the private life

""Do we not all dream of being known, known by our backs, legs..elbows, hair? Not psychologically recognised, not socially acclaimed, not praised, just nakedly known. Known as a child is by its mother."
--J. Berger.  

There is something oddly fascinating about Josh Cohen's book. 

The end of the public world. All of that is seen as fake, disingenuous, lacking depth or substance. All reality has been drained from it so it lies like a dead carcass washed up on the beach: you can see straight through it. Honour, glory, and making a name for oneself are seen, ultimately, as nothing but expressions of a vain and self-seeking ego.

In an age of Gnosticism, as ours surely is, the outer world loses all its sparkle and is viewed as so much dross, flotsam drifting here and there without any reason. There is no more trust in the public world or public officials..and the growth of conspiracy theories fits that narrative: you don't actually believe that bullshit, do you? The truth always resides behind the facade and at times of a collapse in the social world you see it as a facade. 

All the rules, institutions and norms that were once thought of as meaning something, the background which was taken as a given and against which one could make sense of one's own individual life, are now viewed as nothing more than the result of a cynical attempt to foil the "real" you from flourishing. No-one-friends, family- is genuine any more and words, too, are a flimsy mask. words never get you there, never convey what you really feel. The real, authentic "you" lies buried somewhere deep down, a spark amidst all this darkness. 

Except the destruction of the public world has resulted in the demise of the "inner," private self as well. It was if appearances and reality cannot survive without one another (Nietzsche?). 

Cohen writes persuasively about how the obsession of the modern west to reveal all, throw light on the most obscure core of our being is manifest in our fascination with celebrities. This theme resonates with Crary (24/7)..how late capitalism cannot allow space and time for sleep and daydreaming. Everything must come out into the open and be organized (the manufacturing of the American Dream). This is another way of saying that "life," which was previously hidden, is now subject to political and economic control: biopower. 

State invasiveness is, in that sense, nothing new. 

And yet could this fascination with the minutiae of the everyday (in the sense of being hooked to gossip, celebrity shenanigans, and the incredible desire to confess all on t.v. shows) really just be a cover for our own fascination with ourselves: as if to say, what really holds us spellbound is the fact that we will never be known? 

Like Zeus, we want to, and do not want to, be named.

To pry into the intimate lives of other people. Perhaps in the vain hope that someone will find your own life that interesting. What could be worse in an age of self-advertisement and circuses, to miss the show, to not be inquired of?

This desire to unveil, to see face-to-face. One cannot but help think of religion. You remember reading that what really got to the settlers was the incredible reticence of the Red Man when it came to talking about religion. There was something secretive, sly, distrustful about the Red Man. Why was he always so silent, why did he always tell it slant? Isn't this the time for plainspeaking, ya sonnabitch?

Cohen also made me think about the fascination in many circles with the veil. Do we see here the same desire to rip it off so that the real human being can emerge into the light, can cast off oppression? (As if to deny, with our own blind spot, that an excess of light can also be oppressive?). 

This desire to see into the inner recesses of being. To get to the root of it. Cut out all the secondary things. Science, of course, is based on this idea: there is no "mystery," there are no miracles. Every realm of experience is open to its mode of inquiry or else it is nothing, nothing to speak of. One result of that has been that the inner self has retreated to a bare point, a ghostly presence in a world of matter-in-motion.

There was this line by Ibn Arabi that you always found startling (and somewhat distasteful): the prying into Nature's secrets is like looking up one's mother's skirt.  

It's not just the newspapers that want to reveal all. How else can one explain the ubiquity of porn? The mechanical act, or the coupling of animals..is that the legacy of Descartes and Darwin? Equally invasive, though, is the idea that we can, like a voyeur, gaze at the daily, intimate activities of another person (Degas), as if the question of power, the question of what is appropriate, could be dismissed in the name of some higher truth (I'll come back to this).

But maybe Cohen's got it wrong in some respects. The idea that we harbour, and need to protect, this unfathomable inner self may itself be a decoy. What if when it comes to it, we realize that like Oakland, there's no there there? And our fascination with trivia and the meaningless details of other people's lives is a way of deflecting attention from the fact that our own lives are made up of precisely the same stuff? In that reading we're hooked to the private lives of other people not because deep down we're reminded that there is a central, dark core of our being that we want to know, we want other people to know (or even God to witness); no, plausible though that seems, could it be precisely the opposite at work here? We don't want anyone to know that there isn't much to know? Our lives are insufferably boring, made up of so much dross. How much depth can there be to a life that is spent in pursuit of commodities? 

The whole trajectory of modernity has been about-whether it was consciously sought or not-to debunk a certain image of Man (a religious image). Men and women are no longer the centre of the universe, or the centre of creation. Further, it's not clear that thy're even in control of their own lives, driven as they are by unconscious desires (Nazism and Communism would seal the idea that human beings were, after all, nothing worth talking about). Can anyone today still talk about rationality without raising the spectre of totalitarianism?

A higher truth. 

What strikes you about Cohen's book is the sheer arrogance of the perspective. More men in pointed hats telling other people how it really is (and to question their perspective is really just to reveal one's own latent conservatism or suppression..the inability to face a truth which is too uncomfortable to be brought out in the open).

The psychoanalyst somehow-like the scientist-manages to stand apart from the fray and pass judgement. Religion, too, is just another datum in his "analysis". The higher truth, he seems to want us to believe, is that there is no higher truth. 

So, when he writes, "Somewhere in you, the distinctions between sex and affections [between the parent and the child], between one and another mode of loving ..have yet to be learned."

Says who? Since there can hardly be a science of the unconscious-and science is the only true measure, isn't it?-then how is such a view substantiated? What if one were to turn this around and say that the psychoanalyst's viewpoint stems from his own fucked up childhood? But there is the need for a further step and that is to see the whole project from a historical perspective, as a way of helping dissolve the bourgeois, stable self and reveal it to be a mass of tangled and conflicted desires. 

The Master is not at home. Good, because that means we can be driven one way or the other by the mass delusions of the state or persuaded by the market to believe that commodities can-temporarily- put an end to our insatiable longing for recognition, power, love...

Edward Bernays, one of the first PR men for capitalism, happened to be a nephew of Freud. Co-incidence? In the century of the self, a century in which the self has simultaneously vapourized under the weight of the 20th century's irrationality, the economist's idea that desires (or preferences) are simply 'given,' what remains of the private life?

Walser: I came here to be mad, not to write.