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March 02, 2005
No Lear
I wrote here on modes of emotional bondage which, in the absence of actually effective social bonds, continue to tyrannise as moral phantasms, gaining power in fact from their unaccountability, which is dissembled as a kind of spritual spontaneity. Charlotte Street's post on Bonds, Feudal and post-modern intersects and reinforces this from a different angle:
It's as if [Cordelia]'s saying ... "my love does not emanate from me, but from the rules of the Symbolic Order, from the moral matrix in which, unchosen, we live. I love you via fidelity to this code". The other daughters, by contrast, make the gesture of expressing a love that is theirs.
Another student interjects with 'But isn't it really the same today". Initially,I thought this would be another 'nothing's changed, everything is universal' spiel. But not quite. The idea was rather that the 'feudal' notion was in fact the formalisation of what today is merely implicit - a kind of tyrannical superego imperative to love one's parents. Except today, the fact that it isn't formalised and defined actually increases its binding power.
[...]
Where ... these 'bonds' are not formalised and defined one is tyrannised by a kind of guilt. One can never know whether one is 'doing the right thing', and this guilt ('am I loving as I should?') is a more tenacious bond than the 'bond' proper.
Which is to say: we all have to choose between being a Cordelia or a Goneril/Regan; our inclusion in the postmodern individualist-emotional social order depends similarly upon our being seen to subscribe to the amorphous, sentimental protestations of love demanded by a capricious sovereign.
The difference being that there is no Lear, or that the "emotionism" of postmodernity makes of us simultaneously father and daughter; tyrannised by others, tyranniser of others in turn. This is something like the passing down of 'the sting' through the chain of command: but in every direction, creating a mesh which covers all.
The simultaneous absence of the certainty of social code, and humanistic resistance to the axiomatic of capital makes us our own and each others' mad, jealous, overdependent masters. The myriad of images and the meshwork of synthetic dependence produced by/as the regime of general individualist-emotional enslavement occlude the exile, the slow extermination, of those who have the courage to defy it and expose the real conditions of postmodern (a)sociality.
addendum: 'Pipes and Wiring'
also agree with CS on blog writing style ('a blog article should not (in my opinion) be written as if it were to be published in tommorow's newspaper'). Although that misspelling of 'tomorrow' (consequent, no doubt, on said devil-may-care experimentalism) might in fact bring CS into closer stylistic proximity than he thinks, given this (on which depend my hopes of appearing in Private Eye -" that's unless Pseuds Corner opens itself to blogs, in which case it would however need to expand from a corner into an autonomous supplement).
Posted by robin at 07:27 PM