Plan of the Problematique: Building a new concept for the twenty-first century

Plan of the Problematique: Building a new concept for the twenty-first century

By Ian Hoopingarner

Someone like me doesn't want to be comfortable all the time. What has happened over the last three years is that I have been traveling along roads of the mind. When I travel I don't want to travel in style or luxury. I want that secret edge beneath it all; to be living with my wits; to have some of my stuff but not to have all of it; to travel among the both new and familiar. When you clime a mountain, you don’t want the Way to be smooth and slippery; you want it to be rough and rugged, so that you have something with traction to push against to generate traction...when climbing what Nietzsche alluded to as "the high mountains" of the intellect, it is the same...

Wilderness of the Intellect: If the intellect has a topography, it has mountains and valleys and also wilderness, barely settled regions of thought populated only by the most intrepid spelunkers of the imagination. I saw an old comrade not too long ago, and he took one listen to me and said "you've been in the wilderness, haven't you?"...

Civilization's dawn: It is thought that civilization's first arose in areas that are now desert. Areas where people followed the waters to, and there found other people. Some may say these whole regions were once lands of milk and honey; but notwithstanding, they were lands of milk and honey for the spirit though human effort. Places where the lifeblood of human association was, like that song lyric "Like that river twisting through a dusty land..." Places like Ur in Mesopotamia, China's Loess Plateau, and places analogous to Egypt, in the time of Rome. 

Ur, the garden city, whose wisdom exceeded all of its time. Your gardens and field; you sesame. Worn to ruin by the sands and the flood... so much preserved, evermore; but so much lost that we mourn. The greatest scene of its time was the Ziggurat in bloom against the sun. And then the floods, the tears of the world took you life. We remember...

The first: The first remarkable man to be attracted to civilization was probably attracted by someone already there whose naive and trusting eyes assured him that "we can do that" to all his, to-him, outrageous requests...but then also turned scheming, and, to him, malicious when contemplating his requests' fulfillment. This man was probably stubborn about his memories and courageous when it came to what he remembered. Many, including me, would probably say of this man, that I know him, but I do not know of him...

"What is civilization?": It may truly be said, of civilization, that, we don't know what civilization truly is, but, that we don't not know that, in human and personal history, that is both in the ancient past and the lives we ourselves lead, both in man and state, that it captured our curiosity, our attention, a Leviathan, and then our hearts. 

And truly it may also be said of a man, that once he captures a Leviathan, that he become the Leviathan too, and that civilization only captureth, it does not kill anything in spirit that already lives. But also it may be said that once a man become the a Leviathan by capturing one, he must then capture our hearts. And the old truth about the capture of another's heart, is that it is the capture of the self. 

What is the self? (Techniques of the Way of Lao-tzu): "Use it and you will never wear it out." The Way of Lao-tzu, 6. 

"Ho-Shang Kung says: "The valley is what nourishes. Someone who is able to nourish his spirit does not die. "Spirit" means the spirits of the five organs: the gall bladder, the lungs, the heart, the kidneys and the spleen. When these five organs are injured, the five spirits leave. "Dark" refers to Heaven. In Man, this means the nose, which links us to Heaven. "Womb" refers to Earth. In Man this means the mouth, which links us to Earth. The breath that passes through our nose and mouth should be finer than gossamer silk and barely noticeable, as if it weren't actually present. It should be relaxed and never strained or exhausted." Collected in the Red Pine translation of the Way of Lao-tzu. Red Pine was an American who moved to Taiwan to study at a Taoist monastery. 

Petition is a huge cultural adjustement for me: The concept of petition is interesting for someone with my Taiwanese associations, because of the way that the concept differs to the extent that it doesn't really exist in the same way or level of importance in my mind, but I didn't know why. In fact, I didn't know what the Chinese-language concept of petition was until I looked it up, because the concept is far from the minds of Chinese speakers I know, and where it exists, it is more of a negative concept with connotations of "Someone is going to be punished." This is not culturally relative, but rather monarchy-related. The longer Western concept of neutral petition is more democratic. In imperial China, petitions were more likely to be read by the emperor's court if they would result in punishment or removal of ministers or other personnel; that is, punishment for not properly administrating, whereas, in Western democratic tradition and physiocratic government, a petition was a request for disbursement of resources and/or materials from the stores; structured properly, it emphasized its neutrality with respect to the current operations of the store and the quartermaster's records. (Taiwan, by the way, tho' has caught up to the extent so far possible.) (Some traditionalists would say they rewound the clock on human organization to adapt to new technology. Possibly false. Probably technology helps.)

The Self and the Way: What else could be said about the self? For me, perhaps nothing, to be said here and now. Here's what the self can teach; only this: the whole can be described in triangles. Everything is triangulated. Remember your geometry. God is a geometry. That is all. When they well-meaningless interject that "3 is the most unstable number" that is only because in human relationships, three is a dynamic set of relationships. But when the rapper Nas raps, saying: "My main statement is this whole game is triangulated," that is the unvarnished truth. The self can not teach you much, although you could also consider that it could, as above, teach you everything all at once. That is the self and what the self is like. 

The introduction to technique was the most pivotal to me. Technique is a superstructure over top of memory. Technique they also the The Way, as in the Tao. The Tao can't properly be explained. As the opening of the Tao Te Ching says: 

"道可道，非常道"
"The Way that can be named is not the eternal Way."

Only what the Way, the technique that is, causes and effects, can be explained. 

Talking to me: What is the Way to talk to me? First get beyond books. Get to technique. Then empty your cup. Put everything you can do at the drop of a hat into some tangible form, then I'll talk to you. But when you've had enough, just leave for a while. Because "drinking from the fire hose" is a skill too. And what you do is not passively consume the information I give, because I like to overflow your cup, but to pick and choose actively, consciously, the materials and structures you want to use to build your self. And when you are satisfied that you have what you need, then speak up about your self and start to work together; to relate. Because it's not about reliance on externals, not even mine, when I talk to you in this way. It's about you and how ou relate to me. 

"Saying that": There's a great line at the beginning of Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie's book Half A Yellow Sun that goes: 

"Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas; talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair." (1)

Some might take a look at that and say, "how could you say that to me?" It's not that this is a problem or even that he should be pitied for who he is, but the question deserves to be suspected: what's his usefulness?

The guys in Taiwan told me that, as everyone a man, of post secondary school age, had to go into the army after school, they used to sit in underground bunkers in the outer islands during the tumultuous sixties of war, in the dark, occasionally someone smoking a cigarette, and just talk. Because that's the stage you have to go through after reading "too many books" sometimes; sit in the dark with some guys and be interesting. Because, how else could we trust you? And, also, what else is there to do? 

The books that "haunt me": I am haunted by the spirits of three books. One of them I regret reading. The other two I would give (nearly) anything to safely experience my experience while reading them again. The first was just this trashy lurid fantasy novel. The second two, though, were fantastic. There was a red-covered, cloth-bound, large Robin Hood anthology with full-color oil paintings throughout and every possible one of the Robin Hood legends in it. I checked it out at the library thee or four times as a child and I loved it so much. But the very time I decided to get the information on it to buy it, the librarian had taken it off the shelf. The other was a blue-cover, paperback, cheap, book of Greek myths by a woman author, that was unlike anything I'd ever read before. It had every possible myth I'd ever heard of, and more. It was dark, twisted; as dark and scary as those times would have actually been; it actually made my stomach clench up while reading it, viscerally; and I loved it too. My brother and i would take it back and forth from each other's rooms while growing up, until one day it was gone, mysteriously. The Robin Hood by Howard Pyle was pale and unsatisfying in comparison to "mine", and "my" Myths were not by Edith Wharton; all, other, mythic retelling are stultifying in comparison to "mine". 

What was this other one entirely, the one I regret? Just the etymology of an Oedipal crime. Do I want to read these books again that were positive? Of course, I desire to have the experience again, but, logically, I know that as time has passed, the experience may be different; in fact it may absolutely be. I don't want to read them again; I want to have the feeling of reading them and thinking intensely about them again, but I don't want to have the books again, and I don't want to go back to how it was when I read them in order to have the same experience - I don't even want to learn the hard granular lesson that you can't go back to "the way that it was." But I want to miss them, and their feelings, and I don't want to forget what I still remember. 

Of course I want to forget the regretful book, the Oedipal one. But I know that I can't have it both ways. I do think that society should concentrate more effort on anti-Oedipal affirmations. 

What is anti-Oedipus?: Anti-Oedipus is not only personal. As Deleuze and Guattari write in a book of the same name,

"The truth is, sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, (and) a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go the way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at leas as much force as these coercive machines have fore producing breaks and mobilizing flows. It is not through a desexualizing extension that the libido invests the large aggregates. On the contrary, it is through a restriction, a blockage, and a reduction that the libido is made to repress it flows in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type "couple", "family", "person", "objects". Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 293.

"The wheel turning": It is said that before Robin Hood died a bittersweet hero's death, he fitted a last shaft to his bow and determined to be buried at a spot where it landed. It is also said that in the gray and muddled, confused ancient past, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and it gave the people clarity as the fire game them the ability to see during the pitch-blackness of night; but his brother Epimetheus was content only to slowly learn from the gods and slowly pass small things on to the people. Every man has a conscious chance to steal some kind of fire from the gods at a crucial moment in his life, and yet, once done, man has a responsibility to share not only the fire he has stolen, but, also, to make the conditions again, tho' the world moves on materially, such that another can steal the fire again. This simile is something my own brother and I agree on. In this way, books are not only explicit, but a trigger to consciously do a higher sort of Way. And yet the book is not all a book is, in itself, but more. Some secret fire in its heart can be shared and multipled among the peopled, and such is better than to lock it up inside. "Does the epicure of words display his talents or does he keep them secret, in his secret, in his secret pages of the soul and the fire within it?" - "That's the problem with the way radical innovations work: they are not handled properly on ther way to the mainstream." 

Mountains in the intellect and point of fact: I climbed a high mountain before. In the Nietzschean intellect, I found myself strongly opposed to the actions of Oedipus from the eponymous play. In point of fact, I climbed a mountain once, in Taiwan. In both instances, I ascertained for myself that the problem in both cases was momentum and lack of care. Oedipus was so concentrated on fulfilling his political desires that all his desires, even the improper ones, became subsumed to his task, to the infamous end of killing his father and marrying his mother. Obsessed with momentum, he assumed a lack of care about what was really going on. And the problem with mountains in actuality is momentum and lack of care too, which you must avoid, both in the going up, and in a totally different way, the going down of them. 

Working-class politics: I've never been a rich man. I've had rich experiences through my own wits, and prioritization too, but those only. The older I get the more I find myself identifying to a greater and greater extent with working-class politics. The best explanation for this is that the older I get, and also the poorer my material circumstances in money become, the less unreasonable fear I have. What is fear? Fear is a lack, and when it is caused, it is by the unattainable thing that you lack, being right in front of you and unattainable. It is ironic, albeit casually, that the more material wealth I have found lacking, the less fear I have had. But the reason, really, is that the more I have relied on technique and the Way, the less fear I have had. Why, is because I have found that there are reasons that I lack the things I previously desire, and I desire them less now. I still have desire, but I've found that I desire more to do actions, and less to have things. 

The post-WWII labor movement problematique: Being a man of industriousness and historicity I have read history on the labor movement, in America, and been astonished and frustrated that the confusion of post-WWII politics and culture have seemed to flummox historians. Reagan killed the air traffic controllers - so what? From the long view of history, one man cannot kill a movement. So, what is really going on? I have found only one satisfying answer, but not from a historian; rather from a philosopher. 

Film and post-WWII working-class politics: The only cogent analysis of post-WWII working-class politics I have ever read is an interview with Michel Foucault called "Film and Popular Memory". Foucault had actually seen the films discussed, but the conversation went above and beyond the content of the films. The conversation turned on the topic of what movie mean and what they have been used for, encompassing three parts 1.) films are a very subtle form of pornography, 2.) that pornographic power film was what Nazism exploited to control people, and 3.) that what Nazism really distributed to people through desire was not material gains, but power over their neighbor, and also reserved that to a specific class of people that was rather large. The fundamental questions that this undeniable fact brings into the problematic is twofold, 1.) that orthodox Marxism, even left is and liberalism, fall down when having to address questions about a.) desire and b.) power; also 2.) that what happened after Nazism fell was that of desire and power, only desire remained. Foucault ask: doesn't anybody simply desire power anymore? Doesn't the working class? 

Foucault on the desire/power matrix: Foucault: "Power has an erotic charge. There's an historic problem involved here. How is it that Nazism- which was represented by shabby, pathetic, puritanical characters, laughably Victorian old maids, or at best smutty individuals - how has it now managed to become, in France, in Germany, in the United States, in all pornographic literature through the world, the ultimate symbol of eroticism? Every shoddy erotic (erotic) fantasy is now attttributed to Nazism, which raises a fundamentally serious problem: how do you love power? Nobody loves power anymore. This kind of affective erotic attachment, this desire one has for power, for the power that's exercised over you, doesn't exist any more. The monarchy and its rituals were created to stimulate this sort of erotic relationship towards power. The massive Stalinist apparatus, and even that of Hitler, were constructed for the same purpose. But it's all (coproduced) collapsed in ruins and obviously you cna't be in love with Brezhnev, Pompidou, or Nixon. At a pinch you might love de Gaulle, Kennedy or Churchill. But what's goin on at the moment? Aren't we witnessing the beginnings of a re-eroticisation of power?, taken to a pathetic, ridiculous extreme by the porn-shops with Nazi insignia that you ding in the United States, and (a much more acceptable but just as ridiculous version) in the behavior of Giscard d'Estaing when he says "I'm going to march down the streets in a lounge-suit, shaking hands with ordinary people and kids on half-day holidays? It's a fact that giscard has built part of his campaign not only on his fin physical bearing but also on a certain eroticizing of his character, his stylishness. (...) It's the restoration to power of seductiveness (...) ...Even white recently, it was necessary to apologize for being in power. It was necessary for power to be self-effacing, for it not to show itself as power. To a certain extent, this is how the democratic republics has always functioned, where (that) the aim was to render power sufficiently invisible and insidious for it to be impossible to grasp, (and) to grasp what it was doing to where it was."

Foucault - Knowledge/Power: Foucault is also famous for the well-known formulation about knowledge and power. Foucault: 

"Knowledge is controlled in every society by mechanisms of power. Anywhere you find knowledge, there also you will find power."

This is also not only a ver powerful statement but it also takes on an extra significance In the meaning of his statement on the desire/power problematic. In a current state of society where power has disappeared from the working class only to leave behind naked desire with no point, the identification of knowledge and desire for knowledge as the appropriate avenue to pursue power within the framework of this late capitalist environment, where and when there is a vacuum of power where once it was held by the working class. (This also connects together with another fragment from Foucault where he discusses the struggle over the ownership of popular memory.)

An issue vital to the state: The reason that pornography has become an issue vital to the state has nothing to do with guilt or shame. The problematic is deeper than that and we have to undercut the topic of pornography itself while talking about it to get to the real problematic. Here is the real point to make: at some point, desire became imbricated with power. So everybody became concerned primarily with desire as a conduit to power. But then someone or some group told away the power. The desire for power disappeared and all that was left was desire, for desire, for desire, and this led to apathy and powerlessness on the part of the working class. What you have to do is take your power back. Foucault wisely asks: does nobody desire power anymore? This is especially cogent for the working class. 

What should be done about porn?: So what, explicitly, do I think should be done about this porn "thing"? Far from banning it or crusading against it, for that would be crusading against human nature itself; and also, far from trying to legitimize or make porn acceptable conversation in all social contexts, I truly think that what has to be problematized (in a new light) is not porn but easier itself, and specifically the political uses of desire to disenfranchise and terrorize a docile and/or dormant population subsisting in a state. The Nazis and other fascist and dictatorial groups used porn not because porn is inherently a fascist-authoritarian form of indulgence, but because they applied techniques within the type of porn and its use and distribution and framing in a cultural context to further their goals, within and surrounding the thing in itself, by using the psycho-sexual lure of pornography to trick people into disenfranchising themselves thru their desire. That the Nazis parlayed to many people into a bait-and-switch of power for desire, and did so using porn and a culture of porn, does not mean that porn "did it" to people (because after all, the Allies used porn too, tho' differently"). Rather it does mean that we should concentrate our blam (on) where it belongs, even if that mean discussing porn. 

Not all the world is porn: It is best not to waste time interrogating porn nor porn use, but to place it somewhere on the continuum between distasteful and grittily useful, and interrogate instead the human desires as they stand now, which are right as they ever have been, tho' perhaps in some a little more advanced. Not all the world is porn and once we put our porn filters on, to filter out that noise, we can see that, and that there are many very real and very pressing and very momentous decisions we can make about the trajectory of the twenty-first century. Releasing yourself from caring about porn is part of the way of releasing yourself from attachment, which is always negative in an o itself, and so to be attached to such a negative care about the world is unjustifiable. There are so many more, better, things to care about. 

The political problematique: There is a slate of seismic political choice that we must make in order to have a fighting chance in the twenty-first century. In my view, we need to make them in one way, and not the other. The way I see it, this is the political problematique of the twenty-first century. 

1.) Don't we organize our natural economic order around low food prices and we should organize them instead around farmers getting properly paid for producing our food? As I see it, we must keep grain prices as high as possible and allow agricultural commodities to circulate freely in the nation, allow export, but not import of food stocks; this means choosing physiocracy over mercantilism. This avoids scarcity and promotes good living. 

2.) When it comes to distribution of goods, do we choose the notion that "everyone should have enough" or the notion that "everyone should have something"? As I see it, we must see the problem as that people have needs that must be met and not tha governments have guilt that needs to be assuaged. This means must choose a system of social credit and the explanation that "everyone must have enough" instead of a system of distributism that says "everyone must have at least something." This is the only way to make sure we take everyone's needs into account.

3.) Do we allow association of people to be free in form so long as they have to meet certain criteria, or do we strictly define the acceptable forms of "free" association? As I see it, association, even if peaceful, is not fee unless the forms are free. How is a new form of association peaceable if not traditional? The criteria are that someone must read "for" the group and that someone must listen "to all" in the group, and there are no further rubrics. This means that in this knowledge we must choose associationist over either of the two forms of traditionalism,; neither corporations not feudalism. 

4.) Do we allow all relationships to be governed by the state? - and mastered by the State? As I see it, this can only lead to the State's chaos and confusion, and the lack of sovereignty over people's own persons. The ideal must be different, such that people are and relationships are capable of self-government and self-mastery. This means we must choose to be clinical in lieu of anarchist in our relationships, and apparatical in associations rather than contemporaneous. To aspire to prescription, rather than description, of social causes, is the proper ideal. 

The cultural problematique: A corresponding cultural attribute can be affixed to each of the above, in order to aid understanding. In the same order, they are: 

1.) Solastalgia. This word comes from Australia. (Writer Glenn Albrecht coined this term while describing the devastation left in the wake of strip mining near his home.) It describes a yearning for a lost quality in a natural and mental landscape altered beyond repair. It describes also a loss of solace within the nostalgia associated with the above. I saw a monstrous gas pipeline being constructed within feet of a wetland once. When I went back there again, the wetland and its water lilies were gone. That is the emotional trigger of solastalgia. 

2.) The Politics of Desire. We desire more than desire itself. Even desire itself is not all about desire, but about our relationships to the social and material world. Hence it is a "politics" of desire, an old term in modern philosophy. To take our power back from those laconically holding us in apathy, we must confront the word desire in its actual meaning, which is sociopolitical and not merely personal in scope. 

3.) Dirty Computer. This is the title of a project by Ms. Janelle Monae, and the title is a thing of beauty in itself. Not only aesthetic, it denotes the reality of our times, wherein the most powerful tool and process is the most profound and also the most common. What are we to do when the most powerful tool in human history is a computer that can be wielded by a five-year old? We must do this: refocus on the human and on multipotentiality. We must not focus on things money can buy, because only a little money can buy the key to near-omniscience. But a shifted focus to human potency and capacity can redeem the value of our attention. 

4.) The Ethics of Elsewhere. I do not know if anyone else though of this one: unlike a stone dropped in water, which may not perceive the ripples spreading outward on the water's surface, human beings may have the ethical capacity to understand things outside the scope of their perception but not outside the scope of their actions. There is an important component of ourselves that is defined by others. What is the effect of people acting and working in a separate room on those outside that room? What is the power of absence? How does being associated give honor except by comparison to those outside and, how should that effect the association that is given? These all fall within the scope of the Ethics of Elsewhere. 

Politics as the healing of wounds: I'm getting the feeling that there are still some things that have not been written that need to be. No record is complete, of course. But also, no record is complete without something else that I can not name. Something exists at the ragged edge "beyond" what has been mentioned. For instance, the example, glossed before by many, that politics is the choice between two things. To expand on the notion of "we chose genocide over slavery, as we always will", this is, in a fundamental and ineffable, as well as primal, sense, what human politics comes down to, both in the performative and the real sense. The meta history of human affairs has always been that of wars and enslavement. However, the true stance has always been "give me liberty or give me death," and the portico of the temple of the State has always been a place of performative death. Enslavement has always been the path to avoid working with the State. But since the advent of modern religion, that has been the straight path to the Church. Politics has always been death, and mass politics has always been performative genocide. I am no fool. I came to this realization through full and complete understanding of the genocide of Amerindians and enslavement, the American faults. As problematic as this may sound, it happened, and therefore the only way to understand American politics is to understand how genocide and enslavement affected our history. Politics is the healing of wounds on the body politics that represent the legacy of the faults of genocide and slavery. Healing the wounds of slavery brings the disenfranchised into politics. Healing the wounds of genocide heals something deeper than mental illness; healing the wounds of genocide inures the people to fear. And furthermore, only when the people are inured to fear can there be law and a society ruled by law. It takes "men and newspapers" to inure people to fear. And this is why old Wendell Phillips says that we live in a society under a government of men and newspapers: there can be no trust from the people in law, and there-fore no government truly, at all, in the minds of the people, if the people live in fear. 

The "Responsibility of Intellectuals" problematic: We need the real concept of what means the phrase "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" now. The way it's properly understood is not how it's popularly understood, is not how it's glossed by Chomsky himself, not is it how it is more widely glossed by others of the New Left for consumption by a popular audience. The "responsibility of intellectuals" is not to critique the systems of power and repression (although this may be Chomsky's own responsibility which is why he called it that), not is it "not to be value-neutral" as others of the new Left describe it, with the same caveat. But, rather, I think, the responsibility of intellectuals is to know wher they stand on issues of national and political importance and adjust their conduct accordingly. This is something conservative academics will never do, practically speaking, but they have a responsibility that they are abegnating, rather than that they have a responsibility to be liberals. But sadly enough, the responsibility of intellectuals as properly understood still leads to the consequence that those of extreme position relative to the body politics remove themselves from the education of the young, regardless of the worth of their opinions. The only hopeful answer is adult working-class education.

IH