seeking the exit from the flytrap of the capitalist imaginary
Published by Ilias Gotsi
The title of this article is based on a quote by the philosopher Ludwig Widenstein, who, when asked what he thought his duty to philosophy was, replied, “To show the fly the way out of flytraps:
The following text poses some questions and reflections on what are the possibilities of challenging the capitalist imaginary and in particular what are those elements that need to be illuminated in order to understand the effects of colonialism that capitalism exerts on people’s consciousnesses and how spectacle substitutes for life and authentic desire. The paper also raises questions about whether systemic thinking has been sufficiently decolonized by the influences of patriarchal culture and heteronormative notions of the role of the family and the acceptance of gender binaries. The paper finally proposes a move to a behavioral language in psychotherapy that transcends the limitations imposed by masculine and feminine identifications of people’s characteristics.
The paper is based on three books, which I consider to be landmarks for a deeper understanding of the issues I attempt to address in my introduction:
– Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle
– In “I am the monster who speaks to you” by Paul Perthiado
– The Virtual Empire by Renato Curcio.
Introduction
Entering a flytrap, for a fly, sometimes for a human, I imagine that it can initially be an exciting experience as the tube through which the bottle is entered is flooded with sensual smells and sweet tastes and the future is promising and indeed the first contact with the liquid inside the bottle, usually a soft drink or sugar water is delightful!
The fly does not imagine that the reward for this rich pleasure is not only its life but the loss of the most important gift given to it by nature: to fly freely, flying around here and there discovering new smells and tastes, sometimes interrupting our midday summer sleep!
He gradually realizes that the bottle wall is an impenetrable boundary and the trap he is trapped in, and although the path to the exit is in fact, easy to navigate, it is almost impossible to discover the exit point.
The fly lacks certain basic qualities and this is the reason why it cannot effectively organize its escape: it lacks a sense of space and time, an awareness of its existence and ego position, self-reflection, a dialogue with the elements in the bottle, a connection to the meaning for its destination and an imaginary fed by this meaning. Absent, in other words, is the understanding that the fly itself is an organic part of a systemic framework.
Point one: time, space and dystopia: The writing of this text occurs at a time when dystopia has overwhelmed the dynamism or momentum of utopia. The pandemic, the war between European countries , the energy crisis and poverty, the devaluation of democracy, the re-emergence of fascism, the widespread exercise of death and biopolitical control on a planetary scale, the demystification of grand narratives and the dumbing down of the world, the normalization of violence and the domination of women’s and children’s bodies are elements of this period.
Element two. Deconstruction and impasse: My contribution can only invite questions and possible deconstructions, but any attempt to formulate a proposal for exits from contemporary flytraps is doomed in advance because of the doubts and contradictions that constantly come to the fore in my internal dialogue about the possibility of radical transformations.
Element three Language and inadequacy: The systemic language is, I believe, inadequate to describe the fluidity of the worlds that have emerged, on the margins of the dominant world, as the differences .and the number of mappings are unprecedented in their intensity and this condition has no historical precedent.
Element Four Language and encounter: The systemic language important to meet and converse with new philosophical movements and rights discourses such as queer theory, post-feminism, me too, neo-anti-racist movements, veganism, etc. by transfusing into its body elements of their theories and practices if it wants to address the diverse identities of today
Element five Language and the ambiguity of meanings : I appreciate that it is important to ask whether our language is full of words that have ambiguous meanings: self-esteem, autonomy, agency, meaning, desire, pleasure, emotion, happiness, relationships, feelings, ethics, community, collectivity, transformation, intuition, resilience are words that have been imbued with the capitalist imaginary of individuality and competitiveness and if we wish to continue to use them we may have to work hard to give birth to new meanings.
Element six. Tuning into meaning Our words have not only lost their meaning in political or scientific language but also in therapeutic dialogue.
In this context of vision and reflection, what does it mean and how is it defined for each individual in this hybrid place in which we meet today, a conversation about the family or about the concept of community or about sexuality, gender or the body , and so on as the enumeration of meanings is never ending since we now live in a multiverse of meanings? How can we experience a coordinated management of meaning?
Element seven: Language and the ethics of inclusion
One question that also concerns systemic language is whether it is sufficiently connected to the ethics of inclusion, a concept I had the opportunity to develop in the past in one of your two-part workshops.
This past summer I had the opportunity to read a book that I appreciate is a milestone if we wish to understand our participation as systems-thinking beings in conditions that favor the hegemony and domination that scientific paradigms exert in people’s lives.
Trans philosopher Paul B. Preciado extended an invitation to the Freudian Cause School conference in Paris in November 2019 in which he stated the following: Today, for you psychoanalysts, it is more important to listen to the voices of bodies excluded by the patriarchal-colonial regime than to reread Freud and Lacan. No longer seek refuge in the fathers of psychoanalysis. Your political obligation is to take care of the children, not to legitimize the violence of the patriarchal-colonial regime. It’s time to get out of the divans in the squares and collectivize speech, politicize bodies, de-wilding sexuality and decolonizing the unconscious.
Although it was addressed to the world of psychoanalysis I think it is equally relevant to us as systems theory has also contributed to a number of normalities such as the dominant forms of heterosexual families, conceptions of governance and the animation of systems, or the optimization of the functioning of multinational corporations.
In this context and with this self-awareness I will try today to be consistent in an inclusive language Thus I will not refer to psychotherapists or psychotherapists as this excludes from public space and discourse the bi-sexual or intersex people working in the field of psychotherapy and I will use the word individuals instead of male or female identifiers, asking for an apology as until recently I have been reproducing in all my writings a bipolar patriarchal language.
Item eight. The self as an archive of embodiment of heteronormative discourses, contestations and discontinuities: I appreciate that despite the extremely important attempt to which you invite us here today to understand the impact of the capitalist imaginary on the organization of social and interpersonal relations, or on the experience of emotions or deeply human conditions such as e.g. love, death, ascension, but also the mourning of loss or frustrations, our attempt will be incomplete as the self is an emotional, political, social, psychological, dialogical, moral and relational archive, which contains material from aspects of ourselves trained and socialized by a culture that not only creates but normalizes and legitimizes the existence of flytraps. Yet the effort is possible as the self is also a record that has been enriched with deconstructions, doubts and discontinuities
Element nine. The systems approach as a living archive of traditions and theories: If the self is an archive, then everything that accompanies or defines it, such as memories, experiences, relational and affective practices, is also an archive, which nevertheless remains alive, even if it remains unseen. The elements that compose it remain active and are potentially a source of triggers in our thoughts, body and emotions.
Thus any information, theoretical record or memory from our systemic tradition that we have in our theoretical and praxial archive remains active even if it has been deconstructed through the passage of time and our shifts.
If, for example, expertise or reductionism are elements of a proto-government attitude, if the allure of expertise is the honey of a flytrap, then I argue that no individual is free from its allure or the intention to reproduce it. I even argue that there may be times when he needs to reproduce it!
But apart from the idiosyncrasy there are still many elements that are part of systemic culture that are active in reproducing flytraps such as for example the emphasis on gender binaries, white culture’s support for what constitutes community and mental health or scientific thinking organised around the ethics of urban culture, the insistence on thinking about fatherhood in religious and patriarchal terms, the defence of our privilege.
Element ten: The difference of co-construction between subjects and the effect of domination: A strong point of disagreement I would like to express here with respect to the constructivist account of the co-construction of reality concerns the following: Co-construction and the importance of circular relational interaction involves adult equal individuals. In any reference to the co-construction of reality I propose that we have a clear picture of the relations of domination in human relations, where for example the other ceases to be existence and becomes a res , an inanimate object or a slave.
Element twelve. Who defines the meaning of words? The hegemony of words
Or as the rabbit puts it in Alice in Wonderland.
“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty sarcastically, “it means exactly what I choose it to mean – neither less nor more.
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you are able to make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” replied Humpty Dumpty, “who will be sovereign – that’s all.”
I thus wonder about the hegemony among discourses, and in particular here about that claimed by the therapeutic discourse of others, such as social, religious, legal, political or feminist discourses, in the case of an attempt to psychologise existential experiences or social relations or, worse still, the effects of social and ecological crises and disasters.
In what follows I wish to clarify certain concepts, which I believe can be used as useful punctuation points in the attempt to construct an incomplete, but for this reason open to enrichment, syntax for a grammar of the contestation of colonialism.
Concept one: Aestheticization. Walter Benjamin used the term to describe the domination of the aesthetic over theory, content and doing, which for him posed the danger of entering into fascism, that is, the complete control of human existence, since navigating through the senses would remove not only rationality but also morality.
Aesthetics here is not understood as a concept associated with rhythm or harmony, as we have been taught by collaborative constructivist culture, but is identified with the dominance of the senses, with image, pleasure, enjoyment and fetish, and contributes to . a passive attitude.
Concept two: colonialism
I was thinking about how to convey the concept of colonialism to our meeting as it has a central place in the introduction.
I decided to share with you in free expression an excerpt from a book by a man who dedicated his life to the effort of decolonization from the capitalist imaginary, Renato Curtio, who in his book entitled virtual empire refers to the stages of building over the years a condition of colonialism
Scene one: violence
Initially the colonists arriving on the land they wanted used the weapons they roared and violence and death allowed them to set foot on the land of the natives. The landscape was filled with dead or wounded bodies.
Scene two: the image and fear
The ambitious settlers then cut off the heads of those who continued to resist and put them on stakes, then photographed them and covered the wagons with large photographs of the impaled people. They wanted everyone to know their strength. Fear was the new element of control.
Scene 3 : the change in language and control in thought:
As the people continued to resist, the colonists began to change the language in documents and official dealings with the state as well as in education. The colonists’ children began to learn the new language, forgetting the language of their ancestors. Control over thought was now the new super weapon, since we know that language does not merely express but constructs, since my language is the boundary of my world.
Yet the colonists were not content with merely introducing a new language but demanded dominance over the existing one. In what way? By altering the meaning of the old language and assigning new meanings to important words.
Scene 5 colonialism in fantasy and culture. The society of the spectacle: The Self
The fact that some thought remained free and that desires were still being born that were linked to the utopia of decolonialism led to the next and final stage which was none other than the attempt to control imagination and culture. Small or large moments of everyday life, relationships, emotional experiences, love, and the death of people began to be modified through the influence of elaborate control techniques. Iconification and spectacle are part of these techniques and have the effect of giving man the illusion of re-creating his identity through self-definition, while in reality he becomes more and more fused, more and more undifferentiated and heteronomous. The profiles we create to communicate on the internet, body plastic surgeries, methods of self-improvement, addictive and expendable modes of pleasure are some of the fields in which we can explore the effect of spectacle or the illusion of the reification of the self. Particularly with regard to our online identities, which increasingly occupy more and more space in life, there is a huge question about the degree of freedom in their construction.
As Renato Curcio puts it, the invention of a self, corrected of flaws and given to the community, with only qualities and positive experiences, flawless, is now necessary for establishing online relationships. The ugly side of life must be hidden, just in the same way that a tourist visiting a new city does not see its ugly side, which is often carefully hidden.
Concept Three: spectacle and happiness
I have referred to the diligence of hiding the ugly side of life and the next step is to invite you to connect with two central concepts that are extremely useful in understanding the coloniality of the imaginary associated with capitalist and neoliberal ethics and everyday practice, and these are none other than spectacle and happierocracy.
If in the late 19th century and into the mid-20th Marxism has helped us to understand the alienation of desire and human relations through the domination of the commodity, then in the mid-1960s the Situationists and Guy Debord invited us to think about the impact of spectacle and iconization on our lives.
Aestheticization and colonialism are in a direct interaction and circular relationship with spectacle. They have been enhanced by the contribution of spectacle and have contributed to the transformation of life and emotions into reflection and spectacle. Culture, the arts, the aesthetics of pleasure versus desire, the articulation and assertion of sexuality , the aesthetics of bodies are directly linked to the society of the spectacle; especially when organized and expressed in the online world, which, peace be upon us, is no longer a mere refuge but increasingly occupies more time and space than the physical world.
“The spectacle is not a set of images, but a social relationship of individuals mediated by images”, Guy Debord states at one point in the book.
Thus in conjunction with the prevalence of technology, the spectacle not only invades every aspect of everyday life but also claims every aspect of the imaginary in terms of the life we are about to create.
In this context the self tends towards the other person to connect with them through spectacle rather than through dialogue. The concern of the self in colonialism is to express itself through the spectacle and to connect through its reflection . This substitutes for dialogue, turning it too into a version of the spectacle. The self in contemporary capitalism, despite the miraculous leap it has made towards self-definition and plurality, is not, according to this reading, an authentic expression of a polyphonic entity that pulsates and oscillates at infinite intersections on a fluid spectrum ranging between happiness and unhappiness, ugliness and beauty, life and death, desire and pleasure, resilience and vulnerability, relationship and disconnection, and so on. The spectacle seeks absolute dominance in all manifestations of being, in all our emotional interactions or relational experiences.
Happiness is the latest expression of the evolution of colonialism as it contributes to the creation of the most modern flytrap ever constructed.
The self ought to be happy, ought to claim the fiction of absolute happiness and many trends or approaches in psychotherapy contribute to this direction.
Happinessism, moreover, in addition to trying to organize human life around the pursuit and phoenix of happiness, also contributes to the territory of pleasure over desire, with the result that the imaginary is put at the service of its perpetual pursuit and satisfaction.
What we seek as an answer is through which paths we can seek exits from the flytraps but this presupposes decolonization. Serge Latouz, a colleague of Castoriadis, proposes de-development, in the field of economics but while in this field this proposal seems clear to me, I confess that in our field I do not have a clear proposal, as I have already said to submit.
My question and anxiety is how can we as systemically minded beings contribute to this effort, being aware that we are born, live and evolve in flytraps?
If the systems approach is seen as a theoretical and praxical archive that is constantly enriched and fed, if we as systems thinking beings have colonised and internalised capitalist ethics, if we as systems thinking beings , (inevitably?), swing , (inevitably?), across a dialogical spectrum that includes everything from the culture of domination to the collaborative approach to the biology of love then what reflective questions emerge?
Ultimately it is important to ask about all those times when we have reproduced, (or when our discourse has been absent from the social field), dominant social discourses in relation to gendered identities, to dominant family forms, with the effects of toxic masculinity and patriarchy on people’s lives, with the influence of the happinessocracy, with the psychologization of every moment of human experience or contributing to the optimization of the mechanisms of capitalist production.
In conclusion, I think it is important that you invite us to ask ourselves how psychotherapy and systemic practice fits into this context, how it is affected and how it can become a heterotopia of resistance but I would like to point out that systemic practices , as well as practices from other approaches, already contribute to the de-industrialization of the imaginary as they are extensively exploited in advertising or in actions with multinational corporations. If one looks carefully at the sites of famous institutes or even famous theorists, one will find, for example, proud references and reports of workshops they organise in which executives of multinationals, the US military or multinationals active all over the world in the field of privatisation participate. But that is a subject that would take so much more time to analyse.