Thanks Giving is Cancelled This Year
The story goes like this: you've either found some time between the turkey, stuffing and other fixings to check Twitter and you've run into the 'I am going to Pwn/school/dunk on my family politically this thanksgiving' narrative or you were personally participating in it and posting about it on Twitter for the first group to see.
Let's take a look at this narrative.
Here's a Tweet from the ACLU, a 'nonpartisan legal organization,' that lists some 'favorite thanksgiving conversation starters' which end up being strangely partisan and potentially divisive and provocative topics that, depending on your family and its age and class composition, will likely start a tense argument if not a full blown fight.
For the record, I don't personally disagree with the topics raised in the ACLU tweet (using a person's preferred pronouns, not firing people for being part of the LGBQTA+, etc.). Let's not get bogged down in the political particulars, i.e. the content. What interests us is the expression or form. Simply put, these are topics that one would pick to arouse feelings in others (whether in favor or not), i.e., these are topics that are likely to lead to a miserable time with your family.
Luckily I don't have to say much more to argue this point - that people are trying to start an argument - because John Cook (who has ties to 'Gawker') has already done the work for me in his article How To Pick a Fight With Your Relatives This Thanksgiving. In what may be an attempt to be funny - and if it is an attempt it falls flat - this article describes how one can 'pick a target' and 'engage with the enemy' in front of an audience until the target gets so angry they leave the table, the ultimate point being 'to use your retrograde family to feel better about yourself.'
The old adage (derived from Freud's analysis of Jokes) that humor contains a truth that is difficult for the subject to experience and therefore must be distorted and defended is clearly at play here as the sadism underlying the attempt to educate our backwards elders comes to the forefront.
Of course this piece could be satire (though the sadistic wish would seem to still ring true) so lets look at a milder article - Amy McArthy's You’re Morally Obligated to Call Out Your Racist Relatives at Thanksgiving. The narrative is not new and the article can be summed so briefly it sounds like an Onion article 'some people say thanks giving dinner is not a good place to get political but it really is a good place to get political because bad things happen and if you don't get political at thanks giving dinner then you're being a bystander and therefore you're bad too.' We've heard it a thousand times so we will spend no more time here...
To top it all off, let's head over to Jacobin where Cook's sadism and McArthy's moralism synthesize into one monolithic abomination - Jane Mcalavey's How to Organize Your Friends and Family on Thanksgiving which seems to try and give people an idea of how to effectively sway your family to your political position without incurring resistance (as opposed to Cook and McArthy whose method will lead to defensive argument without a political results). The article goes on to lay out a very systematic way to absolutely dominate and control a conversation to produce your preferred results - or what the author calls 'the science and art of successful conversation.' The real creepy thing is not trying to convince someone to believe something you believe, but the way the author describes how you can frame and structure a conversation - often ignoring or invalidating the other person's actual feelings in the process - as to corner them into being forced to comply or agree. In a strange plot twist, here Jacobin, bulwark of the popular left, comes full-circle with institutions it likely critiques such as law enforcement who use certain verbal tactics to take control of situations, and sexual abusers who demoralize their victims with certain rhetoric.
What we're getting at, and as some of these articles point out, the thanks giving dinner table is a microcosm for the larger political reality. This is true but not in the way that these people mean. The fantasy between these texts is that argumentation, whether overt and explicit or covert and discrete, will (to be/is, i.e. ontological claim) lead to some sort of meaningful politics, and that this should (should, i.e. moral claim) be engaged in. As I've said elsewhere (Cognition Don't Cut It No More)
"Deleuze and Guattari remind us that classical philosophy and democracy, both of which are bound up with naturalist-representational and rational-debate / intelligible discussion...are both bastard abominations of the Greeks:
'The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it...that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that...Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." ...All these debaters and communications are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves...in Socrates was philosophy not a free discussion among friends?... In fact, Socrates constantly made all discussion impossible, both in the short form of the contest of questions and answers and in the long form of a rivalry between discourses....'
(What is Philosophy? pg. 28-29)."So if arguments at thanksgiving is democracy reduced into a micro model (democratic politics is of course the premiere molar, Oedipal discourse so its no surprise we see it miniaturized into the actual family) then - to evoke (or invoke) Mark Fisher - what, if any, is the alternative?
Patchwork and Psychic Reality
Here's an answer that Fisher sadly did not arrive at but Nick Land did - patchwork. Recently in a private communication with Nick Land I had asked a question that about Capitalism's tendency to autoselect itself and if other modes were simply obsolete and therefore not selected. Land reminded me that 'Patchwork is about getting away from all this,' that is, I was unintentionally slipped back into a false democratic problematization of things - it's not about Capitalism vs. Socialism/Communism, it's about Capitalism and Communism but, as Land says in an interview somewhere (I forget), 'Just don't involve me, do that stuff away from me.'
- tl;dr metaphor: instead of everyone getting on the same page and writing the same book, give everyone a different page to write on and fill the world with different books
Patchwork, very simply, is an exit oriented antipolitics centered on the idea that two or more systems of social organization (which are transparent, corporate-like entities while the citizens are transposed into consumers or costumers) can exist without negating one another (disjunctive synthesis or complex difference as opposed to negation or simple difference - see my blog entry that explicates parts of Anti-Oedipus and connects it to my experiences in China's literal patchwork geography) but on their own planes or territories (here's a secret yotube link to one of Land's New Center for Research and Practice classes that is usually hidden behind a paywall that talks about Patchwork). If democracy is all about living together and forcing others to agree with you, Patchwork is about living with who you want in your own Patch and letting other people go and do what they want in their own Patch.
For another example that gets at the important dynamic at play beneath the antipolitics: patients often come into my office for their psychoanalytic sessions complaining essentially that other people have thoughts and ideas about them that they can't change - 'So and so makes me so mad! He thinks I am being selfish because I won't bring what's his face to the airport. Me? Selfish? I do so much for...' Sometimes the madness turns to sadness, other times the reverse. My response is not like my humanist colleagues who join the patient in defending against their fear of being selfish and their wish to possess omnipotent control of their self image through others' eyes. No, where my colleagues say 'how foolish for him to think you selfish, you do a lot, he must not see that,' I say 'Maybe you are selfish but you shouldn't feel bad about it and shouldn't care that So and So thinks you're selfish.' The former is concerned with negation and justification (either so and so shouldn't think that or the patient shouldn't think that), the latter is Nietzschean and affirmative (like when a heckler calls Deleuze gay and he says 'yes and so?).
- tl;dr: 'I'm really not selfish because my therapist thinks so, so I am actually good after all' (fantasy of redemption, projecting the bad, idealizing the good, all of which keeps the person clinging to the lost object and therefore mired in melancholia) VS. 'I am selfish but why should I care about others' opinions on my selfishness, and why should I morally critique myself for wanting to not waste my time bringing so and so to the airport (accepting the reality of innate drives and instincts, integrating the bad and good aspects of self, owning the projection, giving up the lost object and escaping melancholia).
Ultimately, one of the significant 'lessons' of psychoanalysis is that what we call 'objective reality' is the meeting of two or more subjects' 'psychic reality,' that is, what people want, believe, and feel (what Lacan might call desire - let's not get too technical) come into contact and create an irreducible differential between two sets of 'psychic facts' that cannot be reduced to one another or an appeal to some third party (real Outsideness as opposed 'alterity in advance').
That is, why do we care so much about abstract oughts that compel us to change others' beliefs? What good does it do us and them? To come back to Fisher's 'is there an alternative [to useless democractic debate at the table, or closer to what Fisher might mean, political deadlock and Capitalist overlording]' - everyone's wondering why depression seems so commonplace but it seems obvious to me that people let politicians and the journalists who themselves are simply mouthpieces for these politicians get in the way of simply enjoying the small things in life such as eating and spending time with loved ones. Enjoy your meal with your loved ones. Instead of making yourself miserable or chasing the brief high of PWNING your fucking grandad (which comes with the miserable crash afterwards - the reality that defeating a relative in an argument wont reverse global warming) forget about that stuff and do whats in your power as long as it links up to what you really want.
Semi-Wholesome Postscript
This year I didn't see anyone I didn't want to. I stayed at home with my loved one and we cooked together. I texted a few friends and let them know I was thankful for them. This recharges me, helps me feel good. And tomorrow I'll go back to work where I try and help people with certain challenges (who want to be helped - not forcing things) learn about themselves so they can feel better. This is how you effectively 'change' the world (if that's what you're after), not by inducing miserable arguments...
