The House

1. a jail where we are confined - under surveillance - until we die
2. a hearth to protect us from storms and the cold of winter, the fear of night, the loss that seizes us, our sense of guilt, our need to rest and recover, to go back again to our selves, to let our Id find its fertile environment, our universe.

 

The Universe is old enough to have truly deep intelligences, so...

What are their motivations and interests?

Seth Shostak

 

The symbol of the home, the abode, the cave, the shelter, embodies the notion of the eternal return. Instead of following Nietzsche’s heroic composure, translated into Georges Bataille’s guilt, the “heroic effort” of seeking the new in the “ever-always-the-same” motivates an intrinsic creative instinct.

If we wish to talk of immortality, we will have to accept the fundamental concept of living together. The wish to Power is to be found in each being. Who is the jurist, the syndic of the seventeenth century, the partitioner, the jailer, the psychiatrist, the mad experimenter, if not a part of our selves. We are the first to join the ruler when danger appears. It is apparently difficult to stand up on the foundation of our Id, in respect, and to go beyond by trying to recover what has been inevitably lost, and to rebuild, tirelessly. In order to hope in the forging of such a personality the basic needs have to be fulfilled. Shelter, food and clothes. Profit is not the way to go. Although competition, as Leonardo da Vinci pointed out, is the beginning. In-between these two poles a suitable way of living should be outlined if we wish to avoid chaos and the fulfillment of a creation tout-court. Foucault analyzes what can be roughly defined the main erroneous trend in history.
In 1975, Michel Foucault in the third chapter of his Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) in the translation by Alan Sherindan, focuses on Panopticism. The plague in the seventeenth century constitutes for him an interesting starting point. The state of terror triggered by the disease allows for a sudden iron grip by which “only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets […]. It is a segmented immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment.”
Collaborative and eager to perform their part, everybody conforms. Didn’t we read of a similar situation during WW2? There was no plague in the ‘40s in Europe but a profound economic crisis.
By going back to Foucault, it is easy to be touched by the attention he gives to each small step that the collectivity has taken backwards to see the enormous cathedral of restrictions develop into an intricate labyrinth by which regulations literally percolate into the smallest detail of our life and take hold of it. He underlines how, once created, the notion of sectarization can easily be reprojected elsewhere. Jeremy Bentham, in 1785 plans the Panopticon (observe: opticon, all: pan). It was never built but it stands in history as the symbol of what most disturbs Foucault and his followers. Inside this construction, the excluded “is the object of information, never a subject in communication.” The pattern, once devised, can be easily replicated and adapted to infinite categories of beings: “if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents.” What the Author wants us to understand is that Bentham’s plan has focalized how power should be: “visible and unverifiable.” Out of the hands of individuals, here is a “machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference.” Foucault’s reading of history is inclement, the ideal of power becomes “safe custody, confinement, solitude, forced labor and instruction.” Logically a kind of instruction to suit the perpetration of the guidelines indispensable for the inexerable presence of power. But of what kind of power are we talking about? The one of mind over mind.
Great effort for the making of the soulless dome has to be ascribed to the Christian elementary schools of the seventeenth century with their way of entering familiar nuclei, indirectly and undisturbed. They were meant to shape a specific prototype. With the beginning of the Revolution their aims sharpened towards the fortification and the development of the body, they had to “prepare the child for a future in some mechanical work,” thus “an observant eye, a sure hand and prompt habits” were needed. The Counter-Reformation, through conversion and moralization, reaches its aims: religious, and economic or political. It is in the eighteenth century that “the organization of the police apparatus sanctioned a generalization of the disciplines that became co-extensive with the state itself.” With discipline, Foucault sees a “type of power, a modality for its exercise, [that comprises] a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets.” It becomes a “sort of generalizable mechanism of panopticism, right for the fact that is has infiltrated all the other mechanisms of power. As Foucault states: “The Enlightenment, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines” and he adds, “in appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an infra-law.”

We live in a disciplined society with a series of cameras to detect our movements. If at the beginning the priest, the teacher, the neighbor were the eyes that pierced through our personal sphere, the same eye has become mechanic, an extension of the power machine, and it records every action we perform. The eye can reproduce our entire life on power screens. There is no way you can keep on your own round here! No place for Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, for Anna Karenina, for Suttree:
"Lights came on above the shops, a neon sign here, sudden paltry spanglements against the bluegray dusk. A fabled miscellany in this pawnshop window. The door clattered and hushed shut and the trolley lurched forward. The pale domes of light in the clerestory waxed more yellow. The seats to the front of the streetcar were vacant yet two blacks hung by one arm each like gibbons from the chrome rail overhead and swayed with the gathering speed. With the heel of his hand Suttree cleared a small window in the frosted glass and peered out at the few figures receding along the walks. Fellow citizens in this bewintered city. A passing rack of hot neon washed his own sad countenance from the glass. He leaned his head against the cold pane, watching pedestrians toil from pool to pool of lamplight, trailing wisps of vapor, bent figures, homebound. He could smell the old varnished wood of the sash and the brass of catches. The trolley slowed, surged forth again. Cars passed below, a rumpling sound of tires over the bricks. The buildings dropped away. They wee gong by a frozen mudflat, lunar, naked, spoored with fossil dogtracks. Under the billboard lights small sprawling mica constellations."
From Suttree by Cormac McCarthey, p. 178 (NY: Vintage Books 1992)

It is such a pleasure to find on the Internet Aldous Huxley speaking, calm and serene in its balanced tone that nonetheless touches both wisdom and irony at the same time, an incredible pitch. So much so that he actually ‘meets’ the embalmed Jeremy Bentham, “a little old gentleman,” as he describes him. Huxley is with Albert Schweitzer who comments that “Dear Bentham” did much less harm than Hegel, to which Huxley proceeds into a very long explanation to justify Schweitzer’s words. The only fault Bentham actually had was his desire for tidiness: “Only in one field did Bentham ever sow the teeth of dragons. He had the logician’s passion for order and consistency; and he wanted to impose his ideas of tidiness not only on thoughts and words, but also on things and institutions. Now tidiness is undeniably a good—but a good of which it is easily possible to have too much and at too high a price. The love of tidiness has often figured, along with the love of power, as a motive to tyranny. In human affairs the extreme of messiness is anarchy, the extreme of tidiness, an army or a penitentiary.” Bentham’s spirit for a well-arranged society reaches its extreme in Nazi concentration camps: “Seen from the air, Belsen is said to have looked like an atomic research station […].” Huxley continues by extending the idea of panopticons to industries, armies, bookkeeping and administration. Why? For the mere reason that human beings are coerced to “subordinate” themselves to structures that have nothing to share with human nature.

I see no good in having several lords:

Let one alone be master, let one alone be king

 Ulysses by Homer quoted by Etienne de la Boétie, ibidem, p. 41

Arakawa & Gins have reached their architecture through the observation of people. That is why they want them crawling inside their homes. The various and increasingly perfected techniques of reproduction, indispensable by now, have reduced man to a robotized entity that directs himself inside a limited labyrinth, blind to the laws of nature, unconscious of hazards. Telepathy, intuition, sixth sense have been relegated to Hollywood or to the improvement of selling techniques. The average urban man lives in reduced spaces, works at a desk for endless hours in a stressful competition, to go back to a few (or be they many, the concept is the same) square meters and try to sleep to recover as much mental energy as he can to face another similar day in the jungle of cement.

 “Not escape,” Neill corrected. “The psychotic never escapes from anything. He’s much more sensible. He merely readjusts reality to suit himself. Quite a trick to learn, too. The room in Chekhov’s story gives me an idea as to how they might have readjusted. […]”
from Manhole 69 by J.G. Ballard

Correlatively, the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium, its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of context where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario) symbolizes the id in a quite startling way. Similarly, on the mental plane, we find realized the structures of fortified works, the metaphor of which arises spontaneously, as if issuing from the symptoms themselves, to designate the mechanisms of obsessional neurosis--inversion, isolation, reduplication, cancellation and displacement.
from The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience, by Jacques Lacan

The manifestation of the Id requires space. Be it physical, metaphysical or emotional. Lacan opens up the concept to society which is conceived as a body with a psyche:

We can understand the inertia characteristic of the formation of the I, and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis--just as the captation of the subject by the situation gives us the most general formula for madness, not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylums, but also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury. (ibidem)

Against the ‘etiquette’ first set into rules by those who needed to distinguish themselves from the rest, at the distant French courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And in the same way against the large white collars with which Queen Elizabeth is portrayed, nobody would have been able to toil soil with such an embroidered armature.

So it was Maurits Cornelis Escher (17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972) to copy from Giovanni Battista (also Giambattista) Piranesi (4 October 1720 – 9 November 1778). Piranesi was contemporary to Bentham, and to Blake and Helvetius (Huxley enlightens us again). His Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) are enormous disemboweled catafalques, etchings that portray bridges leading directly into massive walls, watch towers, choreographic machinery of torture and execution in the background or in the foreground, cargo winches dangling from shafts, nets, an uncomfortable cold, the feeling of being lost, dampness in your hollow bones. What most impresses in this set of drawings are the vaulted ceilings like orbital openings, the prison is inside us, the skull being the delimiting structure, the outside walls. Thomas De Quincey notices the lack of balustrades on the stairs, and rightly sees “the abyss.” Baudelaire arrived later to seize the depth of that abyss.

The same principle, the skull containing what is a representation of the outside world, can be found in Rudolf Steiner with his theater. First built out of wood and, it seems, burnt down by the Jesuits, Steiner lived long enough to see it rebuilt in concrete.
It can thus be said that our society, as it has developed through history, devoured by its psychoses, has been building a kind of architecture that makes of us nothing but diseased fearful beings, unsatisfied and separated, unsited, who – in order to comply with our instinct of survival – cling to ideals, ideas, routines, words, expressions, habits which have been proven to be against our nature or devoid of meaning. Nonetheless the process to let a new kind of consciousness arise is so slow and the resistance to this process so embedded that it might take centuries before we can change the state of things. It is easy to disqualify negative resistance in terms of the interest of a few. Although it constitutes one of the pivoting extremes that tightly pull straight through, resistance does not extinguish itself there. Ignorance could provide some useful clues, but what kind of ignorance? Ignorance of what is not contemplated by the fundamental notions of our culture? Again a thorough reading of Derrida might be needed to enter a selection process to unmask minuscule particles, intersections, detriti, magnetized by Deleuze and Guattari, not to mention Foucault again, who - in his clearness and unselfishness (this is the only way I can praise his writings seen his extraordinary wish to make his thought clear by backing it up with infinite examples) - has read half the libraries in France.
But I would like to end with our fatherly-like all embracing and reassuring father: Richard Rorty. In his Deconstruction and Circumvention he does not diminish Derrida, but his more “incautious followers.” He continues by stating that: “In its extreme form, this belief [that Derrida has discovered the key to unlock the mystery of all literary texts] leads critics to treat every text as ‘about’ the same old philosophical oppositions: time and space, sensible and intelligible, subject and object, being and becoming, identity and difference, and so on. Just when we pragmatic Wittgensteinian therapists were congratulating ourselves on having disabused the learned world of the idea that these oppositions were ‘deep,’ just when we thought we had got this terminology nicely leveled off and trivialized, we found all the dear old textbook ‘problems of philosophy’ being heralded as the hidden agenda of our favorite poems and novels.” He thus inveighs against both those who want to reconstruct the textbook distinctions and against those who want to deconstruct them by offering a third solution, to ‘de-thematize them.’ Because, Rorty explains, “it is important for the deconstructors as for the realists to think that metaphysics – that genre of literature which attempted to create unique, total, closed vocabularies – is very important. Neither can afford to admit that, like the epic, it is a genre which had a distinguished career and an important historical function but which now survives largely in the form of self-parody.”
Are we close to the Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, or to the one by Foucault, but with less Romantic impetus? The new world with one of his main representatives, Richard Rorty, arrives to clarify, to disentangle, to fill us with hope, and finally to wipe out metaphysics tout-court.
I feel I need to quote the conclusion of the paper that Rorty wrote while at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1983 because it is of interest not only to the philosopher but to the same writer: