a bit structurally needy

Recently I subscribed to Structure of Desire after reading The Body Keeps the Fascism: on Jung, White Innocence, and the War for the Unconscious. I enjoyed it even where I disagreed.

On subscribing one usually gets a welcome email. It is an email subscription after all. It was a very good email. I’ll have to go and look at mine now. No idea what’s in it after a couple of years.

One component of the welcome email was the following mission statement, also better than mine.

People like to say they want clarity. What they actually want is structure—a way to make their desires legible, contained. Something they can live inside.

Don’t disagreed with the clarity bit. I write on the wisdom of the blur.

Nor with with the living inside. Nor with the legibility of desire.

I disagree with the “What they actually want is structure”. And for pretty much the same reasons that I disagree with those statements that “people have a deep need for religion”. It overfits. People do not have a need for a state sponsored set of rituals, even when it has been de-stated and re-community-ed (made legible in either case).

One way to disagree with this “What they actually want is structure” or a 'deep need for religion' is to play with what is wanted or needed, and another play would be that they need or want anything at all.

One could play Pyrrho and come up with a variety of wants and need, in addition to clarity/mystery, structure/agency, love/belonging and orthogonally come up with a list of emotions, efforts and virtues require these elements we distinguish from and within worlding (as evolution provides).

They are all ways to world. Saying there is a need for this or that… — is a way to world.

I guess we could call that a structure, that

“What they actually want is structure—a way to make their desires legible, contained. Something they can live inside”

is a structure we might want to live inside. It appears as an explanation (of itself), but such recursions can always then double down into dogma. Which is when we really need to play Pyrrho.

My position on worlding as the outfolding infoldings of a evolutionary dynamic one can label body/landscape, is that one can certainly call that a structure, but this can gnostically miss the interplay, and it all becomes about understanding the structure and not the choice (which structures). This may well be because of the oversight hinted at in the call-and-response phrase hinging on the word ‘want’.

Perhaps choice is too strong a word, perhaps choice says too much. It assumes too much consciousness, to little subconscious, and no unconscious (where structuralisms raise their ugly heads).

Agency is another word, for another choice, which some structuralisms see some structures as necessarily curtailing in order to rule (displaced choice in a hierarchy). A world where everything is a conspiracy, you sheeple.

Ayoto doesn’t do this, I suspect not even to say people live inside the structural prisons of their own wants, or choice. Or clarity. From some POV of nihilism which pretends to some view from nowhere, wanting objectivity we still want, and thus want for not wanting. Is that clear? What a wanter we are. Become. Live.

My basic frame on this statement,

People like to say they want clarity. What they actually want is structure—a way to make their desires legible, contained. Something they can live inside.

is that we live inside the world, and a worlding urge animate us (with an animal grammar) to self the world among others doing the same, and the search for clarity in that gastrulating mess of recursive structures can mislead us into a wanting clarity of our own incompleteness, which we may seek to fill with the world of our own understanding, our own wants and needs, which we are already inside of/by/with/in/out/from/to/over/under/through/on.

We need a new preposition for such a recursive interplay when we dance on the threshold of chaos without our wants, within our needs. Freedom on the shore of our voids. Structures on the coast of our homes, the world where self the world among others doing the same.

Alles klar?

Want is no creation. Need is no different.

Inside the world we find ourselves. That is want Ayoto explores.

Crossposted on substack.com