I would argue that people actually ARE the choices they make. Any other “identity” is bound to be abstract and ineffectual.
Side-note, I just re-watched The Cabin in the Woods this weekend, and totally missed how the giants, slumbering good that must be appeased are the audience. Probably fairly obvious to everyone else, but second viewing for me.
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One thing that kept me from loving TCitW as much as so many have (still enjoyed it, though) is that I thought it’s subtext was too bloody obvious. Having someone show up at the end named “The Director”?
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I think people make choices that are both consistent with their beliefs and that go on to define them. But each choice from groups of individuals get summed up in ways that create a collective consciousness hell bent on giving individuals the things they disavow even in action, making people not just what they do but what they desire as well
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I strongly disagree. Desire only refers to capabilities and achievements which people can do. The common belief in acquisition and possession of things seems quite naive, in practice.
By desires I mean the things people want. Love, fame, fortune, recognition,sex… They may be tied to identity but more commonly, clinging to an identity makes you disavow wants that are not compatible with what you believe about yourself. I’m saying these wants get expressed in the collective decisions we make as groups. If we decide to be selfless, then our collective decisions will show a gaping hole in the things we’ve dared not express. And somethings got to fill it.
I agree.
Are you two going to own your comments, or disavow all knowledge of them?
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Does @popobawa4u believe you can own comments? Are you denying comments autonomy?
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I comment as a process. But to others who do not experience this process directly, they may appear to be an artefact.
Also, it helps that I can still audit my prior thinking processes, even when I have moved on to new ones.
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All ownership of comments is theft. You are not a true Marxist.
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But I am a #TrueScottsman.
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Oh, what clan are you? I assume if you are a true Scottsman you aren’t one of the hated McPhersons, who might as well be English.
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Buchanan.
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Davidson here.
I don’t think we are mortal enemies. I don’t think so.
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I used to know a Campbell (one who turned out to be high up in the line for Duke of Argyll until the new one started having kids). Aren’t they all the other clans’ mortal enemies?
Can a good Marxist acknowledge clan chiefs?
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Hi folks. Sorry I haven’t been around much. I got a new job, which is generally a good thing, but has really cut into my online socializing.
Anyway, I’ve long thought that desire is key to identity, to the self. How does one understand an historical figure or a fictional character? How do you ‘bring them to life’ in writing or acting or role-playing? You think about their motivations, what they want – what they desire.
As I recall, when I was in college in the 90s, as there were breakthroughs in public acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex relationships, my friends were struggling through the process of “coming out” and coming to terms with their sexuality. The relationship between personal identity and desire was a political and social issue, and immediate and personal at the same time.
Understanding another’s desires is the flip side of the coin of empathizing with another’s pain. It is compassion, the basis of solidarity.
I’ve been puzzled by the idea, that I hear from some philosophical and spiritual traditions, that desire in general is something to overcome. The worst moments of my life were the moments in which I couldn’t imagine desiring anything. Detachment seems to me to be not a goal, but the ultimate negation of life, the very thing that all life struggles against.
I once felt is as something of an epiphany, when it occurred to me that the distinction between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ is a social distinction. If you understand that continuing to live is, itself, a choice, then you can see that it makes more sense to use ‘need’ and ‘necessity’ as descriptions of dependency relationships, not as absolutes. You need air to breathe, and you need to breathe to live.
Among other things, it occurred to me that this gets at something left implicit in Marx’s description of a commodity. A commodity has a dual nature: a use-value, and an exchange value. Marx spends a few thousand pages explaining how exchange values are determined. But what determines use values?
Desire. And that’s why human beings – beings with desires – are indispensable to the accumulation of capital. To create something with use-value, you need someone who can recognize that the thing created is desirable to other people, who are like them. That is the essence of creativity. Production cannot proceed without it. The process of production depends upon human solidarity, and thus the possibility of socialism is always at the core of the production of capital.
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Yes, but how’s your socialistizing been, comrade?
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And will she own up to it? (She, right? No?)
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