And the choice is: greasing the gears or being legion…
The individuated self is a mystery that has often perplexed the ablest thinker. What is this self that gets beyond concepts and refuses to submit to identity politics? Is it entirely empty and so, controllable by way of economics, technology and the latest political image?; or is it infinitely complex and already related and therefore not reducible to any particular effability? Is the self one—something that must be made one, ‘panoptically’ as Foucault famously suggested—; or, is it legion, and is that preferable?
We have a desire to believe that there is something that all humans share in common, a common humanity. It is hoped that with some satisfactory definition we might be able to at last ground ethics metaphysically. In the very least we are numerically differentiated; you are you, I am what I am—however we are distinguished and despite the manufacturing of fashion that precedes us and defines what we are. As we each undergo change, we are told that we are the same thing, a consuming thing that differentiates itself from everything else as it consumes.
The self must be empty so that it can be filled, again and again. And the self must be filled, for if not, it has become nothing. To be something, then, is to be filled with whatever muck you are told makes you complete, whole.—Ritalin. If it is possible to be complete, it is possible to be completed.—You will either be completed or you will complete yourself, and everyone else will make you feel like you’re an outcast if you do not grease the gears!
Science tells us that consciousness is reducible, it promises it, in a faith like way. It is accordingly not very fashionable to reject this picture; indeed it may even be too religious to do so—whatever that means. Philosophers and psychologists tell us that we have to get our lives in order—that we should take drugs so that we can better grease the gears. Part of the lie of the self has been perpetuated by way of a lie concerning time. The self can “look” at itself—can consider itself as an event. This presupposes that the continuity of time is made up of parts going from part to part, and that the self transcends the parts in order to bring the parts of the self that seem disordered into better alignment. The claim then is that the bare self is stable—it can reason, it can think—the other parts of self—what one has done—are events that must be brought into alignment with the stable self. There are two lies here. The first is that continuity is made up of parts. If time is made up of parts then there must be no spaces. But parts presuppose space. So, either time is not continuous, or it is and there are no events, only generalized events that we imprecisely take to be events. The second lie is that the self transcends time. The truth of the matter is that the self on the psychologist’s clock is in time, and is considering events as an event. From this it follows that the greasing gears self itself is a construction as much as considered events, events perceived to be problematic, are constructions. Thus, the truth of the self is that it is time for a time, and that it can only be legion just like time.
Part of the reason that we are cautioned to not think this way, cautioned to not celebrate the diffuse self, is that if we find out that we are infinitely related to everything else rather than a unified self when perfectly aligned with our nothingness, we are impossible to manage and impossible to control. It is better then to be legion, to be weird, to keep ’em guessing. We play into their hands, we deliver ourselves if we are predicatble.
On the other hand if we take control of ourselves pragmatically and inconsistently, in a way that is unpredictable, perhaps we might steal the night.
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