Look in the Mirror, and You are the World

        As regards yesterday's post where we struggled between autobiography and philosophy and tried to figure out what was the midpoint between them, and then struggled a bit between the two art forms we saw between them, in the feeling for the image of the world-- a new realization has come to me on this subject which is that criticism lives in between memory and sensation, between analysand and analyst, criticism is very honest to the nature of the perception of time. In a way it is the most honest, maybe. Because you're not analyzing the nature of what you see, or telling your life story, but being both subjective and objective in the form of offering an evaluation. But what we find realizing that is a sort of knot to unravel between criticism and influence, and focus and amplitude.

        Criticism positions us in subjective position with regards to the objective, as the viewer and evaluator of our life, and all its component parts. This is the discourse which thereby reflects most the nature of our everyday experience, and which I believe contradicts the value of autobiographical discourse in therapy as abnormal and perverse. Its perversity derives from the implicit non-critical position this enforces with regards to your analyst, and patriarchal systems one is surrounded in. We tell our story, because we absolutely trust our analyst, and analysis, as a general factor of life. The correct position is to stand in the center and not to fragment yourself across time-- "dissolve and coagulate" runs into this-- back into criticism, because criticism is the subjective position. As a matter of fact, "influence" as artistry, synthetic amplitude, this seems a bit more suspect on a cursory glance, but I suspect what validates artistry over criticism is that artistry embodies its criticisms, it attempts to build a new social world. The good side of criticism however is this resistance against the world it continually offers, and the world is worth this resistance. Criticism is not solely about resistance, but also affirmation; it is critical in the sense of evaluative, and it emerges from unconscious affirmative reference points. However to externalize the criticism, I believe this might do something like what Jung imagined in terms of "onesidedness," in terms of the being of anything always subjecting something else to the unconscious, like the sun facing a part of the world. In the sense that we have an affirmative unconscious when we are critical and a critical unconscious when we are affirmative. What we validate always disparages something else, and what we disparage always validates something else; it may not be a case of a process of elimination at all, but just a completely connected circuit. To consider affirmation/negation a process of elimination is too systematic, too analytical a paradigm for how my loves and hates have emerged for me; it acts as if the rational mind has really been going through that process intellectually, as opposed to swerving left and right in a scatter pattern of attraction and repulsion. 

        Thinking of this as such a magnetism rather than a rationalism might be a key way to surpass banal emotion/reason dichotomies from the past. Any affirmative evaluation is like a magnet with two opposite poles, one side which identifies what repels the object in question, and another side which identifies the object in question, and draws it to itself. So when engaged in criticism, we are identifying the antithesis of the thing we value, or attempting to, looking around for a repulsion. Or rather, this is just a metaphor for the fact that it is this presence, this connection, relation to what is affirmed, which is triggered in a negative sense by the experience of criticism. We sense the resistance to that valued thing which is affirmed and identified with. And this is basically both philosophy and autobiography, because the innate value system originates in the psyche's identifications and valuations reflected in its story/memory, and philosophy because this valuation involves itself in an analysis of the world. And so criticism is a big industry, it happens all the time, on all social media, in so many places and from so many voices, in every mind, gazing upon the world and society and likely, not very happy with things. We get to hit two birds with one stone, autobiography and philosophy, and exist-in-the-world, our feeling for things. And yet.

        Isn't there something like the de facto acceptance of the patriarchal system implicit in criticism, no matter how contrary it runs to popular tastes? The most radical critic imaginable still seems an emblem of the media and the government rather than an artist. I sit here and have a withering appraisal of some of what I am looking at. But in dedicating myself to criticizing this thing I am looking at, I am in some sense enforcing its existence. If I do not like this thing, I may think those thoughts about how I do not like this thing, but when I share them, I externalize myself as an object, a critical object which now stands next to the thing I am criticizing negatively. So what we have is an issue with discourse, with how discourse externalizes the subject into an object, even after we get out of the analyst-analysand dichotomy. Criticism may be very "true" to the nature of everyday reality, but the externalization of this adds a level of unreality, and demeans the impact of the criticism. Because the criticism must then be established in a social order one is critically disposed to, and for that social order to welcome that criticism might be a way of protecting itself from what it says; permitting an airing of grievances as a way of demonstrating how the grievances are unreasonable, for if we are permitting these grievances how can they be warranted? Thus criticism as a facet of a social order is the means by which criticism is neutralized, and becomes the criticism of the social order towards the individual, not the individual's criticism of the social order. 

        Without even involving ourselves in that discussion of how any successful manifestation of political discourse in the social order becomes appropriated by it, and wielded by it against its subjects, we can see how-- ontologically, I suppose-- our critical evaluation of the world, when objectified in a discourse, becomes itself an image of the world, for which we have a feeling. This essentially alienates ourselves from our own critical appraisal. If we externalize our criticism, we become the image of the world which it is criticizing, in a sense. This is another reason why comedy may be so useful a way of sharing criticism, completely aside from the censorship issue, but because it represents criticism as an object, a facade, a world. We are allowed to be critical without disembodying our criticism from its emotional origin.

        So when we speak about the most valuable form of discourse, with regards to unchangeable existential factors, we cannot exclude-- in our emphasizing that remaining embodied in our own existence, in our continuity, is our unchangeable drive-- that discourse is an synthetic externalization. Etymologically, discourse means "to run away," or "to run to and fro." It is basically to run over things, to run from subject to subject in a stream of consciousness. But we look at "dis" and it is a glaring negative, coupled with "course." Why is not a particular mode of communication just a "course"? But what we call a "course" is the class we take, the course we take, an educational journey. A discourse is something else, is a genre in a bookstore, with items beneath it. It is not a path we are taking, but a path taken out of us. And so a criticism ultimately produces something not useful to its own stated intentions. A criticism is useful to us mentally, as we look upon the world, but the second we pull it out of ourselves and into a discourse, it is no longer criticism, though it may wear that name. 

        In reference to earlier remarks on this blog on "continuity" and "discontinuity," we may see a connection with these ideas to the ideas of "course" and "discourse." The course we are on provides the terms of our survival, and is, as we have defined, our feeling for the image of the world, but the discourse is always our contribution to the world, the social order, which is a direct sculpture of that feeling. One sees how we fall into a bit of an Apollonian/Dionysian trap here, of will and representation. But it only seems to have that degrading effect ascribed to that process of representation upon criticism, upon the violence of criticism, which any evaluation is bound to mean, no matter how positive. To eschew illusions about how positive it is to share affirmations with the world, consider the sight of Oscar winners, or overhearing someone having sex. The sight of someone degraded or celebrated by the social order may be equally disturbing, Oscar winners on the same street as homeless people in Los Angeles, depending on how much or little one is alienated from the public verdict. In this specific case, one can't be indifferent; the homeless people are innocents, and the Oscar winners are hacks. The dimension of the social world represented by that verdict I have just made is corrupt to my view, but conversely, if I were to share my own critical affirmation, celebrating what I celebrate without even making a cultural critique, with the social group who are responsible for destroying innocent people and celebrating cultural mediocrity, they would be likewise horrified. These verdicts are as horrific and exciting as sexuality; sexuality is different from optimism or rational love, in that it is a manifest act of violence, preferential on one side of the coin, and derogatory on the other. 

        And the social order subjugates sexuality, criticism, by drawing it to itself, such that the trophies given or punishments meted out to our individuals, spoken from whatever voice, whatever organization, are always coming from the social order. No matter how much a magazine, or a university, or an intellectual, fancies themselves anti-establishment, just to participate in the public sphere identifies your critical appraisals with the voice of the society. And thereby pacifies the impact of whatever is possibly beneficial in what you're sharing, because society is saying it, so the criticisms have been addressed. This is the negative virtue of self-externalization; all valuations so-shared become recognized by the social order and thus a new testament to its freedom. To become, to participate in a "discourse" is a careful thing to do, because you now have projected your image into a mirror, and if the mirror-image is before you, who are you? You are now the world. So the only reason you want to do that, really, is because you love the way the world works. You identify with it, and so you make of your course a discourse. And you've gone to a therapy session, effectively, though in the, perhaps, vertical arrangement between memory/sensation, analysand/analyst. (Referencing personal Psychic Compass paradigm.) You've intellectualized your criticisms, and created a discourse out of your course. 

        Rotating criticism on the Jungian circle or the magnet around, one finds "influence." And yet we have been mixing terms a bit here, since criticism is both affirmation/negation. So, to be clear, "influence" is something other from evaluation/criticism. And it is more akin to previous discussions about "amplitude." 

        Basically the odd place we've gotten to is considering the "course" of life as critical, as an interpretation of the phenomena we experience in a language of valuation we might call musical also. Which is informed by memory, although, to say it is entirely informed by memory is to make a tabula rasa argument, that our experience gives us what we are. I'm not sure I have the arguments to back this up yet, but I suspect there are personal a priori's, things inherent to ourselves, which we might say are physiological, though of course, they may be psychological also, in the sense that we can't even really place what that is. Or it seems irrelevant and crazy to try to. It seems like there are containers relevant to a person's life but I'm not sure I'd call them archetypal, because this wires us into the social. They seem far too quiet for archetypes, they are just energies, things between the forms, not in them, hypnotic and ungraspable but observable, rhymes, connections, dream-logic. And I think they are subjective containers, which people walk into and fill, almost magically. And so where it comes to "influence" and those dynamics, people who influence us do so because they walk into a position where we're already open to that influence. This might be an issue to encounter at a later date, an idea of subjectivity and maybe hypno-types, something in this but I just want to follow through on this issue of discourse.

        So criticism and influence, where influence is a name for art. And what I've been barreling my way to saying this whole time is that art externalizes the subject, into an object, in such a way that criticisms are not appropriated by a social order, thank you very much, but rather an aesthetic comment is made, an affirmation, a thing of beauty, which expresses a value system, and gives us an image of a social order, which is not the social order necessarily. It can be, but that doesn't mean it has to be. The aesthetic says everything about what it affirms and what it negates, but it does so in the form of an object, not a subject. The song or poem is strange because it is subjective, yet owing to the musicality, the subjectivity is destabilized into ambiguity. Similarly the film or fiction has a musical sub-structure to it. Criticism converts a musical sub-structure into an intellectual over-structure, and therefore you look at the mirror, and you are the world, not the self. With the musical sub-structure maintained, one maintains the position of subjectivity, of feeling for the image of the world. The poet looks at their poem and does not see their self-image, but sees the world through their perspective. The poem or the fiction are both a photograph, which is a photograph of both the world and the perspective on the world at once. The viewer's perception is maintained, no need for trans-subjectivity, the song/poem leave the image of the world in tact, and the fiction/film provide an image of the world to contextualize. And this seems the main difference between them, that the song/poem contextualizes this world you see, and that the fiction/film speculates into another world. But its sort of like the words in the song are the sight-of-the-world of the film, and their tonality is the judgment that makes the work aesthetic, a valuation. So the landscape v. portrait distinction I have made between poetry and fiction may be drastically overstated by myself. It's all singing. 

        And this is "aesthetic discourse," this presentation of the sight-of-the-world, plus feeling-valuation. The critical element continues to be represented by musicality, without intellectual translation. This vindicates the individuality of the art-form, the individual perspective of it, rather than its being the voice of a social order. It is not an opinion, but an emotionalized sight-of-the-world. The opinion becomes entrapped in the mirror, and subjectivity is frozen. You give yourself to the mirror, and you are the world, the social order. And this may be the most corrupting thing you can ever do. It is to become an extension of the will of the social order, which is clearly nothing especially good. It may not be the worst thing in the world, no need to be dramatic, but it's not something to affirm. It's not something you can influence by criticizing it, because in participating in critical discourse you become the social order's criticism. "Aesthetic discourse" works because it projects, does not reflect. The camera films a reality, and then what the finished film is what the camera shot, the expression rather than the entrapment of the subjectivity who took the footage.  And this of course is influential, because it begins to recreate the social order, based on the values of an individual, and so there is a concerted campaign to either prevent people from being able to share their work with others, or to influence them if they have a voice. It is as if even the ones who do not know that aesthetic discourse is the most powerful, were committed to thwarting it. 

        This is influential because it comes as amplitude, as music, it does not command with arguments of focus, but shifts focus. Autobiography, analysis, and criticism. The first two ways of splitting a person, the latter one a way of taking someone's subjectivity away from them.