Cognitive Dissidents discussion

I'm reponding here to tENT's comment made in Class Warfare in Culture pt 3.91-- see the exchange under "No Comment for Bruce" for an explanation of my posting irregularities.

You're right-- this topic is highly relevant & a bit monstrous to tackle. I'm hoping the thread will branch out in different directions-- maybe at some point we might even create a topography of the terrain & suggest some pertinent courses in which to tread it-- we've already begun with autobiography-- & you raised a discussion of fallacious assumptions supporting class distinctions & hierarchy in your third post-- I'm tempted to neologize these as "ideollusions." Then in your comment to my post you move on to the problem of cultural & ideological reassimilation-- how any challenging & revolutionary strategy can resist becoming absorbed back into the mainstream.

A brief digression here-- we see that last issue-- reabsorption-- practically everywhere. I once began writing a piece on "conservative social drift in cultural appropriations"-- it was focused on performance. One of my cases in point was the trajectory of the Rocky Horror Picture Show audience interaction. What I wanted to argue was that the initial playful, somewhat spontaneous, & liminal rituals of these performances took up irony & role play in the service of pushing the issues of gender instability & sexuality in ways more challenging than the film itself. Early audiences were pro-sex, anti-repression, & in favor of ambiguity-- especially identifying with Janet's transformation-- her shedding of inhibited & fraudulent sexual mores. But as the "text" for these performances became more fixed, the ritual itself relapsed back into conservative values- with Janet (remember the pleasure that audience finally took in calling her "slut" ?) becoming as much an object for criticism as her uptight antithesis Brad had been. Ultimately, these performances became somewhat reactionary & the gender role destablization was returned to the stutus quo-- or worse!

On to The Matrix. I think I agree with your take. I liked aspects of the first movie for similar reasons. As you say, that central metaphor of the battery is not bad-- particularly coupled with the "unknowing" element-- the world as we perceive it is filtered through ideological constructs in such complex & ubiquitous ways that most of us no longer have any sense of what is real, what concepts represent or might mean outside of the field through which they are transmogrified into generators for capital, who we are or what we might become, what life would look like if it were to shed its "ideollusionary" skins.

Of course, I had issues with the "chosen one" idea & felt the rest of the series was really pretty weak-- reinvested with way too many "philosophical rhubarbs" involving free will, fate, determinism & all that. I thought the representation of techno-tribal culture (remember the dance scene?) was merley a parody of what a self-creating human community might look like.

In some ways I prefer the Wachoski Brother's V-- although admittedly this film fetishized violence in the typical manner of the culture industry-- another form of vicarious pleasure in pointless aggressivity, a "cathartic" opiating of the masses through endorphic release. Another criticism here would have to be the way V's gallery was presented in such an unproblematically positive manner-- hasn't the history of art also supported oppressive ideologies & institutions?

I like the way you put the following-- an "identity too intrinsically threatening & too hard to pin down to turn into a commodity." That must be a key point in developing revolutionary practices & processes-- those inherently impervious to "conservatizing social drift."

Another issue is the need for careful analysis of the social & psychological functions of "pleasure," "benefit," & "reward." You use the term, "reward" in the second paragraph of your comment to my post. Remember my construction of "The Consortium" in F/actions & Collaberrations, Unmad/e Movie Screams in the Tentative Anarchist Zone? I use the term in a similar way there as well. It's an important issue because we need to understand why it is that individuals will act against their own best interests & even against their very "nature" in order to facilitate the working of The Machine. In part because society rewards us for doing so-- even if such rewards are basically unhealthy. Marx & Engles coined the metaphor "opiate of the masses" to describe religion's function-- a sort of "deferred reward": "Your suffering in this life will grant you entrance into a kingdom of eternal satisfaction in the next." But many of these "rewards" are granted in this life as well-- they have to be in order to sustain tolerance for suffering, oppression, & the absurdity of living one's life in the service of consumption & accumulation of an empty signifier (capital). The promise of the "next life" is not sufficient -- how could it be? Enter, "the weekend": "I hate my job, but thank Gog I've got the weekends to do with as I please-- which is shop for things I don't need but desire to such a degree that I'm willing to return to work on Monday to continue the whole miserable cycle." The "weekend" is a classic example of an "ideollusionary reward" reified into a temporal & psychological organization of exploitation at the level of both "production" & "consumption."

But so are many of the pleasures we take from aesthetic objects, intellectual pursuits, language games, & basic interchanges in our encounterrs with others.

Take humor. Henri Bergson argued in "Laughter" that all humor is ESSENTIALLY conservative-- that it points to difference & variation as a means to draw us toward a criticism of what falls outside the "norm." Now, I don't agree with this analysis-- but I do agree that MOST humor tends to do this. Why wld that be? Perhaps Baudelaire comes closer to discoverng humor's essence than Bergson does-- as the taking of power from what we fear-- the release from anxiety at perceived threat. If that is the case, it makes sense that security can be found in belonging to the majority--however mindless that majority might be-- in the safety & sense of false connection which Erich Fromm refers to as "automoton conformity." (See The Art of Loving, Man For Himself, & The Sane Society) Examined at even closer inspection, it becomes clear that this means of alleviating anxiety cannot lead to a sense of truly belonging to ownself & the world. The sacrifice-- which is the authenticity of one's own ideas, one's unique genius, one's own opionions to that of the "norm" can only mask & bury the sense of alienation & fear, it cannot irradicate it.

What an ITIT&THTPDTTIAC (see the quote from tENT a few paragraphs above) needs to do is look for strategies of radically challenging such expected & anticipated assimilating functions-- not just in humor but in all areas of contra-cultural production. What is funny for us is not that one has strayed from the norm, but that anybody besides Norm would want to be him. Because, you see, THAT is what is really frightening & alienating-- not the presence of someone we perceive as different from ourselves, but our utter failure to be who we are on our own terms & our confused desire to alleviate this fear by abandoning ourselves to the herd. No doubt, in turning humor's conservative funtion on its head, for many it will not even be perceived as humor at all! But for some it shall-- & those are the few in whose company I would choose to laugh anyway.

Thank you for your compliment, tENT, your friendship is also invaluable to me.

& so, to paraphrase some philosopher or other-- " Come then, let us sit & laugh together!"

I was going to respond to:

...we need to understand why it is that individuals will act against their own best interests & even against their very "nature" in order to facilitate the working of The Machine.

with: because people do what most people do.

which is similar to when you say: security can be found in belonging to the majority

It also comes down to basic insecurities about onself- a person will not even begin to think in a 'revolutionary' way if they are too caught up in with their own outward display of ego.

Thanks for the response. I will check out"The art of loving, man for himself, and the sane society"

edit: it is difficult, but possible, for a person to begin to act in a revolutionary way if ...etc.