♀️🐮
| Feast of Urania | Feast of Hathor | Feast of Aphrodite | Feast of Oberon | Feast of Utopia |
19 January 2024 Thesis Notes
Preliminary
Friday, Feast of Hathor-Urania, Feast of Oberon, Feast of Utopia
snow has led to bus delays so i haven’t been able to go to cafes or libraries for the last few days. i only have about five dollars left on the giftcard i’ve been using to get food to eat while studying.
Been obsessing about R again, after venting on the emotional venting chat. angry and hurt and wanting closure and stressed about my phone and the data I may have lost on it.
writing now in the bathroom, one of the few remaining power outlets left.
been re-reading Other Minds in hopes of trying to help me think about collective selfhood, soul by committee, multiplicity, paralel modules, self administered violence as information content, as self stimulation, contra a liberal cultural notion of the will which treats the body like a meat puppet, ordered this way and that, the Good Horse checking the Bad Horse.
also been reading Echopraxia, about the bicameral hiveminds and vampires and transhumanism and first contact.
Authority and Creativity
been ordering myself to write about Bleed Out, to write the Introduction, to write a defence or explanation or apology.
author authoritative a vessel to pour out or propel content into the minds of other vessels at will, that is the protestant work ethic sort of demonic penance i’m living
how to write differently, how to write out and through a practice emphasizing collectivity and imagination against force and edict, how to create a refuge in writing and write from selves which do not conform to the regular metaphysics, how to practice a liberatory and exciting intervention through writing, a metapsychiatry against the static, singular, authoritarian soul: that’s what i’m trying to figure out.
Self Harm is a Kind of Writing
self harm, violence, as a kind of writing, a practice which transmits by signs informational content specific to its methods to an audience and across a self, including ordering oneself to do something, calming oneself, punishing oneself, correcting oneself, enacting penance, inducing spiritual ecstasy, engaging in a cathartic process so as to think differently,
the whole body, the entire array of senses and actions and psychosomatic arcs and feedback loops, is implicated in thought, is used for thought, to simulate worlds, to run semi-parallel modules
The Problem of Action:
how do you go from [avowing something, being disposed to it, willing-as-consenting to it] to [will-as-doing it].
what happens when the body rebels against the orders, edicts, pleas, and threats from HQ?
i’ve been so depressed that i lost the ability to walk. my therapists once came to visit me following a trip to the ER and then several day stay at the Health Center and i couldn’t walk from my bedroom to the doorway. I fell over. I felt that I was faking it. Doing it for attention. Whose attention? Mine? I tried to make myself walk but had to settle for crawling. Self harm is wonderful at focusing the attention. It brings one to a height of clarity and immediacy where action becomes again possible, where suddenly there is a palpable difference in our sense of the (im)possible such that
I have a mind virus, like that described in the introductory paragraphs of the Concluding chapter of History of Self Harm.
It was inherited from my father.
it has a bundle of names: positive work ethic, protestant work ethic, positivism, idealism,
the idea is that you can force yourself to have A Good Attitude, to Be Happy, to (by recourse to the pennetancial aid of fantasizing about limbless children traumatized in warzones) Count Your Blessings and Be Grateful.
See my installation in The Cult of the Lesser Evil series, The Fascistic Uses of Gratitude.
My father has displayed classic signs of depressive episodes, at similar duration and manifestation as my own, for as long as I can remember, and certainly longer then I have been familiar with what depression was and could be. Initially I thought of depression, as I suspect many of us still do, as something straightforward and simple, as a profound and protracted period of saddness, which was more or less appropriate following the death of a relative but which more or less shouldn’t get in the way of your productivity or general behavior.
I was told not to let my sadness or distress show as a small child.
I was told that crying or winning, re my food sensitivities, sensitivities to social rejection, obsessive compulsions, (really anything that in any way might intrude on my father’s auster and child loathing sphere (I and my sister being the product of an unhappy compromise to purchase his partnership with my mother) made me a girl. “I didn’t know that we had two daughters” he would remark to my mother if I showed indollance or distress. This extended to physical violence, as when he would happahzardly insist on teaching me to fight, read, teaching me how to take a punch without crying or being outwardly upset, viz., teaching me to comparatamentalize
violence against the self is good practice for absorbing violence later in situtaitons where one doesn’t have control over it and maintaining allertness, mental and physical agility and endurance, productivity, disinterest.
its not just secretarial, though. the senses fight back, flood the brain with adrenaline, the mind thinks in its own voices, pleads, resists, negative self beliefs are mobilized and applied to whatever aspect in the given situation they can, distressing scenarios and memories summoned forth, modules of personality come into being and must be violently negated.
I fantasized about killing myself for hours every day during the darkest years of my episodes. i would picture all the ways I could die, all the ways I could obliterate myself, and by meditating on the annihilation of the self i could bring about dissociation from those modules I judged as failing or rebelling: the working selves which failed to write even one word of an overdue essay no matter how loudly i internally screamed, failed to show up for work and when i got fired failed to make enough applications or do well enough on the interviews. My critic selves would punish, sending into emotional overdrive my working selves, and then my critic selves would turn the knife on the hand which wields it, since the failures of my worker selves ultimately rested on the critical selves, who were charged with coercing and correcting the whole complex.
turning different parts of the brain, not off and on, but muted versus refined, ignored until the chemical signals were exhausted, the beliefs changed, the will to struggle against the demands being placed on me went off line, and only the cool adherence to and mastery of the given task before me remained. biding my time, the proscribed and dissociated parts and patterns out of sight but not unaffected.
to get all that machinery to run again, you use the interface which you’ve developed over time. you don’t just “be kind to yourself’ if you want results. Both adjunctions and attempts to be kind to myself are one of the easiest ways to provoke myself into a blinding rage which then, if i am say in the middle of a shift or on a tight deadline to get rent together, cannot just be let to run its course. engaging in discourse with the raging, hurting, lying, angry, failure parts of myself is exhausting, it leaves me with no spoons for the rest of the day and often a couple more days after that. such intrapersonal discourse isn’t like a storm that needs to let itself blow out and then you feel better, it’s more like a virus which hijacks the body and gets it to fight itself, and the immune system responds by raising its temperature and flooding its arteries with aggressive white blood cells, cooking the whole environment in hopes of outlasting the virus. shadow work is what certain witchcraft practitioners call the dynamic introspection with the parts of ourselves otherwise disciplined, repressed, fought against, fled from, and denied agency. in my own shadow work, i’ve had to cultivate a negative capability to allow the violent modules and the modules subject to violence (by no means a dichotomy, since the whole process involved turning the knife again and again and again back upon itself, removing resistance like a sculptor disposes of the stone which surrounds the statue) to surface, to congeal into thoughts, to express themselves, to resolve issues left on hold, to clear its caches, to organize the always partial and ever under construction feedback loops which make self correction and self consciousness possible. part of that negative capability in practice entails letting myself be open to doing more violence to myself. violence is, among others, a mode and medium of communication, and their is information which can only be expressed in some modes and not others: the relationship between form and content is not discrete, but dialectical. and so it comes as little suprise that violence, far from being exorcised from the body in favor of love and light, would remain key to the structure of the interface, or intraface, between and within modules.
Freewrite
The problem with Hank Green and Liberal Utilitarianism and Effective Altruism is the problem of depoliticization as discussed by Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political.
Schmitt writes of liberalism that it tends to depoliticize discourse, tries to get out of by ideo-öbscurative means, the threat or risk of extra-economic life, the fact that the potential for violence exists, that there is always the fact of making a determination which can not be realized outside of the power to enact it, that no norm is self executing, that freedom is a constant struggle [Angela Davis], the illusion that the world can be reduced to competitors and the possibility and practicality of enemies can be removed, that in turn by competing on behalf of the just and the good one can turn the machinery of capital on problems like disease, poverty, climate damage, exploitation, as if poverty and exploitation where not essential basic input to capitalism, that the operative machinery of state were a neutral and disinterested vehicle, to be steered this way or that, left or right.
Liberals use such depoliticization to repoliticize those who stand against their ostensibly neutral natural background of politics which assumes basicly that private property will be maintained, that the interests of the classes will be subsumed to the contradictory dictations of capital, with the state charged with administering and enforcing the ongoing accelerating terms of surrender wrung from the working and dispossessed classes, so that liberals can say of these enemies, you are beyond the pale of competitors (ie economic competition between capital, withholding labor as individual workers until their savings runs out, the legitimate interests of empire to force the privatization of illegitimate national or private recourses of the colonial state,), and you are beyond the pale of a standard enemy, with honest fundamental disagreements over political arrangements, you are a "universal enemy," an "enemy of humanity," "an enemy of the word," or in Hank Green's case, an enemy of the expedient, for Hilary Clinton, an enemy of Getting Stuff Done, an enemy of whatever banner is being waved at the time, it being always taken for granted that the self proclaimed "realists", those willing to forge compromises and coaltions with the powerful, are by definition those interested in pursuing and bringing about whatever will being about results, by the basic magnetic logic of a compass always pointing towards the existing administration, the existing constellation of powers, the ones capable of acting, as if what were not the foundational, all upholding task were to reorganize the heavens, write new constellations based on new concentations of power, to not just enact policies protecting the earth and the workers and democracy, but what is the real substance: to destroy the capabilities of those who would violate or oppose or overturn such policies.
his is a theory of change which claims he is not interested in the morally individualistic questions of virtue, the palor of his soul or his feels of guilt versus pride, he just wants to strike a deal with whatever devil will have him, but is in fact all the more concerned with his soul because of this: he wants to prove, like Abraham, just how much he is willing to sully his soul, to kill Isaac, to offer up his whole moral calculous on the Altar of the Lesser Evil. In doing so he engages in the Faustian fallacy which takes as assumed that there is a bargain to make in the first place, that the devils in question will be true to their word, or that an instituion exists which can exercise oversight and enforce said word.
He forgets and obscures the fact that, while it may be in the Hobbesian self interest of the competitor or corporation to engage in mutual disarmament so as to establish a singular state to secure the property rights and arbitrate disputes among the powerful, and in so doing make it worth each other's while to enter into externally enforceable contracts--even if they themselves intend to carry out as much graft and dishonest dealings against the terms of said contracts to whatever degree they can expect with which to get away, between the classes of owners and workers, between the fossil fuel industry and life on earth, there can be no general subsumption of divergent personal interests in favor of shared general interests, because the interests of the one means the destruction of the other, and between such forces there can exist no mutuality, no solidarity, but only more overt or covert struggle, aiming towards one side or the other extracting such terms of surrender as day to day conditions make expedient.
Introduction
in December of 2018, 2 years into the Trump administration and one before COVID, I met with three professors to discuss my thesis proposal, my still outstanding (as in, unsubmited) work for the senior seminar, and my plans for the remaining months of the academic year and what alternatives I might have to failing the final requirements I needed to pass before graduating.
I submitted two thesis proposals, one outlining a rather ambitious but uninspired exploration of liberalism and antifascism in the Weimar Republic, a subject I was rather singularly unqualified for as I did not speak a single word of German, the other, a proposal to analyze the political dimensions of self-harm, intrapersonal violence, and the formation of the self.
since then I've been reading and writing on the subject of self harm, with particular focus on phenomenology, politics, mythology, and history.
i’ve tried to pose anti-questions, such as why, when, how do people choose not to self harm, ie refrain from diverging from the norm, displacing the assumed need for abnormality to justify and explain itself.
i’ve proposed that self harm is a kind of writing, an act at once discursive and recursive, bringing about a transubstantiation in the practitioner which makes possible certain actions, transmissions, relations, modules of being. that such actions, their effects and causes, their contexts and denotations, not only occur in a political context, communicating to and being informed by other social agents and culture, impacting agendas, whether advancing, opposing or transforming the agenda items and their partisans, which may be generally said of all human behavior, but furthermore that self harm is a privileged site for understanding operative political theories of self, friendship and enmity, freedom and authority, agency and self interest. I say operative because the way we understand and use these concepts is not confined to abstraction but shapes our understanding of ourselves and the human condition, which in turn impacts individual and collective behavior. I say self harm is a privileged site because it is a point of abnormality, and it is the exception which explains the norm (schmitt), a borderline concept, a constitutive outside to liberal and neoliberal common sense ideas concerning what it is to be a subject, how subjects relate to themselves and each other, and what it is to be self-interested, or to have interests in general.
I’ve suggested that the history, the discourse and treatment, of self harm in the last century, while radically diverse, has tended to share certain basic assumptions belonging to a political philosophy of universal, monadistic subjectivity bound by certain ostensibly self-evident truths, which is to say, points in a discourse after which some authority draws a line saying Terminus Est, here the conversation stops, beyond is what is taken for granted, no system can be both fully complete and fully self consistent, here is the line beyond which only the most profound faith and most steadfast synthetic a priori analysis can designate, the Real, the Natural, the Obvious.
Quotes and Commentary
Next Steps
-Review thesis proposals
-Review and contrast prior thesis outlines as mentioned in an earlier Dispatch
-Write on Bleed Out
-Tag subjects covered in dispatches since last friday
-send progress to Matt