Thoughts on desire, inspired by “Sadly, Porn” and “Psychopolitics”
I’ve done some reading recently that falls under the general theme of desire, so I wanted to collect my thoughts in one place. I’ve separated this essay into my readings of two books, Sadly, Porn and Psychopolitics, and added a conclusion. But I don’t think I’ve fully understood either book, I haven’t finished either book, and I’ve ignored a lot of stuff that wasn’t relevant to the theme of desire, so I’d encourage you not to think of these as book reviews as much as book-inspired digressions.
Sadly, Porn
Sadly, Porn is a 1200 page book/koan. I’ve only read a few hundred pages of it, but it basically takes the form of a series of relatively short and deeply unreadable pieces of literary/artistic criticism, mostly centering around the subject of desire. The book is, conservatively, 40% footnotes - the first page ends with an 8-page footnote, and shortly later there’s a footnote getting upset with you, the reader, for wanting fewer footnotes. The book is written as a sort of polemic, but it’s a polemic against you for being awful.
I found this review by Jim Nelson, who also hasn’t read the book, to be really helpful as I try to understand it. The author of Sadly, Porn, who goes by Edward Teach, claims that the content of our desires is irrelevant - it’s the form that’s important. He then goes on to claim that we aren’t even capable of having desires. Nelson thinks that Teach is driving at a similar underlying point as W.H. Auden, who drew a distinction between desires and wishes. Nelson offers a simplification: “A wish is the simple act of imagining oneself as a different person, or in a different situation; a desire is imagining how one might convert one’s current self into a different person or situation. A wish is wanting to be thin; a desire is vowing to join a gym and work-out every day (even if one doesn’t act on it).” For Auden, wishes are rooted in a rejection of the self, and desires are rooted in acceptance of the self.
I think this is a very good first pass, and it approaches a few points in the book that I want to break down. First, though I don’t see Teach draw the same firm distinction that Auden did, he thinks that people fear any desire or fantasy which is geniunely theirs, because having a desire of your own means that you have some responsibility for it. This seems to be a sort of continuous generalization of Auden’s idea in that the more room your desire leaves for personal agency, the more responsible you naturally become for it.
I’ve done a little bit of elision with the word responsible, because you can be responsible to external forces or responsible to yourself - and this was intentional, because I think Teach intends both meanings at the same time. It’s fairly obvious how you could be responsible to others for your desires: if they think you want the wrong things, or if you want the right things but seem to be unable to get them, they might lose respect for you. Along similar lines, one of the ideas in Sadly, Porn is “pretending high status to oneself”: you want to believe that you have high status among your peers, but status is often illegible. This is good, because it allows you to pretend high status to yourself - the only thing that might get in the way of doing that is if you were presented with evidence of low status too often. From here we have a jump due to Goodhart: since status itself is illegible, “evidence of low status” gets unconsciously subtituted out for “evidence of appearance of low status.” In other words, we can continue to pretend high status to ourselves as long as we don’t risk looking low-status to ourselves when we take what we think is an outside view.
A good example of the desire/wish continuum and where Teach thinks we want to be on it: “you don’t want to ask out the pretty girl, you want her to trip so you’re forced to catch her.” We want things to work out such that we get what we want, without us exerting any obvious effort or incurring any risk of failure in getting there - ideally, we don’t even make any choices. In fact, Teach thinks that we prefer not to risk even having unique, specific fantasies of our own. My experience seems to confirm this: I’ve met a lot of people who are ambitious in a vague sort of way, in that they’ll gravitate towards things that are generally prestigious and even work hard to get those things (eg: promotions, leadership roles, scholarships, well-regarded universities, money), but I pretty seldom meet people who have ambition, in that there’s something specific about how they want the world to look in the future and they are working towards that goal.
In lieu of having desires of our own, Teach thinks we adopt the desires of others. I want the money and the hot girl, but only because other people want them too. People like to point out that attractiveness is socially contingent and usually changes to track indicators of wealth. The obvious fact that gets left out is that the mechanism for picking up your aesthetics from your peers is much simpler than learning to want rich people and then learning proxies for wealth: you just learn to want the things everyone else wants, and you minimize the risks of being responsible for wanting those things by fantasizing about getting them instead of making concrete plans.
The more desire you have in an area, the less comfortable you are with admitting agency in that area. Even people in positions of power usually pretend (to most of us) that they don’t have desires/ambitions within their sphere of influence; they instead have some higher calling or external rationality that compels their actions, and thus absolves them of responsibility. They can fail (spiritually or rationally) to act correctly according to their external driver, but are never responsible for what they want because they get to disavow wanting things entirely.
Psychopolitics
Where there are people looking to dump agency, there’s profit and influence to be gained by becoming someone who’s willing to accept it. On an individual level, Venkatesh Rao would call these people Sociopaths - his views dovetail so well with Teach’s that it doesn’t seem worth elaborating on here, but you can read The Gervais Principle or this Ribbonfarm post to get the flavor (he overloads the word to describe a specific role in interpersonal and workplace dynamics). But it’s also worth looking at how this effect is exploited systematically, and for this I want to talk about Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics.
Psychopolitics is a book on neoliberal governmentality, which is a fancy way of saying “how the state gets you to do things.” As generations of feudal lords have learned, people tend to do the bare minimum when governed at swordpoint, and sometimes they do unfortunate things like revolting and deposing you. Ideally, you would find a way to get people to want to do the things you want them to do, which makes them work harder and revolt less. Psychopolitics claims that modern neoliberal states (the state includes, but isn’t limited to, the government) accomplish this by indoctrinating people to think of themselves as projects rather than subjects - that is, people are made to believe that anything is possible for them if they work a little harder to make themselves a little better. In other words, they are seduced into thinking of themselves as capital, and working endlessly to exploit themselves such that the state never has to apply overt coersion.
Many of the claims in Psychopolitics appear to be directly opposite Sadly, Porn (to the extent that Sadly, Porn makes consistent claims at all, that is - but I’ll proceed taking my interpretations as canon): where Teach thinks we’re too afraid to even be responsible for our desires, Han thinks we constantly exploit ourselves in service of getting what we want (or, more accurately, that we’ve been trained to approach ourselves as things to be exploited - Psychopolitics is a bit short on concrete claims and supporting evidence). If people really did view themselves as projects and constantly work to improve themselves, I’d expect to see them being generally more successful in most areas of their lives. One obvious example is obesity: addressing your obesity is a ridiculously effective health intervention, and most popular diets do actually work if followed (at least in the short-term), so you wouldn’t expect high rates of obesity unless people didn’t follow their diets (or if there was some external driver of obesity like environmental contaminants or widespread metabolic issues requiring specific types of intervention). But Psychopolitics doesn’t require that people are successful in their self-exploitation, only that it becomes second nature to them. In fact, psychopolitics works better when people are moderately unsuccessful at exploiting themselves, because too much success risks people becoming enlightened enough to disengage with the system.
One of the ideas in Psychopolitics is the “digital panopticon.” The digital panopticon builds on Bentham’s idea of the panopticon, in which prisoners who never know whether they are being observed by guards learn to police their own behavior. In the digital panopticon, we voluntarily reveal ourselves to the world (mostly via social media) and serve as guards to each other. The digital panopticon exerts an powerful levelling influence by making social status extremely legible and then gamifying it. When we always feel that we’re on display to the entire world (even if we think of that as a good thing), the idea of being responsible for our desires becomes still more threatening. Which means we become more willing to surrender agency around things we want, which means we’re less likely to get them, which means they can be dangled in front of us as carrots indefinitely.
Conclusion
Sadly, Porn is about how we sabotage ourselves and others, ultimately (to my reading) out of fear of aloneness or rejection. Psychpolitics provides an interesting lens on how this effect is systematically exploited to turn people into units of production while collaborating with them to prevent any benefit of their productivity from accruing to themselves.
This essay has been mostly my opinions anyway, but in the spirit of taking responsibility for what I want: I think you should probably get some ambitions (if you already have some and they seem good to you, that is an excellent and unusual thing and I’m rooting for you). If you’re looking for a place to start: elsewhere in the blog, I’ve endorsed working out as a self-development practice; I’ll reiterate that here. It seems like seeing the results of regular hard work over a longish period of time is really good for self-efficacy (aside from the normal health benefits), which will give you a boost towards being more ambitious.
And speaking of, I think most people should probably be generally more ambitious, too. I’ve personally shied away from the idea of being ambitious in the past because ambitious people always seemed to end up doing business school or consulting or working for Facebook or something and I really didn’t want to end up there. If that resonates for you: just get better ambitions than those people, don’t use them as an excuse to do nothing. If you’re already generally ambitious, but don’t have specific ambitions (as in, you just want to be rich or something): you’re halfway there, and you can do better by thinking about what you want the world to be like and why you want that.
If you can find them, I think you should make friends with some friendly, ambitious nerds (friendly nerds with ambitions?) and consider helping them out if they have good ideas they want to try (cf: microsolidarity; this doesn’t have to be monetary if you can’t afford that, sometimes feedback or introductions to the right people are just as good as or better than funding). Helping other people do something big means that you’ve already done part of something big, and they’ll be more likely to help you when you have an idea. And, being around ambitious people will naturally make you more ambitious.
After reading part of Sadly, Porn, I’ve occasionally redirected daydreaming about outcomes to daydreaming about processes. I’ve also noticed that I’ve started biasing more towards trying things and taking risks that I might have been too scared to take before. I don’t know if that relationship is causal, but it would be an interesting experiment to run!
Unfortunately, due to the sheer amount of irrelevant material, I can’t really recommend either of these books, but they definitely changed the way I think. If you decide to read them: good luck. If you finish, write a review for the rest of us.