Repetition Compulsion: to be, or not to be.

Only the very safe can talk about wrong and right.

-Floyd Red Crow Westerman

My good friend's Gaelic granny had a trite response to any sudden vicissitude: "You live in hope, you die in despair". Such seems to be my lot as a philosophical blogger. With the rash optimism of the dilettante, I address basic points of a topic, state what my conclusions will be, lay out my premises and push through the main stages of an argument - before dropping the post like a ton of Sisyphean brick as soon as I'm faced with the final forceful heave that will bring it to a close. Again. And again. I've got eight half-written posts to this blog, still not published at all. Part III of my essay on Sanitivity is published in an unfinished condition as I write this, and numerous earlier pieces that could be doing with a touch of spit and polish are left in full view of these here public interwebs.

Why don't I just complete one project before moving onto the next?  That is the million dollar question of my life, and the lives of so many others. Of course, there's no point to being too self-critical: I'm using the blog to give some order and coherence to my rather unorthodox opinions, and as they say... Rome wasn't built in a day.

I could recite a litany of theories as to why I display this trait of incompletion: some laced with hubris, some with self-contempt. In fact, I shall recite it: just as an example of the many ways we can rationalise any phenomenon of human behaviour. Here we go...

• Perhaps I have a deep-seated unconscious fear of death. The concept of completion is somehow mixed with that of being done, perfected, dead... so I leave everything half accomplished.
• Perhaps, with the humility of a Navajo rugsmith, I acknowledge that only the Great Spirit can create perfection... so I leave gaps in the tapestry of my writing.
• Perhaps I have a dose of ADD
• Perhaps I don't want to do all the work of understanding for you: I leave you a little space to think in.
• Perhaps I do not attach sufficient seriousness to the prospect of truths being communicated in words. 
• Perhaps I am too lighthearted: as Samuel Johnson says, "I too have tried to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness kept creeping in."
• Perhaps I've introjected the maxim, "It's not the winning, it's the taking part"
• Perhaps at some point in my life it was an a successfully adaptive behaviour to leave things incomplete, perhaps to avoid hurtful criticism of my best efforts. Perhaps it's only maladaptive now.
• Perhaps I have a repetition compulsion, as Freud might diagnose. 

Let's consider that last option...

 Sigmund Freud's view of the repetition compulsion - of how people continue to commit acts (or get into situations) that are clearly not in their interest - led him to move psychoanalytic theory away from emphasis on the life affirming, pleasure seeking libido or eros, and towards the 'death urge' that he called thanatos - the energy behind the ego.  Examples of repetition compulsion would be the woman who continually chooses abusive partners, or the man who continually gets into unnecessary debt, or the baby who continually flings his toy from the pram, and shrieks with despair each time the toy is gone. The most dramatic repetitions are the 'acting-out' behaviours of survivors of extreme trauma: the war veteran who runs for cover when a car backfires; the survivor of childhood sex abuse who seeks out images of such abuse.

Of course, Freud's conception of how repetition compulsions worked - and his concept of a death instinct - were not universally accepted: thank goodness. Reich, who stressed the biological basis of life's drives and energies, saw these repetitions as an attempt by the organism to return to homoeostasis, by discharging the energies held in the initial traumatic event - because the presence of these energies was unpleasurable.

Later, scientists like Peter A. Levine have given a detailed biological account of trauma, acting out (repetition), and eventual healing - which accords with Reich's insight. Levine notes that  animals, when faced with a threat, will fight or run away if possible. When fighting or escape are made impossible, the animal freezes, 'playing possum', and awaits a chance to escape while still maintaining the highly activated energy state in its respiratory and nervous systems: primed to fight or flee when possible. He gives the example of a gazelle chased by a cheetah. If the cheetah catches it, the gazelle 'plays dead' rather than struggling, but it's heartbeat and breathing still race. Should the cheetah lose its grip for an instant, the gazelle will dart off at full speed.

dog

For non-human animals, there are instinctual behaviours which bring the body and brain back to rest after the high activation of struggle. A dog shakes it's body vigorously from head to tail after being startled... but only once it knows that it is safe once again.   For humans in modern society the place of safety cannot always be found: our physical shaking response to trauma  is culturally disapproved, we have never-ceasing social and economic obligations that can thwart our healing - in a sense, we all live in a cage. Wild animals are never traumatised or 'neurotic' - they can return to the healthy state of being biologically at rest, poised and alert. Domesticated mammals, people mostly, can suffer ongoing trauma states very easily.



The video below includes footage of a polar bear discharging the energy of 'freezing' (although the freeze is induced by anaesthetic rather than by an overwhelming attack).

When the release of the energy of shock is blocked, the human organism still tries to do so: with the stereotyped behaviours of 'shell-shock', and with more complex dysfunctional patterns of self-destruction and self-harm.  It will do so until safe places and safe people are found, and it is safe to return to the condition of pleasurable embodiment which is our birthright.

So, we nowadays have a clear understanding of repetition compulsions and acting out behaviour: which is so watertight that it can't be denied, except by the rankest cartesian or psychic platonist, who simply refuses to stop believing that she's an immaterial spirit, only accidentally associated with a physical body.

An effect of unreleased trauma energy is dissociation - the sense of being separate from the body and from feeling. Dissociation is nature's anaesthetic... it stops the frozen gazelle from suffering the full pain of being eaten alive.  Because of dissociation, it is often the most traumatised people, those most in need of feeling their feelings and discharging negative emotions, who cannot do so. Their illusion of safety requires them to believe that they are not their bodies, that anatomy is not destiny, and that the emotions are an unfortunate and embarrassing feature of life - that they would be better off without them. Trauma victims experience themselves as ghosts: ghosts in a malfunctioning, threatening machine.They lose their willpower and sense of self, and they also lose any potent empathy or compassion... in exchange for an illusion of being untouchable.

 Sadly, most everyone in the orbit of globalised consumer capitalism is traumatised, to some degree. Worse still - in humans, trauma can be passed down through generations, and even spread within social groups: as in 'mass hysteria', or in families who suffer, generation after generation, for the sad experiences of an ancestor. A traumatised parent can't attune emotionally with her baby, the child grows up with an underlying sense of anxiety and insecurity... primed for traumas of her own.

Are we ready to accept the full importance of trauma, and the repetition of unhealthy behaviours that it creates, as a factor in our societies and politics? Can we accept that many of our opinions, and many of the causes that we espouse most forcefully, suit us only because they help us re-enact our primal wounds? How credible is it that:

• the harsh, dehumanising stance of the Israeli State towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and the treatment of Israel's Arab citizens as second class, is in large part an acting out of the traumas of the Nazi holocaust by the descendents of its victims, with the victim role being taken by an unwilling proxy? 
•  That the  destructive politics of Nazism was based on the compulsive acting out of childhood traumas suffered by the sons of disciplinarian fathers?
• That the disciplinarian fathers and grandfathers of Fascism were themselves brutalised by the trenches of the first mechanised war, and earlier by the upheavals and uncertainties of industrialisation?
• That the examples above are not unusual, and that every country suffers for the violent compulsions of its most injured members to some degree?
• That no matter how noble our aspirations may be, any of us is capable of great harm, if we act unknowingly based on traumatic pain?

If we can accept this sad story of human history, as a dialectic of psychic forces as well as of economic ones, we need not be dismayed. Technology has played a part in generating the horrors of the past centuries, but we are now beginning to find the psychic technologies - or spiritual technologies, if you like - to break the chain of cruelty and despair. Perhaps all it takes is a commitment to providing proper economic and social support to the caregivers of children... as our greatest priority, and to make personal growth, development and maturity the basis of social respect - and value the search for these attributes as much as we value wealth, celebrity or artistic skill. From what I know of the pre-capitalist world and indigenous cultures, wisdom and compassion were always highly prized in the past: they can be again.

....  so much for those lofty visions of a happy world. It may come, but for now we can only lay the groundwork, even if only in minuscule ways like blogging about it: tossing hopeful messages in a bottle into the electronic ocean of smut, scandal and fake Viagra. As for me, I'll no doubt continue to half-finish my posts (until I release some more trauma) : but at least there'll be bottles, and the bottles will at least be half full.       

  

A Passage from the Introduction to Paul Lafargue's 'The Right to Be Lazy', 1883

The revolutionary socialists must take up again the battle fought by the philosophers and pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they must march up to the assault of the ethics and the social theories of capitalism; they must demolish in the heads of the class which they call to action the prejudices sown in them by the ruling class; they must proclaim in the faces of the hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth shall cease to be the vale of tears to the labourer; that in the communist society of the future, which we shall establish "peaceably if we may, forcefully if we must", the impulses of men will be given a free rein, for "all these impulses are by nature good, we have nothing to avoid but their misuse and their excess", and they will not be avoided except by their mutual counter-balancing, by the harmonious development of the human organism, for as Dr Beddoe says, 'It is only when a race reaches its maximum of physical development, that it arrives at its highest point of energy and moral vigour". Such was also the opinion of the great naturalist Charles Darwin.

Alienation of the Name-of-the-Father [pt2]

Part one discussed Descartes, and Mind-Body Dualism. This part covers Lacan, the shrink from Hell... but first a quick look at the concept of Alienation.
[... and yes, I am going somewhere with all of this ;-) ...]
Alienation was originally a concept from the fields of jurisprudence and political economy. The world could be neatly divided between what was a person's own (proper to him - his property) and everything else (what was alien to him). Notably, [and as far as I know, I'm the first to note this notable] these 'classical' theories of property presume cartesian dualism: my mind and my free will are unalienably mine - everything else I may have, that is made of physical matter, is alienable property... not my essential self, and capable of being sold, lost, stolen, or floated on the stock market. My lands, my livestock, my labour and my right arm all fall into this category. In this theory, the ghost can sell his machine.
So alienation at this point just meant selling.
A more philosophical sense of the term was promoted by Hegel and Feuerbach, and brought to bloom in the writings of Karl Marx. For Marx, alienation was intrinsic to industrial capitalism. A worker sold his work and his time to a capitalist...who took posession of the product of the work. The worker had no control over what he produced or how: his work had no meaning. Marx saw this as robbing a person of his most basic human trait - to improve and adapt the world by co-operatively planning and executing work for the benefit of all concerned. Man was being turned into a mere machine: and was thereby being made miserable.
But wasn't this inherent in the empirical sciences on which industrial technology was based, which were cartesian to the marrow? Is capitalism underpinned by a mistaken, de-humanising mind/body dualism? I believe so, and I'll argue for that point in detail in an upcoming post.  To be already a ghost in a machine, an atom of immaterial mind, is the root of all cruelty. Such an existential position is definitional of disocciation and psychosis: if I have no fundamental connection with the world, it matters little how I treat the world, or the people in it. If I'm Rene Descartes, and I believe in a Big Other - a God, who will zap my soul to perdition if I misbehave, I may act with balance: if I'm Andrew Carnegie, or Adolf Hitler, or Josef Stalin, or anyone who holds to the ghost in the machine theory - but doesn't dig the Holy Sky Ghost - it's harder to feel a good reason to be invariably ethical.  
In any case, Marx's analysis of capitalism became well known, and stayed popular through a hundred years of social struggles, revolutions, and a brace of global wars.
After the second of these wars - Jacque Lacan tottered into the limelight.
To be continued...

Mana Vijnana Saves the World

1) Via Negativa :: Not That! Not That!

Here's a quote from Slavoj Zizek's Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism  He's considering Buddhism as a way to escape from the problems of the 'Big Other'.

"[The point is] ...not to criticise Buddhism, but merely to emphasise the irreducible gap between subjective authenticity and moral goodness (in the sense of social responsibility): the difficult thing to accept is that one can be totally authentic in overcoming one's false self and yet still commit horrible crimes - and vice versa... This is why all the desperate attempts by Buddhists to demonstrate how respect and care for others are necessary steps to (and conditions of) enlightenment misfire: Suzuki himself was much more more honest in this regard when he pointed out that Zen is a meditation technique which requires no particular ethico-political stance - in his political life a Zen Buddhist may be a Liberal, a Fascist or a Communist. Again, the two vacuums never coincide: in order to be fully engaged politically, it is necessary to exit the 'inner peace' of one's authentic self." p135


This is the type of dross that passes for philosophy these days. It relies on a pop-cultural  parody of Zen Buddhism, as much as Zizek's dismissal of Reichian theory relies on a parody of Reich. This particular parody has its roots in the Beat poets, and other hippie heroes like Alan Watts. Watts famously alleged that Californian Buddhist 'Converts' in the Sixties who objected to his drunkenness were just 'crypto-protestants', who carried the baggage of the Calvinist ethics under their eastern robes. The Beats (par excellence, Kerouac) studied the Theravada Buddhist tradition to an extent, and no doubt hung out at the odd Zendo, but they can hardly be classed as experts on Zen philosophy. The whole category of 'Dharma Bums', 'Drunken Zen-men', 'Zig-Zag Zen' (ie finding enlightenment while up on large doses of hallucinogens), etc. ,  was spawned from shallow readings of Buddhism. No doubt this was rooted in the notion of Buddhism as ontological nihilism that was casually held in the West, at least from the time of Schopenhauer.


Obviously [to me, lol! ;)] this interpretation of Buddhism (and of Dhyana/Ch'an/Zen) is a dried shit stick. The summation of the Northern (Mahayana) School's belief system - to which Zen adheres as tight as dried shit to a stick - can be found in that marvellous phrase from the Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sutra: "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form". For the sake of clarity, let's add a few more of these funky identifications:

Being is Nothingness;

Nirvana is Samsara;

Eros is Agape;

Dharma is Karma [maybe... that one's mine... I may well re-incarnate as a toilet brush for saying that, but what the heck];

Body is Mind.

In fact, all dualities are exploded in Zen (and of course put back together again... like Humpty Dumpty in a rhyme free of the laws of thermodynamics). The point is that the world of non-discrimination IS the world of discrimination: it is the very concept of a 'self' that warps our perception. A person stuck in a depressive worldview (Athur Schopenhauer, I'm a-lookin' at you), reads that "Everything is Void" and says, "Hey, I knew that all along. It's all pointless, I'm gonna smoke a lot of weed and watch bizarre pornos for the rest of the month". What that person can't/won't see is that the converse also holds: "Void is Everything" ... the only place where suffering can be escaped is in the suffering world. In the parlance of Zen teachers, the guy is Attached to Emptiness.

So this idea of Zizek's, that someone has to leave the 'inner peace of one's authentic self' in order to engage politically is bunkum. There is no reality to 'inner' and 'outer' in this sense - there is no 'self' authentic or otherwise [at least not a 'self' that can be equated with the psychoanalytic ego, which is what Zizek is referring to here].

Video interlude... Here's a documentary about Seung Sahn. I love the way he sums it all up so beautifully: "NO I. NO PWOBWEM!" (There are several parts on youtube, I recommend watching them all in order).

2) Via Positiva :: Tat Tvam Asi!

OK, so Zen is experiential rather than rational. Subjectivity is also experiential, rather than rational: now there's a statement that should really be too obvious to ever be stated, but it seems to have escaped the great minds of the West for the past three millenia, with few exceptions.The few exceptions - Duns Scotus, Sartre, and so on, go too far in the opposite direction. The legacy of Classical Hellenistic thought is the belief that everything must be either rational or chaotic - everything of the mind, the body and the cosmos must be logically ordered, law-following and utterly predictable: otherwise it is chaotic, primal, terrifying and destructive. Jean Paul Sartre rightly notes that experience is Absurd (in the logical sense of absurd: it just IS, can't be deduced from any premise, there is no reason why I don't turn into a giant lobster at 5pm today, for example). His direct experience of this absurdity came after shooting himself full of mescaline, and and then being followed round Venice by a giant crayfish for six months. The poor guy then went to see Jacques Lacan for advice. Lacan persuaded him that the visions were due to his fear of being forced to live the formalised life of a teacher... maybe he thought Sartre's subconscious was symbolising l'angoisse - anguish/angst - as a crayfish - langouste. Sartre based his enormously influential existentialist philosophy on his interpretation of this bizarre peyote trip. Experience is absurd - therefore there no way of choosing an objectively correct course of action - therefore every person is absolutely free in each moment - this freedom fills us with enormous anxiety - which we spend our lives trying to ignore. Life is absurd, we have nothing to depend upon: so we must swim forever in a simmering pot of terror, anguish, nausea and hallucinated crustaceans.

Zen too admits this fundamental freedom, and the undependable fact of stark reality - with all it's one-handed-clappingness. But you don't often hear zen masters prattling on about anguish.

There's an old Zen Koan, goes something like this: A Zen abbot, let's call him Maureen, walks past one of his novices - Violet - who's crying. "Wherefore dost thou weep?", asks Maureen (he's been learning English). "I have nothing to depend upon", says Violet. "I too have nothing to depend upon. That is why I laugh". At which point, we infer, Violet becomes enlightened.

Now, how is the Zen Master's absolute freedom so much more mirthsome  than Jean-Paul Sartre's absolute freedom? Both have nothing to depend upon in each moment. One possible explanation would be that the Zen Master is indifferent to Karmic consequences or determinants of his actions... at least in the sense that he has no preference for himself over another... after all, he has nothing which may be called a 'self'.  But we should be careful with such verbal analyses of enlightenment: I'll leave it to you to consider the implications of another koan - Pai Chang's fox


0) !

Sartre's existential angst seems to me to be more to do with a fear of inconsistent biography than anything else. Indeed Sartre was not keen on psychology, preferring to "improve the biography of the person". Anxiety at being completely free in each moment makes sense only if one is attached to one's personal history: identified with it even.

For the Zen Buddhist, personal history is a lighter load. Right Action is right only in the moment of its acting: Zen equals answering in each moment of ever-changing life the koan "The World is vast and wide. Why do you put on your robe when you hear the sound of the bell". The answer may be to dress each time the bell rings for a thousand lifetimes, and then once to run naked because the robe is on fire. There is no more merit, no more freedom in consistency than in inconsistency -  no merit in inconsistency.

At last we can return to Zizek, and to DT Suzuki: 'Zen is a meditation technique which requires no particular ethico-political stance', we are told. Correct, in a sense - no pre-existent stance is required to begin the activity of meditating. However meditation is itself a stance, a posture with respect to the world, like all human action it is political. To say that 'social responsibility' is equivalent to 'being' 'a Liberal, a Fascist or a Communist' would be more of a fallacy: social responsibility must surely be an action, or sequence of actions carried out with compassion and presence - not payment of lip-service to some worldview. The biography of a Zen practitioner might say "Hakuin then joined the Hitler Youth", or "Bodhidharma stood as Conservative candidate for Slough in the 1997 General Election", or (more plausibly) Thich Nhat Hanh addressed the UN. But it is acceptance of the very absurdity of biography that characterises Zen. The Buddha can dress as a giant lobster, but can he ever taste like one?