Friday, August 05, 2005
(1:06 AM) | Anonymous:
Does learning to let go only make slavery that much easier?
Part of the allure of movies like Fight Club where the main character ‘totally let's go’ and falls into whatever flow of life happens to pass and carry him along to some romantic vision of life is that we, the adolescents who view the film, want that kind of life. We perceive ourselves as lacking that kind of freedom. This lack of freedom, which I believe goes under the name 'angst', is the same thing that drives our reckless love of the reckless. That ‘letting go’ is freedom. It's interesting what this 'letting go' usually circulates around. The truly free person does not remove themselves from debt; rather they ignore debt all together. American Beauty is a good example of this: the free person is the father who 'lets go' and spends lots of money while working at McDonald's, while the mother is the one lacking freedom as she's tied to her 'stuff'. He's free, he's reckless, and he’s doing whatever the fuck he feels like.This is all wrong - completely and utterly wrong. Not only is it wrong because freedom is pretty much lacking in content today, but it is wrong because the phenomenon of 'letting go' is found in the most enslaving instances of life. For instance, I've never felt less in control of my life (the definition of reckless, no?) than I have currently. 'Letting go' often times is described as a general decision to 'go where the spirit leads', but are you really trying to tell me that the spirit isn't present in a work schedule? That everyday I know that I must be somewhere at 11:30, or 10:00, or 4:00, or 5:00 - whatever time I know that I'm supposed to be somewhere under the power of something other than myself - this is a feeling of 'letting go', a direction given to my very spirit.
Deleuze & Guattari are often charged with being the philosophers of late Capitalism (No, I haven't read the Zizek book, though I suspect I should.), but I don't really see this as a problem as Marx was certainly the philosopher of early Capitalism. They speak at length of these forces that direct our lives, which are essentially non-human. While conceptualizing these forces they strip away the myth that we tell ourselves about the privilege of being human. This myth, a greater error than Christianity surely, says that we have the power to simply change our environment, that we can let go of those objects that decide the direction our life will take, and by doing so become free. Not that there is no hope, but that hope is just the wrong way of going about it. Their philosophy, if read well, doesn't allow us to make petty little sound-bites to get us through the day. It doesn't let us take solace in the faux-Eastern spirituality of 'letting go', which is ultimately a hope that someday we’ll have the power to do just that. It exposes that 'letting go', like every other form of therapy, is simply another conduit of power that must be directed either inside or outside the assemblage that you find yourself in. God, Jesus Christ, I hope I can wield this particular power towards some outside, towards some form of futural life. A speculation on the future; that's what floating on the waves of wage-time is and I only hope that I can take that speculation and make it pay bigger in the end than it looks to now.
