Buying and selling is a dominant paradigm that can be used to provide a totalizing view of everything, obviously in commerce, but much more. Everyone has a line or feels they need to buy into a line to be happy, successful, free, etc. Even this paper can be totally analyzed in terms of an agenda I am trying to convince you of adopting. Commerce defines dynamics of power relationships.
In “Structures of Scientific Revolution” Thomas Kuhn vividly portrays how science is all about competing historical/political/theoretical paradigms and how “truth” has little to do with what gets adopted scientifically. He makes the case that what gets adopted scientifically has more to do with politics, economy, and established paradigms than the “truth” of science. What gets accepted as “scientific fact” is a result of a process of “commerce”, in the wider sense of the word, and not truth
Philosophers such as Nietzsche with “Will to Power” or Hegel’s progression of Spirit in thesis/antithesis/synthesis or Focault’s analysis or sanity and insanity all push their analysis to be all inclusive dynamics of power relationships. Psychologists such as Freud set up mechanisms of libido and id/ego/superego that define psychological mechanisms of power. Adam Smith and Carl Marx also have an obvious agenda of power relationships to sell us. If you know anything about these philosophers ask yourself what would love be for them? I think the answer is that it would be yet another form of manipulation, irrelevant in terms of power, a guise for underlying psychological devices, etc. It would seem as if human community is nothing other than a hopeless tangle of power for those that have something to sell us and those that need to buy.
Spirituality is dominated by buying and selling. Who has the truth? Who is the most righteous in their own group’s metaphysical scheme? Politics is a commerce of ideology and influence. What is circumscribed in all these areas is an arena of power relationships. Needless to say there is a lot of fuel for fodder here that could turn into quite a long historical digression but rather than indulge in yet another “revision of world history sales pitch”, I would like to focus in on a couple areas where I am most interested in this topic. Namely, on interpersonal relationships and what, for now, I will call soulful abodes.
How do interpersonal relationships become games for buying and selling? Someone has an agenda to convince the other about themselves or their mate and the other either buys or tries to counter sell their own agenda. Power issues can all too often creep into serious relationships as a semblance of love, obscuring and blocking the qualities that make a love relationship worth having and replacing them indiscriminately with an empty game playing or “one upmanship” kind of activity.
From the point of view of interpersonal relationships, Freud had amazing genius to set the poles with the base instincts of the “I” (id) and mom and dad (superego). The most significant relationships (whether good or bad, attract or repel) we have, derive from our childhood. All of our adult relationships are an attempt in one way or another to go back, revisit, and complete something we did not get as infants or children. We are attracted and attract those that hold the most promise in allowing us to revisit our most profound early moments of existence. There are so many ways that this plays out. As men, we find ourselves in relationships with women as mothers to heap to ourselves nurturing we never had or had enough of. We expect unconditional approval from the women in our lives to get something from dad we never had or thought we never had. Young men are most often angry if they feel their dads were not there for them. As women, we look for dads to stimulate our deflated ego to make us feel powerful and like we have value or legitimate boundaries from the world. We also bemoan and have anger over the lack or perceived lack of nurturing from our mothers. So we enter adult relationships looking, on some emotional, barely conscious engagement, to address a subtle but seemingly desperate need that requires us to end it, complete it, grow beyond it. Nevertheless, in most cases the only thing we grow beyond is our current partner and our next partner picks up where the other left off. In all of these dynamics we are either selling the other on who they are, what they were, or where they are headed or we are buying the other’s pitch or some combination of the two. Relationships that are dominated by these dynamics can be raised to a feverous pitch where neither person can be honest or even knows how to find honesty and game playing and power relationships rule the day (and night). All of these intense efforts can result in resignation, despair, despondency and basically make one old fast. After all, beating your head against the wall for relentless years may be ok for the youthful but at some point one finds that one has become old and lethargic and in the very old soul it appears as a “waiting around for death” (perhaps Freud’s death wish). Death is kind to those that have lost their way and no longer feel the desire to be. In any case, we should ask ourselves, “Are we condemned to live as prisoners to these power structures or is there another possibility?” What could such thing as “love” be that would be overlooked by the dynamics of power?
To start, I would suggest that there is an alternative – learning, inclining one’s ear to wisdom. Years of good therapy teaches one how to be aware of our incessant, driving needs, where they come from and how we get entangled with exaggerated power from our past sabotaging current and future relationships and condemning us to replaying the past perpetually into our future. And yet, after that work has matured there is still a vacuum. There is no longer a need to buy or sell emotional wares in a relationship – the thrill is gone so to speak. So, do we simply hunker down in a Buddhist like comma and become impassionate observers of existence or is there something more? Ok, it is a rhetorical question. I think there is more but this is where I must move towards what could be termed spirituality (which I cringe at somewhat due to the history we have inherited of spirituality). As Emmanual Levinas has pointed out, there is an inner psychic or interiority that is not historical or subject to the tradition of light, where we can each be released from externality, a retreat from the demands of community, history, and power. Interiority is where we are not totalized, historicalized, lit up by the tradition of light or rationality, perhaps the Buddhist observer. There are those that seemingly have a harder time letting go and having an awareness of their interiority. They are constrained by anxiety, physical or emotional, and seemingly never have a chance to take a step back, reflect, and take a breath. In any case, it is not that they do not have interiority, it is the way they are situated in their interiority. A lack of interiority would be purely animal reaction to environmental stimulus. Perhaps the “human doings” among us get close to this but none of us are merely that. What is more, interiority is not the “be all, end all”. It may be that interiority gives us the space, the ability to hear and reflect, to see the parables that speak from every speck of sand and history rather than simply react ‘till death do us part. Philosophers have always praised interiority as the basis of what makes us uniquely human, reflection.
Outside, history would teach us its narrative, temporality would teach us birth and death and everything marked and measured by the history of Being, and our lover would have us project and be projected upon. When we lose touch with our interiority we are all like kids that playfully pretend with glee, “Lie to me, no me – my turn”. We cover ourselves as a blanket with history (personal, social, language, etc.) and interpersonal relationships and in so doing create over a lifetime what I will term as abodes of the soul. Yes, we can do housecleaning such as getting a divorce, changing jobs, moving and some would say dying/being born again but all the while we simply go back into the world of power and reaction until we are again blocked up in psychic huts of our own creation – soulful abodes. It seems to me like all the while there is this tangential call, the command of the other in Levinas, this non-recoupable moment that only gets symbolized, parabalized, historicalized ad hoc and perhaps can only be gleamed in the form of the erasure of a trace. Without trying to sound too mystical it may be that mom and dad are only shadows of something that draws our desires, something that history can’t capture. Perhaps history whether personal or not parabalizes, speaks in riddles of physicality and externality until we can hear or gleam something more.
As Levinas suggests, the inner psychism of the other is something we have never known or ever can know, shed light on, touch. The other can’t be reduced in any kind of power relationship or analysis of light. Therefore, our response must, of necessity, be one of ethics, the day to day encounter with the face of the transcendent other. I guess the gist of this is that we all, in all of our day to days, are being offered in a totally unique and infinitely individualized encounter with an alterity that can not be evaluated, compared, sifted in any analysis of power. It can only be known ad hoc by a tradition of light that at best is a parable and at worst is a tyrannical, totalizing reduction. The experience of alterity is the sense that something more is calling in all the appearances of power, light, externality and this something requires from me an infinitely individualized encounter – no one can do it or get it for me and yet all things are “saying” tangentially. This “saying” must of necessity get erased ad hoc by history and light. We tend to deduce an errant cause to the effects we observe in externality. We tend to reduce to power relationships, acting and reacting, lying and wanting to be lied to, to create these dwellings, these abodes, that only wait to be swept away by the mercy of death and final demise. All the while “the face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves in me” and “commands my desires” as Levinas put it. We don’t end in the materiality of a mom and dad but perhaps in the spirituality of what they point to – we have a sheltering community and we have an outside to the community, a non-mans land, the howling wild that draws us out and does not caress us. We can move in and out of these soulful places and even have a hint about their nexus. The east greets us on the morning and a full day of light and community is sure to follow while the west points to the pioneer, the wild lands, the place of night and darkness. The winds howl from the west and threaten to blow our communities and histories down. Republicans gleam a fatherly, pull yourself up by your bootstraps approach to political ideology (in their best light) while the Democrats speak of nurture, government assistance and the help offered by community. Both of the ideologies seem to rely on each other and seem to have differences that are rooted in paternity. Communities of clouds gather by winds that they can not know but which determine them completely. Clouds can not choose to be subject to the winds. They simply are. We walk with our feet firmly planted on the earth and trudge along with the weight of existence and emotions/needs/relationships and yet the stars fly forever above our small heads. They ask us in their quiet beauty to look up, look beyond, wake young babes. Something more than our smallness awaits us in every nook and cranny of the universe and while we have the option of being swept away in our smallness, judgements and in death we always have the option, the potential, the possibility for resurrection, renewal, rebirth. It may be that death is only a way to free us from the weight of a lifetime of soul clutter so that we can be reset, start again in Maya (playful illusion) and Samsora (endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth) so that enlightenment can once again have its morning voice to the soul. In any case, the way that existence glimmers in a light other than any known and understood cannot be recuperated into history but can be encountered from my psychism in the day to day interruption of the other.
So, in addition to waxing mystical here I intend to point out that power reductions, relations and analysis are always subject to their own essentially intrinsic limitations. They already provide a framework wherein understanding is constrained to a certain schema. For example, love is understood as a means to an end, a power mechanism. A basis for love that would exceed this framework would render the framework useless, without an answer. And yet, in our day to day, the face of the other always exceeds our cognitive reductions and pre-understandings of the other. The other interrupts, contests, and commands our horizon/site/understandings. What is more, even our experience of “nature” is never complete. We can pursue nature in scientific reductions (which at their best are power relationships without value judgements or individual based means to an end) but this direction will never answer or attempt to answer the “more” of nature that I just tried to bring out in my mystical digression. The totally individualized and irreducible communion with the “more”, the transcendent other, the tangential saying (logos) has been on on-going concern with many religions in their best moments.
The interesting feature about power relationships is that they necessarily derive from the past. The rules of the game have already come from the past. The past instructs us how to play and what winning and losing means. The unknown future has already been decided in advance according to rules/power/light, a history. The more we let the past determine our future, the more we pull the curtains down on our soulful abodes and the more the possibility for something other, something radically transcendent, is reduced. We pull our histories and totalities around us as a baby’s blanket and try to make ourselves secure in our abodes. All the while, death waits to sweep our huts away and even more so, the other, the stranger faces us.
A “need” is a perceived emptiness in me, a lack. This lack is a perception of a loss. Somehow according to the rules we have secretly (unconsciously) adopted, we have lost, we are deficient, we have turned up “needing” to win, to be whole, to be restored. When we “need” a lover we already have adopted an implicit but determining power structure that also places underlying expectations on our lover. These expectations are given from an implicit set of rules based in our personal history. Our lover must perform, they must deliver – me. When this dynamic occurs, our lover has been placed in the role of savior or Satan, mom or dad and we have embarked on a path in our relationship that can only result in a continual replay, rehash of the past. The tragedy here is that we entomb ourselves with ourselves, our history, such that we reinforce the walls of our soulful abodes. All the while the stranger faces us, radical alterity knocks on our door and a future not blocked by our past awaits us.
Desire for the other, the other which is beyond my rules, games and power is the basis of love. Desire is not need. Desire is an attraction for what it does not know. Desire is a pull towards an unknown future, an unknown other not a sinkhole the other is expected to fill, to play in. Love and power are certainly two radically different orientations but so easily get confused. Love for the other is the unknown, untamed, and undiscovered pull towards a future. Need for the other is the known, tamed and discovered retreat to a past, a hut, a soulful abode. Love calls from an unknown future. We do not know how to love. We are yet babes. We assimilate love in terms of mommy and daddy and become weak, vulnerable infants. We lose our power and relegate all of this to the misguided “follies of love”. We do not know how to love. The sting of “lost love” is not the loss of love it is the loss of expectation, of power, of potency. It is the loss of our savior, our Satan, our salvation, our damnation – the promise of our past finally completed and our need finally filled. Yet, what really happens is that we complete our tomb, our abode and we await the final flood of death to sweep us, our hut, away (so perhaps we can start anew towards the alterity that faces us). In need and power all has really been determined. There is no mystery. There is only competition, playing it out to see who wins – for now. In the long run, we all lose – we die. It is a fool’s game. It is like playing poker in a crashing plane – it is doomed and we are all certainly doomed to lose. What is our future in this case? Only the promise of more play of forces, of manipulation. Is winning, filling our needs, the only things that gives us a reason to go on (to our final loss)? Love is the “black hole” of humanity. What we see is not the black hole but the light, the debris and history that is left in its wake. We live and die in remnants of the past, in our needs, our huts. And yet an alterity faces us that we never knew, that was never part of my history, my light, my knowledge and says, “I love you”. Desire towards the other lets us hear tangentially the “more” that is being said in the face that interrupts us, the winds that howl at us and the stars that fly towards us.
When love is need, manipulation, and power, honesty with the other and integrity, honesty with oneself, become less and less important. Staying in a relationship that has long died is one way in which this plays out. In this case, the future, love and desire have died. We do not lose our life to love – we lose to love. To lose to love is to lose our humanity. Love does not happen to a remnant of power, one incapable of giving themselves, of letting ourselves go (or letting go what we think ourselves to be). Love happens to the young, those not yet blocked off in their abodes, those not yet world weary, jaded and resigned to their insecurities. Desire towards the other pulls us toward “more” than a power relationship, a blocking ourselves in with ourselves. It calls us to die to our light, our history, and our power. It calls us to become children, full of exuberance, play and interest in the other we do not know. Love is not hanging on but letting go. Need hangs on and uses manipulation to try to fill itself. Love means making tough but gentle emotional decisions at times, being aware of ourselves and our relationships, growing and being involved in life as children, open to the future and new possibilities. Love is not trying to change our partner into something they are not nor is it exchanging our partner for a better model to fit our needs. It is about wisdom, inclining our ear to learning, knowing when we are progressing as lovers or impeding each other, making tough decisions to leave our huts and our mission to fill our needs. Wisdom is a tangential call that does not play in the world of needs but asks us to leave it for the desire of the other. We have before us love or need, desire or power, spirit or commerce, future or past, life or death and wisdom informs us of the difference.