Desire

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March 29th, 2021
I start to wonder if we can see MacIntyre's modernity as a form of addiction. What we need is not just some kind of athletic virtue ethics. Instead we need a process of understanding, recovery, and cultivation of centers. And for that, we need Desire.
March 8th, 2021
Deleuze and Guattari, like Marx, see capitalism as a tyranny that nevertheless builds the conditions for the social order that will replace it: communism, that is, a society where work is for the common good. They emphasize Desire as a productive force. Capitalism liberates desire from the medieval structures that "melt into air" but also reterritorialize it and privatize it.
Gendlin and Alexander: #Draft 3
The body has intentions and Desires. In a broad and general sense, it wants to go somewhere. It wants to set things straight. It has a directionality, some rudimentary telos, an urge to cohere, persist, and flourish. Therapy ought to assist this innate yearning rather than impose some external schema. We need to learn to listen to our own perceptions.
📰 A Creative Multiplicity
For Guattari, this was a moment of betrayal: if the Communist Party couldn’t recognise when a revolution was happening under its nose, and if Lacan refused to comprehend the force of collective Desire when it was pouring through the streets, then something had to be done.
Instead of Lacan’s commitment to the unconscious as a kind of theatre, where individual Desires are staged, Guattari took up the idea that it was more like a Machine or factory, constantly producing Desire.
Central to Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis is the claim that Desire is not individual; Desire runs through people, and drives people, but is not always aligned with simple self-interest.
The neuroses that Freud diagnosed, and that continue to plague society in the 21st century, were not ahistorical pathologies. Rather, they were products of how capitalism had developed through time to constrain and order Desire into a restrictive set of patterns.
The resulting Freudo-Marxism is a kind of psychoanalytic anthropology that the duo dubbed ‘schizoanalysis’: a narration of the history of Desire, as a productive and impersonal world-creating force.
Deleuze and Guattari advocated a three-stage practice for bringing about political change through schizoanalysis. First, find those processes of Desire that deviate from capitalism; then follow each to their most extreme conclusions, to allow them to escape from the restrictions of capital; and finally, align these different processes to create a ‘molecular revolution’.
Deleuze and Guattari argued that it was impossible to know in advance what such a revolution would look like. Instead of fomenting one according to a pre-ordained plan, they proposed a politics of experimentation. The bodily ordeals of the French dramatist Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’, and the drug-induced adventures of the American writer William S Burroughs, were two of Deleuze and Guattari’s favourite examples of how one might explore alternative organisations of Desire.
📰 Building Up to an Internal Family Systems Model
In the book Richard Schwartz, the developer of IFS, notes that if a Person’s subagents play well together, then that Person is likely to feel mostly internally unified. On the other hand, if a Person has lots of internal conflict, then they are more likely to experience themselves as having multiple parts with conflicting Desires.
📰 Fragments on a “Lacanian” Experience
As I recall, at the time, I was reading Sartre’s Nausea or Heidegger’s Being and Time. As I was standing at the locker to get my books between classes, it suddenly hit me that as he was driving he was experiencing and thinking entirely different things than I was experiencing at that moment. We were somehow a part of the same world, yet entirely different and disparate worlds at the same time. And then it washed over me. This wasn’t simply true of me and my friend, but of everyone in that bustling hallway, everyone on the road, everyone on the planet. All of us are seeing a different world, interpreting things differently, noticing different things, and are filled with different Desires, longings, worries, anxieties, loves, hatreds, and all the rest. We seem to occupy the same world, but really it’s a pluraverse, not a world.
📰 Leopold Kohr, the City as Convivial Centre
And the good life in the community has at all times signified the satisfaction of man's three basic social Desires to which former planners have invariably given material shape in their structures. These Desires are conviviality, religiosity, and politics.
📰 Marx and “Anti-Oedipus.” on Desiring One’s Own Suppression | Epoché Magazine
If, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the fundamental problem of political philosophy concerns Desire, then it becomes a question of the unconscious.
📰 Preface to Anti-Oedipus
Develop action, thought, and Desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
📰 Redemptive Suffering | Saints Quotes, Penance, Mortification
The saints would often say that their greatest Desire can be summed up in one phrase; to love and to suffer.
📰 The Government Within
There is no central control of the mind, it’s just a loose collection of Desires, agents, plans, and assorted bric-a-brac. How then does a coherent self get pulled together from this mess? One of Ainslie’s key points is that the main or only reason we have a self at all is to construct and enforce long-term bargains between independent behaviors and interests, and the self is better understood as a temporary alliance than an organ or a structure.
📰 Yan Fu’s Lessons on the True Mission of Liberalism
Feelings and Desires, he insisted, are “another name for energy,” and the task of politics is to incite and harness individual energy for social purposes—not to drain that energy away with clichéd moralisms and socially obligatory routines.
📙 All Things Shining
One cycles through the list of websites or friends waiting for the latest update, only to find that when it is completed one is cycling through the sequence once again, precisely as expectant and desiring as before. The craving for something new is constant and unceasing, and the latest post only serves to make you Desire more.
It was Jesus as interpreted by St. Paul who first put the emphasis on one’s Desires as the truth about one’s inner self.
Dante thinks that you should intensify your Love and be committed to whatever attracts you with total devotion, and then if it fails to satisfy you, which it surely will, you can learn from your mistakes until you finally find someone or something worthy of total passion and commitment. The last thing you should do is trim your Desire. Free will allows you to train your Desires in the right direction.
📙 Experiences of Depression
If our capacities were unlimited, to wish would be to be to get, and the distinction between Desire, Choice, and action would break down.
📙 Improvisation
For the improviser, the unconscious is not to be feared as a dark realm of dangerous instinct and forbidden Desire. It is instead to be trusted as a gift of God that can, like all other aspects of the baptized person, be transformed and conformed to the service of God.
📙 Marxism, Ethics and Politics
Capitalism provides a form of life in which men rediscover Desire in a number of ways. They discover above all what they want most is what they want in common with others; and more than this that a sharing of human life is not just a means to the accomplishment of what they Desire, but that certain ways of sharing human life are what they most Desire.
MacIntyre believes that there is a fundamental clash of Desires between the selfish, individualistic Desires characteristic of capitalism and deeper, human Desires created through the collectivization and solidarity that bind people together within capitalism
What Aristotle provides is a direct challenge and contrast to the Kantian idea that morality and Desire must always be exclusive and competing concepts. MacIntyre states that the Greek conception of the relationship between morality and Desire maintained that ‘the connection between the moral life and the pursuit of what men want is always preserved’
Any liberal conception of morality that insisted on the division between morality and Desire could never solve the moral dilemmas of the modern world as it fundamentally assumed morality and Desire could never be anything else but competitors.
MacIntyre argued that capitalism potentially provided a ‘form of life’ through which people could ‘rediscover Desire’ in such a way as to discover ‘above all what they want most is what they want in common with others’ (MacIntyre 1959a, p. 95). It was this socialized form of Desire—the Desire to be neither alienated from each other or ones’ self—that could potentially help individuals to discover that what they actually want are new forms of community and radically different social and economic arrangements.
Morality, on MacIntyre’s view, must be understood as the proper satisfaction of our Desires (Knight 2007, p. 105). Yet this is a conception of morality that has been expunged from the modern world.
📙 Postcapitalist Desire
Libido is not only what we want but why we want it. The object causes it, in that sense. And what is raised by this? These struggles are articulated through the counterculture as the production of new forms of Desire. We talked about this when we started off [in the first lecture]. I talked about the co-option of those forms of Desire, via Apple, etc., which precisely individualises, which transforms all Desire into a Desire to be a more successful individual, etc. What is also raised here, then, is the spectre of a different kind of Desire, a different kind of libido, a Desire for a transformed world.
Why, political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you, you have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged smooth-skinned types, but also because you dare not say the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst — and because instead of saying this, which is also what happens in the Desire of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men, what a leader of pimps, you lean forward and divulge: ah, but that’s alienation, it isn’t pretty, hang on, we’ll save you from it, we will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude, we will give you dignity. And in this way you situate yourselves on the most despicable side, the moralistic side where you Desire that our capitalized’s Desire be totally ignored, forbidden, brought to a standstill, you are like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that! And of course we suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy — for what? — does not disgust us, even more. We abhor therapeutics and its Vaseline, we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don’t wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either.
These [left-wing projects] are all inadequate and all for the same reason, over and over again, in that they don’t take the Desire of the capitalized seriously. They reject it and are therefore keep re-inscribing moralism.
📙 Reasons and Persons
Most of our happiness comes from having, and acting upon, certain strong Desires. These include the Desires that are involved in loving certain other people, the Desire to work well, and many of the strong Desires on which we act when we are not working. To become pure do-gooders, we would have to act against or even to suppress most of these Desires. It is likely that this would enormously reduce the sum of happiness.
📙 The Art of Loving
This Desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in man. It is the most fundamental passion, it is the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the Family, society.
📙 The Biology of Desire
People have referred to Addiction as a habit throughout recent history. That’s just what it is. It’s a nasty, often relentless habit. A serious habit. An expensive habit. But what makes it so enduring, so relentless, so difficult to change? What makes it different from what we might call more benign habits? Three things. First, it’s a habit of thinking and feeling—a mental habit—not just a behavioural habit. It’s easier to stop singing in the shower than it is to stop seeing the world as violent or unfair. Second, the feeling part of Addiction always includes the feeling of Desire, which is of course the theme of this book. And third, it’s a habit that becomes compulsive—a topic that will be explored in detail later. Perhaps all habits, once formed, are compulsive to some degree. The brain is certainly built to make any action, repeated enough times, into a compulsion. But the emotional heart of Addiction—in a word, Desire—makes compulsion inevitable, because unslaked Desire is the springboard to repetition, and repetition is the key to compulsion.
Bad habits self-organize like any other habits. Bad habits like addiction grow more deeply and often more quickly than other bad habits, because they result from feedback fuelled by intense Desire, and because they crowd out the availability or appeal of alternative pursuits. But they are still, fundamentally, habits—habits of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Neuroplasticity is strongly amplified when people are highly motivated. Which is why all learning requires some emotional charge, and why entrenched habits like addiction grow from intense Desire. Clearly, the Desire to recapture a potent experience of pleasure or relief is the motivational on-ramp to addiction. But does motivation also foster recovery? Is the high beam of Desire necessary to find the road out?
To experience a sense of continuity between me now, me then, and me in the future is precious. But when it’s been missing for a while, perhaps for one’s whole life, it’s not easy to find. It requires a perspective that can only be obtained by addressing the future in the context of the past. And it requires one other thing, one fundamental resource: Desire itself.
Stories don’t work without emotional themes. They would be impossible to follow. There would be no impetus to get to the next paragraph or the next chapter, either for the main character or for the reader. In the same way, real-life Narratives can’t be held in mind without the feelings that give them shape. Desire is the most potent of those feelings. Desire has the power to propel us through life, to get us from now to later. The trick to overcoming addiction is thus the realignment of Desire, so that it switches from the goal of immediate relief to the goal of long-term fulfillment.
If addicts can access self-narrative in the heat of the moment, even briefly, then Desire has the potential to jump like static electricity to new possibilities and burnish them with drive.
Treatment just requires the attention of one other human being who can hold, possibly distil, and hopefully extend the Narrative energized by the cresting wave of an individual’s Desire to change.
If mammals were going to learn from their experiences—unlike their cold-blooded forebears—they would need a more flexible operating system than the fixed action patterns responsible for the flinching of the worm and the darting of the frog’s tongue. So the part of the brain preserved deep within the cortex—the action brain, the striatum—also became the brain’s motivational centre. And it took charge of the one emotion that gets us to pursue our goals, often relentlessly: the emotion of Desire.
Wanting something is not the same as liking something, and most of the accumbens is devoted to wanting. Pleasure is a pastry puff, a dessert, a flash in the pan. Desire is what gets us moving, whether that means calling your dealer, driving to the liquor store, or stealing twenty bucks from your aunt’s purse. Dopamine—at least where it’s absorbed in the striatum—is the fuel of Desire, not fun.
What Alice had to do, and what all addicts have to do to move beyond their addiction, is reconnect Desire with the higher levels of cognition.
📙 The World of Perception
These studies have all grown out of the surrealist experiment which, as early as thirty years ago, sought in the objects around us and above all in the found objects to which, on occasions, we become uniquely attached, what André Breton called the ‘catalysts of Desire’: the place where human Desire manifests itself, or ‘crystallises’.