From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Postmodern Reflections - Accept the risk
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 11:08:24 -0600


Glen,

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but let me make it clear that what I
wrote about 'safe sex' in the context of emotional relationships was
meant to be ironical. I wasn't offering the simulacrum as a cure for a
loveless world. 

Clearly, the way I see it, a healthy relationship demands my own
self-revelation to the Other and this revelation always involves a risk.
My very willingness to be seen opens me up to the possibility that I may
be rejected-when I am seen for whom I am.  I am willing to take this
risk because ultimately I want to be accepted for who I really am, at
the core of my being. Otherwise, love remains just a masturbatory
fantasy. 

I would argue both Aristotle and Epicurus said similar things about this
within the context of the Greek concept of Friendship (which was fair
more inclusive than ours) in their ethical writings.

The question then arises (and it has been briefly discussed here
recently) doesn't this presume the 'jargon of authenticity'.  How do I
know I even have a real self, especially today when everything becomes a
heady spectacle of the Empire. As Charles Olson once put it:

"o my people where shall you find it, how where, where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when all, even silence, is spray-gunned?"

I think Philip K. Dick's novels were a continued meditation on this very
theme - how do you become real in a world where everything is fake? In
the appendix to his novel Valis he writes:

"22. I term the Immortal one a plasmate, because it is a form of energy;
it is living information. It replicates itself-not through information
or in information-but as information.

23. The plasmate can crossbond with a human, creating what I call a
hosmoplasmate. This annexes the mortal human permanently to the
plasmate,  We know this as "birth from above" or "birth from the
Spirit." It was initiated by Christ, but the Empire destroyed all the
homoplasmates before they could replicate."

I know this also sounds like a paranoid fantasy, but that is also
typical of everything Dick writes - a kind of ontology of paranoia. (The
Greek word literally means para=beyond and nous=mind.) What is
interesting to me about this formulation is the way its mirrors Badiou's
concept of ethics, albeit in a hyped-up druggy kind of way. Dick's
concept of the plasmate somehow correlates to the sense of the
authentic.

George Orwell, in his "Homage to Catalonia", saw the way things he had
experienced first-hand about the Spanish Civil War were so completely
distorted by the government and the media that he recognized history in
the traditional sense had ended.  Henceforth reality would be merely a
branch office of the Public Relations Department.

Thus any sense of who we are as authentic beings comes under increasing
pressure. This relates to our concerns about security because
authenticity is, as Wittgenstein recognized, all about feeling safe.

Under the new jargon of authenticity, this very diminishment becomes a
cause for celebration by the powers that be. As the public sector
becomes privatized our insecurity is increased and this is euphemized as
a new triumph of choice and freedom. 

The reality is that unless each one of us can make an impact upon the
bottom line, we become expendable.  The product life of humans is
thereby shortened considerably.  What I find interesting here in the US
is the extension of misery that is currently taking place. Until the
recent past, much of the real grief was previously confined to the
underbelly of the so-called New Economy; the nickled-and-dimed working
poor who remained invisible for the media. Under the current
circumstances, the rising level of unemployment has extended itself into
the professional and middle-class as well. Now they too are beginning to
feel the pinch and this pinch will not simply go away when and if the
economy rebounds. 

Given the domestic approach of the Bush administration, such conditions
will probably only be exacerbated in the near future and the real
specter of insecurity that is haunting us seems like one that will
probably develop into the following scenario.

The reality of current day Capitalism is such that only a percentage of
the population is needed to fill the available jobs.  This creates huge
pressures upon the masses to conform to compete for the relative
security these jobs offer and conventional wisdom tells them that only
those who keep silent and uncritical will outperform the ones who do
not. 

This creates a vision of the world composed of a relatively small class
of insecure insiders living in maximum security homes and offices (that
more and more resemble wealthy prisons) while others outside experience
a gnashing of teeth and toxic insecurity as they roam from temp job to
temp job in a vast parody of liberal freedom.  The paradox of freedom in
our times is this - as personal choice expands to infinity, more and
more you find there is nothing there you really wanted anyway. 

Isn't another concept of freedom, one that doesn't engender increased
insecurity as its byproduct, necessary-a freedom that doesn't merely
involve increasing our choices, but one that allows us to become who we
really are?  Otherwise, another generation, even younger than us, may
ask: "Freedom, why bother?"

eric