9] Either way, once autonomously present:

In the psychological sense this means that complexes weighing on the soul are consciously transferred to the [myth]-image. This, it should be noted, is the direct opposite of an act of repression, where the complexes are handed over to an unconscious authority, inasmuch as one prefers to forget them (¶95).

Taking nothing away from this—and in part because Jung has yet in the original writing of this work to articulate completely his notion of archetypes, which would stand here in place of “God-image” or “myth-image”—still the autonomy of the myth-image partly links it to the notion of complexes in the first place. Here, the difference—still not fully drawn—obtains between the autonomy of archetypal material (“directly” from the unconscious) and the autonomy of complexes, which occupy consciousness. As he noted in (1911)[10] “On the Doctrine of Complexes,”:

This points also to the complex and its association material having a remarkable independence in the hierarchy of the psyche, so that one may compare the complex to revolting vassals in an empire. Researches have shown this independence is based upon an intense emotional tone, that is, the value of the affective elements of the complex, because the “affect” occupies in the constitution of the psyche a very independent place, and may easily break through the self-control and self-intention of the individual. For this property of the complex I have introduced the term autonomy.

I conceive the complex to be a collection of imaginings, which, in consequence of this autonomy, is relatively independent of the central control of the consciousness, and at any moment liable to bend or cross the intentions of the individual (¶1352).

Thus, both archetypes and complexes might bend or cross the intentions of the individual, and this in fact provides an explanation for the (conscious) act of repression itself as Freud conceives it. In his association experiments, Jung noted errors of memory that resulted from complexes. In other words, that part of consciousness the participants designated as an “I” found itself temporarily bent or crossed by another intention that thus bracketed off ego-consciousness awareness of it and so generated errors of memory. Jung notes how one may sometimes use hypnosis as a work-around for this, because material seemingly blocked to access for non-hypnotized subjects becomes (readily) accessible under hypnosis.

Two paragraphs I’d like to keep around:

It is, if you like, shameful and degrading that the more exalted longings of humanity, which alone make us what we are, should be so directly connected with an all-too-human passion. One is therefore inclined, despite the undeniability of the facts, to dispute the connection [in Miller’s fantasies]. What? A helmsman with bronzed skin and black mustachios, and the loftiest ideas of religion? Impossible! We do not doubt the incommensurability of these two objects, but one thing at least they have in common: both are the object of a passionate desire, and it remains to be seen whether the nature of the object alters the quality of the libido, or whether it is the same desire in both cases, i.e., the same emotional process. It is not at all certain psychologically—to use a banal comparison—whether appetite as such has anything to do with the quality of the object desired. Outwardly, of course, it is of some importance which object is desired, but inwardly,  it is at least as important to know what kind of desire it is. Desire can be instinctual, compulsive, uninhibited, uncontrolled, greedy, irrational, sensual, etc., or it may be rational, considered, controlled, co-ordinated, adapted, ethical, reflective, and so on. As regards its psychological evaluation the how is more important than the what—si duo faciunt idem, non est idem [if two do the same thing, it is not the same](¶125, italics in original).[11]

If one worships God, sun, or fire … one is worshipping intensity and power, in other words the phenomenon of psychic energy as such, the libido. Every force an every phenomenon is a special form of energy. Form is both an image and a mode of manifestation. It expresses two things: the energy which takes shape in it, and the medium in which this energy appears. On the one hand one can say that energy creates its own image, and on the other hand that the character of the medium forms it into a definite form. One man will derive the idea of God from the sun, another will maintain that it is the numinous feelings it arouses which give the sun its godlike significance. The former, by attitude and temperament, believes more in the causal nexus of the environment, the latter more in the spontaneity of psychic experience. I fear it is the old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. For all that, I incline to the view that in this particular case the psychoenergic phenomenon not only takes precedence, but explains far more than the hypothesis of the causal primacy of the environment (¶128)

In the first paragraph, I appreciate the pluralism of Jung’s view. Specifically, he strives to contextualize not only Freud’s monological assertion about the telos of libido or desire as an unnecessarily singular view of the matter but also that desire itself may manifest in a plurality of forms, i.e., rational and irrational forms—hence the significant assertion, “if two do the same thing, it is not the same”. This sort of pluralism or multiplicity of view—this stance that has at least a carrying capacity of two—manifests again in the second paragraph, where Jung distinguishes between those who “derive the idea of God from the sun, [while] another will maintain that it is the numinous feelings it arouses which give the sun its godlike significance” (¶128). This makes for an early, likely still not fully formulated, distinction between extraverts and introverts, but I find more striking the assertion that “If one worships God, sun, or fire … one is worshipping intensity and power, in other words the phenomenon of psychic energy as such, the libido” (¶128).

Of course, this description itself already contains the “outward” or “inward” question that Jung addresses later in the paragraph in the two types; I mean, the first part of the sentence asserting that to worship the sun means worshipping intensity and power accepts an extraverted (environmental) view of the matter, but then the sentence hinges to an introverted view by locating that intensity and power in psychic energy as such. And just as Jung acknowledges the incommensurability, in ¶125, between the more exalted longings of humanity and an all-too-human passion, so also does any dispute about the “ultimate source” of this intensity and power between an extraverted “environmentalist” and an introverted “cognitivist” come to an impasse on incommensurable and indeterminable grounds as well. At this point, I recall how Jung elsewhere describes the difference between the extraverted psychic orientation and the introverted one as “fundamentally irritating”. We should find remarkable that he can acknowledge two points of view at all, even as his own “phenomenological” point of view shapes his discourse.

Somewhere Jung avers that any psychological theorist’s description of psychology amounts to a description of his own—an observation Freud, Adler, Sullivan, Reich, Rogers, Maslow, &c., never admit or at the most pay only  kind of insubstantial lip service to.  And yet, since we all can only speak from an embodied position,[12] to pretend we do not denotes one of the most misleading and I’d say dangerous positions we can take. Recognizing the impossibility of not speaking as an embodied individual, our ethical choice then becomes not “speaking the truth” but “recognizing the actualities of other people’s points of view”. Jung can, given the primary psychological orientation of his temperament, speak only as a phenomenologist, but despite that unavoidable fact he can and does at the same time acknowledge other incommensurable, even if sometimes fundamentally irritating, orientations.

One need not trivialize this as claiming “we all are individuals” or “ we all have subjective truths”. That sort of psychological sleight-of-hand rests on an assumption that Truth (with a capital T) actually exists and that we all, in our various ways, submit to it and ultimately agree on it, at least as far as its existence goes. The phenomenological position—as also the position of radical constructivism, which represents an articulation of and  defense against the encroachment of so-called ‘scientific realism” into the epistemological discourse of the world—locates any such Truth only in the fact that we, as human beings, coexist with other human beings, as well also other creatures in the world, and the “creature” of the environment itself. Hence, I say again, our ethical choice then becomes not “speaking the truth” but “recognizing the actualities of other people’s points of view”. This means that any attempt to “speak the truth” amounts to an immoral gesture. If, by contrast, I offer my description of human experience in whatever terms I do, this invites you (even requires you, because our ethical center rests in the recognition of the presence of other human beings, other creatures, and the creature of the environment) to further elaborate that description, even if “elaborate” in this case means to “take it up” in the form I offered it as.

So as far as the idea “believers make liars” goes, we see then this involves a confusion of domains, because belief never concerns true or false while lying does (as truth or falsehood). Jung (1956)[13] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[14] If I offer you a description of human experience, not as something true, to believe it substitutes for your own missing empirical verification; it denotes your at least partial acknowledgment, perhaps consent even, that such a description warrants use and application in the social world.

Endnotes

[1] More precisely, I will continue to read my usual ten pages but I will also read five pages per day of Burton’s (1620) Anatomy of Melancholy, a gigantic book that at five pages per day I will finish reading near the end of December 2014. I have wanted to read this book for a while, but various features of it make getting through it a challenge.

[2] Jung, C. G. (1976). Symbols of transformation: an analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia. (Collected Works Vol. 3, 2d ed., trans. RFC Hull). Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. i–xxx, 1–567.

[3] Originally published in 1912 and heavily revised by Jung by 1952.

[4] Schreber, DP (1955). Memoirs of my nervous illness (trans. I MacAlpine & RA Hunter). London: W. Dawson.

[5] In the previous paragraph, he notes, “There are no ‘purposeless’ psychic processes; that is to say, it is a hypothesis of the greatest heuristic value that the psyche is essentially purposive and directed” (¶90). We see here also the expressly phenomenological point of view he takes. He does not at all insist that one must accept the phrase “there are no ‘purposeless’ psychic process” as true; rather, as a hypothesize explanatory process, he fins more value and more therapeutic results when one assumes this.

[6] This book in general marks a decisive break with Freud, which Jung provides a number of arguments for, but perhaps most “in one place” here:

It is evident that by this is meant not  physical, but  psychological cosmogony. The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original stet of unconsciousness. What drives him towards this discovery is conceived by Freud as the “incest barrier.” The incest prohibition blocks the infantile longing for the mother and forces the libido along the path of life’s biological aim. The libido, driven back from the mother by the incest prohibition, seeks a sexual object in Place of the forbidden mother. Here the terms “incest prohibition,” “mother,” etc. re used metaphorically, and it is in this sense that we have to interpret Freud’s paradoxical dictum: “To being with we knew only sexual objects.” This statement is not much more than a sexual allegory, as when one speaks of male and female electrical connections, screws, etc. All it does is to read the partial truths of the adult into infantile conditions which are totally different. Freud’s view is incorrect if we take it literally, for it would be truer to say that at a still earlier stage we knew nothing but nourishing breasts. The fact that the infant finds pleasure in sucking does not prove that it is a sexual pleasure, for pleasure can have many different sources. Presumably the caterpillar finds quite as much pleasure in eating, even though caterpillars possess no sexual function whatever and the food instinct is something quite different from the sex instinct, quite unconcerned about what a later sexual stage may make of these earlier activities. Kissing, for instance, derives far more from the act of nutrition than from sexuality. Moreover, the so-called “incest barrier” is an exceedingly doubtful hypothesis (admirable as it is for describing certain neurotic condition), because it is a product of culture which nobody invented and which grew up naturally on the basis of complex biological necessities connected with the development of “marriage classes.” The main purpose of these is not to prevent incest but to meet the social danger of endogamy by instituting the “cross-cousin marriage.” The typical marriage with the daughter of the maternal uncle is actually implemented by the same libido which could equally well possess the mother or the sister. So it is not a question of avoiding incest … but of the social necessity of spreading the family organisation throughout the whole tribe.

Therefore it cannot have been the incest-taboo that forced mankind out of the original psychic state of non-differentiation. On the contrary, it was the evolutionary instinct peculiar to man, which distinguishes him so radically from all other animals and forced upon him countless taboos, among them the incest-taboo. Against this “other urge” the animal in us fights with all his instinctive conservatism and misoneism—hatred of novelty—which are the two outstanding features of the primitive and feebly conscious individual. Our mania for progress represents the inevitable morbid compensation.

Freud’s incest theory describes certain fantasies that company the regression of libido and re especially characteristic of the personal unconscious as found in hysterical patients. Up to  point they are infantile-sexual fantasies which show very clearly just where the hysterical attitude is defective n why it is so incongruous. They reveal the shadow. Obviously the language used by this compensation will be dramatic and exaggerated. The theory derived from it exactly matches the hysterical attitude that causes the patient to be neurotic One should not, therefore, take this mode of expression quite as seriously as Freud himself took it. It is just as unconvincing as the ostensibly sexual traumata of hysterics. The neurotic sexual theory is further discomfited by the fact that the last act of the drama consists in a return to the mother’s body. This is usually effected not through the natural channels but through the mouth, through being devoured and swallowed, thereby giving rise to an even more infantile theory which has been elaborated by Otto Rank. All these allegories are mere make-shifts. The real point is that the regression goes back to the deeper layer of the nutritive function, which is interior to sexuality, and there clothes itself in the experiences of infancy. In other words, the sexual language of regression changes, on retreating still further back, into metaphors derived from the nutritive and digestive functions, an which cannot be taken as anything more than a façon  de parler. The so-called Oedipus complex with its famous incest tendency changes at this level into a “Jonah-and-the-Whale” complex, which has any number of variants, for instance the witch who eats children, the wolf, the ogre, the dragon, and so on. Fear of incest turns into fear of being devoured by the mother. The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step by step to the presexual stage of earliest infancy. Even there it does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right back to the intra-uterine, pre-natal condition and, leaving the sphere of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche where Jonah saw the “mysteries” (“représentations collectives”) in the whale’s belly. The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in which, like Theseus and Peirithous on their journey to the underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life.

What actually happens in these incest and womb fantasies is that the libido immerses itself in the unconscious, thereby provoking infantile reactions, affects, opinions and attitudes form the personal sphere, but at the same time activating collective images (archetypes) which have a compensatory and curative meaning such as has always pertained to the myth. Freud makes his theory of neurosis—so admirably suited to the nature of neurotics—much too dependent on the neurotic ideas from which precisely the patients suffer. This leads to the pretence (which suits the neurotic down to the ground) that the causa efficiens of his neurosis lies in the remote past. In reality the neurosis is manufactured anew every day, with the help of a false attitude that consists in the neurotic’s thinking and feeling as he does and justifying it by his theory of neurosis (¶652–5).

[7] Jung interrupts his exposition to acknowledge a qualifier here: “But to the degree that [such projections not arising from repression] are causally connected with an act of repression they are coloured by complexes which neurotically distort them and stamp them as ersatz products. With a little experience it would not be difficult to determine their origin by their character, and to see how far their genealogy is the result of repression” (¶93).

[8] I do not suggest that Jung wholly transcended the discourse of his time.  If he still refers to “young humanity,’ this problem nevertheless gets offset by his ability to recognize the fully formed authenticity of such young  humanity (and so also, in principle, in children).

[9] In a “process with a teleological orientation in which the cause anticipates the goal” (¶60).

[10] Jung, CG (1911). On the doctrine of complexes. In CG Jung (1981). Experimental researches. (Vol. 2, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. L. Stein & D. Riviere), pp. 598–604 . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[11] As Carus (1899)* notes, regarding the sense of this phrase:

A Latin proverb says: “Si duo faciunt idem, non est idem” (if two do the same thing, it is not the same thing); and this is true not only of individuals, but also of nations and of religions. It is a habit common among all classes of people to condone the faults of their own kind but to be severe with those of others. The oracles of Delphi were divine to a Greek mind, but they were of diabolical origin according to the judgment of Christians. Jesus was a magician in the eyes of the pagans, while the Christians worshipped him as the son of God, and a man who performed miracles (262–3).

*Carus, P. (1899). A history of the devil and the idea of evil from the earliest times to the present day. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company

[12] To state this more precisely: between the competing hypotheses that (1) we speak from embodied positions and (2) we do not speak from embodied positions, we can only assume as a hypothesis the second position, contrary to ever instance of waking empirical actuality in our lives, and for this reason makes for a more dubious an less adequately fit description of human experience. It also leads almost by necessity—in the same way that capitalism requires poverty to function—to social violence and injustice. Not that the first hypothesis automatically avoids this, of course, but it provides a way to avoid “fast-tracking” the commission of such social violence an injustice, whether we (as a culture) elect to take that opportunity to avoid it or not.

[13] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[14] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

NOTES ON A TRANSFORMATION: An Application of Chaos Theory & Depth Psychology (2014): Part XI – Psychoid Effects

“Believers make liars,” except that, as Jung (1956)[1] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[2]

INTRODUCTION

Recently (and currently), I experienced (and continue to experience) a “re-centering”[3] of my identity, by which I mean that patterns and behaviors in my life changed (and continue to change).

Over the course of some fourteen posts, I will describe the various inputs that brought about this change, analyzing them through a lens of chaos theory and Jungian depth-psychology, only in part to further articulate the roots of the change (for myself) and more to provide a descriptive model of the experience that might prove useful (for others). As such, everything autobiographical in this post I consider trivial; its significance resides only in its illustrative value for you (the reader) and for the model.

This eleventh post continues the exposition of Jungian depth psychology and relates Jung’s notion of the psychoid level or effect to my notion meaningful change or transformation.

Psychoid Effects

Below, I sketch out to some extent what Jung means by psychoid (pronounced “sigh-koid” not “psycho-id”), but for the purpose of this paper I mean for it to point at that complex intersection where the activity of the body affects the activity of the mind. This specifically shows up in details during the guided meditation (described below). From a useful glossary of Jung’s terms (from here):

psychoid: neither psychological nor physical, but similar to, and transcending, both.

At bottom this psychoid layer fuses with physical processes and (includes) the sympathetic nervous system, which experiences from within as opposed to the cerebrospinal system, which senses outer things and maintains the ego. In fact, Jung thought the sympathetic system a deeper, wider, and more embracing psyche than the cerebrum’s cortical fields and less exposed to the endocrine system. The highest differentiation of the collective unconscious is the ego, a relatively new combination of ancient elements.

A tremendous amount of historically philosophical weight actually bears down on this “moment” insofar as it attempts to identify the relationship between body and mind, i.e., how does one “get” to mind from body. Plato tried to solve the problem with demiurges, but this only defers the problem, as no shortage of skepticism has demonstrated; positivists, actually destroying their own argument by assuming on pragmatic grounds that their belief in objective reality “is true”, breezily ignore this fact. Jung’s philosophical position as a phenomenologist—surely one of the most important features of his psychology—permits him to assume (in the manner of Kant) the fact of objective reality as an untestable hypothesis, which probably means one shouldn’t use the word hypothesis at all—does an untestable hypothesis lose its status as a hypothesis?. Consequently, the beginning of any empirical investigation can only take the activity we, from the standpoint of an embodied cognitive observer, declare “biological activity”. For a self-defeating positivist, no quotation marks get used; they will speak about “the brain” as a true (objective) fact and thus guarantee, if nothing else, that what they say “is false”—a useful assumption, no doubt, but still false. With the term psychoid, Jung keeps in mind that what we call “body” and what we call “mind” already emerge from some nonsynthetic (or pre-analytic) “thing” on the same grounds that Korzybski describes the world—of knives, tables, forks, &c—as the unspeakable world. This involve no mystification at all; only our utter indoctrination that what we see and what “is” “are” identical allows us to perpetuate the such a  lie.

Screwy as this might sound, both Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schrödinger have expressed similar ideas in the realm of quantum physics. Pauli gets mentioned here in a context of Jung’s notion of the unus mundus, or “one world” (from here):

Unus mundus: “one world” — the physical-psychological, transcendental, “third thing” continuum underlying all existence. Metaphysical equivalent of the collective unconscious. Mercurius. Original, nondifferentiated unity of the world, where all is connected. In the view of Jung and physicists like Wolfgang Pauli, the collective unconscious, a psychoid realm somewhere between physical and mental reality, underlies both, manifesting in one reality as the psyche and in the other as quantum operations and the physical reality built up from them. (Beyond this concept, hinted at earlier but described in Jung’s book Mysterium Coniunctionis as the final stage of alchemy, where body, spirit, and soul unite with it, Jung felt he couldn’t go. It meant a perfect synthesis of conscious with unconscious.).

Nichols (1980)[4] cites Schrödinger’s an Jung’s explicit statements on the matter:

[SCHRÖDINGER] … inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. … If we decide to have only one sphere, it has got to be  psychic one, since that exists as a given for all experience. … if, without involving ourselves in obvious nonsense, we are going to be able to think in a natural way about what goes on in a living, feeling, thinking being … then the condition for our doing so is that we think of everything that happens as taking place in our experience of the world, without ascribing it to any material substratum as the object of which it is an experience; a substratum which would in fact be wholly and entirely superfluous.

[JUNG] The uniqueness of the psyche is of a magnitude that can never be made wholly real, but can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis for all consciousness. The deeper “layers” of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. “Lower down”—that is to say, as they approach the autonomous functional systems—they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e., in the chemical bodies. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence “at bottom” the psyche is simply “world”.

Of course there is little or no hope that the unitary Being can ever be conceived, since our powers of thought and language permit only of antinomian statements. But this much we do know beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcendental background … The common background of microphysics and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental (quoted in Nichols, 363–4).

Leaving aside these massive epistemological and philosophical issues, some details from the guided meditation at the time when the vision actually appeared may also play a role.

I enjoy and have benefited previously from group (silent) contemplative meditation, where the “method” involved “re-centering” on a particular word if a distraction occurs. This involves in a sense keeping one’s attention on “nothing” and not becoming “distracted” by passing thoughts, affects, external noises, &c. I specifically mention attention and distraction here to refer back to the earlier section of this paper on attention and distraction.

In the case of the guided meditation, of course, the person leading the meditation necessarily intruded again and again at various intervals with whatever next bit of the “guiding” he meant to provide. But not only did this cause a recurrent intrusion, which I applied my usual “re-centering” approach to each time, I also found the content of the guided meditation itself annoying.[5] At the beginning, I specifically rebelled against the meditative “direction” he suggested, but then (because I wanted to “let go” and simply “re-center” per my normal meditative habit), I stopped paying attention to the words he said; I could still hear the sound of his voice though, of course.

I had seated myself on an axis perpendicular to the leader of the guided meditation; in other words, my right ear pointed directly at him, and as he spoke, the intrusion of his voice—simply the sound of his voice—seemed to go quite literally right into my ear, and more than once that sound had a quality much like throwing a large rock into a pond. The “pool” of my mind kept getting “sloshed” by simply the sound of his voice. And those literal disturbances seemed to comprise the most immediate cause or prompt for the emergence of the imagery that suddenly appeared to me.[6]

Jung (1907),[7] citing a very extensive study by Zoneff and Meumann (1900),[8] summarizes some of the effects of various stimuli on the respiratory function (breathing).[9] Jung praises this work but cites a number of criticisms of it and provides some of his own. With that grain of salt in mind, we might read the excerpt of Jung’s summary as it relates (perhaps) to the context of my seated meditation, with more regulated breathing, and me attempting to keep my attention on “nothing” while having the (unpleasant) intrusion of the guided meditator’s voice recurring. For example, he summarizes that Zoneff and Meuman found that “Complete inhibition [of breathing] was found more often in attention to sensory than to intellectual stimulation” (¶1058); in other words, one seems more likely to hold one’s breath when attending to sensory (external) distractions or stimuli than to intellectual (internal) distractions or thoughts. Further:

In relation to pleasant and unpleasant stimuli, [Zoneff and Meumann] conclude that all pleasant sensations cause shallowing and acceleration of the breathing, and all unpleasant sensations deepening and slowing of respiration, or, in other words, that the former diminish and the latter increase respiratory function. … In experiments with concentration of attention on stimulus and sensation, attention strengthened the effects of both pleasant and unpleasant feelings upon the curves (¶1058).

If unpleasant sensations increase the respiratory function (breathing) and concentration of attention on (even unpleasant) stimuli strengthens the effect of those feelings, then maybe this played some kind of role as well. Of course, to attempt to link these findings to a circumstance of guided meditation remains highly tenuous, particularly in how such meditation—and this one in particular—began with directing attention to one’s breathing. All that might get tantalizingly inferred involves the possible intersection of breathing, attention, and the heightened affect associated with stimuli, which might then have further prepared the ground for the emergence of the solar hyena.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I began the meditation in a somewhat sleepy frame of min. I did not fall asleep, but I may have been already closer to the sort of frame of mind that supports the appearance of visual imagery. On the other hand, I tend not to get visual material of such a striking quality—I refer to all there images I saw, not just the solar hyena—when meditating. At a place called Universe of You, at one time in San Rafael, California, they had a set up with sound and flashing goggles designed to “attune” your alpha, delta, and whatever waves, and sitting in that environment for an hour could definitely spark visualizations, but that approach, while “relaxing”, also distinctly and continuously bombarded my (closed) eyes and open ears. The experience seems nothing like contemplative meditation, which aspires to the opposite. Also, that the imagery came so early in the meditation surprised me—I had yet to “get into it” so to speak—but perhaps this simply mirrors the sort of half-consciousness one has just as one begins to rift off to sleep, where the lingering half-consciousness easily registers whatever psychic activity the sleeping portions of the mind start to churn out.

I mention this all primarily only also to acknowledge that breathing has for unknown numbers of centuries played a key role in meditation and thus like supplies a factor in meditation’s at times visionary qualities. Researchers have shown that oxygen deprivation,[10] as also sleep deprivation, can contribute to altered states of consciousness, so a sufficient variance from one’s norm (or factors operating in tandem) might play an additional causal factor in the emergence of archetypal material or symbols, like the solar hyena.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[2] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

[3] One might typically hear “re-centering” but I do not believe that the circle represents the correct geometric metaphor; rather, as in planetary orbits, the ellipse does, which has two foci that influence the course of the orbit. As just one partial illustration of this, I wrote elsewhere:

This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

Murphy (1991)* puts this another way: “The struggle is not to abolish any type of centering, but to recognize the relative nature of centers and their dynamic relationship with margins” (51).

*Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey. New York: S. Weiser.

[5] Why so does not matter much.

[6] I had, in fact, three striking images appear—the solar hyena being the third.

[7] Jung, C. G. (1981). Experimental researches. (Collected Works, vol. 2) 1st Princeton/Bollingen paperback printing, with corrections. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[8] Zoneff, P., and Meumann, E. (1903). Über Begleiterscheinungen psychischer Vorgänge im Athem und Puls. In W. Wundt (1883–1902, ed.). Philosophische studien 18, pp. 1–113. Leipzig: W. Engelmann.

[9] In the interests of thoroughness, I provide the entire passage from Jung here:

the effects of voluntary attention and pleasant and unpleasant impressions upon the breathing and pulse. They found that as a rule attention produced acceleration of the breathing, especially at the end of the stimulation, and in addition to acceleration the breathing might become more shallow or be inhibited. This inhibition may appear as shallow or and more rapid breathing, or there may be a partial or complete standstill of the respiration, which is greater in direct proportion to the degree of attention. Complete inhibition was found more often in attention to sensory than to intellectual stimulation. There were variations in the results in different individuals. There were fluctuations in the curves which they considered as being due to fluctuations in attention. In relation to pleasant and unpleasant stimuli, they conclude that all pleasant sensations cause shallowing and acceleration of the breathing, and all unpleasant sensations deepening and slowing of respiration, or, in other words, that the former diminish and the latter increase respiratory function. In experiments with diversion of the attention together with stimulation, they found that emotional effects upon breathing and pulse ceased. In experiments with concentration of attention on stimulus and sensation, attention strengthened the effects of both pleasant and unpleasant feelings upon the curves (quoted in Jung, ¶1058).

[10] For a not very interesting but obviously conclusive example of this, see: Edwards, D., Harris, J. A., & Biersner, R. (1976). Encoding and decoding of connected discourse during altered states of consciousness. Journal Of Psychology, 92(1): 97.

BOOK REVIEWS (2014): Varzen Dralmort, A. Kita, and Ifus’ (2013) Gratitude

Framing/Background for Replies

If you’ve read this already, you can skip it.

Two years ago in 2012, I set myself the task to read at least ten pages per day; last year, I did so. Continuing from then, I now have the task to read fifteen pages per day,[1] and I’ve added that I will write a book reaction (or reply) for each one that I finish (or give up on, if I stop).  I plan also to devise a way to randomly select books to read (given certain constraints) from the public library; this, to avoid the tendency only to read books that pique my already existing interests.

These replies will not be Amazon-type reviews, with synopses, background research done on the author or the book itself, unless that strikes me as necessary or if the book inspired me to do so when I read it. Rather, these replies amount to assessments of the ways I found the book helpful somehow. More precisely—and this describes what I mean by a reply, as opposed to a reaction (review) or a response—I try to focus in these pieces on what I could not have said (or would not have known what to say) except that the intersection of this text and my consciousness brought it about.

Consequently, I will sometimes say stupid stuff, poorly informed stuff, &c. Some in the world expect everyone to possess omniscience and won’t bother to engage in a human dialogue toward divining how to make the world a better place. To the extent that each reply I offer provides a I found this helpful in this book, then it becomes up to us (you, me, us) to correct, refine, trash and start over, or do something else we see as potentially helpful as part of attempting to make our world a better place. If you won’t bother to take up your end of that bargain, that signals of course part of the problem that needs a solution.

A Reply To:  Varzen Dralmort & A. Kita’s (2013)[2] Gratitude

This is a novel by Furry authors (available here), with artwork by Ifus; the first I have read, from Rabbit Valley Press. The summary from the back of the book reads:

Where do you draw the line on family? Stephanie Marteling is loyal—some would say to a fault—so when her gay brother calls in the middle of the night and begs her to bail him out of jail, she bends over backward to save him. But that’s just the start of her problems. And his.

Gratitude is a sharp, modern novel about how far people can bend before they break, with plenty of intimate scenes to keep readers warm at night.

Remarkably, as far as backs of books go, this is a pleasantly succinct and accurate description of the book without giving the plot away. For those following at home, you know that I don’t read much fiction any more unless it is a graphic novel—I’m making an exception for some of PK Dick’s books and this as well, primarily because I was told by a trusted source that this book has “literary qualities,” by which I mean a more-than-average attention to language, imagery, sentence stylization, and that sort of thing that theoretically distinguishes literature from popular fiction. This makes Gratitude a bit strange, in my imagining of “Furry” fiction, because it seems that most of the stuff revolves often or heavily around issues of sexual self-discovery: the classic, young man goes to the Big City (or somewhere) and ends up coming out to himself and the world.

In its own way, Gratitude doesn’t transcend this theme, except that the story centers on the principal character (Stephanie, a ferret) realizing the limits of her own willingness to save others (especially her drama-queen adopted brother, Kip, a skunk, who seems determined to travel from one wreck to another in his life), even as she has her own sexual epiphanies along the way. However, the texture of the book introduces itself immediately, with the opening sentence:

As she parked, chewing unhappily on a thumb-claw, it was dark and she stank of fish, of butter-soaked Lobster Garden biscuits (“can I get you some more, need a refill?”) and smoke. Her smeared nametag reading “Steph” hung off the restaurant-standard blouse she’d pulled open when she’d clocked out as she slouched from a job with such a low glass ceiling that even the managers stooped. And she had a canker sore right between her lip and front teeth.

And it reaches something of a climax, or at least its fullest expression, in one obviously carefully crafted paragraph (set on the deck of an ocean liner) with an enormous sentence buried in it:

[Stephanie and Kip] sat in silence for a long while until Steph energetically popped up and leaned on the rail of the deck, the wind tousling her grown-out forelock. The ice in their drinks clinked and melted away, grew smaller and disappeared, and Steph felt her brother watch her as she stared straight out past the ship’s railing, down past the water’s wake churning and misting against the ship’s hull, then up past the golden moon reflected in her eyes. Images broke in Stephanie’s mind as she mined backward through history, back past college and the gap of high school to the sundrenched backyard with its swing set and chain-link, the Marteling house gleaming and three stories high with its back turned to the fence. And her, a young ferret slyly digging out the joys of tween fantasy novels and getting interrupted by her skunk brother insisting that he got the cookies right this time, carrying them out on a warm tray as she struggled to hide the pulp-grade chakats-and-gryphons book in her paw. And then again that same backyard and that same sunlight years later, when Kip hid in that same swing set with that same fantasy-romance as another argument in the house escalated and Steph would slink up behind him to rub his shoulders and—try as they might—keep their sharp ears from picking up the new bad news about Dad’s business and the mounting bills and the fatalistic tone creeping in so that it wasn’t until actually that last day, that day when her brother swung in the same set with her now as she held in her paws the very prequel to the book that he was holding in his under a sky greying over with overcast and the drops in air pressure making his ears hurt as the first vanguard rain from the storm began to drop like black snow on the pages that they were reading, the very lines that they were reading as an escape from it all, so that it was—despite every brash and unforeseeable boom of approaching thunder and the rustling of a much-too-cool breeze through the windbreak of trees sheltering the far side of their home—quiet, so quiet, when [their sister] spat out in her hackles-raising rasp, “Pack your shit. We’re livin’ in trailers” that that day did at last become their last day and inevitable. And then Kip ran away to drum school after she’d gone away to college. And he’d dropped out after she’d dropped out. And he’d wrecked his romances after she did hers. And maybe there’d never been anything classy to any of it. And maybe they’d never really been well-to-do, only comfortable at best. But still something had happened. Something had broken along a fault line in their lives. Something more than their father’s humiliation or the stress of their lives after the resort failed and they wound up in the wind. Something older still even than themselves, something down in the earth of Mahoney or in its air—all the dead of the native tribes of the Illiniwek people, all of their slain and their dispossessed.

“What went wrong with us, Kip?” Stephanie asked abruptly.

In the Furry fandom, which is very heavily oriented toward the production of visual artwork, there is a large amount of art shares, commissions, and sometimes jointly produced work (with line-work by one artist an coloring by another), but this is less frequent (I think) in written work, which is also otherwise very plentiful. And whenever there is a collaboration of writers, it becomes a theoretical point of interest to detect “who wrote what” or, more specifically, how do the parts of two writers come together (if they do) as one.

Looking at the table of contents, the book is divided into two parts (“Gratuity” and “Gratitude”) and so I suspected that one of the authors wrote part 1 and the other part 2, but I gave up on that idea by the novel’s end. The novel does begin in its first two chapters with a curious gesture: chapters 1 and 2 (“Prairie Needed New Things” dedicated to the sister Stephanie and “The Einstein Intersection,” dedicated to the brother Kip, respectively) have an overtly parallel structures. In both, the brother and sister travel to a parking lot in the middle of the night, theoretically to meet up with a love-interest, only to meet their replacement. For Stephanie, she arrives at a point of peace from this encounter; for Kip, he does something that lands him in jail (he also opportunistically has sex with his replacement).

This explicit parallelism doesn’t seem to come up again in the novel in such an exact way (despite the “Gratuity” and “Gratitude” section titles), and maybe that has something to do with the title of chapter 2, which openly refers to Delany’s (1967)[3] science fiction novella The Einstein Intersection. A main gist of Delany’s book explores how (mythological) narratives undergird and determine our lives so that, at the so-called point of the Einstein intersection, we have the opportunity to branch off of that mythical pattern and to forget new narratives. So if the brother and sister in Gratitude have some sort of shared life-trajectory (both originate as orphaned mustelids), then their paths branch at the moment of decision when Stephanie finds peace and Kip does not.

The remainder of the parallels between the brother and sister seem more muted or contrasting, which is to say I’m not sure how essentially the authors mean for them to be taken. Stephanie is overly responsible, makes sacrifices, takes on extra work, an gets into a generally healthy relationship (with a female co-worker), while Kip uses his ass to avoid responsibility, creates no shortage of excuses for avoiding work, and exploits someone who finds himself helplessly smitten by the skunk. The two main tensions in the novel (for the reader) involve (1) expecting Stephanie to finally stop rescuing Kip and (2) hoping that Kip will stop being  narcissist and sociopath an simply get right with life.

But whatever the deeper or shallower authorial intentions of these parallels (if there is some mythological basis underlying these narratives, I have no idea what they are and didn’t detect any), I raise them simply to wonder about the character of the collaboration here. It doesn’t seem like authorial duties are strictly split in depicting Stephanie and Kip, though both characters spend the greatest portion of the book not in the same chapters (or room) together.[4] And it doesn’t matter in any major way except that as an example of collaboration, particularly on a literary project, the theme of how collaborations occur is already storied and interesting in itself.

One of the things I appreciated in this novel was the presence of a prison narrative—or more precisely a jail narrative. We live in an era of mass incarceration and we live daily with the consequences of that invisible all around us. It is not entirely clear to me, however, what the authors intend to make of this theme. While Kip is jailed—and waiting trial (he ultimately takes a plea bargain for probation)—he preemptively becomes the “tank slut” with one of the older inmates in protective custody with him. In effect, he again uses his ass (and muzzle) to put himself in a position of safety, and after his protector paroles, he first tries to make a play for one of the jail guards (without success) an then winds up in solitary confinement after he attacks another jail inmate. During this time of maximum isolation, he decides to study accounting (i.e., to finally responsibly get his life together), but once he gets probation and is released to shack up with his new boyfriend, all of that goes by the wayside.

On his sister’s side, there may be some attempts to parallel Kip’s incarceration, though her “imprisonment” is only an analogy: she is a wage slave an partially responsible for her own predicament, since it I her desire to raise enough money to bail her brother out that puts her in various difficult ways.

Not merely as an aside: I use the terms “brother” and “sister” to refer to Kip and Stephanie, but they are in fact not related. She is a ferret, he is a skunk, and both come from the same orphanage. As an adopted person myself, I on the one hand appreciate the inclusion of this theme but on the other don’t see a lot of following through on the imaginable details that could be involved. There is, in addition, a third sibling, who is born of the mother and father that adopt Kip an Stephanie. But it remains unclear if Kip’s sociopathy is linked by the authors (or should be) to his adoption, whether Stephanie’s excessive devotion to him should be (one could probably make more of a case for this), and whether the third sibling’s relationship with her sister and brother is informed by their adoption.

The basic narrative purports Mr. and Mrs. Marteling as benevolently good people, an Stephanie at least seems to be represent a “properly acculturated” adoptee, with all of the proper gratitude toward her prints. I feel like it would be gratuitous to lambaste this book for having a “standard” or “naïve” reproduction of the discourse of adoption—it seems a question of innocence on the part of the authors, rather than willful ignorance. Because Stephanie is a ferret and Kip I a skunk, the mere fact of this would seem to require adoption to some extent. (I can’t remember, but I think Mr. and Mrs. Marteling themselves are minks.) So, for whatever reason Stephanie and Kip were not the same species, this means (simply as a logical narrative consequence) that one or both of them would be adopted. And so the trope of adoption winds up in the novel without the authors necessarily feeling like they should or ought to explore it in any depth.

And to be  kind of fair, there is nothing that says all adoptions play out interpersonally in problematic ways. Stephanie acclimatized to her adoptive family; Kip didn’t; it happens. But adoptees might still feel this begs the question. At a minimum, it reproduces the standard discourse about adoption (consciously or not, deliberately or not), n we certainly don’t really need more recitations of that. Challenges to it would be better.

All the more so, given that Kip seems to be a sociopath. However, much as I want to object to the depiction of the adoptee as maladjusted sociopath,[5] he’s obviously contrasted with the book’s other adoptee, who though far too accommodating also overcomes that fact by the book’s end. As the back of the book suggests, it’s precisely what Stephanie needs to get over, and she does. So even if she is the hopelessly “good girl” of adoption, she at least sheds that much of herself when she finally rejects her brother’s continuing calls for help.

Endnotes

[1] More precisely, I will continue to read my usual ten pages but I will also read five pages per day of Burton’s (1620) Anatomy of Melancholy, a gigantic book that at five pages per day I will finish reading near the end of December 2014. I have wanted to read this book for a while, but various features of it make getting through it a challenge.

[2] Dralmort, V., and Kita, A. (2013). Gratitude. Las Vegas, NV: Rabbit Valley Press, pp. 1–438.

[3] Delany, S. R. (1967). The Einstein intersection. New York: Ace Books.

[4] I mean that the chapters for each character could have been written separately by each author.

[5] In Whedon’s (2013) Avengers, for instance, we have the following exchange (from here):

Bruce Banner: I don’t think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy’s brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on him.

Thor: Have a care how you speak! Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard and he is my brother!

Natasha Romanoff: He killed eighty people in two days.

Thor: He’s adopted.

NOTES ON A TRANSFORMATION: An Application of Chaos Theory & Depth Psychology (2014): Part X – the Self as a Solar Hyena

“Believers make liars,” except that, as Jung (1956)[1] reminds us, “Belief is a substitute for a missing empirical reality” (¶666), so believers do not always make liars, but only unverified asserters.[2]

INTRODUCTION

Recently (and currently), I experienced (and continue to experience) a “re-centering”[3] of my identity, by which I mean that patterns and behaviors in my life changed (and continue to change).

Over the course of some fourteen posts, I will describe the various inputs that brought about this change, analyzing them through a lens of chaos theory and Jungian depth-psychology, only in part to further articulate the roots of the change (for myself) and more to provide a descriptive model of the experience that might prove useful (for others). As such, everything autobiographical in this post I consider trivial; its significance resides only in its illustrative value for you (the reader) and for the model.

This tenth post continues the exposition of Jungian depth psychology and addresses the specific symbol of the solar hyena to my notion meaningful change or transformation.

The Self as Solar Hyena

I intend, or suspect, this may prove the most gratuitous or personal portion of these notes, but at some point it seems vitally necessary to get specific about the specific symbol—the specific archetypal material that emerged, and that I have since engaged in different ways that it becomes a sign integrated into my consciousness.

Jung treated the Self as a composite of consciousness and the Unconscious. Conventionally speaking, within the conscious portion of the Self, the ego-consciousness serves as the at least theoretical seat of one’s will, but there exist there also any number of other “complexes,” which I intend to discuss more below. In Jung’s (1979)[4] Aion and (1956)[5] Mysterium Coniunctionis, he specifically delves into the phenomenology and the representation of the Self in the symbolism of alchemy. He speaks of it extensively and everywhere, specifically with respect to transformation in (1962)[6] Symbols of Transformation. [7]

Although the circle may offer the most elementary symbol of the whole Self, when crossed by two lines that divides it into quarters, this adds a significant piece of information. And then beyond that, the further articulations of lines and curves in the mandala itself becomes a more “fully formed” edition of the symbol—one that has in many places become a sign, and thus entered into human consciousness as an input (a return) to the Unconscious, and not only an output of it.

I do not wish to bog down in trivia, but at least for myself to better understand why this transformation came about—and hopefully in the process of that investigation to uncover patterns or mechanisms that you might find of use—I cannot avoid digging into my autobiography,  though not in any systematic or chronological way.

In the section on chaos theory, I identified that a sufficient sharp shock to one’s routine may bifurcate into a state of chaos. For me, this involved a large car expense and breakdown and the loss of my income. Somewhere Jung asserts that if we disregard our one-sidedness too long, then we may begin to experience events from the  “outside world” that take the place of the more “gentle” reminders of dreams (and then nightmares) attempting to offer us the complementary re-balancing. This represents one of Jung’s weirder (or perhaps simply daffier) ideas, not nearly quite as compelling or unsettling as the notion that our psyches actually extend beyond our bodies and out some distance around us. I do not intend to try to rationalize or even defend this notion; rather, I would point to the question whether thinking of those events as manifestations of my one-sidedness might further illuminate the roots of the transformation that eventually happened. Because any answers only apply to me personally, simply to pose the question already underlines this idea enough without further specifics.

As a matter from the very distant past that feels related, my birthday falls on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius (22 November, the anniversary of JFK’s assassination). Quite apart from any useless question whether astrology “is true or not,” I find it illuminating to divide my life into periods governed, first by the scorpion, later by the centaur—in both cases the governorship of each thwarted and brought low by the other. This symbolized but very palpable distinction in myself that I can attach to intuition and intellect, respectively, usually manifested in the form of a battle—the Scorpion and the Centaur did not cooperate, except when I would do Tarot card readings. And at the time of the appearance of the solar hyena, I had been commenting on a (Jungian) commentary on the Tarot for several months; more specifically, I had written the commentary on the Sun card the day before the solar hyena appeared, one day after my birthday.

I can imagine Jung confidently declaring a case for synchronicity here, but I have no trouble seeing something more like a deliberate stewing that plays on dominant mythologies in my life: the division of my birthday, the split between “reason” and “intuition” (which has its own long arc or articulation in my life), and like things. Having blogged about the Sun card, I thus (accidentally) provided myself with the very thing around which the solar hyena might constellate. And the vision occurred during a guided mediation, when I deliberately set aside my “conscious” thinking to let the light of the Self shine through instead.

Not that I could have predicted this; like a good plot twist in  movie, it seems rather inevitable in retrospect, especially the delightful fat of occurring the day after my birthday. It occurred as well during what amounts to a vacation, a period away from home, and one that amounted to a deliberate and gratuitous expense in the face of my loss of income. The vacation took place “among my people” (at a conference), the type of which I’d not (to my sadness) been to in some years but one that I had never (to my anticipation) attended previously. There, rather than attend my usual panels on writing—my previous habit—I “somehow” decided to attend the “spirituality” panels instead. In rooms full of people who identified as having spirit guides, I engaged that terminology (i.e., I took it seriously in the terms it offered, just as when I do tarot card readings I take the premises of its system to heart). In all of this, I created a very large space of atypicality for myself—of location, of thought pattern—and that too may have helped pave the way for the emergence of the symbol.

I state as a categorical fact that the sensation accompanying the vision of the solar hyena (as a symbol of integration) did “re-center” me and did “en-lighten” me and did bring a sense of lessened, if not removed, tension between “my two halves” (symbolized as the Scorpion and the Centaur). To write this still, even now, causes a welling of emotion in me, which I find odd in a sense. Did I give up hoping such integration could ever occur? I never found myself longing for it in a conscious sense. I noted that my Scorpion and Centaur got along infamously, except when cooperating over a deck of Tarot cards, but I can’t think of ever seriously hoping they’d work out their differences. In the second major crisis between them back in 1992, this eventually led by a spectacularly circuitous but also tragic route to my own realization that I should call myself, however awkwardly, a mystical atheist or an atheist mystic. For the purpose of these notes, this amounts to an intellectual realization of the union the two categories might affect, but it did not make me into one. In a nutshell, it taught me that the “argument” between my Scorpion and my Centaur over which “was right” could never get settled and didn’t even make sense as a question. The two simply had to admit, much as they could not make sense of one another, that the other’s autonomy and point of view had a legitimacy beyond their ability to grasp.

But that still left them regarding each other from opposites sides of the table. With the solar hyena, they merged.

Once again, even to write this causes me to feel deeply moved. Except that I refuse to let fear or embarrassment have any say about this, it could well feel embarrassing to admit this so plainly in a blog.[8] But also, the sheer unlikeliness of this reaction seems curious to me and makes me more ready to admit it. I wouldn’t think it could comprise a meaningful sentence to me (much less such  meaningful one) to simply think “I am whole” but it seems to work out that way. And this, in any case, points to what Jung iterates no shortage of times, about the experience of the Self in its totality.

As for why the face in the sun emerges as a hyena, the details of that trace seem much better sketched out and so that much more plentiful. The two main threads involve role-playing (online) and various appreciation of hyenas as creatures—the roleplaying of others I encountered leading to “research” (Wikipedia reading) into hyenas, &c, in a mutually reinforcing feedback.

I have role-played for a long time, and have sought out various online places to do so. I did not originally seek out to play anthropomorphic characters, but I found such online, so play them I did: cats and dogs primarily. After too many characters and what I referred to as a mid-life crisis, I settled on only two: an unassuming Vietnamese dog and a snow leopard. However, already some dim part of me liked anthropomorphic hyenas, as I had seen them played online, and I created one—definitely a very rough first draft, if you will—and a character who didn’t get a lot of air time in any case. Later, as a sort of second draft attempt, I more or less sloppily merged the dog and the snow leopard to make a white hyena with purple spots.

Assuredly, the Vietnamese dog and the snow leopard (both from the far East, one might note) were wildly dissimilar, except for the shared trait of a very good-natured optimism and happiness. I did not think of them a emblematic of the Scorpion and Centaur, and in fact the fit remains poor if I try to make it, but their polar opposition of behavior (except for their cheerfulness) definitely reproduces the polar opposition of the Scorpion and the Centaur. Of course, also, snow leopards dwell in the cold of the high mountains, and Vietnamese dogs (tend to live) in the heat of the city (amongst other people) often near sea level. Their union in the white hyena with purple spots, however, seems not to have resulted in a very satisfying mix, even if while one finds hyenas sometimes described as a mix of cat and dog that really doesn’t originate in either. In particular, the white hyena seemed very shy in demeanor, which definitely does not reflect the demeanor of the dog or snow leopard.

As an aspect of defamiliarizing social identity in the world—I hang out with people who clown professionally and not; so wearing clown noses as a social intervention has a whole politics for me—I took to wearing a (snow leopard) tail all the time. At the recent conference, I finally replaced my now very worn out tail. And because I found one, I got a (spotted) hyena tail as well, and rather than pick between which one to wear, I started wearing both. One day later, the solar hyena arrived.

To specifically track why the Sun merged with a Hyena would involve way too many details. I have long found myself drawn to certain kinds of pariahs, specifically those who seem vital to culture but who remain scorned, feared, or hated nonetheless. In Christian mythology, the figures of Judas and Lucifer occupy this position; in Norse mythology, Loki. In Othello, Iago’s complaint certainly warrants more serious consideration than declaring him unmotivated evil, even if his response to his complaint eventuates in an atrocity. Hyenas, in the European and African folklore about them alike, occupy a similar position. Sometimes, they get dismissed merely as brute beasts, but even then one notes that culture can’t stop speaking about them. In other folk stories, they take on the threat of Lucifer or Loki, and their acknowledged dreadfulness clearly comes with a measure of respect.[9]

But the most salient crime of the hyena, at least in the European folk-tale, involves its hermaphroditism. Mistaken as inherently magical beings—and terrifying for that reason—they manifest in East African folk tales in stories about were-hyenas, the African forebear of the were-wolf, the man-wolf. However, all of this hysteria hardly applies. I do not want to say that the culture misunderstand the hyena, though it seems the case as well. The experience of the hyena amounts (as far as humans go) to radical otherization. My own sense of alienation (from childhood on), my sense of isolation, &c, constellates around the bewilderingness of this; why do so many people react to me this way, so to speak. THE feeling of misunderstanding usually presupposes that someone listened first; I found myself more isolated from the world than that—no one listened.

This relates, no doubt, to my non-heteronormative identification. I grew up both isolated but also singularly daft about the existence of other not-heterosexual people. I believed I alone felt the way I did, and that persisted for a rather embarrassingly long period of time (into college). So in particular the notion of the hyena as gender non-normative positions it to capture my attention. Like Scorpios, with their (not usually deserved) reputation for magic and morbidness, the hyena suffers similar from the human aversion to certain kinds of dark nooks and crannies. For someone who felt woefully not served by culture, to the extent that the hyena seems the very paragon of anti-culture (as conceptualized by culture, of course), this too makes it an appealing pillow for my (Scorpio) soul to alight upon. In their reputation for filthiness, vulgarity, and nihilism (that laugh of theirs), part of me wants nothing more than to utterly wallow in the mud of such a “high” opinion held by a benighted culture—if society hates you, you know you must be doing something right—and people who have suffered through racial oppression may well sense a resonance there—because of course the truth of the reputation falls very short of that.

Again, one might feel tempted to describe Lucifer, Iago, and Judas—my childhood heroes, in a sense—as misunderstood, but that misses the point. All of them—as I read them—simply want recognition in their own terms, not as culture-destroying rebels, but simply as yet another manifestation of a sapient being, more simply, as a nonconformist. In relationships I have had, I tell my partners, “The only way I can truly be faithful to you is if you tell me I can sleep with whoever I want.” And the punch line, if you will: give me that permission, and I do behave faithfully. This does not arise in me from mere perversity; if you tell me I must remain faithful, then I no longer know if I choose to remain faithful or if I (or you) have extorted that faithfulness. And if I remain faithful to you on the basis of extortion, then that provides me no legitimate grounds for a relationship.

So when Lucifer (the atheist) says, “I want to assert in public that god does not exist,” this serves less to annihilate religion in general and more to invite a broader consciousness and thus a social plurality of people concerning the experience of spirituality. So too, when Iago (the homosexual) says, “I want to assert in public my erotic affection for Othello,” this serve less to demand the humiliation of all heteronormative modes of sexuality (to say nothing of tribally prejudicial prohibitions on interracial relationship) and more to invite a broader consciousness in people concerning the possibilities of sexuality. So also when Judas (the anarchist) says, “I want to assert in public that culture may be transformed,” this serves less to demand complete destruction of all traditions from all time and more to invite a broader consciousness in people concerning the possibilities of human sociability. Each figure ask simply for culture to say yes to these requests, rather than to react (again) with the familiar fear-ridden, narrow-minded (and thus self-righteously overbearing) no.

I have mentioned various online roleplaying attempts with hyenas; I had offline ones as well, or attempts at least. I had several times attempted to arrange D&D games with housemate and whatnot, where I could play a gnoll paladin, a gnoll being one of a hyena-like race (as pestiferous and vulgar as orcs) in the D&D multiverse, and a paladin being a holy warrior of a god, literally the knight in shining armor type, and generally a shining paragon of virtue. Conceptually, then, a gnoll paladin represents an adequate embodiment and anticipation (in a concrete sense) of the solar hyena. But it also attaches to what I described in the previous paragraph. Here, if the gnoll paladin says, “I want to assert in public that prejudice against appearances shows your blindness,” this serves less to demand the erasure of all difference in people and more to invite a broader consciousness in people of what constitutes the human in the first place. If we push this far enough, it means also a recognition of all forms of life as sentient—something already factually the case—but that we might address and be addressed by as sapient as well. Snyder (1974)[10] wrote:

What we must find a way to do, then, is incorporate the other people–what Sioux Indians called the creeping people, and the standing people, and the flying people, and the swimming people–into the councils of government. This isn’t as difficult as you might think. If we don’t do it, they will revolt against us.  They will submit non-negotiable demands about our stay on the earth. We are beginning to get non-negotiable demands right now from the air, the water, the soil (108)

Murphy (1991),[11] describing the possibilities of a radical ecofeminism, writes:

When a person cries out in pain, is it volitional? When selenium poisons ground water, causes animal deformities, and reduces the ability of California farmers to continue to overcultivate through irrigation land with little topsoil, are these signs that we can read? And in reading such signs and integrating them into our texts, are we letting that land speak through us or re we only speaking for it? ¶ Nonhuman others can be constituted as speaking subjects rather than merely objects of our speaking, although even the latter is preferable to silence (50).

If emotion and instinct arise from historical natural influences on the evolution of the species, then their exertions on our behavior, their entering into our consciousness, are a form of the natural world speaking to us through signs that our consciousness renders verbally (48).

This at least may help to illuminate to some extent why the imagery may have appeared as a hyena: culturally, the hyena remains marginalized and rejected as anti-cultural (as also the gnoll) but the hyena as an animal also represents another human prejudice, our nonrecognition of the “animal” world (the world of all living systems) as also present in the world and with its own demands.  The arrogant dispensation by YHVH to give humankind (or perhaps only Adam) dominion over the world gets shown by the sapient hyena as yet one more tacit slavery. Murphy cites one author who “argues that the domination of man over woman is the prototype for other forms of domination” (43), an argument Lerner (1986)[12] advanced some time ago as well. However, one sees from this that the child and “nature” broadly conceived provide earlier prototypes for domination.

Endnotes

[1] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[2] Also, from Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:

One could easily assert that the impelling motive in this development [of the desire to obtain magical prestige or social influence] is the will to power. But that would be to forget that the building up of prestige is always a product of collective compromise: not only must there be one who wants prestige, there must also be a public seeking somebody on whom to confer prestige (¶239).

[3] One might typically hear “re-centering” but I do not believe that the circle represents the correct geometric metaphor; rather, as in planetary orbits, the ellipse does, which has two foci that influence the course of the orbit. As just one partial illustration of this, I wrote elsewhere:

This elliptical shape changes the characteristic or consequences of the planetary motion, to the point that we experience seasons (in different ways) on the earth. It means the Sun offers the most predominating factor, but that not only do other planets exist, we might actually stand on them at different times, pointing to Jung’s notion of complexes—as alternative personalities (or at least pseudo-personalities within our psyche) as well as rationalizing his sense of possession. Epistemologically, this points not only to a multiplicity of points of view but also to their incommensurability into the bargain; it never boils down only to a difference of semantics, but to a fundamental difference in value-orientation that cannot resolve simplistically. Ethically, that we move relative to two “centers of gravity”—two loci of motion—means not only that we have a radical, existential demand to take responsibility for ourselves but also that the Sun must have obligations as well—we do not merely spin round the Sun, solely or helplessly worshipping it while it owes us nothing more than to just keep on doing what it always does and has. We become in our rights to make demands of it, which the Pueblo people nicely hint at when each morning they venerate the Sun in order to help him up. No simply all-powerful deity, humanity must serve as his alarm clock each day, suggesting that we not only have a duty to do so, for the sake of the whole world, but also a right to. Were it not for our intervention, the Sun might just sleep all day!

Murphy (1991)* puts this another way: “The struggle is not to abolish any type of centering, but to recognize the relative nature of centers and their dynamic relationship with margins” (51).

*Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] Jung, C. G. (1979). Aion: researches into the phenomenology of the self. 1st Princeton/Bollingen paperback print. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[5] Jung, CG (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis: an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. (Vol. 14, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Trans. R.F.C. Hull) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

[6] Jung, C. G. (1962). Symbols of transformation: an analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia. New York: Harper.

[7] For better or worse, i.e., more effective or less effective, I have yet to read Aion and Symbols of Transformation—perhaps a charming or damning but either way essential elision in my reading of Jung’s work!

[8] I could console myself with minimal readership!.

[9] All of this links very much with the supposed notorious and generally undeserved reputation of Scorpios as well.

[10] Snyder, G. (1974). Turtle island. New York: New Directions.

[11] Murphy, PD (1991). Prolegomenon to an ecofeminist dialogics. In DM Bauer & SJ McKinstry (eds.). Feminism, Bakhtin, and the dialogic, pp. 39–56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[12] Lerner, G (1986). The creation of patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press.

BOOK REVIEWS (2014): Robert Burton’s (1620) The Anatomy Of Melancholy [Part 1]

Framing/Background for Replies[1]

The full title of this 1620 book by Robert Burton runs: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What It Is: With All The Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, And Several Cures Of It. In Three Maine Partitions With Their Several Sections, Members, And Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened And Cut Up.

This year, I have set myself the task to read four or five pages of this book per day, which for its nearly 1,400 pages will put me finishing it sometime in October 2014, once I skip the indexes and footnotes that source Burton’s Latin quotations, &c.

Since I cannot hope to remember with a book this large, especially one read at this pace, whatever I might write as a reply to it, I plan to collect reflections along the way, not particularly numbered or systematically, maybe sometime(s) sporadically placed online, but primarily to memorialize the reading in some way.

In the scheme of temperaments— sanguine (pleasure-seeking and sociable), choleric (ambitious and leader-like), phlegmatic (relaxed and thoughtful), and melancholic (analytical and literal)—I fall into the last category. These days, melancholy gets abused as a synonym for depression, but it more arises from self-reflection.

A Reply To:  Robert Burton’s (1620)[2] The Anatomy Of Melancholy

This is the first post to offer up reflections so far about Burton’s book.I’ve read 210 of 1,381 pages.

Burton says he chose the pseudonym Democritus Jr. because Democritus himself had written a book on melancholy in order in part to understand and cure himself of melancholy. We have a hint of this when Burton notes: “I did sometime laugh and scoff with Lucian, and satirically tax with Menippus, lament with Heraclitus, sometimes again I was petulanti splene cachinno [with mocking temper moved to laughter loud], and then again, urere bilis jecur [my liver was aflame with gall], I was much moved to see that abuse which I could not mend” (19). Nice catch of melancholy there at the end.

Around pages 27 to 30 or so, Burton gets a bit testy an provides a number of Latin phrases or citations about the sheer numbers of book scribblers (how timely most of his remarks still seem) an also—to put it in a single phrase—you can’t please everyone all the time. But also: multo melius es sermone quam lineamentis de moribus hominum judicamus; “we can judge a man’s character much better from his conversation than his physiognomy” (27). From Erasmus, we have orexin habet auctoris celebritas; “the author’s name creates a demand” (28), a phrase I would have found handy recently in an Internet thread.

Also, I simply like the phrase et quod gravissimum; “and what is most serious” (30). And this points to the way that this book is, at times, a kind of one-step shop. Burton piles together so many quotations, perhaps providing an original example of the Internet misattribution—he admits he piles things up—but still one encounters from on Didacas Stella: “Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident”, goodness only knows from where, which translates per burton to, “A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself” (25), which phrase should definitely sound familiar and colloquial—moreso in England, where the £2 coin sports it.  And that, because Isaac Newton supposedly wrote something like it in  letter. By the time he did, however, the phrase had become commonplace, enough so to appear in Burton’s book by way of a Spanish theologian.

For fun, however, let us note (from here) the various attributions:

The metaphor of dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants (Latin: nanos gigantium humeris insidentes) is first recorded in the twelfth century and attributed to Bernard of Chartres [see below]. It was famously used by the seventeenth-century scientist Isaac Newton who wrote it as: pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident.

One may see from Burton’s text above, if Newton claimed this as his own, he plagiarized it—something Burton, by the way (citing Hierome’s example) says he does not do, attempting always to give credit for phrases, even if it makes him seem like a pedant (he says) and even if it had still not caught on as a popular scholarly habit when he wrote his book.  But, just for clarity, in all of this pother, I wish to track this exact phrase (“pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident”), since that exact phrase does actually appear just like this in Burton.

Burton says he got it from Didacas Stella—a sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan mystic and theologian, born 1524 in Estella, Navarra, died 1578 in Salamanca (see here)—but in the (1159) Metalogicon, John of Salisbury declares it originates with Bernard of Chartres:

Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

(“Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos, gigantium humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine, aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subvenimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea”)

We see how the implied humility of the original has disappeared from Newton’s use of the phrase. From here, quite obviously rehashing Wikipedia, we have the story repeated:

In a letter dated February 15, 1675* Sir Isaac Newton famously wrote to Robert Hooke “Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident” which translates as “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”  The most evident meaning is that contemporary researchers are better enabled to make new discoveries by relying on the discoveries and insights of researchers from the past (¶1, italics added).[3]

Like a good sport, the author here at least notes that Burton has the phrase in his book half a century prior, and that folks err who attribute the phrase to Newton, but running down this exact phrasing “pigmaei gigantum &c” proves tricky. Especially since, with regard to the letter in question, it reads:

But, in the meantime, you defer too much to my ability in searching into this subject. What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in considering the colours of thin plates. If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. But I make no question you have divers very considerable experiments beside those you have published, and some, it’s very probable, the same with some of those in my late papers. Two at least there are, which I know you have often observed … (italics on page in original, from here).

Which decidedly fails as Latin. Now, perhaps I will discover in a hot second that Newton wrote letters in Latin, but until we get to that point, not only do we not have “Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident,” but also this phrase does not translate as “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” but rather more like Burton has it, “A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself”. And, while covering all the bases, the phrase “pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident” does not appear in Bernard of Chartres, which has “possimus plura eis et remotiora videre”, at least when John of Salisbury supplies it.

And unfortunately, that seems the end of it, since some glosses on Plato’s Timaeus would appear the only extant work by the fellow. So then, how does one arrive at the exact phrase “pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident”? At this point—if Bernard’s work does not exist, if John of Salisbury does not reproduce the phrase exactly, the Burton provides the only source I have seen (so far), and that comes from Diego de Estrella. About this, however, Merton (1965)[4] writes (too coyly, too archly):

For centuries now — ever since Burton — scholars have instructed us to look for the Aphorism in “Didacus Stella, in Luc. 10, tom. 2” thus beginning a tradition that was to become obsolete before it became ancient. Let me put it to you plainly (and without that false modesty which is the height of arrogance): who, before now, has followed that scholarly injunction and actually looked into Didacus Stella for the Aphorism? On the evidence, none. Even the incomparable Sarton was evidently willing to repeat Burton’s footnoted directions without following them in actual practice. As he put it, with his characteristically full integrity, “Burton’s reference is probably to Diego’s In sacrosanctum …” No one can mistake the force of the “probably” (and I have supplied the emphasis of italics to ensure this universal recognition). Thorough-going scholar that he was, Sarton was announcing that he had not tracked down the reference for himself. As with Sarton, so, manifestly, with more, Koyré and the myriad of others (including Bartlett) who have routinely cited Burton’s Didacus Stella, in Luc. 10., tom. 2., without themselves looking into the cited source. I have (253–4).

But the remainder of that mystery will have to wait.

From approximately pp. 43–97, Burton cites a heap of grumblers, Democritus principally among them, who maintain that the world teems with madmen, fools, and offers nothing but sights of absurdity. In the course of this, he cannot resist citing practically the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy of Catholicism top to bottom as warranting especial singling out—well done, Protestant hypocrite. But this last marks simply the capstone on the obnoxiousness in this passage. For while Burton assures us he writes of melancholy due to his own, which one might hardly object to, he attempts here to rationalize melancholy as the “natural” response to the world, because the world teems with idiots. Almost exactly 300 years later, Jung (1912)[5] noted:

It is hard to believe that this teeming world is too poor to provide an object for human love—it offers boundless opportunities to everyone. It is rather the inability to love which robs a person of these opportunities.  The world is empty only to him who does now know how to direct his libido towards things and people, and to render them alive and beautiful. (¶253)

One hardly needs say more than that, except this: very many of the grumblers cited by Burton have enjoyed some considerable station in life, no one more than the narrator of Ecclesiastes. To declare from the top of the world that “all is vanity” and the like, and in effect to confess at having bluffed one’s entire way through the administration of a kingdom, provides more evidence of “stupidity” than all of the fools, madmen, and charlatans adduced as evidence by the cited or celebrated authors Burton points to. I don’t doubt for a moment that running a massive enterprise involves difficulties, reversals, and no shortage of unnecessary trouble, but if at the end of the day you think it all a waste of time, then you were the wrong fool for the job and your pathetic mewling after the fact only sets a bad example. Better you should walk away from Omelas without announcing it or making a fuss; whining about it in memoirs deserves the fire pit or amnesia.

He veers away from his theme somewhat to imagine how Democritus might have responded to the state of affairs in Burton’s ay, and then seems to imagine some kind of Heracles who might heroically make a difference, exact that “there is no remedy, it may not be redressed, desinent homines tum demum stultescere quando esse desinent [men will cease to be fools only when they cease to be men]” (97).

From this lazy conclusion, made all the lazier given the immense amount of citation Burton piles together to make the point, he then—having told us the world consists only of fools—in all seriousness proposes his idea of utopia.

The boorishness or perhaps rather the utter platitudes of his utopia notwithstanding, what strikes me more involves the bipolar character of this massive exposition (indicative of hte subject matter? Is this why Burgess calls the Anatomy a great comic work?): after a heap of depressiveness, it gets answered by a manic utopia. This certainly illustrates both the theme and problem of the book (as it unfolds so far), but it means it equally lacks in diagnostic power (this utopia) as the previous diatribe.

And at the centre of this farrago stands the insistence, not cited from classical sources but Burton’s own phrase in Latin (I believe) that “men will cease to be fools only when they cease to be men”. Since Burton practices foolishness, we should therefore ignore him. Or if we can only act foolishly, then we must erect our rational civilization on this immovable base.

But in general, and I have ranted about this lots elsewhere, any invocation of human nature as unchangeable involves a hopeless condemnation. Do amend your silly opinion—after all, you did not always hold it, which shows that the thesis stands false—or spare us the babble (popular as a way to extort obsequiousness, obedience, or apathy with respect to changing the status quo). Nothing more tempts me to want to suggest, “Then just shoot yourself” than this sort of position, even as I despise the fact that I find it a kind of (in)adequate response to the position.

Nothing changes in this that Burton finally admits that he is as much a fool as anyone else.

Meanwhile, a rather sweet notion in passing.

There is a foolish opinion which some hold, that [devils and angels] are the souls of men departed; good and more noble were deified, the baser grovelled on the ground, or in the lower parts, and were devils; the which, with Tertullian, Porphyrius the philosopher, M. Tyrius, ser.  27, maintains. “These spirits,” he saith, “which we call angels and devils, are naught but souls of men departed, which either through love and pity of their friends yet living, help and assist them, or else persecute their enemies, whom they hated” (181).

The idea this keys off in me is that we might be persecuted by a devil but not have known the fellow personally in life. We may have affronted a friend of his, and thus become his or her enemy. And then we can extend this idea to the Jungian domain of the unconscious, and devils become a sort of objective correlative (if that’s the right phrase here) for a guilty conscience.

Endnotes

[1] If you’ve read this already in my other book replies, you can skip it. Otherwise: two years ago in 2012, I set myself the task to read at least ten pages per day; last year, I did so. Continuing from then, I now have the task to read fifteen pages per day, and I’ve added that I will write a book reaction (or reply) for each one that I finish (or give up on, if I stop).  I plan also to devise a way to randomly select books to read (given certain constraints) from the public library; this, to avoid the tendency only to read books that pique my already existing interests. These replies will not be Amazon-type reviews, with synopses, background research done on the author or the book itself, unless that strikes me as necessary or if the book inspired me to do so when I read it. Rather, these replies amount to assessments of the ways I found the book helpful somehow. More precisely—and this describes what I mean by a reply, as opposed to a reaction (review) or a response—I try to focus in these pieces on what I could not have said (or would not have known what to say) except that the intersection of this text and my consciousness brought it about. Consequently, I will sometimes say stupid stuff, poorly informed stuff, &c. Some in the world expect everyone to possess omniscience and won’t bother to engage in a human dialogue toward divining how to make the world a better place. To the extent that each reply I offer provides a I found this helpful in this book, then it becomes up to us (you, me, us) to correct, refine, trash and start over, or do something else we see as potentially helpful as part of attempting to make our world a better place. If you won’t bother to take up your end of that bargain, that signals of course part of the problem that needs a solution.

[2] Burton, R. (1620). The anatomy of melancholy, what it is: with all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostickes, and several cures of it. in three maine partitions with their several sections, members, and subsections. philosophically, medicinally, historically, opened and cut up . New York: New York Review of Books.

[3] Perhaps part of the reason Newton omits to mention dwarfs arises from the following:

Within the context of [Newton’s] letter, Newton refers to an optical experiment performed by Hooke, where he claims that Hooke has “added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration.”   However, it has commonly been interpreted by historians that Newton was using the “standing on giants” phrase as a sly insult to Hooke, who many believe was short in stature – but some believe he was simply afflicted with a combination of Scoliosis and Pott’s disease, which would have made Hooke a hunchback (1).  The two men had bitterly quarreled in the past after Hooke publicly claimed that he had given Newton the idea that gravity follows an inverse square law and that Newton simply crunched the numbers (2) (¶, from here).

[4] Merton, RK (1965). On the shoulders of giants: the post-Italianate edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

[5] Jung, C. G. (1962). Symbols of transformation: an analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia. New York: Harper.