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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

unconscious, apocalypse, critique « Previous | |Next »
January 23, 2007

There is a discussion between K-Punk, and Poetix, and I Cite about whether we are living in an apocalypse culture happening in the blogosphere. The initial issue of the conversation has been whether or not the question revolves not the damage to the world is irrevocable and whether another world is possible. This is interpreted in terms of whether there's a limit to capitalism or an alternative to capitalism, rather than the cultural or philosophical aspects in the discourse of apocalypse or the destruction of civilization; or the way social theory draws on some explicit or implicit notion of the unconscious to understand fantasy and desire.

This aspect of apocalypticism is picked up by Larval Subjects and Rough Theory. The former gives examples of apocalyptic fantasies from a wide range of contexts, and then argues that psychoanalysis can help us understand this phenomenon:

the psychoanalytic approach suggests that we ask how our desire is imbricated with these particular representations or scenerios and enjoins us to analyze how our thought collectively arrives at these visions of the present rather than others. How is it that we are to account for the the ubiquity of these scenerios in popular imagination... An omnipresence so great that it even filters down into the most intimate recesses of erotic fantasy as presented in the consulting room?

It is argued that the key to apocalyptic fantasies is that they represent clothed or disguised utopian longings for a different order of social relations, such that this alternative order would only become possible were all of society to collapse. So the manifest unconscious fantasies of destruction have some kind of non-destructive latent content, and that the specific latent content might be utopian in character.These fantasies serve the function of rendering our dissatisfaction tolerable while fantasizing about an alternative that might someday come to save us.

Rough Theory appraches the issue in terms of how critical theory, in Adorno's sense, can provide an historically immanent and self-reflexive critique, with this qualification:

I have remained aware that simply establishing the historicity or the social grounding of critical forms of subjectivity is only part of the task. Such a critical historical analysis can take us to a certain point: it can help us understand the forms of subjectivity - including critical forms of subjectivity - that are historically plausible at specific times and - crucially for political practice - it can help us understand the relationships that connect these forms of subjectivity in specific ways to elements of our social context that we experience and articulate as forms of “objectivity”. From here, though, the path to be followed by critical theory becomes much more complex, because it is from this point that we have to ask ourselves whether we intend just to understand the world, or also to change it.

Rough Theoryi s drawn to Adorno's question: - the question of whether the experience of living in a society that suggests the potential for its own transformation might, under certain historical circumstances, render likely the emergence of abstractly destructive sensibilities.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:14 AM |