Emitting thoughts

My mind is increasingly bothered by thoughts that I shouldn't be thinking about for another few weeks and its disturbing my reading on Bataille (who I'm enjoying immensely, more on him later) so I thought that I might emit a few thoughts onto the interweb in order to free my mind for Inner Experience.

What is bothering me, and always seems to be bothering me recently, so much so that its stunting my other 'philosophical' thoughts, is this notion of dynamic ontology, and in particular the notion of dynamic ontology in relation to politics and the political. If we are, as I believe, entities in a process of becoming then this has all sorts of implications on how we are to go about existing in this state. Human beings invariably adapt and change in different situations, at this moment I am me as writing a blog, later today I shall be me reading Bataille, five years ago I was me living in a community of snowboarders, five years from now who knows. I change as I interact with different objects around me in such a way that the object no longer is an object but part of an event that is happening in a certain moment of time (Ah time, another thing that bothers me but I'll get to that another time).I am measured, not as height, weight, eye colour etc etc, but as what I produce, how well I do in essays, how I perform in a group situation, the effort that I put in to a particular project. These are all dynamic possibilities that are never fixed and have the capacity to change in relation to different events. What I am is never just me, but always me in a specific context and situation.

It's all very nice to talk about this and write about it and theorize about it but it seems to have so many problems that are rarely resolved, at least not in the system that we live in. The nature of capital demands that we adapt to whatever the market requires at a specific moment of time. This is very much apparent in the Industrial North where ship building turned to mining and mining turned to call centres and now the call centres are all off to India so who know what the labour market in Newcastle will have demanded of it next. The market forces labour into a process of becoming, where becoming is not self-differential but defined by capital.

In all this flux and change that capitalism imposes upon us we are still 'allowed' to cling to the fact that there is such a thing that can be called 'self', that there is me. I'm reminded of a scene from Fight Club in which the protagonist tells Tyler Durden that he was almost complete:

JACK You buy furniture. You tell yourself: this is the last sofa I'll ever need. No matter what else happens, I've got the sofa issue handled. Then, the right set of dishes. The right dinette.

TYLER This is how we fill up our lives.

Tyler lights a cigarette.

JACK I guess so.

TYLER And, now it's gone.

JACK All gone.

Tyler offers cigarettes. Jack declines.

TYLER Could be worse. A woman could cut off your penis while you're asleep and toss it out the window
of a moving car.

JACK There's always that.

TYLER I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's a terrible tragedy.

JACK ...no ...no ...

TYLER I mean, you did lose a lot of nice, neat little shit. The trendy paper lamps, the Euro-trash shelving unit, am I right?

Jack laughs, nods. He shakes his head, drinks.

TYLER But maybe, just maybe, you've been delivered.

JACK (toasts) Delivered from Swedish furniture.

TYLER Delivered from armchairs in obscure green stripe patterns.

JACK Delivered from Martha Stewart.

TYLER Delivered from bullshit colors like "Cobalt," "Ebony," and "Fuchsia."

I think this film depicts wonderfully one of the seminal problems of the Western condition. We believe that we can buy ourselves, in doing so we cause the market to grow but eventually realise that a self is not something that can be bought, it is only a fiction that is created and we buy into it. When the fiction falls away what are we left with? There are some lines of flight that can be taken, through music, art, poetry, literature, eroticism (or in the case of Fight Club fighting) but those who are not able to flee simply turn in on themselves, unable to do anything but stagnate. We are not told how to deal with this, we are simply told to buy more, work harder, have children, get married but I think that once you have become disenchanted it is impossible to buy back what has been lost, nor do I believe that one would want to.

My issue with politics is that it perpetuates the idea that we are static. We are told that a liberal democracy is the highest aspiration of the west and we, in all our glory and righteousness, have achieved it. This state upholds capitalism and yet it doesn't allow any space for change within it. Our politicians seem to be right neo-Hegelians who have a fixed idea of what is right. But what is 'right' changes all the time, it changes with cultural contexts, it changes with our relationship to technology, it changes as much as the capitalist market changes, and our system doesn't allow for any form of becoming-other in politics. We are a liberal democracy, it is the best, we must impose it upon others because that is what is right. There is no thought that perhaps a different country might become something other, something greater, than a liberal democracy. It seems to me to be a blatant contradiction; that we live in a system of constant change and flux and yet our government only promotes the static.

There needs to be a notion of politics that is based upon dynamic ontology, one that isn't rife with Christian doctrine and Hegelian dialectics. If it is something on a widespread scale then it must have the ability to adapt, structured upon the inherent possibility for change, otherwise it will be assimilated back into capitalism. I am convinced that this is essential as politics has so much baring upon our lives yet it does not reflect how we actually exist. It seems to be a distant thing that is more concerned with suppressing difference in other countries than promoting it in its own, that's probably why I don't understand it; not because I don't know what its principles are, or what it is that politicians are trying to do, but that it seems ontologically wrong. Perhaps there is a solution out there somewhere, in some work of philosophy or other, and I haven't found it yet. But I really hope I find it soon because with every year I seem to get more jaded with the world and I don't want to be forced to emigrate to Alaska to live alone with my cat.

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