Dream differently

I've been in California. A student challenged me on one of my typical appropriations of Zizek, this time the one that says something to the effect that we have to reinvent our modes of dreaming.

Leaving aside the unfortunate evocation of Clinton era politics (reinventing government)--which could be mine, but I'm too tired after the red eye back to look it up--there is something impossible (but necessary) about an injunction to dream differently. But maybe that's the point.

Dream.

Wake up.

Dream again.

Dream better.

Our mistake in emphasizing either dreaming or waking is forgetting the connections between the two, their imbrications and links, the way each persists as a gap in the other, and even the way that there are moments when they blur such that we can't tell whether are asleep or awake (then again, this could be simply my extension of the early hours waiting this morning at JFK, neither awake nor asleep).

The nihilism of misplaced realism is the way it remains stuck in wakefulness, as if dreaming were a retreat (Lacan points to how in waking we flee the Real of the dream). Frequently, and with increasing intensity, perhaps as we approach the Real of Capital in today's continued condition of undeniable, unavoidable, crisis and excess, some on the left, hands over their ears and screaming, repeat, repeat, repeat that we've learned that socialism is a dead exercise, that communism is no ideal, that any, any, any evocations of a Party, or discipline, or--heaven forbid--taking over the state and having the state take over the economy are, slap/slam, slap/slam, slap/slam, misplaced dreams.

But maybe that's the point. To place the dreams of communism again in our setting, to reset them, to occupy them and extend them and use them to change and distort what we've woken up to. The same dream in a new setting is not the same dream.

Since I was young, I've dreamt versions of the same dream. It usually involves exploring a house or houses. And in each dream, I remember the previous ones. I know where the rooms lead, where the hidden staircase is, where the scary places are. Each new dream adds something else or each of my wakings is different and so what I recall or accent is different.

In State and Revolution, Lenin makes the withering away of the state depend on the spread of accounting, surveillance, and discipline throughout the population. When society becomes a factory and an office, when the tasks are so simple that anyone can do them, the parascitic elements of the bourgeois-military state are no longer necessary (of course, it goes without saying that this aspect of withering away is only possible after the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state and the establishment of a proletarian state). Too many so-called leftists write today as if we can have the withering away without the revolution, as if the withering away would necessarily be a human withering (or maybe this is why they are so keen on animals and objects; they know full well that this is no human withering at all, that the fundamental edifice of police power protecting the finance sector doesn't and hasn't wither away at all, that humans persist as so much refuse, accumulating as themselves as the new surplus). It's the way that they deny antagonism.

They should go back to sleep.

Comments

[amy]

"The same dream in a new setting is not the same dream." Doesn't the new dream require new language and metaphors? I don't think we've even begun to find sufficient terms.

[Charles]

Jodi:

First time poster, long time reader...

I'm wondering if you have any thoughts of the growing field named "speculative realism," with its various investigations, eg, object-oriented ontology? If you have a piece about this already on your blog, forgive me, I haven't seen or found it, but please direct me to it, if you would. (You reference to certain thinkings of animals and objects made me wonder, but I take it you had a difference context in mind.)

[Jodi]

Amy--I'm suggesting that in a dream, what appears to be the same language/image/word can, because of a different setting, be something different. So, the language of secrecy and revelation meant one thing under absolutism but is inadequate under communicative capitalism; an ideal of society as an office and factory was one thing in a setting of peasants without electricity and something else entirely in a setting where over half the people are on computers every day.

Charles--the reference to objects and animals was a gesture in that direction; but, it's a kinda weak gesture on my part--more polemical than thoughtful--because I stopped following their discussion. I stopped following because I didn't see the political purchase of it. I've asked someone to write a general account of the arguments for Theory and Event; I'd like to read a nice overview before deciding whether to go into the details.

[amy]

In the sense that SR is reacting against a trend or tendency within academic philosophy to subjugate non-human entities on the grounds of correlationism (and thus create a human-centricity that suggests solopsism) it's political isn't it, if only in the tiny realms of the academies? But aren't all realms tiny at the threshold? This movement away from the human echoes all those movements that attempt to protect other species from the onslaught of human excess.

The irony is of course that outside the academy the dominant unconscious M.O. is realist epistemology, with all its dangerous presumption and prejudices. We are not encouraged to doubt ourselves and our self-serving viewpoints nearly enough.

[old - Doug Johnson]

Very nicely put.

[pollywog]

funnily enough i'm finding i need to sleep more, maybe i just need to dream more ?

[Charles]

Jodi:

I look forward to your thoughts on this, if and when you make them.

Amy:

Good points. When reading much of SR I really can't say I disagree with it on ontological grounds -- surely there is an ontological heterogeneity that is certainly "real" (also including the Lacanian real), but I don't see how admitting this heterogeneity is a move "away" from human concerns and the realm of the political, as you say, but rather a resistance to linguistic or cultural reductionism (or a neurobiological reduction, say). If anything, it is a complexification of human existence, inasmuch as it is also inter-species existence, ecological existence, cosmological existence, technological existence, etc.

Your final point on the doxa of our time being one of immediate self-presence masking our "unknown knows," means to me that the dominate ideas of much of continental philosophy, while for SR are perhaps, at times, dogmatic and reductionist, are still extremely valuable -- philosophically and politically -- for the situation today. These are open questions, but is the problem of political activism one of the failure of the late twentieth century (subjective) thought, or a failure of its embodiment outside of the academy? Will SR and an object-oriented ontology bring about, in any causal way, better political thinking, framing of questions, tasks, etc? I wonder, in a Žižekian way, have we not taken the subjective approach far enough, for instance, in his example about the inconsistency between experience and knowledge with regard to the ecological crisis? That we need further subtraction and alienation from our object-ive ties and interdependences? I don't know, but it's fascinating. I am looking forward to the new book on the "speculative turn."

[amy]

"I wonder, in a Žižekian way, have we not taken the subjective approach far enough, for instance, in his example about the inconsistency between experience and knowledge with regard to the ecological crisis?"

Charles, if you don't mind, could you explain this, I'm not sure what you mean exactly.