Exteriority, or, Living on the Threshold

Much criticism resembles censorship, a form of repressive power working negatively against freedom or desire, i.e., against negative liberty. It cannot establish or understand the way 'positive liberty' works, as it is reactive toward a problem that has already occurred. But notions of breakdown or fragmentation can only ever allow an image of a cracked whole to emerge - the lines that appear are irreversible and inseparable from the critique, like with a shattered mirror. As such, the critical procedure can aid, but can never substitute for praxis.

Agamben writes: "Be your own face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather, go with them, in them, beyond them." This is placed at the end of a short essay, "The Face" (1995), which begins with the premise that "the face is the only location of community, the only possible city." Bravo, Agamben, for pointing beyond the subjective-objective murkiness of 'self-reflection' and 'identity,' with all the implicit inner-outer assumptions. When I am just my own exteriority, when I am just my own exposure or relation to the world, I am not alienated, I am reunited with an 'essential' correlate of myself, which is precisely my other-than-self, a self-in-becoming. This is both spatial and temporal, and the two can be linked. When I become the way my body 'faces' the world, and not how it re-presents itself via conscious recognition (which, as the inverted mirror-image attests, is truly impossible), my potential 'appears' concretely in practice - my 'self' becomes unpredictable and uncapturable to those who would control me, while I retain a corporeal know-how which allows me to act in both self-defense and self-expression (which I cannot 'grasp' to represent, however). Exteriority allows ecstatic self-expropriation, and is opposed to all notions of appropriation or self-identity based on prior 'sense-certainty.' Instead, 'one' emerges as a singularity beyond both particularity and universality.

What I feel like I need is support or aid without creating chains of dependency. It is a lie, and an expression of extreme alienation, to say that the dominated want to rely on the dominant, or on an overarching system, for survival. This hurts our development and maintains the status quo. What we have to do is dissociate practices of mutual aid from the neglect of human needs which accompanies anti-welfare ideologies and discourses. There are forms of self-protection that enable new social needs and possibilities, as long as these are not totalizing. If needs develop at the dispositional level of habitus, and are never fully visible or representable as such, then we must question public recognition as an a priori criterion for aid. Too often, this externalizing and overbearing relation suffocates the very human potential it is supposed to foster. There is no such thing as equality of opportunity, since some come better equipped to 'run the race' on their home ground, but systemic imbalances need to be addressed in a way that doesn't overcode the relation between the dominated person and system of domination into a hard association, that leaves room for people to grow in relation to others, but not to a generalized Other. We need support and healing so that we can develop new experiences, but not a system to fall back on or 'fix' us. We need a non- "possessive individualist" autonomy.

The Difference Between Creative Self-Transformation and Self-Mutilation

Arguably, creative expression is necessary to personal development. But as modernist artists understood, expression actively creates new aspects of the self, rather than just representing a person's ideas. The act of communicating or expressing meaning is enough to transform personal experience by creating different ways of relating. Creativity does involve the self, but is based on self-formation, rather than self-protection or self-interest. It involves risk-taking and a degree of unpredictability. It is the difference between becoming who one 'is' and static being, if you remember that 'to be' is a verb.

Unlike the tortured soul image of creativity (the self-mutilating artiste), self-transformation involves healing and developing the potential to be different which was already there but unrealized/unnoticed. It does not mean alienating oneself or becoming overly mediated by the 'external' world, because an intrinsic part of ourselves is always how we relate to the world. It means living on a threshold (i.e., 'limit-experience') in which it is impossible not to face the world, and respond to different potential future as they emerge. Self-mutilation confirms the wounded self even as it denies the possibility of self-transformation, of actually dealing with the causes of suffering. It is a masochistic way of being, which leads to only seeing negative emotions as 'authentic' and valid. Joy, care, affective feelings are denied because the mutilated self cannot experience them without an overload of sensation. But sensation and 'pleasure' are not accurate ways to describe affect; they must exist for a self who perceives and judges them. The reason for emphasizing feelings of ecstasy is because they are fundamentally linked to our relationship to otherness, both the world and our own becoming-different. According to Martin Heidegger, "ek-stasis" - standing outside one's self excentrically - was the meaning of existence, but some point, this translation was forgotten. It is exciting to develop your potential and needs both in space/place and time, at the same time as it is scary. However, to think that uncertainty and risk can be represented as an object of horror would be to misunderstand how and why affect exists. Self-mutilation is a moment of creative self-transformation, but by itself should only be used as a means of self-defense in extreme circumstances. We need to help people heal so that they don't have to live in this agonizing, chronically stressed mode that relates to social domination.

What do people mean when they talk about 'socialism'?

It is very difficult to say exactly what socialism is. It has a long and checkered history in the practices and imagination of 'left' activists since the early 19th century. Now, it is even clearer that there is no single, unified socialist project. But neither is there any unified capitalist system. Capitalism is still recovering from a world-historical crisis - the 2008-9 recession - that has exposed its fragility. Although it has deeply penetrated into our everyday lives and relations to the world and other people, it has still left room alternatives. The alternatives would start small, develop into a network, and expand inside and outside institutions. There is no need to change society from the inside-out, top-down, in order to show some goddamn solidarity or sympathy with oppressed people.

When we say, "another world is possible," we mean that human beings have the capacity, under the right conditions, to live differently. There are glimpses of socialism in the way people act in ordinary situations, when they don't consciously recognize, but unconsciously sympathize or support people around them. That sincerity and affectivity is common to most human interactions. I don't need to go into a full list of examples to simply argue that a lot of peoples' needs tend to thrive in situations where mutual growth and learning happens, and that without a shared culture, our experience as people would be blunted. Is blunted.

The premise is not a perfectly functioning, equal system, where everyone is happy, content, and lazy. That classist stereotype gets us nowhere in discussing socialism. The first premise has to be: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme). Our current system - advanced capitalism - hijacks human potential, reserving it for those who've adjusted their needs to its interests and desires. There is no question that those at the top are currently more skilled and hence more able to earn the rewards of doing better. But they have received advantages that others have not. These aren't simply arbitrary privileges or entitlements (though inherited wealth does matter). Due to the inherent logic of profit-driven competition, only certain individuals and business who make it to the top can succeed and develop their abilities to the fullest, while many people waste their efforts. We all complain about this because it increases the amount of work we have to do, the difficulty in finding and keeping a stable job, and the chronic stress of living precariously. The development of some leads to the underdevelopment of others, not simply to an unequal distributions. We would fight against this if we could, i.e., if we had the voice and means to. Unfortunately, there have been certain ways of officially representing personal experiences, i.e., as fixed identities, and of airing 'grievances,' i.e., in public discourse and state politics, which are limited and unappealing for most people. Having no outlet, we invest the energy of the other world we feel is possible in popular culture and things that don't really develop our capacities as people. The only real 'necessity' or moral obligation is considering human needs.

Unless we are hopelessly confused, needs will always come before wants and desires: this is my second premise. As Marx wrote in The German Ideology, there is obviously a natural basis for human history: "life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life." The unintended consequences of this process lead to changes in humans' relationship to the natural world, and to themselves. Nature changes over time. Thus, "the second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act." Emerging needs would include practical know-how, affective intelligence, knowledge-sharing, and the material transformation of the human body and psyche through activity, e.g., having your body, gestures, habitual energy, and so on shaped by doing manual labour. These are the most vital experiences which are foregrounded in peoples' life-worlds, and this is the only basis for abstract debates about justice. Beneath all the so-called competition (and much monopoly), class struggle is going on, but in the words of Warren Buffet, "it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." Enough said?

"Another world is possible" means that socialism comes from the imaginations, experiences and life-worlds of ordinary people. It doesn't have to come from the minds of elite university-educated revolutionaries, or be top-down. Arguably, it is not a 'system' at all, and should not be evaluated as such. It is a project that we are building, whether we know it or not, and thought about socialism should merely generalize or extend the needs people themselves express in their everyday experiences.

When do you really care about someone?

When do you really care about someone? There are numerous formal ways to express caring, like romance or public displays of affection, or other rituals. But I think the only one that really shows it means something is being willing to spend intimate time with another person. To check your ego, to check cynicism for a bit, and feel the other person's presence. To mutually grow as people, to let deep affects resonate between you and letting that fill your life with energy. We are stuck in an exhausted, cynical, egoistic paradigm, and don't realize that our energy comes from our relationships to the world and to other people. We do not possess this energy, any more than we possess the time that we live our lives in. That tempo and rhythm is something that exists between people, not something that is just abstract or purely individual.

The time 'invested' in our relationships on caring for another person is regained with a 'surplus,' but it's hard to measure exactly how much. But rest assured, if you feel better and do things faster, and with more energy, it should make up for itself in the end. If you care. That's what makes relationships and love so uncertain and risky, but also meaningful. You will feel how intimacy and love affect other areas of your life positively, but will rarely be able to calculate exactly how this related to an initial effort. Without taking a chance, though, you may not realize important aspects of your potential self, such as improving emotional memory and the ability to resist stressers. A relationship can be part of your broader support network, and many people in relationships do share friends. If either person doesn't want to public displays of affection or bourgeois romance, that is fine; it's unnecessary, since the only 'duty' or 'commitment' should be to respond to the other person when you are able to.

If someone says they don't have enough time for a relationship, I think it has more to do with trust, like not feeling comfortable to be intimate, or not wanting to expose yourself beyond a certain comfort zone. I get that everyone feels vulnerable, and some more than others, but I also think it's a bad idea to only think about self-preservation. Constructive self-criticism can help in development, and relationships can definitely reveal areas we need to improve, as well as reveal surprising things about how we are developing.

You really care about someone when you are willing (and ready) to spend the qualitative time to feel intimate with them. It is not a contract or an investment. You can set limits, but you can't exactly define where it will go. However, there are real advantages to seeing risks as chances.