Refusing to Become Subjects

NOTE TO MY READERS: THIS WILL BE MY LAST POST OF 2020. PLEASE LOOK FOR MORE POSTS BEGINNING IN JANUARY 2021.

Traditionally, emancipatory practice has been tied to a desire to become a subject. Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subject of history, of representation, or of politics. To become a subject carried with it the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to be an object was bad. But, as we all know, being a subject can be tricky. The subject is always already subjected. Though the position of the subject suggests a degree of control, its reality is rather one of being subjected to power relations.

                                                                 —Hito Steyerl[i]

Hito Steyerl

Now that the 2020 Presidential election is over, we might well ask to what extent voting in such a process makes one “a subject of history” in whom “the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, [and] agency” is fulfilled — to use the same terms Hito Steyerl, a German documentary filmmaker, philosopher, and professor of  New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Art, does in the lines above. Or is becoming such a subject even in that agentive sense finally a matter of being subjected to some sovereign, as she goes on to suggest in her remark that “[t]he subject is always already subjected”? That is, is becoming a subject even in the sense of becoming an active agent always already at bottom the very process of being cast beneath someone or something who or which exercises sovereignty over that one or that thing, as fits the etymology of the very word subject (from Latin sub-, “beneath, under,” plus iacere, “to throw or cast”).    

 If, in voting, we are being subjected to becoming subjects, just who or what is doing the subjecting, the casting down beneath? Who or what is really in charge here, where we are all so subjected? Who or what is really the sovereign authority commanding us to vote, constantly threatening us with losing “autonomy, sovereignty, [and] agency” if we don’t? 

Sovereign over us today is no person or body of persons. Rather, it is the system itself, the very system that masks itself behind the image of “representational democracy.” 

*     *     *

Jean Baudrillard

Our relationship to this system is an insoluble "double-bind" — exactly that of children in their relationship to the demands of the adult world. They are at the same time told to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free, and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive objects, inert, obedient, and conformist. The child resists on all levels, and to these contradictory demands he or she replies by a double strategy. When we ask the child to be object, he or she opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, the strategy of a subject. When we ask the child to be subject, he or she opposes just as obstinately and successfully a resistance as object; that is to say, exactly the opposite: infantilism, hyper-conformity, total dependence, passivity idiocy. Neither of the two strategies has more objective value than the other.

                                                         — Jean Baudrillard[ii]

Children need to be left alone just to be children. They should not be forced to become subjects-objects. When adults experience any temptation to objectify children and/or force them to become subjects, those adults need to be careful not to yield to that temptation. They need to access the child that remains buried in any adult, and let that child activate rebellion against any such tendencies. 

That is never easy for adults to do, especially today, after centuries now of adults having been forced to be subjects, and therefore also objects, ever since they were themselves children. It always involves resisting heavy pressure to assume the role of subjects that has been forced upon them, and the role of objects that is inseparably bound to that of subjects. To take off such costumes after decades of wearing them is like taking off one’s skin. Indeed, such once-worn and never-till-now-even-once-removed outfits have become just that: a second skin. 

Stripping such hide off oneself and then keeping it off is, however, the only way to true liberation for anyone. As Spinoza famously said: “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

We must make that difficult effort, for the sake of all children, both those within us and those who are other than us. To help us along our way, we can take heart if we attend to what Baudrillard has to say in the remainder of the passage I quoted at the beginning of this section of this post:

Subject resistance is today given a unilateral value and considered to be positive — in the same way as in the political sphere only the practices of liberation, of emancipation, of expression, of self-constitution as a political subject are considered worthwhile and subversive. This is [to] take no account of the equal and probably superior impact of all the practices of the object, the renunciation of the position of subject and of meaning — exactly the practices of the mass — which we bury with the disdainful terms alienation and passivity. The liberating practices correspond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects; but they do not correspond at all to the other demand to constitute ourselves as subjects, to liberate, to express ourselves at any price, to vote, to produce, to decide, to speak, to participate, to play the game: blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, probably more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is to demand the liberating rights of the subject. But this seems rather to reflect an earlier phase of the system; and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer a strategic territory; the present argument of the system is to maximize speech, to maximize the production of meaning, of participation. And so the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and the refusal of speech, of the hyper-conformist stimulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is another form of refusal by over-acceptance. It is the actual strategy of the masses. This strategy does not exclude the other, but is the winning one today, because it is the most adapted to the present phase of the system.

            We might also, altogether unexpectedly, take heart from the example of all the corpses that the Nazis—not the present-day ones who have crawled out of their holes recently in the United States and elsewhere, but the original, German ones from the middle of the preceding century—heaped up. This passage from a French prisoner-of-war who survived the Nazi camp-system suggests so, at any rate:

There are moments when you could kill yourself just in order that the SS fetch against this limit as it confronts the impassive object you’d have become, the dead body that has turned its back on them, that doesn’t give a shit about their law. The dead man will at once be stronger than they are, just as trees and clouds and cows, which we call things and incessantly envy. The SS undertaking is careful not to get to the point of denying the daisies growing in the fields. And like the dead man, the daisy doesn’t give a shit about their law. The dead man no longer offers them a handle. Let them savage his face, let them hack his body to bits, the dead man’s very impassiveness, his complete inertness, will counter all the blows they strike at him.

                                                                      —Robert Antelme[iii]

May we all be like the daisies growing in the fields! May none of us give a shit about their law!

Robert Antelme

[i] Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” e-flux, no. 15 (2010). Available online at https://www.e-flux.com/journal/15/61298/a-thing-like-you-and-me/

[ii] Jean Baudrillard, “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media,” translated by Marie Maclean, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster (Standfor: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 218-219.

[iii] Robert Antelme, The Human Race, translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston, Illinois: The Marlborough Press/Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp. 93-94.

A Humble Encomium--To Myself (?)

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

                                                       — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

PETER: Good point. And, as a final comment, Mary, don’t you think it’s amusing that it turns out, once again, that I was right, after all? But also, once again, that it turns out I was right despite myself?

MARY: It’s good to keep that “despite myself” in mind, Peter. Good for anybody, but especially us, for purposes of our conversations. It helps us to keep from getting uppity, from letting our noses get bent out of shape, as you said about yourself earlier. If you don’t keep that in mind, you can easily be tempted into betrayals, not only of yourself, but also of philosophy. Come to mention it, I’m not at all sure but what betraying the one is betraying the other.

                                             — Francis F. Seeburger, The Stream of Thought 

Thought, like water, will always eventually find a way through or around any obstacle put in its path. If we will only let it, thought will also carry us along in its flow. 

We are called to let it do just that. If we but listen, we will eventually hear that call; and, once we truly hear that call, we cannot but answer by heeding it. We have only to listen in order to hear, and then to obey.

As long as I can remember, I have always tried to let thought carry me along. I am still doing so. What’s more, insofar as I have any say in the matter, I will continue to try to let thought carry me in its flow for what remains to me of my life. That’s what thought itself has taught me it means fully to accept being human: to go with the flow of thought as best I can, wherever that flow may take me.

To pray, with Frantz Fanon, that one may be always someone who questions is to pray that one may be always someone who thinks. Just reading Fanon’s prayer should itself give one to think, raising as it does the question of what it means to pray to one’s body that, in effect, it may give one a soul. That is not a way of praying to which we are accustomed. Unlike our accustomed prayers, which we all too rarely even attend to when we say them aloud or even just mentally, Fanon’s prayer thus gives us to think. 

What’s more, Fanon’s prayer is a prayer of the sort that is already answered in the very preying, just as, to give another example, to pray that other persons be blessed is, by the very praying, to bless them, in the transitively active sense of carrying blessing to them. Augustine observed that the very fact of seeking God (whoever or whatever, if any “thing” at all, that word may mean, let me add) is proof that God has already found one. In just that way, to pray that one continues to be a person who questions proves that one continues to be just such a person, at least for the moment one so prays.

Following along the flow of Augustine’s remark as I hear it, I would add to what he say that to seek God is precisely to give the thanks due to God for having always already found one, even before one prays to be found. Along the same line of thought, to pray Fanon’s prayer—at least when we do so prayerfully, which is to say attentively—is already to thank that to whom or which one so prays. To pray such a prayer is, then, to thank one’s body for giving one to question.

May we all pray such prayer always! 

*     *     *

            In the most basic and ancient sense of the word, this is a book of “philosophy” — not philosophy as academic scholarship, but philosophy as the love of wisdom. As the love of wisdom, philosophy is a way of life, and, as Socrates taught, the philosophical life is the only fully human way to live. It is the only way of life that can truly succeed in keeping the heart.

 — Francis F. Seeburger, Emotional Literacy: Keeping Your Heart (Educating Your Emotions and Learning to Let Them Educate You)

I have published six books so far in my life of almost 75 years now. The Stream of Thought, from which I took the second of the two epigraphs for the opening section of this post, was my first published work. It came out in 1984 (New York: Philosophical Library). Emotional Literacy, from which derives the epigraph just above for this current section of this post, was my third published book, which first appeared in print in 1997 (New York: Crossroad). In between the two came Addiction and Responsibility: An Inquiry into the Addictive Mind (Crossroad, 1993). 

After those first three of my so far published works came The Open Wound: Trauma, Identity, and Community (2012), followed by God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life (2013). I intentionally circumvented traditional modes of publication for both books, and bought them out myself (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace). 

To complete the list of my six published works, my most recently published book is The Irrelevance of Power. My daughter Freya — a professional cellist and multi-media performance-art producer who uses the professional name Cellista — just last spring published that work through Juxtapositions, her publishing and artistic production company (San Jose, CA: 2020).  

In preparation for that recent release of The Irrelevance of Power, last spring I reread all of my own five previously published books. In doing so, I was pleased to find that they all continue to question, which is to say think. I would no doubt write each of them (and especially the first and by far longest one, The Stream of Thought) differently if I were writing them today rather than from between seven and thirty-six years ago. However, I was quite encouraged to find that they all do indeed remain, to borrow the title of the first of my series, afloat in the stream of thought itself.

What more could I ask? 

*     *     *

            In his Myth of the Cave, Plato depicts philosophy itself as a process of conversion. Philosophy is the educator. Not just an educator, but the educator. Philosophy and education are the same. And what it is to become educated is to have the soul turned completely around, in more ways than one. 

 — Frank Seeburger, God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life

The more we question, the more we question. What is more, no longer to question — which means no longer to think — is to relinquish our very humanity. No other death is so to be feared as that one.  

The still-moving corpses of those who die that most frightening of deaths often continue for years to move about above ground. In effect, they have not yet received the word that no soul animates them any longer. No dirt has yet been thrown over those  corpses, nor any fire yet set to incinerate them.

Let us all who still live human lives pray that such un-souled-but-still-moving corpses be brought to life at last, before those corpses finally do lie rotting in the ground or going up in smoke and ashes. Let us all so pray not only for those corpses’ sake, but for our own, since such still-walking corpses always enviously oppress the living. 

Against such oppression we must all revolt.

NOTE: My second through sixth published books — Addiction and Responsibility; Emotional Literacy; The Open Wound; God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy; and The Irrelevance of Power — are all available for purchase through the Store at this website. My first published book, The Stream of Thought, is out of print. However, I do have a few remaining, autographed copies of the 1984 edition that I am willing to sell for the original cover price of $27.50, with no extra charge for shipping. If you are interested, please email me at fseeburg@du.edu and I can tell you if I still have a copy for you, and where to send your check. 

Products Made, That Then Just Do

The detritus of productive life — the flotsam and jetsam of the world of products — comes easily to mind when one begins to think of products that are neither made to be done unto nor made to do, but that are made, and then just do. By detritus, by flotsam and jetsam, I don’t mean what are called “by-products” of production. Nor do I mean the leftovers of production, the unused stuff that remains after all the usable stuff has been made into something. Such things — such garbage as industrial wastes or the odd bits and pieces of leather that are left over after the shoemaker is done making shoes — are only called “products” because they happen to result from processes of production, rather than because they are anything those process actually aim to produce. They’re not products in the same sense that, say, shoes or drugs are; they’re things that just accidentally accompany the making of products that are the aim of production. And they’re not at all what I have in mind by speaking of products made, that then just do.

What I have in mind are such things as doodles, scribbles, or children’s drawings. Or things like home movies or home video strips. Or the little stories we so often make up and tell one another just for fun — just for the hell of it, as we say. Or the little, useless do-dads that people who are into woodworking often produce. What whittlers whittle, whistlers whistle, and hummers hum. The non-utilitarian products turned out by all the hobbyists with all their hobbies, from ceramics to glassblowing, from writing to designing blueprints for alligator farms. The sorts of things that aren’t even really intended by their makers to be watched, looked at, read, or observed; things that, even when they are watched, looked at, read, or observed, are rarely, if ever, of any interest at all to anybody but their maker and, maybe, the people who love her or have to live with him. These sorts of things ordinarily inflict naught but boredom and embarrassment upon any innocent bystanders unfortunate enough to be forced to watch, look at, read, or observe them. 

That’s the sort of things I have in mind.

Home movies, for example. They’re certainly products. They don’t just come about of themselves (thank God!). Somebody has to make them. And they’re exactly what their makers aim to make, not just something that comes along with something else that’s really aimed at. But they’re not really made to be used at all. They’re obviously not made to be any kind of tool, instrument, implement, conveyance, utensil, or carrier. But they’re also not like tombstones or propaganda pieces: they’re not made to do any special thing or combination of things.

Home movies aren’t even designed to be watched — by anybody, including the homebodies, the family themselves. Most home movies, once made, rarely get watched again by anyone, including their makers. I still have, for example, many cans filled with home movies my father took years and years before he died in 1994, and in all those years almost never has anyone, including my father when he was still alive (I don’t know about since then), watched any of them. 

Of course, if someone does happen voluntarily to look at some old home movies, then even though the home movies weren’t made to do anything to those who watch them, it often happens that the home movies do indeed end up doing something to the watcher. They can even do quite a lot. Watching them can sometimes move us to tears, or to joy. They can move us to despair or hope. They can drive us to drink, or to give up drinking. And the interesting thing is that the “us” so moved, so driven, need not be anybody in the home movies we are watching, or even anybody related, either biologically or in any other way, to anybody in those movies.

Home movies aren’t made to have anything done unto them, and they aren’t made to do anything. They’re just made, and then they just do.

The same goes for snapshots in old family albums and all the other things I’ve given as examples of the detritus of the world of products. It’s also interesting to note that it goes, too, for anything we call a “work of art.”

At any rate, so much for products, of whatever sort.

Paul Klee, Mountain Village (1934)

Products Made To Do

A tombstone is a good example of a product made to do. Tombstones aren’t made for the sake of being manipulated in any special way: They aren’t made for us to do anything with or to them, even as a means of doing something with or to other things. Instead, tombstones are made for the sake of doing something themselves. They are made so that they can be set up to commemorate dead people at gravesites; and once set up at such sites, that’s what the tombstones themselves do.

Quite a few of the things we call “instruments” also belong in this class of products made to do. All those instruments we use to find out things about other things — such instruments as thermometers, barometers, and all the other o-meters — belong here, for example. So do watches and clocks. What clocks do is tell the time, which is why we can find out what time it is by looking at a clock. In the same way, thermometers are made to tell the temperature, and it’s only because they do so that we can find out whether somebody has a fever, for instance, by sticking a thermometer in that person’s mouth, ear, or other orifice, and then reading it.

Most products designed to be watched, looked at, read, or observed are products made to do, rather than to be done unto. (After all, watching, looking at, reading, or observing don’t as such do anything to what’s watched, looked at, read or observed.) Such products are made to do a large variety of things. Some are made to entertain or amuse, others to shock or frighten. Some products of the type in question are made to divert us, others are made to inform us; some are made to enrage, soothe, or teach us, whereas others are made to indicate or signify something to us. Sometimes such products are made for the sake of doing only one such thing, sometimes to do a number of such things together, either sequentially or all at once.

Such products can be neatly subdivided into those that do whatever they do because they’re watched, looked at, read, or observed, on one hand, and those that are watched, looked at, read, or observed because of what they do. Products designed to indicate or signify, for example, all belong to the second subclass: they are watched or whatever because of what they do.

Take a thermometer again. It’s because the thermometer, by its level of mercury, indicates the temperature that we look at it when we want to know just that, the temperature. Or take a clock. It’s because the position of the hands on the clock’s face indicates the time that we look at it when we want to know what time it is. An American flag works the same way: we look at the flag when we want to pledge allegiance or the like, because the flag symbolizes our country.

On the other hand, products made, say, to infuriate or entertain us aren’t like the flag or clock or thermometer in that way. Instead, they do what they’re supposed to do only thanks to our watching them or whatever. That’s because the sort of thing they’re supposed to do is always something they’re supposed to do to us, the very people what watch them or whatever.

So one could also draw the distinction in question this way: all those products designed to be watched, etc., are products made to do something, but only some of them are made to do it to us.

Almost every television program, as well as most movies, records, and books — and this post itself — are products designed to do something to us. When what they’re made to do to us is something we want done to us, or at least something we don’t mind being done to us and see no reason to mind, then that’s okay with us. But when they’re made to do to us something we don’t want done to us, or think there’s some reason to mind being done to us or others, it’s not okay with us; and we mark our displeasure by saying some such thing as that the product is manipulative. All propaganda, of course, is manipulative, even though not everything that’s manipulative is propaganda.

So much for products made to do.

That leaves, for my nest post, products made, that then just do. 

Products Made To Be Done Unto

A product is something brought forth (from Latin pro-, “forward, forth,” + ducere, “to bring, lead”). Some products are made to be done unto; some are made to do; and yet others are made, and then just do. In this post, I’ll consider the first sub-category: products made to be done unto.

Among products made to be done unto, some are made to be used, and others are made to be used up.

Some products made to be used are made to be used to do something to something else. For example, hammers are made to be used to drive nails, strike strings (as in a piano), dent or straighten pieces of metal, and so on. In general, what we call “tools” and “implements” are this kind of product. So are some “instruments,” such as surgical ones, for example. Some—but not all—of the things we call “devices” are this sort of product as well, as are bath-towels and dishrags and many other things.

Next, there are products made, not to do something to something else, but to do something with something else. Forks and spoons, which are made to let us do something with food, namely carry it to our mouths (but not knives, which belong to those products supposed to do something to something—cut it, in the case of knives), are products of that sort. So are cups and plates and pots and pans and most of the other things we call “utensils.” So are things such as back-packs and luggage-wracks for the tops of automobiles. In general, “carriers” and “conveyances” of all types belong to this sub-class of products made to be done unto.

There are also things that are made to be used, but not for the sake of doing something either to or with something else. Instead, they are brought forth to have something done with themselves. For example, there are things that are made to be played. That would include violins, games, radios, television sets, phonograph records, exposed video tape, developed movie film, and the like. Or, to give a few more examples, there are things that are made to be driven (automobiles and golf-balls, to name two), thing that are made to be ridden (bicycles, sleds), worn (clothes, shoes, insignia, body decals), or worked (puzzles, computers), and things that are made to be sat on (chairs, stools, sofas) or at (tables, desks). We don’t usually call products of this type “tools” or “implements,” but some of the things we call “instruments” belong here, including violins and other musical instruments.

Among those products that are made not just to be used, but to be used up, some are made to be eaten (hot-dogs, corn-chips, etc.) or drunk (liquor, soft drinks, etc.), others to be transformed into some other product (as leather, for example,  is produced to be transformed into shoes and clothing, or unexposed and undeveloped cinema film is to be made into movies). Still others (such as nails, glue, thread, or mortar) are made for holding the parts of other products together, or just for making it easier to do something to or with something else (cleansers and grease, for example).

So much for those products that are made to be done unto.

In my next post I’ll consider products made, not to be done unto, but themselves to do.

Without Grounds: An Impious Thought

We are not used to feeling strong affects without their having any ideational contents, and therefore, if the content is missing, we seize as a substitute upon another content which is in some way or other suitable, much as our police, when they cannot catch the right murderer, arrest a wrong one instead.

                                                                 — Freud

I invite you to entertain the idea that attributive thinking arises from, and in a sense is nothing but, the attempt to address the very absence of any adequate, ultimate reasons or grounds for thinking itself.  

                                                 — “Thinking Addiction,” (invited talk I gave in Vancouver in 2006)

Perhaps I will always live in questions more than answers.

                                                                        — Rebecca Solnit                                                                        

 If questioning, as Heidegger once said, is the very piety of thinking, then we perhaps need above all to question the ordinary understanding of piety. From the perspective—or lack of it—wherein piety appears to be unquestioning adherence to some presumed orthodoxy, which is to say “right-thinking” (from Greek ortho-, “right, correct,” plus doxa, “opinion”), a thinking that persists in questioning cannot but be considered an utterly impious thinking.

Thus, for example, in the third of the quotes at the beginning of this post, taken from her recent, revealing autobiography, Rebecca Solnit exposes herself to the charge of heresy. So, of course, does Heidegger in his testimony that questioning is itself the piety of thinking.

To put the point paradoxically, if questioning it the very piety of thinking, then all right-thinking persons must regard thinking itself as impious. That is why they avoid it so strenuously, no doubt.

*     *     *

Just before confessing she may be guilty of the impiety of living in questions, Solnit sins against orthodoxy by asking what it would be like not to live in a perpetual state of war, either actual or potential, as do we all in this age of global consumerist capitalism. “What does it mean” — she asks on her own behalf and on behalf of all women and others denied a place of their own to stand in our war-set contemporary global situation — “neither to advance, like a soldier waging a war, nor to retreat?”   

What would it be like to feel you have that right to be there, when there is nothing more nor less than the space you inhabit? What does it mean to own some space and feel that it’s yours all the way down to your deepest reflexes and emotions? What does it mean not to live in wartime, to not have to be ready for war?

            Some of it comes from your position in society, and all the usual factors of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and more that come into play, some from a quality for which confidence is too glib a word. Perhaps conviction or faith is better. Faith in yourself and your rights. Faith in your own versions of truth and in your own responses and needs. Faith that where you stand is your place. Faith that you matter. Those people who have it in full seem rare to me, and clear in a way the rest of us aren’t; they know who and where they are, how and when to respond, what they do and don’t owe others. Neither retreating nor attacking, they reside in a place that doesn’t exist for the rest of us, and it’s not where the overconfident who take up too much space and take space away from others reside.

What, indeed, would it be like to have such a truly and fully human place to stand — what ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle called the polis, the place where genuine politics, so unlike what passes for politics around our globe today, takes place?

Maybe that place just shows itself, upon questioning, to be an utterly open place, one even utterly without grounds, since it consists of questioning rather than of asserting any claims to some enclosed property, either of opinion or of land. Is it perhaps only by falling head over heels and without any defense into such a groundless abyss that we at last for the very first time find our place? Maybe our common human place, the place where human beings can finally find a true home “with and for one another,” as Paul Ricoeur liked to say, is precisely and only in such complete free-fall.  

Maybe it is only such impious thinking as perpetual questioning that defines what it is to be human.

It may be only in such impiety that we should place our trust, our faith.

At any rate, impious as it may be, the question of whether that may be so is worth asking. After all, isn’t that what it is to think?

Note: This post was occasioned by my reading of Rebecca Solnit’s recent autobiography, Recollections of My Nonexistence (New York : Viking, 2020), from which the third epigraph and the longer quotation in the body of the post are both taken.