🪐13 Pentember 2024 Day 10,075
on Thursday (⛲🍇) i didn’t get up to too much writing, but gave my brain some time to do some big thinking in deference to the New Moon 🌑.
on Friday (♀️✨) i used most of my spoons driving through the blizzard to get groceries and made a couple omelettes which were really good but the sudden infusion of eggs after eating barely anything most days made me feel pretty sick. I did do a little thinking about Big Structure, in particular my Historical-Theoretical-Programmatic tripartite.
thinking about and worrying about how i am going to get everything finished and turned into substance and everything. but i am not without help.
i am also worried about losing my streak of work days. Mondays I’ve decided are my rest day. If I can do something that feels productive on the thesis today and tomorrow that will mark two 6-day weeks of writing productively.
Freewrite
i am thinking about i am thinking about i am thinking about tarot about my new tarot system 9 suits instead of four: Wands Cups Orbs Blades Lamps Bells Quills Horns Sandglasses.
| One Ace | Two Altar | Three Charm | Four Gate | Five Shrine | Six ? | Seven Mission | Eight Bridge | Nine ? | Ten ? | Eleven Tower | Twelve Temple |
| Thirteen Ambassador | Fourteen Comissar | Fifteen Tribune | Sixteen Philosopher |
144 Minor Arcana
Angels Demons Aeons Titans Faye Spectres Spirits
Courage Tempernce Efficacy Kindness Solidarity Patience Unsatisfaction
worried worried worried worried worried
OUTLINE
History
Recent history of self harm has shared an underlying self-interest logic as a kind of key to interpreting and thereby managing bodies
Present oriented response to social issues, manipulation or appeal for help
Present oriented response to managing stress, grounded in biomedicine, neurobiology, and neoliberalism
The kind of self differs significantly but the relationship to the self, that is, the intrapersonal relationship, is imagined as given, to some degree, self interest being innate or learned early on, or to be rediscovered in some cases
Theory
Other theorists have demonstrated the ways self interest is historically contingent, produced, an ongoing process.
Carl Schmitt describes the friend enemy dynamic, wherein one’s identity and in particular one’s capacity and willingness to sacrifice themselves can be rooted in a social/adversarial dynamic. One might die to protect one’s friends from one’s enemies, or support a power that compels everyone to fight for their friends as the best strategy to protecting themselves from the enemy, but the causation can flow in the opposite direction: one might die on behalf of one’s friends so that they will continue to fight against and defeat one’s enemies. that is to say, the enemy is a constituative outside
What then of a case where one hurts oneself, where one’s self is one’s enemy?
self harm is an embodiment practice, a technology of the self, which over repeated iterations, rituals, contributes to a way of life, a way of being in the world.
it has a function, a diverse aray of functions. it can sharpen focus, calm despair, concretize and metabolize the angry stillness of a mixed state into an aesthetic fuge state
Maggie Nelson points out that self consistency, self preservation, feeling unproblamatically good, are far from the only motivations on which people act.
self harm can be used to punish, correct, to enact violence and thereby condition oneself to not do X, think Y, be Z.
it can be used to eliminate, to destroy, one self in favor of creating space for a new self to emerge
personally, the relationship between the working self and the critical self, the one who reaches for solutions and feels the stress of failure versus the one who knows standards and embodies them, represents them, has been critical to self harm, wherein the Critic seeks to destroy the derelict worker and in doing so again and again to greater intensities can attack itself, the worker being a scapegoat in which he repeatedly embodies himself, tries to eliminate in order to take the place of so that he himself can in turn be eliminated. the mill of perfection runs on the blood of self sacrifice
self harm is sacrament, it stands outside and above the Normal, the Healthy, the Happy. liberalism’s avowal of the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may be able to make a space for that which rejects its own life, undermines its liberty, and destroys its happiness, but it will be an uneasy space, and its boundaries will teem with those who believe in a natural self evident right way to live which must be enforced on those who are not judged as having the capacity for freedom—not that they will fail if they are free, but that they don’t have the ability to do freedom if given the chance. it is a space not dissimilar to the paradox of tolerance, subject to the philosopher-magistrate who will deem where democracy, liberty, security threaten to compromise themselves or each other, at best an abstract emmenation of rights otherwise intended to be enjoyed, but not understood, avowed, celebrated
at the same time, the precariousness, the profit seeking, the double freedom of the worker entirely subject to the whim of the market and therefore entirely culpable to herself if she fails to slot herself into its ever evolving and imperfect uses for her, places such demands on her that she must do the impossible, put another way, that she must become something that she is not, and self harm is a key strategy to becoming something one is not
Programatic
the avowal of liberty, the open space to pursue such agendas as one’s innate and generally imagined as ahistorical interests incline oneself, has been and will continue to be a useful watchword for those who would evade police and bosses and landlords and psychiatric constraints in order to and by engaging in such rituals as self harm, but it is not sufficient for understanding ourselves and each other, leaves us ever at the cold bluster on the doorstep of boss and magistrate.
a more substantive basis would be refuge, not unlike the refuge self harm can provide those who would wield the knife to reshape their soul.
refuge to make our own bad choices and bring about our own jerryrigged souls. unlike the social democratic/welfare state model, it would place ourselves as the authors of our own worlds rather then tamely submitting to the ministrations of a well intentioned functionary