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Title: Intimacy
Author: Frére Dupont & ifinsiturcon
Date: n.d.
Language: en
Topics: nihilism, systems theory, theory
Source: Retrieved on October 3, 2010 from http://fendersen.com/Intimacy.htm][fendersen.com]] and [[http://fendersen.com/Intimacy2.htm

Frére Dupont & ifinsiturcon

Intimacy

Intimacy 1 — Frere Dupont

1. This is the double bind of lifestyle:

A creeping awareness of the controlling nature of society is

crystallised for me by an especially disempowering experience. Suddenly,

I recognise my lack of power over my own existence. I see how society

intrudes into personal life and causes me to express its values. My life

is moulded into the pattern of its regime. I decide to take back my life

and live according to my own sense of priority. I will resist this

intrusion by excluding its influence. I will set up my own intimate

system which will allow me to control myself but. But I have found that

no matter how I try to exclude it the external system keeps re-imposing

itself on my system. Each time I discover it leaking into my life I

tighten the control I have on my system. My intimate system is a system

of control. And the external system is a system of control. The external

system exerts control by intruding into intimate systems. It has

intruded into my system in a way I did not anticipate. It has caused me

to express in my system its value in terms of a controlling system.

2. worn paths: systems against the system

How mysterious other people’s methods are, and how incomprehensible

their enthusiasms. What events in the past could have led them to behave

as they do now? Opinions and actions appear like some autistic rigmarole

— the closed systems of other people’s activity are fused into the idea

of who they must be, and it is who they must be at all costs which

animates their activity.

It is precisely what we hold most dear, what we consider essential to

our identity, what it is that we stand for, which becomes our defence

against a relation with others. It feels like our ideas are always under

threat from outside forces ... it is all that we can do ... it takes

most of our energy just to stay in the same place ... this is my line in

the sand. One such locked-in lifestyle defines itself as ‘attachment

parenting’ and it is this particular conception of preciousness, or my

tentative approach towards it, that I will use to try and uncover a

method for coping with enthusiasms and enthusiastic activity in general.

My intention is to help develop a means by which we will be able to gain

insight into matters that are of significance to others but not to us. A

means which does not adopt an either/or, for/against framework. How

might I talk to other people about what is important to them without

disagreeing violently? Which procedures should I follow so as to prevent

myself from calling you an idiot? At what levels can so and so and thus

and thus connect to each other without sheering-off in mutual disgust?

3. I fain would go with you

The regime or circuit of attachment parenting begins with a conventional

mise en scène: you look on at some screaming kid and its furious mum in

the supermarket, and you say to yourself ‘when I have a kid I will never

behave like that.’ And then you have a kid and then you do behave like

that. And then you feel shame and then you have a long hard think and

then you try and live your life differently, and better. You want to

take control, to establish a system of control. And that ‘personal’

story feeds into deeper anxieties about toxins in your child’s body, and

the abuses of so-called childcare, about security, about, oh about the

end of the world. And so it is that you find yourself volunteering for a

mission for which you supply the reasoning: I don’t have much power but

I can at least make a difference to my own life.

The intimate negentropy of attachment parenting ... the downsizing

flight from the complexities of modern life ... the micro-surgical

reconnection of familial bonds torn by TV, private transport, refined

sugars and transfats is afforded by a perceived dominion, an economy of

sorts, over the specifics of my personal realm. By embracing an

alternative method you have rediscovered a proper sense of proportion —

Aha! No matter what other priorities might press in, the child, this

comes first. But uh-oh, in practice this re-prioritising flatly

contradicts every received notion associated with childrearing in this

society — suddenly you are up against, the normative techniques of the

medical and educational establishments. You need other books that are

not the books provided, you need a different community that is not the

community provided, you need theories, examples, events, practices,

taboos, sanctions, conventions controversies and scandals. You need to

set yourself within a petit regime, you need to assert yourself so as to

ensure, my child is to be valued as more than just a peg to hang

commodities from.. Oh precious, is it?

Attachment parenting supposes a mutually experienced natural instinct

for proximity between child and mother. It is assumed that close

connection during early years of life will cause the resultant

individual to reproduce a system of secure, empathic relationships in

adulthood. Attachment theory argues that an infant instinctively seeks

proximity to a familiar person and the system, or circuit, of its self

feels completed whenever that person is present.

Children attach to their mothers because they are social beings, they

experience and develop in the world from their mother’s position. Just

as chimpanzee infants for their first five years look out to world and

connect with it from their mother’s body, which acts as a frame for

experiencing and gauging responses, so the theory of attachment

parenting argues for prolonged physical contact. The presupposition for

attachment is a perceived necessity for carrying, a constant low

intensity intimacy — the initial movement is one of holding close. This

is in contradistinction to conventional practice of distancing — putting

the child down and distracting it.

4. holding hands in the strange situation

It was inevitable that an identified tendency towards attachment would

then be separated out and transformed, in the narratives of those who

claim it for their own, into the basis of a theory of human nature. It

was inevitable that the phenomena of attachment would become a motif of

naturalness in human beings. Moral authority derived from claims for

what is most natural is used, in the unnatural world of competing moral

authorities, to extract recognition from the world. And like the reverse

image of the supermarket scene, which demonstrates unnatural

disconnection, attachment comes to stand for something primal,

irreducible and therefore proper. It is from this basic ideological

building block that subsequent preferences and activities may draw their

justification, and an entire lifestyle be built up from it.

Strange then that the authorisation of attachment theory, and this

desire for authorisation, isn’t derived intuitively from the relation

itself. Strange how this natural bonding is first spooled out as

findings on a computer printout, strange that the mise en scène of its

discovery is a theatre of estrangement and peopled by the Dr

Strangeloves of 1950’s clinical psychology — the white coats, the

vivisection, the experimental situations. Strange that primal connection

should be inherited via the strange room.

The theory of attachment was first proved by an experiment in which

young monkeys (separated from their mothers) were supplied with two

dolls intended to function as surrogates, one doll was made of wire and

included a bottle of milk whilst the other was soft but had no milk. The

monkeys chose the softness of the milkless doll over the nourishment of

the uncomfortable one. This was said to prove that maternal love was the

primary demand of infants. It was observed that monkeys deprived of

attachment displayed strange behaviours and abnormal sexual activities

when they reached maturity.

Further developments in the theory of attachment were developed by an

experiment known as ‘The strange situation’. This experiment was

designed to both classify types of attachment and gradate the degrees to

which these were exhibited in children’s behaviour. The strange

situation was set up in a room containing two way mirrors which

concealed the authors of the experiment. A child and its mother entered

the room, the child was encouraged to play with the provided toys, then

the mother left the room. As the mother left, just like in an Ibsen

play, a stranger entered. The child’s response to the stranger was

recorded and classified. The stranger then left and the mother returned.

No doubt today’s proponents of attachment are eager to distance

themselves from crude early experiments. Nevertheless, the function of

‘findings’ and thus official authorisation from psychological research

continues to play its securing, attachment-like, role. The urge is

always to find the most basic and therefore ‘natural’ urges so that

these might be used to justify present activities.

New studies have found that close attachment increases the mother’s

progesterone levels, facilitating the maternal bond and decreasing the

likelihood of postpartum depression. There are also claims for better

health of the infant which range from improved neural development to

better gastrointestinal and respiratory health as well as a better sense

of balance and muscle tone. Aggression is diminished, IQ and brain

development increased, and properly attached children are more able to

communicate in the world. We might observe, when confronted with these

claims, that the theory has itself passed from a need for the harsh

bottle-doll of monkey experiments to a desire for the comforting soft

doll of family therapy.

‘Attachment parenting’ is a strategy directed against alienation, and

yet it is also a system which is derived from, and ultimately still

attached to, a general system of alienation in which it is but one

product in a competitive marketplace of ideologies and societal

cure-alls. It does not escape conditions, nor does it seriously contest

the capitalist productive relation and the waged existence which

constantly drags workers away from attached intimacy, but rather it

merely seeks for itself a niche afforded by the husband’s salary. The

function of ‘the natural’ within attachment parenting’s arguments is its

main selling-point, and yet this very emphasis strategically obscures

other issues of equal, or greater concern, than what is ‘natural’ in

human productive relations.

5. control in systems of control

Surveillance is one of the few words in the political lexicon which has

not shed its meaning, and even where ubiquity has become the name of a

means of social mediation the word itself still retains a sinister

quality. Surveillance is characterised as a system of control which is

deployed as a tool by a wider system of control. The general purpose for

the use of surveillance is the continued reproduction of existing

relations under static conditions.

Surveillance is a basic and easily communicable means of extracting

significant information from apparently complex and multiple relations;

it encapsulates the disproportionate hierarchy that exists between

relative positions of watcher and watched. The specific content of the

hierarchy is expressed through the purpose and practical requirements

for the deployment of surveillance: first it must be decided why this

place/this group of people needs to be watched. There is no surveillance

without intent.

Surveillance always invokes a mechanism for the monitoring of more or

less unknowing peripheral parts from a more or less conscious centre.

The function and value of the monitored parts, and the degree of control

related from the centre to the parts is invariably set by the centre.

The intent of the relation flows from the centre outwards, whilst

information flows from periphery inwards.

The problem of consciousness is the problem of intentional or purposeful

authority over the circuits it monitors. In other words, that element of

a systemised relation which is in conscious possession of the purpose of

the relation inevitably has more power to manipulate it than those

elements which have none.

The problem of consciousness as a mode of control is the problem of

elective communities. In other words those practices and ideas which

seek to wrest control of life back from the received general social

relation, so as to achieve some level of autonomy, are necessarily

dependent on a mechanism that is defined by intent, purpose and valuing,

in other words, a conscious controlling centre.

6. surveillance against surveillance

Elective communities, elective practices, are reliant to a greater

degree than received everyday life, on the practice of surveillance.

Attachment parenting tends towards conflict with received or established

surveillance — it rejects the conventions, standards, models and

interventions of child-raising as proposed by the medicalised state but

in order to sustain itself as a counter-tendency it must necessarily

adopt a surveillance practice of its own. Above, I have sketched out

this convergence with the scientific gaze but the practice of

‘monitoring’ goes much further than this and through it we begin to make

out the paranoid character of autonomy and self-management.

At a juncture in history where the social relation has become thoroughly

permeated by surveillance — now is a moment, more than any other, that

is characterised by the circuit ‘watching/being watched’ — so it is no

coincidence that rebellious activity should unconsciously follow the

outline of the surveillance system. In the example of attachment

parenting, the original break with the system which involves a primal

desire to experience the world from the perspective of the child’s

interest, a break which grasps the world’s intentions to the child as

based on negation, necessarily requires the taking of further steps to

secure the original insight.

The self-management of child-rearing requires that the conscious centre

which occupies the place of the child, it having no consciousness of the

issues for itself, attracts an array of parts (objects and activities)

which function to sustain the centre. The practicalities of an

attachment parenting lifestyle generate a number of ethical values which

are interpreted in a variety of ways. Some logical developments from

child-centred parenting would include involvement with natural

childbirth, home birth, stay-at-home parenting, homeschooling,

deschooling, anti-circumcision, anti-vaccination, natural health,

co-operatives, organic food, amongst many others.

The array of practices and values which become attached to the centre

similarly become centres themselves from where a further array of parts

are monitored. For example: organic food could function as a part in the

surveillance system of attachment parenting but it will almost certainly

transform itself into a monitoring system in its own right and maintain

in its orbit an array of peripheral parts including issues of sourcing,

supply, certification, and then on into further systems of perfecting

self-sufficiency. Under the sign of surveillance existence is translated

into a matrix of distribution nodes, each carefully monitoring its

specialised input/output values. Consciousness, at the heart of the

surveillance system, is translated into a mechanism for

recognition/evaluation.

7. change controlling systems without use of controlling systems?

From the primal scene of the strange situation to a general climate of

technologised watchfulness, the practice of surveillance imbues much of

everyday life and this is often adopted in radical undertakings where

those who seek to refuse their conditions must in turn keep a close eye

on the minutiae of their activities (hence the heated conflicts in the

radical milieu over small details of definition). I have noted the

paranoid character exhibited within projects of self-management, in fact

self-management might be diagnosed as an anxiety state which has

developed into a condition of exacerbated watchfulness with particular

sensitisation towards that which is being managed.

I have noted in the example of attachment parenting how anxiety caused

by present circumstances is translated into a compulsive will towards

controlling local and intimate circumstances via the monitoring of small

details. And I have also implied that this anxiety is not shed in the

subsequent development of alternatives to present circumstances but on

the contrary the problem continues to suffuse all proposed solutions.

The condition of attachment within attachment parenting mimics the

dependence consciousness has on its most familiar objects. A

self-managed system, like a circle of settlers’ wagons arranged against

the wilderness, defines its details with a specific watchfulness and

this watchfulness is constrained to recognise the appropriate movement

of its objects within very tightly defined criteria. There is little

room for ambiguity within the circuit, objects, actions, significances

are stark and are sharply contrasted between their positive and negative

functioning.

Similarly, the perceived relation of cause and effect, when driven by an

anxiety for self-control, becomes oversimplified to the point that each

separated string of events decay into base moral instances which call

for judgement from the centre. Thus the urge to assess lists of objects:

the provenance of the coffee you drink, a baby’s cry, an other’s casual

remarks, the standing of an historical personage, food packaging, a

political idea, a style of dress, chosen mode of transport, taking a

holiday, favourite drugs, are all transformed as they pass before

self-managed consciousness, each must be described, categorised,

compared, evaluated, included/rejected — each must be retained or

rejected, each must have judgment passed on its fitness.

Self-managed systems function, ultimately, as multiple series of yes and

no. But whilst strings of simple relations between starkly defined

objects form the main object of self-managed consciousness, there is

also produced, by the very act of evaluation, a ghostly grey area, an

area of grey relations. And the presence of these external unvalued

relations further ratchet up levels of anxiety at the centre — patriots

of an old language argue over whether to use anglophone neologisms,

vegans argue over meat-substitutes, christians argue over the relevance

of post-biblical innovations.

Fundamentalism is a paranoid response to objective relativisation of

values — further ‘objective’ relativising measures result in a further

tightening of core values. For example, if a parent refuses the state

vaccination programme, this might initiate an investigation by a social

worker, as such a refusal might be interpreted as ‘neglect’. On another

front the refusal of vaccination might result in a coercive refusal of

admission to school and of medical insurance cover. In return, the

parent’s monitoring system might respond to official moves by refusing

to allow the child to attend school and denying access to it by the

social agencies. From both positions, the monitoring/security mechanism

is tightened up at the level of ‘pass/fail’ criteria for activities and

objects.

The appearances of ghosts, or dissonances, within self-managed systems

are indicators of different associations between parts and alternative

means of attributing significance. Ghosts are disturbing because they

threaten the coherence of the circuit. They indicate the process of

entropy, the loss of cohesion in the elective system. I will not propose

here that disorganisation is preferable to organisation, that is I do

not think it is better to simply go along with the state, but rather

that forces which cause disorganisation and disruption in personal life

must be included within decision making. It is important to build walls

against the outside, this is the means by which we come to know

ourselves, but these should be temporary walls which may be kicked down

easily.

The significance of self-surveying circuits is that they facilitate

continuity and cohesion, this in turn allows for accumulation of

experiences and produces a coherent identity which acts to frame

engagement with the world. However, every system should also include a

conscious acknowledgement of its internal mortality, i.e. it should come

equipped with an off switch, if only to allow those released from it to

build subsequent systems differently.

The strict systems of identity which produce living arrangements such as

‘attachment parenting’ are reliant on very simple mechanisms of

signification. But if these systems are to relativise the surveillance

aspect of their consciousness they must first adopt a different

understanding of how they come to be in their particular place — this

de-fetishisation of their perspective should help in disrupting

reproduction of established practices of ownership and control.

Surrounding the line of inheritance, negentropic spirals and the

circuits of accumulation there are also clouds of association, random

leaps, disorganisation — connection with these grey relations aids the

breakdown of the tendency in organisations to become reductive and

self-celebratory. In the example of attachment parenting, it is the

parent who is flushed with anxiety, it is the parent who is paranoically

attached, it is the parent who must learn to let go — that is, conceive

and practice the limit of its own system.

8. Two models of cause and effect

That attachment theory is not really a flight from, or response to,

‘modern alienation’ but is in fact, like powdered ‘infant formula’ milk,

just a parallel product, is sobering but no proof as such against the

methodology. All we can say is things are not as simple as they seem —

living lives based on making decisions and living according to a strict

discipline are not enough in themselves to escape the determinations of

the general social relation, nor do they seem sufficiently powerful as

gestures to cause social change beyond the limits of the self-managed

system.

This strange limiting, or holding in, of individual activity illuminates

once more the double bind of ‘control’. There are two, apparently

contradictory, models for social change. The first (activity) model

proposes that changes in activity and values causes further changes in

activity and values — multiple alterations cause multiple

transformations. The second (generalising) model contradicts the first

by interpreting decided activity and values as merely one set of

marginal activities amongst an almost infinite number of other marginal

activities which can only be understood, when considered in their

totality, as possible expressions of their moment. The second model

proposes that general changes at the level of activity only occur when

there has first occurred a transformation in the general conditions that

determine behaviour.

The ‘activity’ model responds to the ‘generalising’ model by observing

that we don’t actually live our lives at the level of the generalised

social relation and therefore to criticise activity on the grounds that

its effects are contained to the level of activity is a mystification —

a change in lifestyle is not a change in the social relation but it is a

change in lifestyle. It goes on to argue that through the formation of

elective communities which exist in flight from the general relation a

definite form for critique of general relations is developed at the

level of lived life. It is through lived experience and reflection upon

different sets of experience that the determining conditions for living

are revealed — change at the level of the social relation is not

possible without individual experience of both unhappiness and dreams of

transcending unhappiness.

Nevertheless, argues the generalising model there is no proof that even

a massive aggregation of decisive activities would have sufficient power

to transform the general social relation — human beings have never

before successfully altered the conditions of their society by means of

decision or conscious action. Control over crucial elements has always

been elusive. The wider claims of the activity model are therefore

unsubstantiated. One may only ever validate one’s acts up to the borders

of one’s own existence, beyond these borders, which are defined by

preference, there is no iron law of extrapolation.

This circling of conflicting and irreconcilable models becomes, in

itself, or so it seems to me, an illuminated regime. Neither model

entirely cancels out the other but together their mutual critiques merge

to form an entirety in the matter under discussion. It is the tension

between each pole, their orbiting, their answerlessness, rather than any

proposed resolution of the tension, that expands both the scope for

possible further development at the edge of the system, and the multiple

(and contradictory) consciousness derived from it.

The Cybernetics of Intimacy — ifinsiturcon (Reply)

The problem of not mixing metaphors is the praxis of cybernetics. The

universal metaphor (a metametaphor) is described as a language — the

formalism which demonstrates the equivalence of all situations it

describes. Thus, in cybernetic language, social relations can be

described as exhibiting the same characteristics as an electronic

circuit of hierarchical distribution of electric potential (pressure,

power) and volume (voltage), flow (current), capacity and resistance.

The surveying, extraction and production systems (the mine and factory)

can also be described this way and, not surprisingly, because it is a

good metaphor, it works well. It provides commensurability:

surveillance, detachment, production, commodity distribution.

Manipulable circuits. Control systems.

A good metaphor, the meta-metaphor is also what is known as “elegant”.

Elegance generates laws of nature. Unfortunately, we are trained that

metaphors must not be mixed except in avant garde poetry. That only

specialists can break laws recapitulates hierarchy and an interchange of

centripetal and centrifugal distribution. Power flows from negative to

positive except in ac/dc circuits, but even then, it follows predictable

and malleable pathways. It is regulated by control systems — gates

(checkpoints, offramps) and storage. No consciousness is required to

make informed decisions.

Mixing metaphors is the zoom lens in the camera bag. It allows us to

escape rigid lines of thought, to see the small in the big and vice

versa. When a metaphor such as cybernetics describes or models something

we deem important or ubiquitous, such as the inputs and outputs of

economic investments and expenditures, we see that which is described as

the model for everything else, a necessity, a law of nature. Taxonomies

are reversed. The general economy becomes the unmoving condition, the

reality behind the appearance, the law of nature, the competitive

“free-market” system which now describes universal relationships as well

as personal intimacies. Cybernetics itself is only a derivitive of

“natural” cognitive processing and the give and take, accumulative

discharges in “natural language” to facilitate manipulation and

expenditure. It is an unfortunate confusion of priorities when dynamic

life comes to mimic its static description.

The metametaphor fails when it is seen that the “real” concerns not just

electricity and plumbing circuits, but the actual fundamentals of the

mine and factory. This is our heritage. It is deep. Electrical and

hydraulic systems only pattern it. Feedback occurs when the metaphors

are mutually reinforcing (hydraulic and electronic systems). One is

always explained in terms of the other — soon they become almost

indistinguishable. Social relations become simultaneously more

regulated, self-running and efficient. We are prone to see all

observation systems as surveillance systems. They are synonyms. We

“discover”, by virtue of our universal metaphor, laws of nature. We

submit to its authority.

People who do not share our heritage of surveillance (the predatory eye

to detail), extraction and production, who do not view the environment

(whether physical or social) as a resource base, are still observers and

producers but did not undergo an industrial revolution. Surveillance has

shed an archaic meaning, but has only become more hideous since. We do

not remember our ancestors.

I love this definition:

Surveillance is characterised as a system of control which is deployed

as a tool by a wider system of control. The general purpose for the use

of surveillance is the continued reproduction of existing relations

under static conditions.

Surveillance is a basic and easily communicable means of extracting

significant information from apparently complex and multiple relations;

it encapsulates the disproportionate hierarchy that exists between

relative positions of watcher and watched. The specific content of the

hierarchy is expressed through the purpose and practical requirements

for the deployment of surveillance: first it must be decided why this

place/this group of people needs to be watched. There is no surveillance

without intent. — frere dupont

The etymology permits a less sinister notion in its earlier usage, but

there still resides a certain sense of paranoia:

SURVEILLANCE: 1802, from Fr. surveillance “oversight, supervision, a

watch,” noun of action from surveiller “oversee, watch,” from sur-

“over” + veiller “to watch,” from L. vigilare, from vigil “watchful”

(see vigil). Seemingly a word of the Terror in France. A hideous

back-formation, surveille (v.), was coined in 1960 in U.S. government

jargon. Pray that it dies.

Compare with:

OBSERVANCE: c.1225, “act performed in accordance with prescribed usage,”

esp. a religious or ceremonial one,” from O.Fr. observance, from L.

observantia “act of keeping customs, attention,” from observantem (nom.

observans), prp. of observare (see observe). Observance is the attending

to and carrying out of a duty or rule. Observation is watching,

noticing. Observant is attested from 1608; in ref. to Judaism, from

1902.

OBSERVE: c.1386, “to hold to” (a manner of life or course of conduct),

from O.Fr. observer, from L. observare “watch over, look to, attend to,

guard,” from ob “over” + servare “to watch, keep safe,” from PIE base

ser- “to protect.” Meaning “to attend to in practice, to keep, follow”

is attested from 1390. Sense of “watch, perceive, notice” is c.1560, via

notion of “see and note omens.” Meaning “to say by way of remark” is

from 1605.

With observance, one can see a circularity, a negative feedback loop

which presents an ambiguity as to just who are the watchers and who are

the watched. Hierarchy takes a step back. Outside of the clustering and

specialization (districting) of the civil relation, some “archaic”

peasants and the “uncivil” held to a “keep it living” view of the

relations between people and the environment, both social and physical.

The less opposition or separation between what we consider the dichotomy

of physical and social “realms”, the more this attitude of celebrating

life saturates all other concerns. Certainly, early christian peasants

could have had little notion of autonomy and self-actualisation in their

children when they were “producing” saintly adults immune to the stakes

and stocks reserved for heretics. — fendersën

This ‘other’ observance (or “mindset”) is coming to be called in some

circles TEK, for traditional ecological knowledge. As Khrushchev and

Lysenko discovered, aspects of it can be detached and easily co-opted by

industry. The “keep it living” part has usually been shed, but even this

is not necessary in the capitalist relation because, for example, even

though our children are surveilled, detached, exploited, moulded, and

commodified, we do not actually want to kill them in the process, only

their proverbial spirit.

An observant apple picker sees not only the specific product to be

extracted, the shiny red apple who loudly announces “pick me”, but as

well the spur to which the stem is attached. To damage this spur

prevents the appearance of an apple next year. Production declines. The

orchardist transmits less of a keep it living attitude than merely

expand surveillance duties to the apprentice picker. There is an

accumulation of trade secrets (specialisation) which maintains and

reproduces production and hierarchy. All other observances are

superfluous and run interference to the circuit — the distribution of

product. Surveillance keeps them to a minimum.

Nurturing in “attachment parenting” requires observation. There is no

product. What is observed is allowed to be. We try not to be too

conspicuously vigilant in the process. The concern is to keep it safe,

not to produce a product. It is a policy of guarded but present

non-interference. It is still describable as a cybernetic system of

flows, feedbacks and decisions, but not in a hierarchical power lathe

putting out a specific product meeting predetermined expectations. We

are not disappointed when our children do not resemble us ... and then

they do. Keeping it living is none other than Heidegger’s Öffnen sie zu

werden: “openness to being”, “flowering”.

The celebration and nurturing of a growing individuality results in a

collectivity of self-resemblance. This is hidden within the idea of

contingencies of reinforcement in operant conditioning — the

encouragement of self-motivated behaviour maintains it and not

ironically, reinforcing patterns are mimicked, imbibed, observed. It is

a matter of aesthetics. Our reproduction through punishment only creates

distortions, corruptions of us. It is a matter of neurosis. This came as

a surprise even to Skinner, who had spent a professional lifetime

concerned with surveillance and control and behavior modification toward

desired ends. Yet, put this way, there is a certain horse sense to it.

Duh! Unfortunately, Skinner and his comrades in the white labcoats may

have seen the sense of it, they were unable to envisage its profound

sociological implications beyond more efficient and complex control and

management. The discovery of the “mechanisms” or formal description of

an “openness to being” did not reproduce it. The lab must be maintained

at all costs, as it is our only means to “wisdom”. Wisdom is still

interpreted in terms of the efficiency of production and the

correspondence of the product to our expectations.

Concerning ecology, an Indian friend once said with a look of accusing

irony, it was cool that we have come to certain assessments of the

universe which resonate with native sentiments. The irony was that the

‘natives’ didn’t have to wage a 500 year war killing fifty million of us

to get there.

The fact is, we are not there, and this doesn’t mean “there” is

somewhere we need to be, a destination. That idea only keeps us vigilant

producers and our children are still commoditities. The self-managed

home is still a factory until we decide to view it as what it is, life.

“It” is already in us. “It” is not something one acquires. This line of

thinking is not confined to positing an origin and means to a terminal

end. It is about seeing bigger pictures, a superstitious perspective

which allows us to question our own confinement, where liberation or

“disalienation” is not a project and does not require liberators. This

is not to deny projects and helpers and creations. It does not deny a

militant self-defense when attacked nor a vengeful chase. It allows the

gift to lose all sense of economic value and the giving itself to become

a human value, a life value, something we esteem and pass on. Home is

not an isolation chamber but a refuge welcoming of refugees, where trade

becomes what one does with one’s enemies. In the absence of enemies, the

home is no longer confined to the house. A true sailor is at home in

every port.

When it is one’s ‘nature’, this coming into the alienating world in

which we find ourselves alienated, to “blow your mind” is not a

destructive act! It is an inspired breakthrough — this de-fetishisation

of perspective. But as you say,

The appearances of ghosts, or dissonances, within self-managed systems

are indicators of different associations between parts and alternative

means of attributing significance. Ghosts are disturbing because they

threaten the coherence of the circuit.

That there is magic and science (a continual shifting of attachments and

detachments, associations and dissociations) does not mean there are

magical or scientific solutions. There is mindfulness, but no

omniscience. Detached observation is still surveillance. Parenting is

participatory, a performance art. Revolution should be no different.

Trying to do things differently must remain organized with the

mindfulness of what it is we wish to change. Abuse is never transformed.

It is prevented, the reproductive cycle is broken. This is a matter of

interfering in the reproduction of one feedback loop so another is

“allowed’ to sprout forth. It is a slippery slope but not a double bind

to understand that we cannot be mindful of the totality of influences

nor exercise even adequate control over our situations. It does not say

“give up observation, stop making waves”. Sometimes the most influential

effects arise from the most limited intentions to control them.

And we are most pleased and surprised when we are encouraged and

allowed. Treating ourselves to this is not self-control or

self-management when mindfulness does not become vigilance, that is,

controlling. Lived life as social beings is not submission to democratic

forces. That is not what Kropotkin meant by mutual aid. It’s a matter of

mimicking what looks good (is reinforcing, encouraging, aesthetically

‘pleasing’). It only looks like democracy from a detached position, the

position of alienation. It is an anacratic system of inclusion and

choice — a practical Utopia unconfined to the future or distant lands

and where all is not roses. There are also dandelions.

FOURTH LAW OF CYBERNETICS: The openness of any circuit is proportional

to the diverstity of weeds allowed to thrive in the front lawn.

If any idea seems hitherto to have eluded all efforts to reduce it, to

have resisted down to the present time even the most out-and-out

pessimists, we think it is the idea of love, which is the only idea

capable of reconciling any man, momentarily or not, with the idea of

life.

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference

of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies

it. We can have but one great experience at best, & the secret of life

is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. — Oscar Wilde, The

Picture of Dorian Gray

Yes, I believe, I have always believed, that to give up love, whether or

not it be done under some ideological pretext, is one of the few

unatonable crimes that a man possessed of some degree of intelligence

can commit in the course of his life. A certain man, who sees himself as

a revolutionary, would like to convince us that love is impossible in a

bourgeois society; some other pretends to devote himself to a cause more

jealous than love itself; the truth is that almost no one has the

courage to affront with open eyes the bright daylight of love in which

the obsessive ideas of salvation and the damnation of the spirit blend

and merge, for the supreme edification of man. Whosoever fails to remain

in this respect in a state of expectation and perfect receptivity, how,

I ask, can he speak humanly? — Andre Breton

The intimate order [nonrepresentable and nondiscursive being] cannot

truly destroy the order of things (just as the order of things has never

completely destroyed the intimate order). But this real world having

reached the apex of its development can be destroyed, in the sense that

it can be reduced to intimacy. Strictly speaking, consciousness cannot

make intimacy reducible to it, but it can reclaim its own operations,

recapitulating them in reverse, so that they ultimately cancel out and

consciousness itself is strictly reduced to intimacy — Battaile.