Minus Twelve

We're Getting A New Look!

Look for a design overhaul and relaunch of Minus Twelve around Columbus Day. For now, I'm off to the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas....

The Idea For This Blog

This idea came to me yesterday as I was getting out of my car at Bellevue, like some of the best ideas do:  just out of nowhere, in a flash. And like the best ideas, it is a hybrid of three or four concerns / ideas that have been floating around in my head for a while.

I have been thinking for some time about how the "diseasing" of social traits and skills has confused how we think about how we act. One example is passive-aggressiveness (P/A), defined as a psychological affliction, when in its non-pathological form is nothing but a healthy attendance to personal needs couched within good manners.

More generally, there is the concept if the ego (and the individual) itself, which is as central to the modern concept of the self as the central dogma is to genetics, and on just as shaky a footing, if its proponents would apply their own logic to their own beliefs (and the fact that they don't is contained in their assertion that they don't harbor "beliefs" at all). The affective nature of the self within the community -- widely disdained when, as with its traits such as P/A, it is described a pathology -- is seen as a deficiency since it implies there is no solid self. And all developmental questions -- described as distortions introduced by trauma into the development of such a self -- are themselves subject to the same paradigmatic constriction. (This is not to say that development of an afftective self might not have its own dvelopmental distortions and weakenesses and pathologies -- these exist also within "the literature" of cultures that have a greater sense of community than post-Enlightenment societies of the industrialized West.)

Another element that came together at that moment was a memory of the therapy sessions with Ellen toward the end of the marriage was the mismatch that occurred when the therapist asked us each what we wanted the other to do, to change. For Ellen it was easy:  I want him to stop drinking. She chose a symptom. I couldn't verbalize what I wanted her to change. I knew there was something basically wrong, but there was no easy (read: straw man, read: idolatry) thing for me to latch on to. There was no one identifiable thing that I could ask her to change; what I needed her to do was to care, to see outside her own interest, to validate what I felt I wanted or felt was right. It made me feel incapable, and to a certain extent, wrong, guilty. But that didn't feel right, and I couldn't accept it, though I could not put a word to what the problem was (and I still can't put a single word to it).

I did finally (in a different session, maybe even with a different therapist) come to a sense of what it was -- and hidden within that realization was a clue to what I now have at least a further sense of: I told her (the therapist -- of course they were women) that what I needed was not for her change in the sense of stopping something (like drinking -- which would have not solved anything, being only a symptom...and in our case probably would have worsened our problems in the absence of any change on her part by removing my coping mechanism) by becoming something, that is, a person. I told her that I couldn't love a person if there was no person there (no there there, etc., "where's the beef?) and that until Ellen became a person there would be no way I could relate to her (much less "love" her).

Now in some ways, this would seem to be contradictory to the larger understanding I had at the time this moment occured yesterday (which I will not fully explicate right this moment) about how the individualized self is a fiction, a distraction, an idol limiting the scope of the affective self, but it is not. People like Ellen -- at least as that time, but apparently still so, based on seeing her briefly  a couple of weeks ago at Thanksgiving -- and Tukey and Flannery (and unfortunately to an extent her mother Kate as well) are at the other end of the continuum of the affective self (one we might call the "effective self" in an ironic turn of phrase that is similar to the way the term efficiency when applied to nature is both very and very-not true).  In this sense, the continuum runs from people who are so totally within themselves (psychically) that they are only aware of others as an extension of themselves; at the center of the continuum is the modern self which is detached from "itself" in that there is self consciousness -- not in the classic sense of mirror awareness, but in the sense of recognizing in a rational way that there are other egos, other "selves" out there -- and then the affective end at which the self is constantly definied by the feedback between one's own "locus" of interests and the loci of others, forming a variable web of interests and "selves" with in a larger self.

In that sense, while both ends of the continuum involve a connection between entities, one is centralized (the all encompassing self) and the other decentralized (the self as node). It has been a long time for me to be able to understand this in enough  to detail to discuss it in even this level of detail, but I had an image (regular for me) a long time ago about how this works. The image was people who sit on a merry go round without horses -- a flat turntable -- and watch as the world spins around them. The left end (the effective) people sit in the center of the merry go round, facing out and get to see every thing around -- except the half of the carriage (the self?) they ride that is behind them. The right end people (the affective) see things differently: while they still see all their surroundings, they see them across the carriage of the self and thus have a sense that what they see is within the context of a larger self, which is the merry go round (I did not grasp that last point until just yesterday, only the image...which I supected held an important lesson if only I could tease it out)

That's enough for now.

Nex I need to work how I would structure this work and why it is called what it is...

.