The Self, The Network of Gazes, and Living Through the Screen

What I am is inseparable from what you are. I do not have some kind of autonomous self that subsists independently from the people around me. The people I come into contact are an integral part of what I become.

For when I engage with you I am not simply deducing your mental process from your words. I am doing something more like recreating your mind within my own. I simulate your mental processes as I observe them in order to be connected to you and therefore part of my understanding you is becoming you within myself. What I know of you is really something that I know of me.

Similarly, when I am around you I not only see from my point of view, I imagine how you view me. When I walk down the street, for example, I often have an internal image of what I look like from behind, how a stranger would view me walking down the street. I always see myself from both within and without.

Sometimes the view from without is a definite perspective, like that of a close friend or lover. Sometimes the view from without is vague, amorphous, not belonging to any one person in particular, but rather a general sort of mind that I assume belongs to our time and place.

All this should be fairly obvious. Of course the self is not some static entity. It changes based on who I am around. And, more specifically, it changes based on what perspectives I am able to imagine myself from. Thus my therapist posed the very intelligent question, 'Which me do I get to be around this person?' The point being precisely that relating to different people make us into different things because it forces us to occupy their perspective and therefore to subtlety change ourselves. The point being: The self emerges out of the constellation of perspectives that we take on a regular basis.

This idea of the self as hinging on the possible perspectives we can imagine ourselves through is at the heart of Foucault's work on panopticism. In Discipline & Punish Foucault wrote about a 18th-19th century prison design known as the panopticon. The idea is that there is a guard tower standing in the middle of a ring of prison cells, each one visible from the tower. The top of the tower is totally blacked out, whereas the cells are fully lit at all times. The prisoners therefore cannot know if they are being watched at any particular moment, but they know that there is a possibility for them to be viewed at any moment and thus they must behave as if though they were being observed.

The idea of a panopticon is therefore essentially a means of control that functions by forcing an individual to view themselves from a point of view other than their own, in particular, an outside perspective that  has the capacity to judge or punish. In the case of the literal panopticon, a prisoner is being forced to imagine they are being watched by a guard who could inflict punishment on them if t hey catch them breaking a rule. There is, however, a more general point to be made: any new perspective I learn to take allows me to criticize and praise my actions in new ways. This is why Allan Bloom said that great authors must be worn like a pair of glasses through which we see the world. I've also read that therapy, from the patient's point of view, is about learning to build a more balanced perspective in part by using your relationship with your therapist as a touchstone for healthy consciousness. I can say from personal experience that it is a useful to ask, What would my favorite professor say about this? Or what would my therapist say to me right now?

The ability to internalize another person's perspective, and learning to criticize oneself through that perspective, therefore has significant repercussions for our actions. Foucault used the image of the panopticon precisely to draw attention to how our behavior can be altered merely by 'the gaze' of another. He therefore meant the panopticon primarily as a metaphor for the way our current social order depends on a regulatory 'network of gazes'. Our dominant institutions, penal, legal, psychiatric, medical, etc., all institutions that exert power on society by producing knowledge about what is and is not acceptable behavior, therefore putting a corral on the potentials for action. The knowledge they wield, moreover, expresses itself in a gaze: a point of view that each of us internalizes and learns to criticize ourselves through. Foucault might say that there is a doctor, a psychiatrist, a judge, and a priest inside us all. Or, more precisely, we have all learned to silently judge ourselves through those perspectives.

So much of our experience is filtered through these dominant perspectives. So much of what we are is about the other perspectives we imagine ourselves from, which stories we tell about ourselves from which points of view. I am thus claiming that the self is something that emerges out of a 'network of gazes', or, to put it differently, it is the sum of all the points of view, all the silently simulated perspectives, that we carry with us in our daily lives. Solitude, friendships, relationships, all breed very different kinds of selfs.

If it is true that the self is something that emerges out of the variety of perspectives that we carry within us, what does this say about our relationship with media in general and facebook in particular?

With media in general we have to recognize that many of the things we may think about ourselves, our bodies or our minds, is often being generated by a machine that doesn't want to make us into better people. It wants to make us into consumers. It wants us to buy into unrealistic standards for our bodies and our relationships. We can catch ourselves criticizing ourselves through this lens we've internalized from marketing and media generally. We can label it as such. In doing so we can place a little bit of distance between us and those narratives. In our initial dealings with media it is easy to be unaware of its subtle influence on behavior, but the goal is to recognize that it serves a regulatory function that you are capable of resisting for yourself, free to explore alternative narratives of what you'd like to be.

Foucault would wager that such an activity is 'political'. It is true that the dominant institutions of our society have become somewhat politicized. I can't eat at Chic-fil-a anymore, god dammit. I wish I could just eat one of those chicken sandwiches because it's a fabulous sandwich. Chic-fil-a's approach to social and political issues, however, overrides that. The medical industry, psychiatric clinics, and penal institutions, too, are major structures of our political system. But does merely thinking about them differently constitute a political action? I suppose that being open to counter-narratives and alternative subjectivities could drive one to have a certain political leaning or attitude towards action. I've never quite grasped Foucault's thinking on politics. I know I'm not the only one. Forgive this digression.

In addition to being critical of the dominant narratives around us, we can actively seek out positive forms of media that will provide us with new points of view which to view ourselves. Reading and getting to know an excellent philosopher, for example, can provide you with a new set of eyes to see the world through. I can say that my world view has become noticeably richer and more exciting because of the contact I've had with friends, therapists, and philosophers. Each of them offers me a new perspective that I can see myself and the world through. At the end of it I feel like I'm able to build up a more realistic perspective on myself and the world because I try to find a place within myself where I can balance all the perspectives I've internalized. Recognizing that a more realistic sense of can self emerge out of interaction with diverse perspectives is very helpful in the task of reflection and self-cultivation.

I finally just want to comment briefly on what all this means in relation to facebook. Facebook is a very strange thing if you think about it in the terms I've presented here. It allows us to imagine our profiles from the perspective of hundreds of people that we've met throughout our lives, many of whom are acquaintances at best. I think in turn people tend to put their 'best foot forward' online: we choose our best pictures, we spend time thinking of witty things to share, we want to be acknowledged. There is an interesting quotation from some bro named Steve Furtick. It goes, "The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel." What is facebook if not a permanent highlight reel?

My concern here is that we are abstracting ourselves, that we are forcing ourselves to become generalized people, one's more amenable to the packaged presentation that something like facebook or okcupid enables. This imperative, moreover, is something that may emerge out of the network of gazes that facebook provides us. When all we see is people having tons of fun and posting great meals and changing their statuses to engaged or married or whatever it can be easy to assume that they experience no speed bumps, no fits of self doubt or sadness that come out of nowhere. But of course they do. We all do. What I'm wondering, though, is if it's possible that long term exposure to facebook (as a network of gazes that we imagine ourselves through) can have a lasting affect on our behavior? If we take a picture of every meal, if everything is documented, and we know that it is being documented, is it not true that a part of our mind is perhaps imagining what that picture will look like to the hundreds of people we know online? Is not part of our mind therefore detached from the situation itself, and the experience in some ways passes through imagined screens as we experience it?

Other people have written about facebook as a panopticon. It makes perfect sense. I have not, however, seen anyone render the panopticon in the language of perspective taking and simulation theory more specifically. When we do render facebook panopticism in the language of simulation theory, we get something like what I'm trying to talk about. I'm struggling. But the idea is that facebook can exert a regulatory affect on our behavior by providing a huge number of perspectives that we criticize and praise our actions through. Facebook as a network of gazes, moreover, exerts a generalizing power, forcing our self expression to be condensed and trimmed. It encourages us to display only our highlight reels, and I fear we may forget how to move comfortably behind the scenes.

Degrees of Theory

Theory can be many things.

At their most intense theories are prescriptive.

At their most basic they are observational.

In the former case one has predicted a phenomenon so well that one can reasonably create a doctrine or set of rules that will prescribe a course of action.

In the latter a phenomenon is so unpredictable that one is satisfied with simply observing it properly.

Observation is obviously a part of every theory.

Prescription and prediction is clearly not.

Understanding the many layers of theory is definitely important if we are going to grapple with Clausewitz.

The rough gradient of theory:

Observation

Identification of regularity

Generalization

Prediction

Prescription.

Those five things are generally a part of theorizing. But not every theory need follow them in that order.

Regularity is a tricky question, especially with human phenomena.

For in nature we simply identify regularity.

In humans we have the extra problem that we can not only identify regularity, we can also create regularity. Thus we must worry about mistaking habit (second nature) for (first) nature.

This problem of reflexivity and habit should make us tread lightly in the realm of human theory.

We don't want to make ourselves into simple abstract beings just for the sake of clear thinking.

Let experience overrun the theories, I say.

I owe so much to William James and Henri Bergson right now. Thanks.

Resistance

I resist many things in my life.

It was an undercurrent for many years. I was so habituated to favoring what wasn't that I lost touch with what is. My mind drifted more easily in the was and could.

I've become more acquainted with the present. I like it here quite a lot.

I'm far more conscious of resistance now. When the moment demands a mood, when the bus won't get me somewhere on time, when my mind or body won't cooperate with me. Yet my resistance still surprises me.

I am currently resistant towards writing. Even these keystrokes bring me a bit of pain. That last sentence made my brow furrow and my left eye compress into an awkward painful wink.

Writing has always involved a 'towards which'. I have always written with a future in mind. A future in which I am an academic, a professor, a lauded and accepted thinker among a community of thinkers. Writing was previously a means to an end, the end being graduate school and a scholarly profession.

But the idea that one can be a 'professional philosopher' is of recent origin and seems less and less viable to me. One can be a professional teacher. One cannot be a professional philosopher. My best friends have told me so. Bloom clearly asserts that philosophy is an individual task. Collingwood is adamant that the life of a professor is not the best life for a thinker who hopes to write books.

This is such an obvious fact that it often escapes my gaze.

I wanted philosophy to provide my primary access to the world, I wanted it to supply my community. But it won't. I suspect the American universities are bankrupt, another casualty of the new American oligarchy.

Many other issues are presenting themselves to me as relevant. I continue to reflect and I have no intentions of stopping.

But do I intend to stop writing? Why do I find it so difficult to write in the present? I've so often written in the future. I've done this work with the idea of it leading me to somewhere else, some place that I am not, somewhere with people that I don't know.

But I love where I am, and I love the people I know.

I'm not sorry I didn't get into graduate school.

I'm sorry that thinking and philosophical living has been so impoverished by its confinement to the university. I'm sorry that it has been rendered so politically and socially impotent. I'm sorry that we have a shitty institutional structure that only provides pseudo-engagement with the world of politics and philosophy.

I'm sorry that people read Clausewitz so poorly.

I won't resist my thinking. I don't want to resist my thinking.

But it isn't 'taking me anywhere', it won't be a career for me, and that causes me pain. It is the death of a dream, the death of a fantasy.

I think this is for the best. I don't want the poverty and desperation that comes from the university life.

I see how it could very easily lead to sloppy thinking. In that world one must publish or perish, not think clearly and honestly.

I still find my heart and my mind so full. The world is richer than it's ever been for me, and I don't need any person or institution to ground me.

Although, I wouldn't mind a person.

Thinking

Oh such restlessness in my mind right now. I want to channel it into some kind of energy so that I can write. I want to write on Clausewitz and other related things. Like William James and Bergson.

Unfortunately that writing is wrapped up with a future that no longer seems accessible to me and thus causes me a kind of pain.

Doing scholarly work on Clausewitz was something that I wanted to do in graduate school. I wanted to really tackle On War and Chicago or Chapel Hill. Alas, I won't be going there this year. I'll continue to live my life this year.

It's interesting and difficult for me to acknowledge that doing academic work causes me pain.

I was doing some academic writing the other day and an acquaintance came into the room and told me he thought it was cool that I did that kind of stuff for pleasure. I unreflectively told him that it was causing me pain.

I've been struggling to have clear feelings this week or two. They've remained amorphous to me, covered in that generic blanket of anxiety and fear. I'm trying to peel back that blanket a little bit, get a clearer picture of what is really going on in my heart and mind.

It involves a lot of longing. A lot of pain at things I want that aren't present for me. Things like love, like a potential academic career.

An academic career? What a nightmare. I read so many articles online about how you shouldn't go to graduate school for the humanities. Just don't do it! It seems pretty obvious. Yet so many of us hold out hope that we are the tenured ones, we are the ones who will come out on the other side unscathed, thinking our beautiful thoughts.

It probably won't happen for me, and that is hard because it means the future is unimaginable.

For what the universities represent is not simply an institution that could give me a job. It is a way of thinking, a way of living.

How is philosophy to persist as an attitude when the institutions meant to house it are broken and the larger institutions are hostile to it? At the very least, the working world is not really conducive to philosophical thinking. But neither is being a university professor, Collingwood warned me.

I think my draw to the universities is really about love. I think that being in a university gives me the idea that I would be welcomed in a certain way by the people there. We would be brothers and sisters in thinking. We would think together, shelter ourselves from the world that did not nurture our minds.

So what is the point of doing this work in the present?

I see the Clausewitz scholarship as being so muddled. I look at my professors book and I read Clausewitz and I know he has it better than anyone else. Then I look at other writers, Strachan, Paret, and I just don't get where they are coming from.

Clausewitz is so much clearer than we think he is. We just have to spend a lot of time following him. It isn't until Book II Chapter II that he unveils his reform of the theory of war. It does not disappoint.

I wish I didn't know the things I know. I wish I could forget.

Institutions of the Heart and Mind

I recently read an article about my generation's anxiety with marriage.

We don't feel economically stable. We don't know how we are going to make our way in the world. Thus we don't feel comfortable thinking about marriage or children. How are we to think of these things unless we feel stable in our livelihoods? How are we to get married and live out this narrative unless we can buy a house and 2 cars?

I'm worried here about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'm worried that we are forgetting about love because the institutional structures no longer support it. For marriage is but an institution meant to corral our experience of love, sex, and procreation.

The university system, like marriage, is an institution that structures the activity of thinking. Similarly, the universities are experiencing a bit of a crisis. They no longer have the means to fulfill the narrative that they have built themselves upon. They don't provide an appropriate or accessible outlet for thinking, just as marriage does not provide a strong framework for love.

My hope, my conviction (which I very much need to be correct), is that the experiences of love and thinking can exist in spite of the institutions that fail to facilitate them.

Love and thinking are self sustaining activities. The heart and the mind do not need institutional structure. Though it'd be awfully nice to have it.

A Rough Outline

Hmmm, I like typing into blog space more than I like typing into a word document. Perhaps it has a feeling of finality, or it gives me a sense of directness. This writing is going somewhere in that it literally will be deposited into the void of the internet as soon as I click 'publish'. Word documents just sit there.

I've got some juices flowing on an essay on Bergson, Collingwood, and Clausewitz. I love dramatic and involved titles, naturally, so this one is tentatively titled 'Political Education in Bergson's Universe: Collingwood and Clausewitz on Preparing for the Unforeseeable'.

The thread that ties these three together is their insistence on the unpredictability of the world. They all reflected seriously on the shortcomings of predictive knowledge and the consequences of novelty and the unforeseeable. In fact, I dare say that prediction (or novelty) was the central problem that all three of these thinkers grappled with. Yet each of these thinkers explored the question of prediction in different domains. Clausewitz thought of war, Collingwood of history, and Bergson of the natural world. All three of them, naturally, were intelligent and diverse enough to reflect on all of these topics. Clausewitz spoke of history and natural science; Collingwood of natural science and war; and Bergson of history and war. They merely had different emphases.

One problem I'm trying to explore in this writing is Leo Strauss's claim that Bergson didn't produce a political philosophy. Apparently Bergson's final book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion did indeed elaborate a moral and political philosophy (centered on love, I hear). I will have to suss out that claim for myself at some point. In the meantime, however, I believe I can take some steps to understanding how Bergson's philosophy is at the very least compatible with things I already understand in moral and political philosophy.

Indeed, Collingwood and Clausewitz offer a moral and political philosophy that I believe is compatible with Bergson's thinking.

That's enough for now. These are the notes I took today:

"Bergson

- Generally outline the idea of the universe as pure becoming, pure novelty

- Identify the problem that our habitual modes of thought stabilize, do not think with movement, cannot often perceive the novelty around us

- Thought as the extension of our perceptions. Space and the manipulation of matter as default state of thinking. Spatial thinking and division as the normal mode of our thinking and what stands between us and the novelty of things. Mind and time as the realm of novelty more purely.

- The importance of engaging with mind and its unity with time and thus the importance of breaking with the habit of thinking spatially and learning to think in terms of time, learning to think in terms of unity, difference and not identity

- The method of developing this kind of consciousness of duration as the image, as purposeful perspective taking, images as prompting an intuition

What we will find in Collingwood and Clausewitz is Bergson’s task of intensifying inner life by plunging ourselves into the duration, the expansion of our sensory apparatus, put towards explicitly moral and political goals."

Philosophy, The Purposeful Intensification of Inner Life, and Subtractive Learning

I still wonder what precisely philosophy is. There are so many different ways to define it or think of it. Deleuze calls it the creation of concepts. Rousseau, Bloom tells me, speaks of it as the purposeful ordering of the soul. Collingwood spoke of it as a form of second order knowledge, and later controversially claimed it to be a purely historical form of thought.

One thing seems undeniable: It begins with an admission of ignorance and from there proceeds into a quest for knowledge. It is above all a process, no doubt. A verb, not a noun.

Fortunately the philosopher I am most focused on right now, Henri Bergson, understood that the world is pure process, and that it is our business to think in a way that moves in tandem with the world. Bergson challenges us to think movement, think change, and, above all, to think time (whereas thought is typically spatial). I don't have the chops to go into this yet. I'm working on sorting Bergson, but he's a challenge.

One thing, however, is definitely clear to me: Bergson believed that the task of philosophy was to purposefully intensify our experience of the world, to attune us to the constant unfolding of novelty that is always happening within and without. As he says in his essay "The Possible and the Real," he is struck by "the continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty which seems to be going on in the universe."This explosion of novelty, moreover, is far from an abstract phenomenon, but a deeply personal experience: "As far as I am concerned, I feel I am experiencing it constantly. No matter how I try to imagine in detail what is going to happen to me, still how inadequate, how abstract and stilted is the thing I have imagined in comparison to what actually happens!" ('The Possible and the Real, in The Creative Mind, 73). I literally laughed out loud as I finished typing that quotation. Bergson's sense of the world was so wondrous and beautiful! He felt the intensity and uniqueness of every moment with such clarity. I can't read his writing without also being struck by the novelty and freshness of every moment. There is no such thing as identity, no such thing as sameness, only difference. Reading Bergson makes this infinitely clear, not only intellectually, but viscerally and emotionally.

The world is more intense after reading Bergson, and he would be delighted to hear me say that.

He provokes such love and such fear in me. He opens my eyes to the world in a way that I badly crave. Reading him is like staring at the familiar landscape with a new friend who is seeing it for the first time: he imparts such freshness and such particularity unto that which has become so stale and generic. I'm holding back tears as I write this, his thought creates such emotions in me.

So, the obvious question is, Why is it so hard to perceive the uniqueness of the world? What stands in the way of us and a raw experience of reality in all of its particularity and unpredictability?

Chiefly, classificatory and generalized language. When we speak of the world in terms of 'kinds' and 'types' we reduce things to what makes them similar, essentially sheering off all their elements that make them different. Thinking in terms of generalities, moreover, is a pervasive modern habit that comes out of our relationship with natural science.

The intensification of inner life, becoming attuned to the novelty of every moment, is therefore partially a matter of overcoming our attachment to general concepts.

The process of shedding our conceptual apparatus is to be conducted through metaphysical study, which Bergson thus calls 'the science of dispensing with symbols'. Metaphysics, then, is a way of using language that is supposed to help us leave behind our general conceptual apparatus. Hmmm.

It has something to do with Bergson's concept of the image. The kind of language used in metaphysics differs from scientific or classificatory language because what it seeks to do is to plunge is directly into the flow of novelty and unity of our lives. Metaphysics is meant to plunge is into the flow of time, whereas scientific language is meant to divide the world in terms of space. Metaphysics is meant not to give us an analytical understanding of reality, but is supposed to give us an intuition of the pure flow of time, which he called duration. Thus he said that "the philosopher's sole aim should be to start up a certain effort which the utilitarian habits of mind of everyday life tend, in most men, to discourage.... No image will replace the intuition of duration but many different images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able, through the convergence of their action, to direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from usurping the place of the intuition it is instructed to call forth, snce it would then be driven out immediately by its rivals" ('Introduction to Metaphysics', in The Creative Mind, 139).

I'm sorry I'm just throwing these quotations out. But the idea is that metaphysics involves a use of language that is supposed to get us past language and instead plunge us into the ineffable novelty of reality. We are meant to use diverse forms of language so that we can dive head first into the flow of time and reality.

Oof. Challenging thinking.

A final point.

Bergson's thinking about metaphysics, about intuition, about what stands between us and the intensification of our inner lives and a purer relationship with reality, can be called a form of subtractive learning (a la Nassim Taleb in Antifragile). Taleb is a strong advocate of what he calls subtractive epistemology: We get smarter by taking junk out of our heads, not by adding things. Bergson, too, believes that contact with pure duration and reality is achieved mostly by forgetting all of the generalizations that we have become so habituated to. Metaphysics is a form of purposeful forgetting, or subtractive learning.

Such beauty in him.