So if capitalism is driving so many of my desires, manufacturing my sense of want and need, how can I decide what I really want? Do any of my desires come from me - sui generis? Or are my desires all simply cultural productions - is the whole idea of desire manufactured in a late-date capital economy where necessities are usually well taken care of?
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested that desire always came from some type of lack - a hole that we attempt to make whole. Lacan thinks this starts during the mirror stage - when a child is about 2 years old and he recognizes that his reflection is not another but rather himself. Lacan imagines the child being held by his mother and both of them gazing into a mirror. The child sees himself and his mother and feels whole and safe. However, after that moment when we stare into the mirror we now see a lack. Where is our mother? Where is our back? Lacan thinks essentially this is the birthplace of desire.
However, Deleuze and Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus have a different idea. They believe that desire itself is a productive force, not the result of a lack. They believe that desire essentially produces the world - I write this essay because I desire to understand desire; someone reads it and responds and so forth. (And this is the same process that produces stuff like movies and chairs and lamps and books and discoveries and inventions and everything else) Essentially, D & G see desire as a positive force, whereas Lacan sees desire as originating from a negation. D & G believe that the Oedipal model that is used by Freud and then psychoanalysis thereafter is actually itself a product of capitalism, i.e., Capitalism produces the "Nuclear Family" which of course is the basis for the Oedipal model (father - mother - child) in the first place. In place of psychonalysis, D & G claim that capitalism needs a "schizoanalysis" in order to be understood.
As I understand this, the argument is that capitalism is creating desires all over the place - I start hearing voices in my head "I need to buy a new gadget; I should watch the new fall lineup; I need to redo my wardrobe; I want the new Nick Cave album; I need a new amplifier; Amazon's right - I do need to buy all those Dostoevsky books I haven't read etc." And these voices don't seem to come from within, but they seem to be pulling hard at my insides. This causes a state of confusion and it seems to endlessly defer meaning. (Well okay the iPhone didn't make me feel complete, but I bet a new TV will help. Well maybe if I watch only art films. I should buy more criterion collection films)
So it seems to me that it becomes difficult to begin to sort out which desires are important and which ones aren't. For example, I play music, so is my desire for a new amplifier more "pure" than my feeling that a new television will make me happier? It's not as though guitars aren't marketed in the same way that a television would be. So all of this leads to a complicated relationship with desire. Clearly I want things and I think it's good to want things - I'm not an ascetic by a long shot - I've always thought denying pleasure as a form of growth sounded profound but was inapplicable for me. And it seems that there is no meaningful way to tell for sure where these desires come from - I mean even the ones that seem most personal and intimate have historical, materialist origins. That is to say, I wanted to play guitar at a specific moment when I saw a guitar in a store, or was it the moment I saw one on MTV?
This, I think, leaves us with Nietzsche - which is always a good place to be left - and we must decide whether our desires extend our being, make us stronger, make us larger, or whether they make our spirit whither and force us to live enslaved by desire - or worse where we simply no longer have anything that resembles desire in a classic sense and what we desire is simply to be entertained all the time; we turn into Nietzche's last man - the couch potato.
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