to be or not to be

A book about disciplinary power situates it in the habits that state institutions drilled into the denizens. To be a state is to act according to the habits drilled in you by the state. The hearts and minds come later; they're epiphenomenal. What one can do is act, and act without really understanding the philosophy of that act. It's meaning, be it ultimate or not, comes later, an after-effect.

To act is to be. Some acts conjure into existence things that others do not want to exist. I speak my mind. I act on my feelings. These conjure something into being, a subjectivity that threatens the subjectivity of others. It's all in the mind, but the acts are where we find the only real stuff.

Perhaps I place too much truck in this activity. I trust that drilling habits makes power automatic in the political body. If some act in ways that seem to flout their respect for others, their exclusive relations with others, and their relationship to the object of their actions is that real?

Is it real? Does acting, even if it's a performance, conjure up the very relationship to which it elides? Yes. Does this performance, this act, have an effect if someone dances dirty with someone who isn't one's partner. That is trickier to diagnose. Swingers are older couples, couple who are so deeply ingrained in their habits with each other that no matter of performance, no matter how real, no matter how deep cannot shake that habit.

Love is drug abuse. Love is a habit that one cannot shake. Love engages those same neural structures that reinforce habit, to engage in it again and again.

Love is a poverty of creativity. Over time, love frames our vision, our relationship with a significant other becomes a paradigm that is hard to break. To do so requires a revolution. History of public dissent shows how quickly, once the discontent piles up, that a simple act of sitting down, rallying, or petitioning can raise the consciousness of a group. But I'm talking about couples, dyads, not masses.

We interact with ourselves through our bodies, our eyes, our ears. If we can conjure up an alternative version of ourselves, which is nevertheless real, we drive a wedge between our current habit-filled, banal situation and a scary, unforeseen possible future, one that perhaps disavows the past and those people who populate it.

How do we guard ourselves? It's a matter of attitude. If you can play along in the careless joy of simulation, play-acting, performance, and you're ok with it, perhaps you can get dirty with the wives of your friends in a drunken yet consensual act and walk away. But this, like that simple real act, can plant a seed in that network of habits. To call the effect a cascade is too metaphorical. The stuff of nerves is real, electric, and mathematical-geometric in organization. When we play-act we're only trying to fool ourselves; it's how we transgress the seemingly stable networks briefly without believing ourselves nor convincing others that we have transgressed.

Why is self-reflexivity viral? Perhaps our view of the virus is merely a metaphor for considering our own displacement, externalization from the nature of things through self-reflexivity. The virus is a stunning simplicity, a zero condition from which all else is measured. The virus is not self-replicating, yet it contains its code and knows how to pirate the production facilities of foreign cells in order to sustain itself. Ideas, are they self-replicating? They emerge out of something and they spread like a virus. Their ability to infect is yet another metaphor. A virus is a prior condition for life: motive without means. It reveals life as an aggressor. Life must take in order to sustain itself. The virus, it is a transgressor.

Perhaps thinking, and thinking as such, taps us into this deep stream. It's probably an incidental feature, something made possible by the nature of neural organization only because it was a path of least resistance.

Thinking's substance is the world around us. Acting's props are the world around us. This substance and these props can be people, things, and ideas already in circulation. Cognition isn't a centralized activity. Cognition is displaced into the scene. Knowledge and wisdom are in the world; it's a source of endless wonder, and how we choose to relate to it bears upon us.

So if the stuff of thinking and acting is out there, when we choose to do what out there affords us to do, is that real? Does it have a motive? If one chooses to swap partners because that possibility is there, is that motive or merely opportunity? What goads this? Is it merely insecurity or lack of creativity that keeps us from acting upon it? That's a very tricky situation. The phenomenal existence of cheating is in the presence of situations that afford this action. But these opportunities usually go untapped. But they're there. Are we any better to break from our habits to act? Are we any more in control if we do so?

Perhaps control is a precarious balance of habit and innovation and a burgeoning propriety about how to manage this. The habits of mind, body, mouth, and social relations are how we build ourselves. Extracting ourselves from that social setting changes us. Trying so very hard to maintain those is about trying so very hard to keep these neurons pulsing. Strange that our minds become so beholden to their networks, so that we must try very hard to sustain the ties in the world that correspond to them. Keeping a lover is a pragmatic orientation to a neural network built for the sake of that relationship. Keeping a network of friends is a pragmatic orientation to a neural network built for the sake of that network.

So our mind, in all its resplendent complexity, is a hard habit to break. Our relations, our attitudes, our habits, our actions reflect upon this interaction between some sub-set of our mind and itself and and this mind as constructed and the world that conspired, incidentally, in its creation.