I don’t know what’s going on here, but it looks complicated.

Issues of desire and pleasure loom large in the discussion of the human condition. I say this, and it’s not necessarily a sex thing, though the piece “Everyone is Beautiful and Nobody Is Horny” from Blood Knife is, I think, a piece of the puzzle. Foucault discussed the latter at great length, and Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard built whole theories around the former. Lesser thinkers followed suit – for example, I built a theory of art around the idea of “Complex Pleasures” – the artistic experience being something that a person would choose to experience again outside of chemical compulsion to do so.

For my money, desire is the more interesting of the two, at least in its Deleuzo-Guattarian form, its machinic mode. Oftentimes, it is conceived of as a lack, as a (w)hole dug out of us that we are compelled to fill. We are led to believe that there’s something special about the hole itself, like that’s what desire is. The interpretation given in Anti-Oedipus is that desire isn’t a gap, isn’t a lack: instead, it is a positive force, the motivation to take action, not the deficit that inspires the action.

The piece in question was inspired by the mention of the “Mutilated User” in the work of Murray Bookchin —joined, uncomfortably, I admit, to the conceptions of humanity, animality, and snobbery found in the works of Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève — about how the reason that we haven’t built a post-scarcity society is that people don’t *want* to escape scarcity on some level. Which isn’t a fully automated luxury space communism thing, but more the fact that we’ve been seduced by advertising instead of choosing desires that actually serve our ultimate goals.

This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more since writing the piece “Your Desires Have Been Captured” – because I feel it’s true, but how does one capture a lack? And what would it mean for desire in the machinic mode to be captured?

There’s a pairing of concept and image I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but have struggled to find a reason to talk about. Perhaps here is where I can discuss it.

I think that much of human interactions with the world can be thought of in terms metaphorically related to orbital dynamics: we are all rocket ships or probes launched towards a destination, but along they way we are tugged this way and that by gravity wells that distort the fabric of space and time around us. The traditions, institutions, and even the pressures that we face every day are trying to pull us in one direction or another – as a result, there are no straight roads through life, no flat trajectories. What would otherwise have been a line is now a parabola.

I keep trying to get into *Children of a Dead Earth* on Steam, but I think I’m more interested in being the sort of person who gets good at an incredibly granular and scientifically accurate simulation of space warfare than in actually being good at an incredibly granular and scientifically accurate simulation of space warfare. Between not being good at this game and not being good at *Kerbal Space Program*, you can guess that my understanding of real orbital mechanics is limited to knowing that there is such a thing as orbital mechanics.

Of course, I use the dated but intentional term “rocket ships” to make clear that we have the ability to change course mid-trip, to alter our destination to a limited degree. It’s not all “Cold Equations,” but neither are we completely free. (Example: I’m fairly overweight, I have bad knees, and I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep since before summer truly began. I’m probably not going to be able to dunk a basketball, no matter how much I want to or work to do so. Also, most likely neither I nor the basket would survive.) However, we can enter into a negotiation with the world and work to achieve something material in the process. (Example: okay, so I can’t dunk – back when I was in middle school and junior high I was pretty good at sinking a three-point shot; given the fact that I can usually hit targets like a trash can or hamper from across the room with projectiles of a variety of densities, I could probably practice a bunch and get good at that again.)

Of course, I’m going to guess that using a basketball example caused me to lose the crowd that calls anything other than D&D (get a better game) or Settlers of Catan (ditto) “sportsball” and the crowd that actually like basketball (I am not conversant in the NBA. I will look at you blankly). However, the game, much like soccer, is a great attractor of desire for many people. It is what they gravitate towards and what they spend their attention on.

It is a powerful gravity well.

So in my thinking, desire is momentum, and the things that make up our social world are mass: we are pulled along towards them. However, just as a sufficiently powerful gravity well can warp space and time around it, so to can certain things in the social world warp the context.

The traditions and institutions that make up our social world – that are, indeed, constantly created and recreated by human choice and action – can create eddies and ripples in the context we find ourselves in. The institutions of liberal democracy are one such set of attractors. Those of market capitalism are another. Those of our religions, and family traditions, and cultural practices, are all additional attractors.

While we aim ourselves at the objects of our desires, while we propel ourselves with capital-D Desire, Desire sans object, these institutions, traditions, and assumptions warp our paths, and instead of striking the moon, we often end up among the stars, reaching places we had no intention of going.

Drop the Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers aesthetic for a moment, stay with the model, of vectors moving through space and being bent towards points of attraction that signify particular formations of the same libidinal energy (energy is mass, mass is energy, physics tells us this – a sufficiently bright light can be a black hole because a sufficiently bright light can pass its Chandrasekhar Limit.) These attractors of institutions and systems and soon are getting better and better at this because they survive based on our investment in them: if people stopped giving a shit about money tomorrow and just started gardening and sharing with their neighbors, then capitalism would cease to be. This is a utopian impossibility, but its astronomical improbability doesn’t make it any less true.

Though, possibly, I’m just inclined to view space as a lovecraftian thing. Thanks, Junji Ito (image is from *Remina*, one of the books that’s going to appear in my next round up.)

These attractors – ideologies by other names – are subjected to a darwinian process to become more and more effective at capturing our desires, at pulling them more and more into themselves and becoming stronger and stronger. Them not doing so intentionally doesn’t remove the lovecraftian patina from the whole situation, in my mind.

But that’s a conversation for another time. Let’s go back to our general metaphor of desire as orbital mechanics.

Hypothetically, if desire were a thing that could be quantifiable – perhaps the SI for it would be the Tantalus? – we could create equations for a sort of libidinal calculus. Of course, this is a ridiculous proposition for a number of reasons, chief among them being that it’s near impossible to quantify the magnitudes of our own desires, much less to measure them objectively between different people. As such, Libidinal Calculus should be preemptively placed alongside Phlogiston and Lamarckian Evolution.

But still, the image of the social world as a social universe, governed by orbital dynamics of a kind is a compelling one.

Let’s set this metaphor aside, perhaps to return to it later, and look at things differently.

The equation of supply and demand – high supply results in filled (thus low) demand, and vice versa – is just this same attempt to create a Libidinal Calculus, measured in the increment of the dollar or any other such currency. Never mind that the unit for just such a thing is elastic, and a ruler that stretches and contracts is hardly a useful implement to bring to bear on a question so important as that of desire.

So perhaps the unit is not the dollar, but the hour of labor-time. Time, after all, is functionally inflexible to human experience, and the mythology of capitalism hinges on everyone having the same twenty-four hours in the day, and some people just being more able to milk the clock for all it’s worth – never mind that it’s impossible to work millions of times harder than another human being, and so the concept of the billionaire is an incoherent one from this standpoint.

What is the problem with mapping supply and demand on to desire?

Just this: it reduces desire, again, to a lack. A need to be fulfilled and a hole to be filled. Not to be a snob, but this sounds less like desire as an open-ended thing, as a motive force, and more like dumb animal appetite. Supply and demand is purely the logic of consumption, and it encourages over-consumption as a result: Costco or Sam’s Club buy-in-bulk logic turns joy into jouissance – encouraging us to gorge on the things that bring us enjoyment to the point where we can no longer enjoy.

What of the artist’s or hobbyist’s desire to create, even uncoupled from the profit motive? Look at the people that modify old video games or release open source remakes out into the wild on the internet: they desire to create, but this is not a consumable thing. This is time spent free from supply-and-demand. It is not, itself, outside of the logic but, on the other hand, it does indicate that there is an outside.

Okay, maybe I’m just bringing up *Hearts of Iron IV* because I got pretty good at the Spanish Civil War after playing through it six or seven times over the past year. Not at all inspired by this piece.

I am reminded here of the linked concepts of Interpassivity and Depressive Hedonia. The first is when either (A) an amusement is set up to play itself, such as those instances where someone sets up a Paradox Grand Strategy game like Hearts of Iron IV to play in spectator mode (that is, on automatic), watching the events of World War II play out in countless tiny variations in under an hour, or alternatively (B) when one person is encouraged or forced to enjoy themselves by a second party who refuses to participate in the enjoyment. Depressive Hedonia is the affective root of this: playing music without listening to it, or wearing headphones with no music coming from them as a sort of asubjective form of enjoyment. It doesn’t matter what’s happening so long as something is being enjoyed.

What do we make of the vectors of desire in these situations? Has the human subject been captured into a stable orbit around something? Are we locked in, unable to escape from an unbreaking cycle?

Okay, okay, okay.

So what’s the upshot? Where does this go?

I don’t know: this is sort of the middle portion of a larger beast. There’s no head or tail to it, just the middle section. But it seems to me that desire has much written on it while not much is actually understood about it. The traditional conception of desire as a lack that is filled up by something else – the negative conception – is lacking. The (positive) conception of desire as a force that provides motivation towards a particular course of action seems much more accurate, though attempting to use it as a starting point is somewhat dodgy.

It seems to me that – building on desire as a motive force – it might be more useful to speak of desiring as a process. It has its subject, the protagonist of desire, and it has its object, but it isn’t simply a flux between the two points. It’s like a chemical reaction that changes the person experiencing it, as well as the object of that desire. The painter that desires to create something changes the inert matter of the raw materials into something significant; the same is true of any artist, hobbyist, or craftsperson.

“Emily Dickinson Kayfabe” got me nothing interesting on Google or Craiyon, so have Deleuze’s portrait of Kant again.

This is exactly the sort of thing that the hiring manager smiling at you from across the table wants from you when they ask why you want to work at their company: they know that the answer is that you want to not starve or be homeless, but they require you to put on a kayfabe of desiring to sell jeans or olive oil or whatever little widget sits on their shelves the way that Emily Dickinson wanted to write poetry.

Frankly, as an aside, I find this kind of insulting: you have to pretend that it’s your life’s dream to work at a dry cleaner or gas station, instead of dreaming to do anything more. If you’re lucky, or you get a really dedicated interviewer, then they’ll join you in the charade, modeling how hard you need to pretend that this is your life’s dream to get the job.

Because in the eyes of most people, this is a special kind of desire. However, at the same time, it’s also a very ordinary kind of desire: they can’t imagine anything modeled outside of pure consumption. I think, when you view desire as purely this teleological, consuming thing – a hunger reaching out of you and drawing its object into you – then there’s this surplus left over, this idea that you should experience the motivation to do something, the desire for something more that isn’t being satisfied. And so, the force expended but no direction given, it winds itself into a circle, winding ever tighter and tighter.

Do you experience depressive hedonia?

Do you wish for your amusements to have fun on their own – music playing for no one, television just noise in the background, electric monk chanting in an empty room for an absent soul?

Do you seek pleasure compulsively?

Do you feel trapped in a purgatorial cycle of behaviors repeating themselves over and over?

Do you want to want something else?

Stop thinking of your desire as a hole to be filled. Instead think of it as an explosive charge launching you at your goal. Just give some thought to how you’re aiming it.

What Do You Want?