Machines should work! People should think!

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.

--Russell Baker--

*Not sure of this quote's origin. Lifted from an old post by Tad Ermitano.

http://cavemanifesto.blogspot.com/2008/09/discomforting-quote.html

“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?”
Lacan

“Lacan never pursues purely philosophical objectives.”
Badiou

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THERE IS HELL IN HELLO BUT MORE IN GOODBYE

Two-part essay on Love

“HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK”

“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.” – Roland Barthes

“I have an empty head on love in general. I'd either have nothing to say, or I'd just be reciting clichés”, as philosopher Jacques Derrida aptly put it once during an interviewⁱ. Sharing the same sentiment, this is not an essay about love in general. However, I would like to question what this quote below means:

"There is no love; there is only proof of it."ⁱⁱ

Until now this quote is still as puzzling as it was provocative when I first encountered it many years ago. Its conclusiveness is kind of demanding especially towards a subject that has seduced many people: especially philosopher and poets who have elaborated or ruined (whichever way you want to think) its meaning. The paraphrased quote (it was translated from the French) is from Robert Bresson’s classic film Les dames du Bois de Boulogne, whose dialogue was written by poet Jean Cocteau. Despite it being a very elusive quote to fully grasp intellectually, it had somewhat made some sense to me, in perlocution. Despite having told myself to avoid talking too much about things I don’t really know much about, I’d like to muse on this quote.

A female friend who always fights with me once said “isn’t our fighting a form of love?” If that would be the case, what would that imply about love? Many people will say their favorite cliché notions of what love is: love is compassion, honesty, trust, admiration, the thing that compels one to be attracted to doing this or be attracted to this object, person, idea, etc, this and that… Much of the modern concepts of love have seemed to reduce love into materially contractual states¹ of one’s experience to the other. It means that love in some way has become a sort of commodity, or a tangible, self-conscious and self-evident, useful social “contract” among people. Unlike the idealists of the ancient world, the Greeks for example, have elaborated on love significantly and prescriptively of what love is and what other people should be doing when enamored with it. Plato presents eros as being consistent with his notion of “The Forms” – unchangeable, eternal metaphysical concepts of Truth. Aristotle on the other hand, considers philia, and its importance to egotism² and altruism, as necessities in order to achieve happiness. And more memorably, St. Augustine’s famous take on his religiosity and idealism on God and love (and he uses love as contingent with God)³ is evident in his beautifully-put adage: “the measure of love is to love without measure.” My point is: love, (like much of modernity and the so-called post-modernity)⁴ seems to be always defined through something else. It is impossible to define what love really is as it really is.

If you cannot know it, does that logically imply that you cannot believe it? If beliefs are representational we can only believe things we are sensitive (senses) to.ⁱⁱⁱ Love is after all simply a four-lettered word too. And like many other powerful words, we know its power and its implications since we use language to better the understanding of our experiences. So is love simply just a concept? Maybe so, however uncertain I am, there are seems to me “only proofs” of love that we could account for. This is so since love as a concept can be understood and experienced through something else that exists in the external world.⁵ If we would only relate love to our thoughts without having any actual transactions or “proofs” that define what love is, then love can never completely exist in our heads, and we may never know what love really means. It has to relate to something else “out there.”⁶ And it is through these things that are in the external world that can help us conceive of concepts. These concepts are compelling or convenient ⁷ for us to justify our beliefs about a thing in the end. And the implication of having knowledge could also imply that our beliefs are true. (Maybe, but I am not sure. I am simply speculating. I am still open for doubt.) If we believe that love exists, it is because there are data and experiences that we gather from the external world and it provides us justification to our beliefs.^iv Therefore, love is a relatively abstract concept. A concept defined through real transactions in our world of experience. So the cliché notion that “God is love” is nonsense. Because God is supposed to exist outside (or beyond) our world of experience.⁸ I won’t expound too much on this but my point is you can experience love more easily because it is defined through something else that already exists in our world of experience. Its results are more direct and case-specific. The main quote is peculiar because it is opposite of the doubt that religious people or “believers” usually encounter: “there is a God but there is no proof – or there is a God but how can we prove it?” But this is rather a boring subject to talk about, and a circular argument so I won’t get into it. A deadend. In a way, love is more important than God, or at least for me; because I can have direct transactions or “proofs” of love than I would with God. I am not really claiming that I know what love really is. Everything I can know about love is based on what I have experienced. And from my experience it is not enough for me to talk about it further. I have really no general opinions of what love is. I’ve only talked about the quote on the first page.
It is impossible to define what love really is without relating it to something else. Reductionists would say that love is simply a result of certain chemical imbalances that occur in the brain that makes us feel this and that – but this is a rather extreme point of view. Are we really ready to accept this?

The pioneer of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida, also had shared similar idea that love is defined through its relationship with other things; but for him there is a clear division on the who and the what.

“The history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and the what. I think that whoever starts to love, is in love, or stops loving, is caught between this division of the who and the what. Do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are? For example, I love you because you are you. Or do I love your qualities, your beauty, and your intelligence, etc? Does one love someone, or does one love something about someone? Often, love starts with some type of seduction. One is attracted because the other is like this or like that. Inversely, love is disappointed and dies when one comes to realize the other person doesn't merit our love. The other person isn't this and that. One wants to be true to someone – singularly, irreplaceably – and one perceives that this someone isn't x or y. They didn't have the qualities, properties, the images, that I thought I'd loved. So fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what.”^v

Since childhood, we are taught to think of love as a singular entity. Whether it is God's love, marriage, passion, or patriotism, we are taught to think of love as a unique and exclusive prize. But as semiologist and philosopher Roland Barthes' points out in his book “A Lover’s Discourse”, love is built upon fragments, many of which are mundane. The most compelling part of "Lover's Discourse" is Barthes’ dissection of the phrase, "I love you". Drawing upon literary examples and common sense, Barthes asks us what we mean when we state that we love someone. Do we love what they do for us? Do we love how they make us feel? Do we love the idea of them? Are we in love with love itself?^vi This concept is borne out by the protagonist Merseault, in Albert Camus' novel, “A Happy Death”. The first thing Merseault says to his lover when she wakes up in the morning is: “hello image”. Extracting love from ideology and examining it under a microscope, the deeper inquiries about love may confuse our eyes even further; but the view contains more than a glimmer of reality as much as faint murmurs of a heart, beating in the dark.

References:

Roland Barthes: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Fred Dreske: The Epistemology of Belief (excerpts)
Plato: The Symposium
Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics
Albert Camus: A Happy Death and L’estranger
Jean-Luc Godard: Éloge de l'amour (In the Praise of Love) (2001), b/w and colour, 97 mins, feature film
Jacques Derrida: TV interviews (culled from youtube.com)

Endnotes:

1 Love as a form of social contract – this idea is usually associated with marriages. This is based on my own experience and observation, but at the same time is resounded among many modern cultures and cultural expressions (literature, movies, etc) and in some writings of post-modern philosophers like Derrida and Barthes. For example, this experience of bliss and joy that I find in love is defined through the relationship between me and the ability of another person to project a kind of comfort that I seek (materially, sexually, socially, or intellectually) with whom I project my love to. That’s why I think marriages are done, more often than not, out of necessity and practicality.

2 This does not mean that Aristotle is egotistic, but he considers self-love to be the highest form of philia, following a logic where in order to love another, one must love himself first.

3 This contingency is popular to most Christians (let alone religious people of any religion), and even more extrem e that its usage, because of popularity has gone beyond the contingent relationship and became interchangeable – as evident in this popular phrase “God is love”. Which I will show in this essay that this is not so.

4 The plight of modernity and even more, post-modernity is that everything is defined through a historical spectacle. Philosophy, technology, cultures, etc – all cannot escape the clutches and demands of history.

5 External world is the living, real world that is independent or separate from our thoughts/mind. The world of experience.

6 Again, the world of experience.

7 If there are substantial sense-data, facts, etc, but we’ll not go into that… it is obvious that I am leaning towards externalism.

8 The world of appearances or the world of sensible things.

i Jacques Derrida - TV interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1BuNmhjAY

ii Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), Robert Bresson

iii Fred Dreske: The Epistemology of Belief

iv Fred Dreske: The Epistemology of Belief

v Jacques Derrida - TV interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1BuNmhjAY

vi Roland Barthes: A Lover’s Discourse

Barthes on the Semiology of Love

The lover is the natural semiologist in the pure state! He spends his time reading signs -- he does nothing else: signs of happiness, signs of unhappiness. On the face of the other, in his behavior. He is truly a prey to signs.

So the proverb is a lie: love is not blind...

Love is not blind. On the contrary, it has an unbelievable power to decipher things, which is related to the paranoid element in every lover. You know, a lover combines bits of neurosis and psychosis : he's tormented and crazed. He sees clearly -- but the result is often the same as if he were blind.

Why?

Because he doesn't know where or how to make signs stop. He deciphers perfectly, but he's unable to arrive at a definite interpretation, and he's swept away by a perpetual circus, where he'll never find peace.

Roland Barthes, Playboy, Sept. 1977 (interview conducted by Philippe Roger)
Photo by Toni Blay

Getting High with Life

Anu nga ba ang buhay? isang ilusyon,

isang anino, isang kasinungalingan,
at ang malaking biyaya'y maliliit pa rin,
dahil ang buhay ay isa lamang pangarap,
at ang mga pangarap ay pangarap lamang.

¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño:
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca, La Vida es Sueño
[Verses found inside a public LRT train along Taft avenue, MNL.]

Photos by Jake Salvador

Leng Tch'e

Leng Tch'e

Antonin Artaud, the Man Suicided by Society.

Here is a man, whose defiant brilliance emanates from the utmost of human anguish.
He was a true visionary of his age, but he also transcended all space, time, all caverns of thought and disrepute. Like a feral jackal he stalked the unknown, unexplored realms and states of mind in search of his true self, and in doing so, managed to share his own anatomy, his higher thoughts and soul with us, his readers, in ways that border on the occult in their brilliance.
But behind all these mournful blasphemies against man there is real love. And he is genuine, for every sentence was written as it had been lived.
-- Tengal





ON SUICIDE

Before committing suicide, I ask that I be given some real assurance of being; I should like to be sure about death. To me, life seems merely a consent to the apparent legibility of things and their coherence in the mind. I no longer feel like some irreducible crossroad of things death heals, heals by severing us from nature; yet what if I am no longer anything but a mere detour ridden by pains but not by things?
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will. I free myself between the beautiful and the hideous, the good and evil. I put myself in suspension, without innate propensities, neutral, in the state of equilibrium between good and evil solicitations.
For life itself is no solution, life has no kind of existence which is chosen, consented to, and self-determined. It is a mere series of hungers and adverse forces, of petty contradictions which succeed or miscarry according to the circumstances of an odious gamble. Like genius, like madness, evil is unequally apportioned in each man. And as with evil, likewise with good: both are the product of circumstances and of a more or less active leavening.
Certainly, it is abject to be created and to live and feel yourself in the darkest corners of your mind, down to the most unthought of ramifications of your irreducibly predetermined being. After all, we are only trees and it is probably written in some crook or other of my family tree that I shall kill myself on a given day.
The very idea of the freedom of suicide falls down like a lopped tree. I create neither the time nor the place nor the circumstances of my suicide. I do not even invent the thought of it; will I at least feel it when it uproots me?
It may well be that at the very instant my being will dissolve; but what if it remains whole? How will my ruined organs react? With what impossible organs will I register the laceration of this suicide?
I feel death upon me like a torrent, like an instantaneous bound of lightning whose capacity surpasses my imagination. I feel a death loaded with pleasures, with swirling labyrinths. Where is the idea of my being therein?
But look at God all of a sudden like a fist, like a scythe of slicing light. I willingly severed myself from life, I wished to turn my destiny inside-out.
This God has disposed of me to the point of absurdity. He has kept me alive in a void of negations and furious renunciations of myself; he destroyed in me everything , down to the finest dust of conscious, sentient life.
He reduced me to being like a walking robot, but this robot felt the rupture of his unconscious self.
And how I have wished to produce proof of my life. I wish to get back in touch with the resonant reality of things, I wish to smash my pre-destination.
And what does this God say to that?
I had no feeling of life, every moral idea was like a dry arroyo in my veins. For me, life was no object or shape; it had become a series of rationalizations. But these rationalizations, like a motor running, didn't even get off the ground, but were inside me like possible 'diagrams' which my will vainly tried to rivet on.
But even to get to this state of suicide, I must await the return of my conscious self; I must have a free hand in all the articulations of my being. God has placed me in despair as in a constellation of dead-ends, whose radiance culminates in me.
I can neither live nor die, nor am I capable of not wishing to die or live.
And all mankind resembles me.

Antonin Artaud

Translated by David Rattray
Taken from Antonin Artaud: Anthology, edited by Jack Hirschman
Portrait by Man Ray

Seven Poems: Fragments