Elena: I am using these people's work to develop my own understanding of the subject at hand. This is my first attempt to formulate a theory of the Octave of Impressions as conceived by the System or The Work, presented by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. This paragraph is taken from the article http://ej.lib.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/2939/3007.
One of my aims is to help people stop hurting themselves and each other. Life is LIFE! Love is life!
PD: Yes, but — to return to what is emerging as a powerful theme in this discussion— the reason for a transformation in a distinctly modern mode of self knowledge derives, not just from the innovations of that class of elite producers charged with the task of self reflection — the ones we call philosophers and human scientists, whose communication with the everyday has yet to be adequately explained from a Foucauldian standpoint — but from changing social figurations in everyday life itself. A new subjectivity, one characterized by a new inwardness, or by the belief in a new inwardness, and a distinct sense of an emotional interior, as an object to be
known and interpreted with the aid of science, develops from a wider process of relative class equalization.
Elena: This is interesting. The relative class equalization brings to the average human being a sense of his own self independent of his position in the social hierarchy. The human being appears! But we always were there from the beginning. What is happening is that we are becoming conscious of it en masse!
At an earlier time, people experienced emotion in terms of practices of deference to their superiors, in which emotions are associated very
clearly with social hierarchy. Under the effects of increased interdependence and class equalization, emotions are disentangled with hierarchies, and become projected onto this new domain, the subjective interior. People tend to lose their social compass as a means of finding the source of emotional experience, yet they still experience emotions, which they now imagine emanating from within. So if modern subjectivity is understood in terms of the emergence of new ways of searching for the truth of oneself, this must be understood not simply as a philosophical innovation, but as a reflection of changing social figurations.
In other words, the homo clausus, as Elias termed it, or the myth of the individual subject, does not come directly from practices of the self, though people may of course engage in practices that could be described in this way, but through changing dependencies (andtherefore power relations) between people of divergent class positions.
Elena: This last paragraph is important. If I understand correctly, for which there is no guarantee being so little familiar with this language and context, the question here is whether the individual self actually exists or is a make up of social relationships and I would argue that both spheres exist. The sense of "individuality" that developed in Capitalist America, creates a definite kind of individual and individualism that has nothing to do with the kind of individual that almost "feudal" Colombia develops in its nationals but neither one has hardly anything to do with practices of the self. The practices of the self that even Foucault speaks about when he puts forward the idea of philosophy as a "therapy of the soul" belong to a perfectly individual inner realm that can become independent of social dependencies. Only in that realm is the individual truly in a sphere of his own volition. This does not mean that the individual is disconnected to the social fabric, it means that he is connected to the archetypes, the net itself and not the threads or colors of the tapestry. It means that s/he is not as easily affected by the world around him and instead becomes a force of his own that begins to affect the world around him. Like circles of force circling within and around each other, when the individual creates a life of his/her own he/she moves from being a completely passive circle to being an active circle creating a lemniscate between himself and the world around him. Life itself takes care of developing lemniscate forces between the individual and his surrounding through the personal experiences each person goes through. In every exchange between people, the self of every individual expresses itself and whether the relationship is pleasurable or displeasing both individual’s selves “introvert” the experience which conditions the notion of who they are. This is the first explanation I’ve ever written on how I am beginning to perceive the “octave of impressions” as conceived by the System, which could have never develop within the Fellowship cult because it requires freedom to develop itself amongst people. This is so beautiful! Free people produce freedom and recreate each other in that freedom. People in psychological prisons destroy each other. The objective consequences of relationships between people determine what those relationships will reproduce the dialogue between the individual and his world, the individual and his surroundings is what the octave of impressions is about.
It was impossible to understand or develop it in the Fellowship cult because there is no second line of work; because there is no freedom, because there is no culture, because there is no life. This is what leads cult members to suicide in the long run. The guru is a victim as much as the members. His death with the members proves it. They all succumb to their own invention without the slightest hope for help. The “closeness” of the “air” they breathe, suffocates them. The lack of “self” of each individual producing the dialectics of life in the community, leads them to self-annihilation.
We must look at this carefully. My understanding would be that every single human being is, at all times, “creating” “life” from within their own self. The “quality” of “life” that s/he can “create” depends on the state of “health” of his own self. The kind of “life” that each human being “exudes” “creates” “distills” depends on his own condition. Farmers “distill” a different kind of “life” to what citizens “distill”. Scholar’s “distillations of life” are also different to the distillations of life that blue-collar men distill. Likewise people from different nations have a different “distillation” to themselves. This “distillation” proper to every individual is a reality onto itself and we feed of each other’s “distillations” like “perfume” of our selves. Each human being is a human perfume! The names we carry are actually the name of that perfume!
Our lives mutually feed each other and if we are individually psychologically disappearing as it happens in cults and every form of psychopathic repression of the self, including in parent-child relationships and every form of psychopathic authoritarian power, “life” is literally “sucked” out of the individuals. In other words, any time that an individual is abused by his teachers at school, his classmates, parents, doctors, policemen, military and no matter who, “life” is shunned out of the victim. Very high levels of abuse even through lack of contact and indifference is what is causing the suicide and homicide of young people around the globe. “Abuse of each other” is not necessarily happening “actively”, it is happening in great quantities not by what people do to each other but by what people neglect to do for each other.
In cults, this neglect of people for each other becomes pathological in the whole community but the more they abuse each other, the more they justify it and sublimize it as the necessary step towards “awakening” required by the power structure within the cult. The vicious circle that the energy of being abused and the “transformation” of the abuse develops, becomes addictive and the abuses become greater each day because they need to grow in the justification of the abuse itself. It becomes a form of life or rather “lifelessness” but what keeps it going is that the self of each individual participating in it is active in the process of destruction as it justifies it and at the same time promotes it. The individual actively participates in his own destruction by submitting to the guru’s will. Like in any drug addiction, the process repeats itself until death consumes them all.
Within the cult there are no “checks” like in regular society. People are not stopped from behaving this or that way, on the contrary, they are conditioned to behave specifically THAT way. In regular society, “any” way is too much after a while: once the repetition becomes vicious, people move away from it because “life” demands it for survival. In the cult on the contrary, any change is seen as criminal.
Happy Easter! We resurrect each second!
These de-
pendencies are not exclusively based on class, of course, but also upon other group
relations that have changed, and which consequently channel emotions in particular
directions (in this case, inwards). I think Foucault’s use of the word ‛practices‛ com-
pared to Elias’s insistence on processes is telling here. Maybe it’s Foucault’s con-
tinued attachment to philosophy that made him sometimes look more for invariance
or specificity, and less for gradual change or linkage over successive stages of
development. For example, the practices of the self described in The History of Sexua-
19
Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 164.
Binkley, Dolan, Ernst & Wouters: The Planned and the Unplanned
70
lity seem to be designed for universal application; there’s little sense of how they
might change depending on changing social contexts.
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