So here's where I'm at. I've been focusing on self-valuation a lot as the essence of being, considering that being has no alternative but to prefer itself to nothingness, and so that all "presences" are "auto-valuations." The main purpose of this is to create a linkage between reality and pleasure principles in the psyche, and to liberate the psyche from both Jungian mysticism and Freudian guilt, for-- and this is what I believe salvages a line of thinking I expressed earlier in "The Reality of Intelligence"-- if valuation is unconscious, then desire and wish fulfillment isn't necessarily unconscious, all it says is that a value-system of "presences," an intelligence which preferences what it discerns, would show up in unconscious phenomena, but that desire and willing would remain a conscious occupation.
However, presences being self-valuation does bring us face-to-face with the problem of narcissism, and the problem of explaining-- as I believe I was deluding myself wasn't so in a nevertheless productive questioning of assumptions-- unconscious sexuality, and the non-intellectual (or so it would seem, more on this later) origin of sexual energy. If desire comes about as energy, how is it profitable to say that it is not unconscious? How is Schopenhauer not wrong to equate music with willing? Maybe he is not wrong, but wrong to say that the willing is strife, and again in some perverse backhanded way we end up slightly agreeing with Nietzsche that the joy of life is the taking-action, not the contemplation.
After all, willing can't be strife since the strife only exists in a contrary will; and only in the representation is that conflict evident or existent. So contemplation of the representation thereby is a pretty bad prescription for happiness or aesthetic joy, and rather, contemplation of the will is the better prescription, because thereby you witness it as oneness, as the unity of all force and life-desire. Hence people worship God, Luke Skywalker learns about "the Force," et cetera, because contemplation of a unified will makes people happy, and contemplation of the representation of the World makes people want to shoot themselves, because the World is constantly in this violent relation to itself. Which, if Schopenhauer's correct, and there's this chain of representations, could be a result of progressive deviation, a copy of a copy of a copy, which begins to introduce distortions. Maybe.
Well, one idea I had from before this blog started must be brought into the fray at this point, to just see where it lands with these other ideas, and that's the rather intense insight I had in response to my irritation with archetypal psychology that-- despite my attempt to dismiss mythologies and images, and to favor music as this fountain of love, it must be said that where there is sexual energy there are sexual archetypes, a self-and-other conjunction which is evidently imagistic. And this seems one of my best insights I've had, that sexual energy cannot be a completely unmoored libido that's raging like a striving will and harnessed by representations to some sort of arbitration. Sexual energy must be like a spark that's cast from the conception of a linkage of sexual bodies, of whatever sort. And so therefore I explained the idea that the unconscious is constituted of valuation and that desire is a conscious phenomenon, by way of saying that unconsciously, our psyche is not centered on an ego or a self, but nor is it de-centered in an inchoate mass of instincts. And in a way I hate saying this because it means I'm agreeing with Jung, who counterposes modalities and instincts, and considers instincts ecto-psychic and modalities endo-psychic.
I, really, don't go that far exactly. (I feel myself getting pissed off.) But I do consider "desire" ecto-psychic, and that leads me back to an old consideration I had that the dreaming psyche was actually not as sexual as the waking psyche, that the orgasm, if you will, was actually the peak experience of being unified with the logic of the waking world, arousal and waking were one and the same. The peak experience of the dream-world was actually the valley experience of maximum withdrawal from the world, and maximum sexual disinterest. Freud's idea only makes sense if you exclude the body, and think about things culturally. A completely physical analysis bears out what I'm saying. Now certainly Freud's right to see intellectual energy as capable of displacing sexual energy, of being a repressive seal upon it. But that is still a further level of phenomenon interceding upon the physical dynamic I'm illustrating.
So, back to how valuation is unconscious, and how it is made manifest and conscious in desire. I really wanted to fight the archetypes, which put me into an intellectually honest position, because I had to accept the existence, narrow and conditional, of sexual archetypes, because sexual energy presupposed a relationship to imagery a priori. And that unconscious valuation really sums this up as a self-and-other relationship, a conjunction of self-image and other-image that creates a reality-desire. And further liberating myself from old-fashioned talk about animus and anima, I'm saying self-and-other could be gendered any which way, in fact involves a complete aesthetic arrangement of a plurality of factors which are valued, that could express homosexuality or heterosexuality et cetera, or nonbinary identity. It just makes sexual relationship the lynchpin of sexual energy, rather than seeing that as unrestrained and captured by some erotic, bodily relationship. Rather than unrestrained, sexual energy is caused by the kind of modal opposition Jung talks about, though its not opposition, but covalence, and it's not these dismal mystical categories of the god Mercurius.
What's disturbed me about my thinking as of late-- and has been tied into the plate of experiences life is serving up to me-- is that my valuation theory which privileges immanence over transcendence, presence as preferable to nothingness and hence setting up an logic of perception that is not independent from desire and pleasure-- solves the problem of a delusion of "becoming" by way of picking sides, of staying on the side of "being." And so being is self-valuation, even without, let us say there being a self-as-such that is valued. Being/presence always values itself, because there is no alternative, and this is like an elemental formula that one sees echoing down the ranks of conclusions, convictions, and perspectives, even where there is a choice between two "presences," they are always measured against the obviousness of that preference for being over nothingness. (Even the will-to-death, the will-to-nothing, I believe is a conceited appraisal which has projected presence on nothingness in the face of life's supposed meaninglessness.) The problem with this is that it is an agonistic binary, a war between presence and absence, in the sense that one is privileged over the other.
So we have to add something to that binary of presence and absence, or recognize what's a priori, in order to negotiate the valuation theory with the sexual archetype theory. And this is somewhat a relief to me to recognize, and it's very much like to what I was saying in the previous post about the "Dream-Mind" vis a vis the inescapability of the transcendental category of perception, since even Schopenhauerian will comes about as a representation. (What an annoyance that Schopenhauer can be wise enough to contradict Kant on the score of perception being intellectual without the intercession of mind, and then use that critique of Kant to just barrel ahead with a theory of will, which makes me want to turn back to Kant, despite the mind-mind-mind fixation on concepts. One can see somewhat how Schopenhauer finds will inside perception in this way, by making it intellectual, by seeing it as capable of discerning causality through perception, without concepts, with the understanding. It's this athleticism, this muscularity of the understanding with regards to its perception that begins to feel like the permutations of will he sees in music. Perhaps we could also say-- having used such terms-- that the understanding is a "grasping," and so related to physical innervation. Ah, so perception is willing? Yes, but then we perceive it as representation, we grasp our grasping, and we cannot will what we will, let alone know it through that famous idea of a fallacy.) Anyway, huge train-wreck of getting mentally distracted in that parenthesis, but what I was going for here initially is that to preference presence over absence, and this is where we get into a strange place, there must be a perception to do it as a third thing. "No object without a subject."
"You can do what you will, but you cannot will what you will." This reminds me of a thought process I had as concerned perception and will. One time I found myself saying to myself, "You have to STOP telling yourself what to do!" And recognizing the absurdity of that, I laughed and then just felt like intensely reflective on what that remark expressed about the mind, and myself, and out of that I realized that it was only through violence that anything was ever commanded anywhere. Commands have no inherent power, only the association with violence makes commands get followed. So you can tell yourself what to do, but unless you're willing to make yourself suffer-- or unless you spontaneously suffer-- for not following the commandments, that won't mean much. Outside of violence, however, how does the mind accomplish any direction of our will? Does it just sit there jabbering on? And this leads me back to the "Reality of Intelligence" idea, in which I suggested that reality-principles unconsciously sculpt the nature of our sexual energy, and that if things "repress" it they're probably customary things or psychological things that really don't touchdown into true reality-principles. For what I concluded then was that only through knowledge and truth did the mind take us to account in any way for our actions, in the same way that our visual perception of the world completely controls our interaction with it. In only those ways in which our mind establishes reality as definitively as do the other senses does it have any true, non-ephemeral power over us. And at the time I considered this the process of inquiry, of question-and-answer, as contrasted with command, and that our thoughts style themselves commands and principles, but really only facts make anything happen as a lasting ethos.
Again, this may demonstrate that will depends on the perception, that will is designed by perception. And platitudes and sentiments may get us drunk on some course of action for a time but we always come back to what we think is true, what we know to be true. And this lets us bring back the issue of narcissism into this in a new way, because narcissism, the self-as-principle, has this odd relationship to the reality-principle. It would seem that our own "reality," who we are, what we know to be true about ourselves, is something we are liable to, and which we must privilege and presence, as being preferences itself over absence in self-valuation. However that self-conception can enter a lot of a fuzzy areas of mythologizing, of romanticisms of group alliance, and the self wherever it exists is this complex being that is related to a very wide range of factors, which can make the emphasis on one factor become a very sort of irrational thing, where one denies other things that make them who they are in the delight of one thing that makes them who they are, and that doesn't have to be this "shadow" situation since the denied other things may not be anything too troublesome, just maybe things that aren't socially and/or psychologically easy to rejoice in being. It would seem impossible to contain all the unique characteristics of what makes a person what they are inside any mythology, or indeed, any philosophy. The container of a concept of any sort will not do the job, so of what use are the a priori categories if they cannot be used to see one's self? I believe this self-organization, that is self-recognition, can only in any scenario be considered as an aesthetic category, as a stylistic assessment. We do not get the sense of a "self-symbol" from Christ or Buddha as Jung believes, but something closer to that from Joyce and Picasso, or Jung himself, in a way, though far more weakly than we know Joyce or Picasso. And that's because Jung is identified with his philosophies and you have to work at thinking about his Red Book paintings or be very familiar with his writings to have a sense of him as an aesthetic category, which I would say I do.
The self can only be conceptualized as an aesthetic category, which is to say, as a "style." And that is why I mention Joyce and Picasso, because they're very famous artists who emblematize, symbolize something to people, whether you're a fan or not, you can just put a stamp on something and say, that's Joycean or that's Picassoean. Or today, Lynchian, Kubrickian, Beatlesy. Kandiskian. The point is what you think of is analogous to what you might think of a friend, family member, confidante, lover, in the sense that it's just a fragrance of someone's "vibe," and doesn't amount to an ideological, official position. So you can see that kind of artistic fame as problematic, and maybe it is, but, it is still a cultural reflection of how the self appears in everyday life and Jung has his head up his ass: Christ is a symbol of the self, Geez Louise, what a crock of shit. Christ is a symbol of God, or no one would talk about him.
So this brings us back to unconscious sexual energy, the idea of the self as the archetype of an aesthetic category, the "presence" of which as unconscious "will" that we cannot will, or self-valuation, does not in-itself as a schema of unconsciousness explain how desire emerges as conscious experience. It is the reality-principle of self, taken to its furthest exponent in which conceptual and symbolic organization dissipates, or is condensed within something bigger than any definite form, but what must be defined as aesthetic energy, which can be taken-- yet-- as a category and as a symbol. But here's the thing about this kind of symbol-- the Kandinsky painting at the top symbolizes the Kandinskyian, as something bigger than what it actually symbolizes, it symbolizes the sensibility of its author, a la, how the world would symbolize God for people. So we see a whole series of paintings of an apple made in an art class and what we see is not just the archetypal apple but the archetype of self, given many different characterizations as the artist is disposed to render the apple out of their own sensibility. Perhaps the problem I have with archetype is that of "type," maybe we should start there. Because a style is really not much of a "type," it doesn't establish itself in so rigorous a semantic system of patterns. The style is like an inception point from which the types, the variety of representative categories, like mythology, philosophy, how one looks, all serve to be contained by and to create. We have a style, Joycean, and then we describe it: type of this, type of that, type of this, etc. And yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and here the phenomena is the noumena, because it's like explaining an apple in all of its meanings, and then looking at one and taking a bite. All those awful screenwriting books, including some inspired by Joseph Campbell, which dissect popular movies and old myths and want to provide an instant blockbuster recipe out of all that, rather than admit, you know, get into the workshop and start experimenting, what the fuck do we know about what's good. Here's some reasons why this or that is good, but you'll spontaneously imitate that if it's good for you. The phenomena is the noumena where it comes to the aesthetic, the medium is the message, because it gives us the aesthete in question as a style, which then is author of all those individual categories. And really this coheres with Schopenhauer and Kant's a priori mentality, though it demonstrates that the logical mechanics don't give it to you totally.
If I'm right about the self, then it's true that any object is only totally knowable as an aesthetic object, because from the aesthetic, which transcends logical dissection, everything you can find in it through analysis is presupposed, authored by the original feeling/style. And this is not so pollyanna a metaphysics, since animals behave this way all this time in how they evaluate what to eat, and what makes them comfortable or uncomfortable. Existence is essence, and when an object comes before perception, in Greek, the aesthetic, it is known before it is known, for its aesthetic surface is expressive of everything that one will find inside it. Every characteristic that can be logically read into that object will be a derivation of what the aesthetic initially proscribes as knowledge of the object. Now, objections can be made: you can't judge a book by its cover, or beautiful people are monsters. Neither objection concerns the aesthetic. Covers are not the book, the book is the text, but flip to a random page and get a feel for a random selection of prose, you have examined thereby the aesthetic surface of the book. The point is you don't have to analyze to the bottom the ideas or situations contained within a book to see that those ideas and situations will be prefigured by the aesthetic surface, the poetry, of the prose you capture in a random selection. Aesthetic surfaces are not masks of concealment. The same goes for "beautiful people." There are very many widely-considered "beautiful people" I don't find especially attractive for my own psychosexual reasons. "Beautiful people" is a social construct, and somatically dependent, in the sense that a not-so-beautiful person (in physical terms) can appear more sexually attractive for their physical fitness than a more beautiful person (in physical terms). And beauty is clearly in the eye of the beholder: why do we assume there are universally beautiful people when we cannot agree on music, movies, artists, et cetera? What is sure is that there are commonly beautiful people, just as there is popular music and movies, an aesthetic which appeals to a wide bell-curve of people, which is no guarantee that I or anyone else will find the thing/person in question beautiful, or that is is the most beautiful. "Beautiful people" has always been euphemistic in my mind for a popular kind of beauty, which people may consent to upholding as their personal ideal for fear of alienation more than true desire. You name an example of a person universally considered attractive, and then you name an example of when someone expressed the beauty of someone and you found it mystifying. But here we could have solved our problem much quicker by saying that this doesn't have that much to do with beautiful/ugly, which is always a dichotomy that opens the door to clichés and bad maxims. This is more like "a beauty," then "the beauty," which is what we mean when we talk about "style." And so we are free to trust what our eyes tell us, if, and only if, we look at the true aesthetic surface, which is not the form of concealment and it is not where we rank something in a subjective hierarchy of aesthetic. It is aesthetic category, quality not quantity. So, in other words, look at two conventionally beautiful faces, universally beloved, and there is something different you can discern in the the two faces, some different prefiguration of the identifications held within.
Still, I keep deferring the philosophical problem that has me write. That the self is an aesthetic category tells me that it is not a type, because a type implies a reduction: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Rather than, millions of possible shades, and the aesthetic category would be defined as one of those millions of possible shades, so to speak, and then within its logical definition, we'd say for a red-orange shade for example, related to color-type, red, and orange, hertz value such-and-such, etc. And everything would follow from the individual color. A type implies a set number of modalities, rather than a capacity for infinite modalities, and modalities within that modalities. The aesthetic category is a category that contains typologies, which can only be expressed by the in-itself. Really we are talking about a "style," which functions like a category of authorship, so if we asked "what type of style does such-and-such have?" We would usually get a series of typologies: blunt, sensuous, etc. Or in Jungian personality type language, INFP--which just goes to show you how obnoxious this thinking is, that there's only 16 personalities, when there's far more than that in the art-world. Far more than 16 discreet original styles of art and no real benefit of reducing them down to a smaller system if only so Jung can jack off on a mandala. There's a humane assumption that psychiatrists are predisposed against that when you start characterizing someone with a string of adjectives, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and not because it's contained in some shitty myth, and that you probably only skim the surface of the adjectives close to your mind and your own relationship with a person. That in describing the Kandinsky painting above, we might never run out of adjectives, of typologies, to define what we see there. We won't. A style is a word for which there is no limited definition.
Now a stupid painting by a stupid person-- and for all my Jung-bashing, I'd never bash his beautiful artwork, I have to say-- is going to be called unoriginal, that is derivative of other artists, a word with a bounded definition. Or, it is going to be considered as "didactic," as something with a meaning we can take away in an instant, like propaganda. Art will be-- no matter what fucking critics say about its political meaning or how its "right for right now" or some crap-- always privileged on the basis of it not belonging to our existing language. That gets it admired and talked about, and then the critics start dissecting the poor animal out of the perverse desire to claim that dissection gives the animal life. It's only for a work of art's not belonging to discourse that gets assholes interested in the first place in making it belong to discourse, otherwise they'd turn their nose up to it or not even stop to notice. "Chinatown" made serious bank and everyone loves it, because it's great, so dumbasses like Syd Field have to claim that their theories will cook you up another Chinatown, and he's the most benign version of this mentality in the universe. Similarly, we could say, you won't get laid because you read Freud.
So, we can say, self-valuation is being is auto-preference, and the only way to composite all the varieties of reality-knowledge about the self this entails is not inside a concept but inside a style, which gives all the information, as all the information is attributes which are parts reflective of a whole. And we have a problem I keep failing to talk about due to my getting distracted. Which is that the argument can be made-- well, then all sexual energy is narcissism-- self-appraisal of aesthetic style, and we project that aesthetic style on other things and get validated by them, and sometimes we do that in the form of attribution, identifying ourselves with something and then identifying something else with that, and love is but the displacement of unconscious self-regard. Yeah, this happens, but it doesn't explain sexual energy, for many reasons, but one of the basic objections to make to this is that this "attribution" involves an analysis of the aesthetic style of the self, which occurs within consciousness. And so that is no evidence of unconscious narcissism, because it has to be manifested in this way. Still beyond "attribution," there is idea of unconscious attribution, of just being struck by something's resemblance to ourselves without articulating it as such, and admiring it. If this were so, there were no heterogeneity in attraction, then mirrors would always be blissful to some degree no matter how we felt about our bodies, homosexuality more normative than heterosexuality, and masturbation more appealing than sex.
Valuation and preference is more akin to satisfaction than desire, and so in this way, we agree with Freud's idea of wish fulfillment, being the essence of dreams, but give it a different spin, in the sense that the wish is already granted there and no argument or censorship intrudes upon it yet, and also that means the wish is not so centrally important. So dreams being wish fulfillment gives us a different picture than Freud's of things only peripherally being related to wishes, but centrally related to valuation. Really wish fulfillment or satisfaction is only how the desirous mind would think about a dream-world generated out of facts and values rather than agendas and wishes. In short I contend there is an a priori sexual Other which causes sexual desire in conscious life for its absolute presence in unconscious life, and this is what Jung referred to as anima and animus. Like the Platonic idea of love being the separation of one being, or the Gnostic idea of the syzygy, unconsciously we are composed of a Self and Other, which conceptually requires that it remain unconscious, because the conscious self is just that, a fragmentation of an unconscious self/other, which cannot become totally conscious or it would disintegrate ordinary perception; it must be externalized. And I say Self and Other rather than specify genders because this accounts for all sorts of sexuality and doesn't "cramp anyone's style." That sexuality involves a Self and Other seems in no way objectionable, but such liberally-minded ideas have been wrong before.
The sexual energy that has its source in the unconscious is active in life through externalization, and then passive in sleep through internalization, because in dreams we are capable of discoursing with an inner Other, demonstrably rooted in our own psychic energy. So a shock of recognition, anima/animus projection, does take place, of sorts, rooted in whatever our Other-conception is in dreams, and the fragmentation that waking life means creates desire which is muted during dreams. But what does this Other mean? What is its relationship to the aesthetic category of the Self, as an aesthetic category?
This is what I keep trying to say and keep being blown off course by other things that occur to me. We can return to our simple metaphysics: being privileges being over nothingness, and self-valuation is thereby being, and self-consciousness, self-perception, since being only does this if it is self-perceiving. But-- and this seems more important than anything-- being must exist inside being. For if it does not, it does not exist. Being must be located in being, as the self sees a world, as the dreamer sees a world. From this we reach the radical metaphysical conclusion that the world must exist in a "something" or else it does not exist. Existence, being, the object creates an endless chain of itself, because it must always be located in itself, and if that is represented, it cannot be represented without continuous Matryoshka dolls. Therefore the Self as aesthetic category conceives of, or is conceived by, an Other as an aesthetic discourse, which we might know as perception. And this is what is strange: how the aesthetic category as dynamic conceptualization of the self, as a style, puts to one side the identification with perception. To know ourselves, to think of ourselves, to be conscious of ourselves, or to have a will we cannot will, is to convert self from perception to representation and other from representation to perception, as happens continuously in a conversation.
The Other is what we know in ourselves when we look at ourselves. Since the Self is a representation, the Other is perception, and the Self is representation of perception/the Other, and the Other is perception of representation/the Self. And the Other's perception is aesthetic as the Self is an aesthetic category. In waking life, perhaps it could be said we are not free to be perception, we must be Selves, images, aesthetic categories, we are visible and must consider our visibility, not our seeing. Again this gets back to "The Reality of Intelligence," and the idea of flipping the placement of reality-principle and pleasure-principle. In dreams we are Self/Other, perception and style, and when we are awake, a sexual desire is created to unify with our perception in another person. And perception provides the truly universal part of the equation.
And maybe most importantly-- this perception itself becomes a separate aesthetic category from the aesthetic category of the Self, its own representation of what stylistic world "contains" the Self's style as a form of being within being. So this is not a case of a hand drawing a hand but of Matryoshka Dolls, in which the Self is contained in the Other, as representation is contained in perception. Being is preferred to non-being, and then being exists inside larger being. So narcissism is not enough, though self-preference is a factor in what is our other-preference, yet the Other is always larger than the Self, and not just larger but a container, a discourse, an eye for the image of the Self. What is responded to aesthetically or sexually is a vaster experience than narcissism, for in that self-appraisal, something else in our "selves" does the appraising.
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