Find your beach

'Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city. Find your beach no matter what else is happening. Do not be distracted from finding your beach. Find your beach even if—as in the case of this wall painting—it is not actually there. Create this beach inside yourself. Carry it with you wherever you go. The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty...

When I am in England each summer, it’s the opposite: all I see are the limits of my life... In England even at the actual beach I cannot find my beach. 

Here you will be free to stretch yourself to your limit, to find the beach that is yours alone. But sooner or later you will be sitting on that beach wondering what comes next.'

---Zadie Smith. 

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"Been around the world and I..."

"Bustling activity will more and more take the place of reasonable consideration...It is not by bustle that men become enlightened. Spinoza was content with the Hague; Kant, who is generally regarded as the wisest of Germans, never traveled more than ten miles from Konigsberg."

---Bertrand Russell.

In time we may find there is no wisdom in space or in space travel.

"A happy life must be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live."

"What yoke can be imposed on men who need nothing?"
---Rousseau.

Notes from Xenos's lovely 'Scarcity and Modernity'..all ties in, freakishly, with Russell: the need to reflect on desires, on what is meant by need. The need for roots? Well, yes, that's a tough one. Who, today, has any roots? What is close at hand must be disparaged, denigrated in favour of borders to be crossed (is there desire without transgression)? It is often said that needs relate to the isolated individual whereas desires are by their very nature relational. What we desire is at least in part socially constructed. Does the emulative nature of desire lead, eventually, to a "black inclination to harm one another"? (Rousseau).

But is it not the case that, at least at the extreme, it is desires that isolate ( the gambler, the pornographer)? An unmoored imagination, neither constrained by Tradition or social norms or "customary expectations"(E.P.). What is desired is something that cannot be attained, a pleasure that is at once always around the corner and simultaneously satisfied. Perhaps this is a source of unhappiness, our always being on our feet, in motion, 'perpetually moving happiness machines.' Next time things will be better. If we are what we desire then who are we? Are we even sure that we really want what we desire?

If you could track a person's history by the history of what she desired. The world: the locus of the exchange of desires.

But this silent transition in the way we talk, from the language of needs and rights and obligations to the language of desires, preferences, wants: taste is just a crude, arbitrary and momentary feeling that picks up one commodity out of a dazzling array of possibilities. Prior to that, perhaps, is the making over of various 'things' into commodities. One must be made desirable. Even if you ain't got it, flaunt it.

"Trinkets and baubles", Smith said. "Deception" and illusion as the great motors of civilisation? Ever widening and finer refinements, 'conveniences', the profusion of useless things and cheap throwaway products, for nothing must be allowed to last in this shape-shifting world. The "unnatural growth of the natural" (Illich), the relentless pursuit of growth, change, innovation. All very dizzying from a certain perspective, no doubt. If we didn't have that spark would we be confining ourselves to lives of immeasurable boredom? Perhaps. And yet the irony is that the system requires us to be bored out of our wits, to be discontented with our current situation and to believe that anything passing through our hands to be dispensable, dated, never quite the real deal. Life itself is seen as a series of choices (optimality), and if you don't get the best deal in life you've been swindled-except this time it isn't the fault of God or the State but yours because, in the final analysis, it was your choice.

I-level

I will not be one person again.
---Karen B.

What do you remember? Think of a film, or some music, or a loved one. There is, on the one hand, the direct, fresh experience that is, perhaps, unaware of it even being an 'experience'; a feeling that is so caught up in the wonder of it/her/him that it is blind to itself. Face to Face, seeing I to I. And there is, on the other hand, the memory of happiness, a report, a re-collection that depends on one's ability (desire?) to retrieve and the artistic ability to integrate the fragments.

What do you remember of any person you've come across, or a book? A few, quintessential aspects (as with a caricature)? Certainly not the whole story, the insignificant details (but what is significant? Watson often looks at the same world, the same facts, but in a different way...only later gets the drift, grasps the point, sees what was obvious).

For films Kahneman says it is the final scene. A good or bad ending can change the whole recollection of the experience. Peak-effect. Or it is a weighted average of the last scene and the most intense moments in the experience, as if the mind/soul needed to filter out the rest, reduce it to background material, and pick out the unique, the dazzling, radiant moment.

Is memory enough? Of her. As if by repeating the memory, as I recall, could somehow magically conjure up the real thing. The delusion that it is the real thing, when our selves are constantly falling away...

Solaris.

How can there be a remembering of what you've never known? In films, in films, you often hear a man saying to a woman he's met for the frst time: "I feel that I've always known you" or "haven't we met before?". At other times, you want to remember to forget...

I want to know how to feel

The human capacity (you want to say 'human', not biological, or the mind's) to adapt

The Blank Good Life

When you get there, there is no there, there.

In Late Antiquity, happiness meant nothing else than to withdraw from the world of appearances, to retire to shady suburbs, die with an open book in one's hands. And we, we modern Eloi, have lost even the desire to flee or dream. Sit, and sip lemonade under imageless pale blue skies, as ice clinks and melts and a tune from the 1970's is heard buzzing from a radio in the distance.

'The body,as it is swallowed by the blue, a vanishing-act watched by absences'.

--Robert Hughes.

When we live we occupy a certain space.

And when we don't live? Hockney, Icarus.

If you're happy and you know it then you aren't happy.

From a letter by Mozart:

'To live respectably and to live happily are two very different things, and the latter will not be possible for me without some kind of magic; for this, something truly supernatural would have to happen'

'Any happiness commensurate with man is always hubris...magic is not a knowledge of names but a gesture, a breaking free from the name'
---Agamben.

In a room full of mirrors. And still there's nothing real about you. The more you see, the more you see through. A life-any life-is made up of an awful lot of blank spaces. Time before, and time after. But more: time within time, like the dream of a monk.

How do you weigh up a good life? An instant, an ascending curve to truth, beauty? Or, less ambitiously, does the avoidance of x, y, z constitute the good life? How do you take account of, speak about, things which have no dimensions?

positive spin

It's everywhere, this Cult of Positivity, at least in America, the birthplace of Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, and est, where 30,000 beaming "life coaches" ply their trade and a pessimist is no more likely to be elected president than an atheist. George W. Bush provides a sterling role model. Asked on his most recent birthday about the potential nuclear threats of Iran and North Korea, as well as the U.S.-instigated civil war in Iraq, he replied, "I'm optimistic that all problems will be resolved."

Google offers more than a million entries on "positive thinking" covering almost any kind of challenge you might encounter. Dieting? Robert Ferguson, the "Master Weight-Loss Coach," tells us, "With a positive attitude you can do, have and be everything you want in life!" Bereaved? You can put the fun back in funeral by replacing it with a "celebration" of the deceased's life. Need money? Attract it to your wallet with positive mental affirmations, such as:

I love having money. . . . I am open to receive money. I give generously to myself and others. I am generous. I feel great about all the money I spend. Note: Be SPECIFIC about amounts of money [you require].

Cancer? See it positively, as a "growth opportunity," and hopefully not just for the tumor. A representative of the American Cancer Society rebuffed a researcher in the mid-Nineties by saying that the organization didn't "want to be associated with a book on death. We want to emphasize the positive aspects of cancer only." Laid off? Forget the economy and concentrate on reconfiguring your attitude, as explained in the 2004 bestseller We Got Fired! . . . And It's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us.

One measure of the cult's success is the growth of the "self-improvement" industry, most of which promotes techniques for upgrading your attitude and visualizing success through affirmations that open you to the abundance of the world -- like this one, for example, from a current financial self-help book:

Place your hand on your heart and say . . . "I admire rich people!" "I bless rich people!" "I love rich people!" "And I'm going to be one of those rich people too!"

In 2000, the self-improvement industry -- including books, CDs, seminars, and coaches -- took in $3.35 billion. In 2005, it grossed $5.62 billion, with the coaching market alone growing by almost 500 percent.

---from Barbara Ehrenreich.

If you've lived in cynical old england or are a Lahori then you'll find this type of feel-good, in your face swaggering pomposity either hugely irritating or hilarious. Old world pessimism, sin and fate, reticence, ambivalence, and tentativeness are not going to get you very far, not going to lead to "success" are they, you loser?

Be aggressive!Well, steady on N, old chap. Assert your what? I tried it, honest I did. Looked in the mirror and said to myself: I will allow the power of positive thinking to change my life. Be aggressive, b. Be. Well, yes, I know, quite sad about that student who I hit on the head with a glass bottle. Khair, I think he'll be okay. Think positive +++

Yesterday some of these 'leadership' bozos were here. A day before some of the students (or should I say customers now?) had wanted me to speak about 'business solutions to social problems'.

Fuck off!

Sorry, fuck off! :-)

And so there they were, assembled under a tent like members of the Nazi youth movement, wailing away about how they all wanted to be leaders, gradually being whipped up into a frenzy of excitement by some monkey with an American twang, flapping their arms, stamping their feet, and hollering like wild beasts. Oh dear! I need to buy a book to help me help myself. Nearly as bad as Christian missionaries who harp on about how Jesus loves you (really? and how do you know that, bud?) Where are those 72 virgins when you need them?!

And now the Dean wants to "motivate me" to do some research! (please, it's easier if I just watch some Oprah). There he is, like a Cheshire cat, all fluffed up, grinning away, so pleased with his grand role in the universe. Makes me sick, I tell ya'.

happy smiley people

What is worse than the sullen, pretentious, pseudo-depressed fashionable moping around of the ill-spirited ones? Give me, feed me, Pasolini, Bergman, "realism"...dress it up as "existential angst" or rebellion against the superficiality of 'the bourgeoisie', the triviality of consumer society. Dark, and deep, the un-nameable, mysterious gnostic soul that fears symmetry, order, allegiance, that finds meaning, authenticity, in sickness and alienation. Pain & Suffering are real; they alone are profound. Already half-dead before you've even lived!

Well, perhaps only the smiley happy people, the boring, sickly-sweet dullards, with their Christian-Muslim moronic pamphlet-induced morality; the nice brigade, the flatlanders, the insipidly virtuous do-gooders cowering behind their picket fences and family life who want to talk about "life" and "positive thinking". Fuck, the whole world's American now! And have a nice day!

What counts as health, a good constitution, strength nowadays?

The strange thing is that the world bank wallahs and the economists/economic historians have noticed something quite peculiar: it doesn't work!

As societies grow richer they don't necessarily become any happier. Put to one side, dear reader, your scepticism as to whether happiness can even be measured, and your concerns about why happiness should be a way of evaluating how good an individual's life is going (why not freedom, say?); put to one side your profound queries about the social choice problem: namely: how do you aggregate across different individuals in society to get an idea of how good a society as a whole is doing? I mean, even assuming that one can make inter-personal comparisons of subjective well-being (happiness) what is tis notion of overall happiness? The greatest sum of the greatest number or the happiness of the least happy? Or perhaps greater social happiness occurs in a society where happiness is more equally distributed.

What's going on?

1. As average standards of living improve you think you need to have even more income, more goods, just to be at the same position you were before: the hedonic treadmill. The people in rich countries are not much happier than they were at the end of WWII. Great expectations,
and ever greater (and more frequent) disappointments. Looking for a partner: shop around. Fish.


2. Even if your income does grow but it doesn't grow as fast as that of those in your peer group then you're screwed. Rivalry.

3. The constant effort to acquire more and more may mean that you miss out on other things, things that you actually value-both intrinsically, and instrumentally in happiness terms: family life, trust (social capital!), a relaxed state of mind, peace, time (time is not money!). So, diminshing returns to income.

Self-help. Get help. Always the same individualised 'solution', a solution that itself has become a commodity and is relentlessly marketed. If you're unhappy, it's your fault, bud. That means never look at the capitalist system itself, how it generates, has to generate, this ceaseless stream of desires. The success of capitalism, comrade, depends on the promise of happiness, of it always being just around the corner. The pursuit of happiness as a fundamental right. A right, for Christ's sake!

What money can't buy

Bob, an american desi, thinks that we can quantify things like love, friendship, loyalty and a whole host of other things. Another american coined it : time is money!

That we can go from quantification to dollarization isn't that surprising (see Bernard Williams' comments on Bentham in 'Morality'). Once we start to conceptualize things in market terms, as commodities that are alienable and cease from thinking of them in relation to notions of personhood, or duties or rights then we're on a slippery slope to what Sandel calls 'corruption'. What matters here is the narrow conception of freedom: negative liberty and, ultimately, a shallow view of happiness (wealth and material goods).

What's really being commoditised here is Time itself (Marx:"Time is everything, Man is nothing" (see the excellent online article by Barbara Adam: "When time is money: contested rationalities or E.P's 'Time-Work discipline'). The Church saw this early on with its prohibition of usury (Le Goff: no-one "owns" time, and therefore it cannot be traded).

What Bob and his like are really saying is that other pursuits like poetry or art can be thought of as leisure and valued in terms of their opportunity cost (foregone income). Again: quantification implies commensurability. This obsession with reducing all behaviour (motivations and evaluations) to a single dimension for "tractability" at the theoretical level. It goes deeper than that, though: it's a political move. As Abe Lerner said, markets solve the political problem. Once we have the measure of life do we get the emergence of a new type of politics (the bio-political)? Once everything is reduced to life and the process of consumption do we lose the world as a place where human beings dwell, meet, tell stories to one another? The decline of public man, of trust, the view of nature as a resource (pure extension), are surely linked to these developments.

Americans -and we're all americans now-reared on the myth that the pursuit of happiness is a right suddenly realise that this obsession with happiness is part of the problem: I can, therefore I must (Zizek).


Well, what's wrong with that, bob asks? Who determines which things are alienable and which aren't, and to what degree? what's the process and what are the justifications for excluding us from thinking on those terms.


I don't think that's the right question..not to start off with anyway. I think we must recognize that throughout human history there's been the idea of the sacred and the profane, of different realms (or "spheres of justice") with their own set of principles to determine allocations of the 'goods' (rights, duties, equality, fairness, happiness, security, needs, merit, capabilities and so on). So, we must start the other way round: on what grounds should we say that one principle-the market- should dominate as a distributive mechanism?


But quite frankly, someone who thinks that friendship, happiness, art or love can be thought in terms of quantities already holds such an extreme view that I really don't know how to respond. Why this perverse need to calculate everything (Sen: evaluation is not calculation) ? Can we really order life, desires, time in that way?

The Dying Animal

Love is a shadow
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

---S. Plath



Listen: time passes.
Listen.


She held out a hand to him. His fate was entwined in that primordial gesture of woman. One falls in love or one falls out of it..but one falls...


I watched the awful 'Into the Wild'; only the last scene when his photograph is shown do we realise this was a real human being, and not the caricature we see depicted by some rather hammy acting. But the lines ring true still: it is important to give everything its proper name. He comes to realise, painfully, the great truth: the quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.

~~~
Literature: as a diversion, a way of forgetting, a way of remembering....

'..[y]ou feel even more than you ordinarily do the poignancy of every last grace that's been lost'

The only solution to life is to live more of it, pure excess, an explosion of sensibility, the anarchic, orgiastic spirit delighting in the revelry of transgression against bourgeois conformity, norms, moral standards. Those pointy heads with their seriousness, their platitudes and worn-out cliches..Islam is peace, America is the land of the free. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire. Bakhtin, Bacon, the rehabilitation of Nature. The other Bacon: our ultimate reality: flesh.

One cannot "save" a life, just as one cannot "save" time. At least the devil has blood pulsing through his being, unlike this phantom being, this cardboard cut-out: man and his "limit-loving class". A rebel -with or without a cause..that does not matter..the will is all that matters-and after me the deluge...why did you climb the mountain? Because it was there. Desire is everything. You are what you desire. Books on how to assert yourself, books on how to cope when you fail to assert yourself. Greed is good. Consume your way out of terror..consumption is the terror that behind this desiring there is nothing but a dying animal.

the end of america, the beginning of america.
Small-town conservatives and red-necks. The horror of difference (witches, negroes, gays, jews, catholics, commies,towel-heads). The Puritans were the agents of rule and godly virtue. When did it end, this experiment in dictatorial intolerance? Elvis, the car, the pill, the Charleston? The empire of virtue replaced by the empire of candour. In your face. Express yourself. Kick-ass attitude.You want the truth, you can't handle the truth, bud!


The end of capitalism, the beginning of capitalism.

This wild, sloppy, raucous repudiation, this wholesale wrecking of the inhibitive past. What Tawney called the mimicking of the 'divine frenzy', the moment when the world is obliterated. Laughter and nonsense against authority. Life is a cabaret, my friend. Radical dissent. Transgression = creativity. The shock of the new. The authority of the present. The normalization of the repression of guilt, the repression or forgetting of movements upwards...the only question is: how to enjoy our liberation from (drum roll) the family, society, religion, tradition, the past, the state. Free, free at last. How to liberate pleasure from reason. The Tree of Life, not the Tree of Knowledge. This dying animal is an animal. And that's that.

But why, it may be asked, was life a problem in the first place? And nowhere is it asked why this unfettered individualism has led to such pathological behaviour, so many addictions and compulsive neuroses. Is the gambler an individual at all? The settler sees wildness, emptiness to be filled with his own projections. The nomad sees an inhabited world that he shares with others. Nomadic space is about co-existence, not distance.

Do not pause-for to pause would already be a victory- to reflect on how convenient this is for late capitalism, this production of desire itself: eroticism, publicity, advertising. Bio-politics. The efficient management of life, the bringing of the life process into the public realm, subjecting it to techniques of control and manipulation and analysis. This gives way to the second-stage of capitalism: liquid modernity. The dissolution of the world since everything can be traded, is fungible, until there are no more boundaries. Global citizens! Nothing is sacred. Just this bare forked animal before you.

Do not ask why you must always escape yourself (even a holiday is called an escape!) or, politically speaking, what it means for the impossible to become possible (Arendt). Just do it! Spectators, voyeurs before the pornographic. The triumph of the surface, of trivialization, the banal, of entertainment.

(citations: Roth, Rieff)

~~~

There is great pathos in this view of us being nothing but dying animals and the fanaticism of the Puritans hardly appeals to but a rare few. But is this all we are ? (I don't mean that as an intellectual question but, rather, as a question of how do we live : joy in contingency?). Do we not knowingly, lovingly, name the world? We look to find our true name with God and know the great importance of finding the proper names for things, of speaking in the right tone. Do we not know that we are dying animals? And think , write, create in response? Even if we die alone, we do not always live alone:

The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.

Conquistador of the Useless

Are you happy?

Er..why do you ask?

Dunno. Just like that.

Guess I was until I had to think about it!


Perhaps there's something in the soul that hankers for darkness, that desires to be lost in something that is totally foreign to itself. But it's impossible to think that way when one is surrounded by light (wish I'd brought The First Man with me now) . All this striving for narrow confines, all this melancholic brooding, is beginning to become a touch boring (I can only imagine the Internet leading to an expansion of self-pity and introspection).

What is it?

You ask too many questions!

Perhaps you find the world trivial, people superficial, life a bit fake..not quite the real thing.
Perhaps you find the world full of meaningless suffering, inexplicable contingencies. Understandable. No one can think otherwise, no-one can live like a Stoic. But there are escapes, and then there are escapes....

Why do I watch a film expecting it to be profound, something deep, something that will move me? Is it to fill some vacuum? Isn't that what we expect of all art? (Plato, that old wahabi, might have something to say on that!) . Why do we think eccentricity, madness, is the only form of genius, the only thing worth talking about (The Romantic legacy, perhaps)? What would it mean to have sound instincts, to live heartily, with attachments and bonds-and not as an exile, as a fanatic, estranged from one's life, one's times? (Roberto Calasso is brilliant here : the American woodsman as the future, the cowboy who "discovers" the frontier", the colonialist who from inner boredom is compelled to go "where no man has gone before", the 'settler' who sees only wasteland where there is the Red Man, the Palestinian...).

What could be worse than having simple desires, what could be more difficult than saying 'Yes!' to life. Not only must we live with the void, and not be too hasty in filling it with our own private fantasies, remedies, but we must also recognize that to see only the void is not right-seeing and is an act of profound and startling ingratitude.

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise

W.H. Auden

There will be blood.
What utter crap!

Fitzcarraldo.
What utter crap!

No, Hollywood always/usually trumps because it shows real people. For similar reasons, all this Sufi jargon and 'mysticism' seems, to my mind at least, to miss the point. We have to speak about our times, and in our language. I'm sure all this convoluted thought of the Europeans is very intelligent at its own level, but please, give me a break...what price naivete and what would we give for some solid English writing, for some pragmatism to dispel the hold of these evenings of the mind ?

'Life, at all times full of pain, is more painful than the two centuries that preceded it. The attempt to escape from pain drives men to triviality, to self-deception, to the invention of vast collective myths. But these momentary alleviations do but increase the source of suffering in the long run. Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of the intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space.'
---Useless Knowledge.

This is one of my favourite passages, and is full of homely wisdom, good advice. But something else holds my attention today. Yesterday, at the Sunday market, amidst the onions and carrots, the plastic baskets and smuggled crockery (which was spelt crochery) was a small book stall. Most of the stuff was Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins (man, they're really popular here!) but there was also a dusty, well-worn copy of old Russell. How amazing that one can find such things amongst the necessities of the world! In it were underlined the following words:

Whatever we may think, we are creatures of Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are essential to it as summer and spring, the rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more to than the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestial life. The human body has been adapted throughout the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter....

Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element of this contact with the Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what....

The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

Long Sunday

An endless, dreary Sunday afternoon, an afternoon swallowing down whole years, its every hour a year. By turns walked despairingly down empty streets and lay quietly on the couch. Occasionally astonished by the leaden, meaningless clouds almost uninterruptedly drifting by. ‘You are reserved for a great Monday!’ Fine, but Sunday will never end.
---Kafka.

Anyone who has lived in the west will have a sense of how true these words ring; the paralysing dread that accompanies the end of a Sunday morning. However, this unnameable fear is itself receding as it becomes increasingly difficult to tell one day from the other.

'This picture (Seurat's) is a single mosaic of boredom,...vacant faces, the group of other forms for the most part wooden verticals, like puppets from a toy-box intensely pre-occupied. Hapless idleness and expressionless brooding..an internal (infernal?) utopia of distance...such a bourgeois Sunday afternoon in the landscape of a painted suicide which does not become one only because it even lacks resolution towards itself.'
---E. Bloch.

The restlessness. A thousand projects started, all abandoned. Is it possible to imagine a simple happiness again, a life that is not burdened by the thought of incompleteness, by capitalism's false infinity? And what, exactly, are we to make of holidays that are marketed as 'an escape' , our desire for virtual realities, or the ever more daring demand for 'thrills'? Is this, ultimately, nothing but a sign of our profound boredom, a cry of desperation?

Russell is a timely reminder that there was once a time when the task of the philosopher was to say something about how one should live one's life and not just comment on what one can know or strive to appear to be intelligent (Zizek).

'Whatever we may think, we are creatures of Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are essential to it as summer and spring, the rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more to than the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestial life. The human body has been adapted throughout the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter....

Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element of this contact with the Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what....

The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.'

Casino Culture:

To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time-at least momentarily.
---J.Franzen.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Where every prayer is answered.

I want it now, I want it all. At one level it might be thought that this is just the cry of a child at a candy store. Perhaps it is the cultural contradiction of capitalism. The fundamental tension between a sacrifice for future rewards and 'instant living' is undermined by the overwhelming desire to consume everything now and apres moi, le deluge. In another respect, the great thinker Hans Jonas would ask how such a nihilistic tendency could allow for a care for the earth and a responsibility to future generations since the very notion of responsibility loses its binding force.

Eternal sunshine. But like the Joker's face, a permanent smile becomes quite grotesque.

Leafing through Joel Sternfeld's latest book and came across the curious fact that a large proportion of the Utopian experiments to set up small-scale communes or experimental communities were to be found in California. And the question is asked: How did it all go wrong? Why is it that such idealism invariably ended up in ruin, disaster and heartache? The Rappites, the Exodusters... Is it because nothing of the collective spirit can survive on a soil where the 'I ' is king, where the social is replaced by the spectacle and a series of images, and where libertarianism is really a theory of missing persons? [Of course, large-scale, scientific socialism, wasn't any more successful].

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
Ceremony?

From Joan Didion's Slouching to Bethlehem:

My mother was a genuine all-American bitch.

The centre was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy and commonplace reports on casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they sprawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared...sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skin. Children, who were never taught and who would now never learn the games that held society together..It was not a country in open revolution... It was the United States of America in the late cold spring of 1967.

An excerpt which seemed to capture the tone of the essay:

This chick tells me there's no meaning to life but it doesn't matter, we'll just flow right out. [On] the East Coast at least I had a 'target'. At least there you expect it's going to 'happen'...Here you know its not going to.

I ask what it is that is supposed to happen.

I don't know, he says. Something. Anything.

Between 1945 and 1967 maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game..they are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it.

Notes from Roth:
Life at the surface. The perfect life, the false smile, the grin that one at first thinks covers layers of complexity before one realises that the mask is all there is. The horror, the horror. Beyond the visual shallowness, flatness, emptiness, there is no reality and this calls for a certain theatricality. Is this the ultimate meaning of Hopper's paintings?

Picket fences. Arcadia, the idyll. American Pastoral, the long summer evenings without a past or future. It was the summer of '69 and it lasted forever. But, as in David Lynch's films, behind the calm seamless life of suburbia lies a terrifying quiet desperation. To be exactly as one seems. The holy grail of authenticity. I am what I am. A strange desire to imagine oneself as innocent, to envisage any change as meaning the world will never be the same again. The fall from grace is always on a grand scale (Nixon, Clinton); the scandals, the deviancy are relished all that bit more because they deliver the opportunity to pontificate on the evils of the world. Surely this is a legacy of the first settlers, surrounded by heathens, witches, 'Negroids', Jews, proto-commies, the licentious rabble...

The conservative reaction against the 'permissive society' is not that new nor, I think, is the drama of a life spinning hopelessly out of control. Is Utopianism anything but a desire to return to that simple, first moment, that closed world, pure and uncomplicated by the existence of 'others' and desire (to be in Paradise alone), free from the order of society, the Church, authority, government?

The intensity of shallowness.
Not to be seduced by the charm of the tyrant or a profound conservatism, the spirit's longing for order finds its home somewhere else. The childishness of Romantic idealism is rejected and instead one gives oneself over to the pragmatic spirit, the dullness and averageness of the bourgeoisie's ideal; The American dream was to be the ordinary, regular guy, the girl next door that made it. A member of the moral majority whose core values were sound, respectable. And all along, no-one realised that the consumerist ethic that had at one time required such stability and conformity (that appropriate to an undifferentiated 'mass society) was now being unravelled, now pointing in other directions.

Surfing U.S.A.

If everyone had an ocean
across the U.S.A.

Modern notions of happiness have become axiomatic for us and our contemporaries-a fundamental right and demand that prevents us from achieving any sort of stillness or peace of mind. In other not too distant times, suffering and pain had been taken to be part and parcel, no, rather, an essential part of what goes up to make a human life. How to reconcile one's life with suffering, the absurd and unpredictable irruption of tragedy with out projects for stability and meaning. The elimination of unhappiness is hardly something that one could conceive of, let alone wish for. To abolish it would have seemed like a fanciful dream since life itself consisted of the constant interplay of good and evil, pain and pleasure.

And if one could ever eliminate unhappiness from the human condition, if that state of perfection was ever something that could be achieved, there's a profound suspicion that it would, in turn, degenerate into a most terrible boredom that would trigger off even greater waves of violence.

By the 18 th century 'happiness' becomes a right, not a privilege. And from the perspective of society or the government it becomes a duty. The very legitimacy of the latter is premised on its ability to deliver 'the goods', to make the greatest number happy. From then on, the state is a therapeutic concern, caring and nurturing its flock: the Motherland.

This expectation of happiness becomes the main legitimating factor of social integration. Our shared endeavours and goals have no other object than to maximize the sum of happiness. At the same time, it must be remarked, this represents, in some sense, the birth of the totalitarian state, a state whose main function it is to reduce the uncertainty of modern life , to reduce the impact of Nature's capriciousness: security : life and a way of life must be preserved.

In that sense the State is a new 'god', a provider of insurance in this world. If the perfect, happy state is achievable (conceivable) then why shouldn't the state be allowed to plan a trajectory to it? If that means the narrowing down of individual choices then is that such a bad thing? When it comes to the elimination of risk, the conflict between security /identity and freedom, we know on which side the heavy hand of the state comes down...sovereignty, as Hobbes points out, is not incompatible with terror...

In the first stage of capitalism-the solid stage- happiness stood there like a treasure at the end of the rainbow, something that might be distant but whose benefits were tangible nevertheless. The path to ultimate happiness was a road with a teleos, a finishing line.

But now progress is no longer subordinated, as in the optimism of the 18th century to superior and external finalities, human emancipation and well-being. It has instead become a movement without a cause , escaping all control, proceeding on is own with no destination or purpose....a perpetuum mobile.

Globalisation: the future is not something we can control (See Ulrich Beck's Risk Society) and is more unpredictable. Unknown unknowns said that wonderful natural philosopher, Rumsfeld. Science itself initiates processes whose results we cannot, simply cannot, fathom from our current position. The bourgeois' penchant for control is not unrelated to his fear of the unknown (Levinas).

Technology develops needs. It is naive to think that technology is merely a response to needs. There is no question, nowadays, of 'true' or fundamental needs, something that might be consonant with out nature since there is no thing as human nature; intrinsic worth is devoured by market exchange; everything is evaluated and measured by a universal marker , whether that be utility or happiness. (see Illich)

The consumer market is constantly at war with tradition.

Continuity, fixed habits, are broken up by the shifting tissue of desires, the unceasing interplay of desire with imagination, a busy, breathless movement that cannot stop to catch its own breath, gaze that cannot focus on any one thing. Our attention span must be forever agitated, disrupted, our gaze fragmented.

Stable needs set by customary expectations, norms, a work-force rooted to its fixed ways of doing things was now the enemy of progress (see Hobsbawm:'Land' in The Age of Revolution ); now it is the traditional consumer with his notion that a good says something meaningful about his personality, as if the latter were something that is given pre-established once and for all. For capitalism to be truly dynamic it must dismantle the very idea of status goods as well as the notion of a individual/consumer having a fixed identity.

'Having' was previously a servant of , and was justified by, 'being' (meaning, virtue, the good life). In some sense it appears that there's been a reversal: we live to eat, we do not eat to live. But even here, 'having' was still associated with possession, ownership, and therefore an element of stability and being. Both shared the idea of commitment and both suggested dependency (one on goods, the other on people) . Having could still be plausibly linked with use value. But the last and final movement in this process is to unhinged desire, to a sort of virtual reality...

Surfing. A minimum contact with reality, with the world. The surface is the only reality.

Emerson: In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed. Avoid the deeps.

Modern consumerism is about gathering (and hoping for) sensations, not goods.

Furita: no stable career path. Experiences-even f fragmentary, partial, are everything. Fast food, always on the move, travel light..all this helps us forget our initial aim of happiness: amnesia is the meaning of happiness now.

Utopia: The urge to transgress, to overstep the limits, to transcend them, is universal. The world would not be the world if it did not induce in us some desire from escape from it. But projects of transcendence are particular , historically constituted conglomerations of ideas and practices: utopias. In the solid stage of capitalism the two defining features of them are: finality and territoriality. the sedentary imagination is haunted by topos, a place. Thomas More: an island, an imaginary space. In normal society identity itself was a fixed abode. The Utopian imagination was architectural and urbanite, a map, a well-ordered society, where everyone and every thing was in the right place, at the right time.

Finality: A perfect society and not just a better one, where at last man would have full control over his destiny and not be subject to the whims of nature or the gods. This Utopian reality was just undiscovered, a place waiting to be found, and not unknowable , in principle. Here there would be certainty and stability, freedom and necessity. In sunshine ever fair (Pindar). Law and rules would be willingly accepted (Kant), will and desire would be reconciled, as would body and spirit. Imagination itself would be transfixed, at once both predictable and planned.

The new capitalism, the fluid stage of modernity, dispenses with this type of Utopian project. The nomadic imagination is much more 'nomadic' and like scholarship and science's pursuit of knowledge, it knows no boundaries: infinity, rather than the cosmos, is the presiding idea. And this goes hand-in-hand with the decline of the nation state with her frontiers and meta-narratives. A disengaged imagination and the end of 'territory' as the dominant form of power are two sides of the same coin.

Imagination is privatised. From community, to society ( a self-enclosed totality) to a virtualisation. The growth of abstraction.

Happiness is not in the intellect or the fancy-but in the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; by the green land; by the bright hearthstone! This is the magic glass, man.

The slaves unrespited of low pursuits
Living amid the same perpetual flow
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end.
---Wordsworth, Prelude.

Happy Accidents

Beauty is the promise of happiness
------Stendhal

An elusive happiness that is always just out of reach and that is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies, and that disgust with life sometimes gripping them in calm and easy circumstances.
---- De Tocqueville



Much of the current debate on happiness seems to revolve around what things go towards making a happy life. The issue becomes one of ranking the things that matter to us - meaningful relations, good health, education, job satisfaction, lots of money, the life of the mind - in order of importance, and trying to decide which institutions - the state, the market, the family - are in the best position to deliver them.

But perhaps another, more basic question gets passed over in all of this. Namely: should we think of life essentially in terms of happiness, and what exactly is this fascination with it?

Despite Nietzsche's claim that only the Englishman seeks happiness, the drive to feel good seems to be a universal preoccupation found in diverse societies over vast tracts of time. At its most basic, the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure may be hardwired into our nature, a mechanism that ensures our survival as a species.

At a more sophisticated level, for some people, happiness lies in the search for a "golden age": a time of plenty and abundance when we were not defined by what we lacked. Attempts at achieving happiness become variations on this theme of a return to lost purity, from the religious idea of "the garden", to the secular retreat, to rural idylls and even, perhaps, to our dependence on, and unity with, an authoritative figure in childhood. Could it not also be that our forward dreaming and the shape of our utopias is informed by the feeling that happiness lies in our origins: the first time, that first place?

In all these examples, happiness is another word for satiation, rest, bliss and perfection. The problem with the idea of happiness as some sort of overarching and guiding principle is that it is a projection of a very narrow view of what it is to be human. Are we really governed by this single factor, or might there be other things - respect, altruism, duty, compassion, love - that move us to act? That we attain some level of happiness in pursuing meaning, beauty and knowledge is not to say that the motivating factor is happiness; it is just to say that happiness accompanies such pursuits.

Of course, one of the main reasons that happiness has had such a long run, and why it is the current flavour of the month, is that there's a certain charm (and benefit) in reducing all moral issues to a clear-cut method of evaluation. By allowing us to assess different states of affairs, and the elements that go up to make a good life, on a single dimension that can easily be objectified, the idea of happiness provides us with a common currency, as it were.

Being hooked on happiness may at first glance look like the legacy of Romanticism; in truth, though, it is more closely linked to capitalism. We define our fundamental rights in terms of our ability to pursue - not achieve - happiness. Indeed, shopping and consumerism depend for their hold over us on cultivating this sense of being unfulfilled. It is hard to think of the endless expansion of capitalism, or the whole notion of progress and development, without this permanent lack of satisfaction and contentment. Our modern, troubled happiness is the new salvation not because it promises a perfect state of bliss but because it offers a picture of perfection that is always just out of reach: a happiness that is unlimited and therefore unattainable.

We have a sneaking suspicion that behind the shining surfaces and smiling faces - a life singularly devoted to the pursuit of happiness - there is another, more real and authentic life. Anything can be endured but the succession of fine days, said Goethe, and at least a part of us cannot but help think that there's something shallow, trivial even, in all this sun-and-wheat-consciousness. A life of perfection and of happiness is really the life of the Eloi: a life of boredom and indifference. If we are no more than "constantly moving happiness machines", is it any wonder that in these complex times it is only children who find happiness in things they do not possess: a star, a tree, a flower?

The Happy Pessimist

I'm H.A.P.P.Y., I know I am, I'm sure I am.
Surely it is a mistake to suppose that happiness is the central and not just a central aspect of human nature? In fact, might it not be suggested that the concept is introduced at a particular historical juncture and with specific political motives and that it has, therefore, less to do with our nature than one at first might suspect? The insertion of life into the political realm is a decisive move; the concern for life, pleasure and pain and its calculus, the efficient management of growth, the 'standard of living', the discipline of the body, the normalizing of the population and the setting up of pleasure industries, utopian fantasy islands: all follow the rubric of biopolitics. But this, it might be suggested, is but the late flourish of a clever animal. Only we recognize that we are needy animals and are defined by what we lack.


Nietzsche’s wry comment: "happiness: only the Englishman seeks that" would indicate that happiness is not the universal, over-arching principle that it is made out to be. Furthermore, to believe that the motivation for pursuing 'meaning', art, beauty, or knowledge is our happiness is fundamentally wrong- even though these things may lead to it or accompany it. Are we really governed by this single motivating factor or might there be other things like duty, love, and compassion that move us to act? I think that one has to admit the obvious charm and benefits of reducing all moral issues to a clear-cut principle or common currency that apparently does away with conflict (as well as tragedy)-but one does so at significant detriment to our perception of ourselves. This one-dimensional, hollow man is travesty of all the best that we can imagine and even though the mind loves being absorbed by one thing it also needs to know the world in depth . A concept may lead to easier calculations or it may allow things to be more readily objectified in monetary terms, but that does not in-itself mean that it offers a surer method of evaluation.

It seems quite strange to make an argument for happiness from nature or evolution(as if our natures are such that we seek happiness because of its survival value) when others have thought of our natural purpose in quite different terms: namely, the good life that depends on the virtues or the perfection of the soul: indeed, happiness is only one such notion of the common good and to say, therefore, that we must start from man's nature "as it is" means starting with the assumption-and it is only an assumption-that the bourgeois, non-metaphysical individual is the best model we have and that he represents the true version of human nature. That this is a self-evident truth is surely contestable, to say the least. Can we now envisage a politics that stands outside the web of life, can we move back from the language of the markets to the language of justice, virtue, and does that depend on possessing a transcendental perspective?

Even within the utilitarian framework there are still some awkward questions: what about entrenched preferences (a happy slave or an extremely poor person may convince himself that he is happy with the help of religious consolations and notions of kismet and how many desperate housewives are there that adapt to a life of low expectations?) And what about the happiness that results from the fulfilment of frivolous desires (incidentally, weren’t such vain desires and the concern for status the motor of economic growth according to Adam Smith?) With regards the latter set of issues, it might be argued that we should distinguish between temporary and permanent happiness but most economists would suggest that temporary happiness, a quick fix, is merely a case of informational problems (in the sense that we do not realise that that happiness turns sour in the long run) or an irrational pursuit, the failure of the rational calculator to see and latch on to a happiness that doesn't fade. But does the recognition of this imply a move to human nature, not “as it is” but as it should be, an ideal self? If so, then happiness, on its own, is an inadequate guiding principle.

The problem is that we want a moral principle that can deal with such questions but that at the same time is sensitive to the charge of paternalism (who, for example, has the authority to oppose our democratic choices or, in another expression of this, what the market determines; indeed, why not ditch the classics or education altogether if in doing so one makes the greatest number happy?) The over-arching idea of happiness is really just a problematic version of universalism: as if to say that the existence of other values, other ‘forms of life,’ only indicate a deficiency with respect to the new (and universal) standard of happiness. Those in the developing countries must, according to this logic, be first made aware of how unhappy they are before they can enjoy the right to pursue a life of happiness.

There are equally troubling questions with the approach: its neglect of freedom. For example, would an educated person who'chooses' not to read have the same level of happiness as a person who is illiterate? Many would think that the former, with its greater range of opportunities, offers a better way of living. So, we either accept freedom as another source of value or we reduce it to a means to our utilitarian end. Of course, we are warned of the dangers of thinking of everything simply in terms of as a means to an end but if this is so the question remains: why then persist with happiness as the only end to which evolution moves? Might not freedom be explained in this way as well, so that nature evolves along degrees of freedom?

On what grounds, for example, should society prevent a change or, say, a fair process of exchange that leads to a small minority becoming significantly better off at the expense of a lot of people becoming only slightly worse off or, in a variant of this, on what basis would society rule out an increase in utility of large sections of society at the expense of seeing a few members having their fundamental rights infringed upon or their utility dropping to extremely low levels? If on a theory of rights are we, then, to move away from the utilitarian framework? To put it more starkly: can we invoke a moral theory that doesn't talk about intentions or sacrifice or restraint or any actions that go beyond our own happiness. One can only talk about these things tautologically: we accept limitations because we choose to do so, because doing so makes us happier. It is the point at which explanation can go no further.

The central problem with this analysis is that it just doesn't take on board the whole gamut of human motivations and ends (this being, of course, the familiar complaint that homo economicus is a very 'thin'concept) ; for example, religion, civic virtues or the pursuit of knowledge are not simply or exclusively about enhancing one's happiness or forwarding our self-interest. Perhaps the pessimistic Romantics would have had a thing or two to say about happiness and its embodiment of a 'sun-and-wheat-consciousness' (Lawrence) and wouldn’t the Freudians say that this constant search for perfect happiness is a form of neurosis? Deep down we have the sneaking suspicion that a life singularly devoted to happiness is a shallow and trivial one.

But is it perfection, bliss, stillness that we really seek? Would we be happy by having attained our heart's desire? There is the bonum honestum, accompanied by an interior joy, and the bonum delectabile, which is a pleasure that becomes an end in itself. Happiness, in this sense, is a shadow of desire for the garden, a utopian longing for the end of longing, the desire for a land of plenty where we are not defined by what we lack.

If we accept that there are certain things that are of intrinsic importance-and this is a concept that economics has banished a long time ago-then we are already well on the way of thinking about human motivations and ends in a more pluralistic (and more complicated) way. This would be a radical departure for economics because for centuries we’ve been brought up with the idea that something is valued because it is desired, that desires can make pushpin as good as poetry (Bentham), and that our subjective experiences are not to be snuffed at. Is the content, soothed animal the best picture, the truest depiction, we have of ourselves?


In the end, might it not be the case that our fixation with the idea of man as a 'constantly moving happiness machine' has in part-and quite tragically-led us to being so unhappy? Coming on the back of a century devoted to the happiness of the self, the American dream, the American pastoral, perhaps we could do worse than turn to Philip Roth for his descriptions of how perfect, happy lives unravel. We are left wondering how much loneliness, depression and indifference lies behind the shiny surfaces of the happy life. And the disturbing possibility that, as one of Roth’s characters says, “it was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self…”

Perhaps there is more.
" Psychoanalytically, any form of life will tend to generate a fantasy of what it is to get outside that life". In that sense, true happiness is achieved by not achieving it, by being a happy pessimist. "Anything can be endured but the succession of fine days". Capitalism and consumerism would never have such a hold on us unless it held up the possibility of endless expansion, of unlimitedness itself (Marx would say that the growth of productive forces allows for a breaking out of the ghetto, the limited but narrow perfection of the ancients for the unlimited, multi-faceted, alienated individual); insofar as we are modern we must reject the Greeks and the closed medieval world; infinity can no longer be located along a vertical axis, as it were.

And so, the best thing about being human is that have the ability not to be human, to step outside te natural necessities from which the animals derive satisfaction, happiness. This is what Hannah called the unnatural growth of the natural. Ours is a troubled happiness, something that we want to and do not want to name, to find and to lose. "Only mortals pursue ends that come to an end, we dream of a deathless activity."

Modern happiness is, therefore, a discourse on how to escape the ordinary, finitude. It is not an attempt, contrary to first appearances, to weigh ourselves down with so many goods and trinkets but, rather, a desire for lightness. But there is a lightness that comes from profundity, and a lightness of being that is unbearable. By detaching our pleasures from 'the good' , from the world, we have thought that we could be free to find our own infinites. The moderns, in their inwardness, are the true ascetics! One only needs to reflect on how many of our freedoms have turned to obsessions, compulsive behaviours, to realise that maybe, just maybe, we are not as sure as to whether we really know what happiness is any more.

(citations from J. Lear and Goethe)