Time is speeding up. There is intensification all around. Feedback loops tighten and constrict. But at the same time, our capacity to form new worlds is growing. Technologies, curative and poisonous all at once, offer new avenues for liberation. We become and create machine gods; we instantaneously connect across physical space, forming archipelagos of trembling thought that offer care, love, and support. We make and remake connections with the Earth and the universe, grateful for the golden threads of freedom that were carried through time by forebears who dreamt.
In the face of hope the old stories reverberate louder than ever. Bombs are dropped on hospitals, lights turned off on entire cities. People all across the world are stripped of their humanity so that they might be locked away or killed as animals. Animal and plant kin are treated as mere externalities to growth; their slaughter and extinction on unprecedented scale is Business As Usual. The Earth, our life-giving vessel, is sucked dry.
It feels dark. Perhaps it was ever thus. The eschaton is perpetually imminent, and we are perpetually immanentizing it. Nevertheless, there is something about This Time. It feels pivotal. There is a sense that we are teetering; that a new world is being birthed, that new paradigms are emerging. That SOMETHING has to change.
This piece is an attempt to place Desire in this context; to move beyond desire as a method of personal liberation, and to elucidate the revolutionary liberatory potential that Desire offers.
1. Liberation and Desire
First of all, what is Liberation?
It might be;
A collective freedom from the throttling grip of the capitalist death spiral, that accelerating feedback loop that spirals around us at this present moment in time. A distribution of resources that allows every one of us to be, to live, and to become. The absence of dominating and illegitimate forms of power that take hold of our lives and extract, extract, extract. The presence of collective, caring love as a means of organisation; the presence of beneficent, consensual, and playful power relations that serves to support, nurture, and mother every living being.
Liberation is a long-term project that requires the formation of a non-dominating power(s) that challenge the hegemony of dominating power, and tools [technologies, techniques, methods etc] with which to create the conditions required to achieve — and then maintain — freedom.
Temporally, liberation takes place in the past (memory) and the future (imagination), and is experienced in the present (NOW).
Spatially, it occurs where we stand, in our bodies — within and of the territories that we inhabit — at home. It is of the Earth and from the Earth, the gift of our ancestors and an offering to our descendants. Liberation is a felt experience.
And what is Desire?
I think of desire as an affective experience first too. It is Of The Body. It is a feeling of attraction, a magnetic pull. Desire invokes the ritual of future-creation and incites the transformation of internal-world feeling into external-world materiality. It beckons to you invitingly and seductively to act, and to perform magic.
Desire derives from Drive. Drive is a way of referring to the intrinsic, fundamental, often unconscious impulses that exist within us. These impulses are not universal — they vary in shape, intensity, and direction — but we probably all have them in some form. Drive is not subject to influence by external power - or, it is much less responsive than desire.
Bernard Stiegler suggests that Desire (désir) arises when Drive is filtered through cultural and social contexts. Desire is contingent on current and historical conditions, and subject to influence by the forces that influence these conditions, and is mediated by technology. As desire is constituted by and constitutive of the world which we inhabit, it is contested. Desire is recognised as a precursor to power.
Desire channels and focuses Drive into action. Desire enables us to transform reality from within. Desire is the wisdom of the Body within the relational field.
And how does this relate to liberation?
“In the consumerist economy, the drives are diverted from their aims and toward artificial needs — needs that fail to constitute any desires.”
Bernard Steigler
A great deal of time and energy is devoted under the capitalist system to attention-capture. Advertising seeks to grab our attention in order to manipulate our drives towards materialist consumption. Content is fed to us using algorithms that seek to optimise engagement, competing for our attention, which is treated as a limited and valuable resource.
Desire sapping imagery invokes anger, fear, hatred, envy; affective experiences that isolate and atomise, causing us to turn inwards and shield ourselves, or to compulsively seek the next hit of feeling. These feelings are valuable in the attention economy - an angry scroller is an engaged scroller.
Methods of attention-capture that derive from the work of pioneering propagandist and nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, seek to convert drive into desire in a way that limits transformative action in favour of passive consumption. Desires where they are evoked are for things that already exist; for products, for content. We are invited to desire things that are proven to be in some way appealing to our magpie-brains. Shiny stuff that looks and feels good when we hold it or gaze upon it, or purely hedonistic withdrawals into selfhood.
The grand-scale diversion of drive into angry engagement and passive consumption has served to dim our collective hodological map, dangling a veil of capitalist realism over our eyes and obscuring an imagined future. We are mired in nostalgia, not just for the cultural ephemera of our childhoods, but for the time of empire, for warriors and kings, and for domestication itself. What might be becomes less important than what once was.
Inquiring autistic minds might ask: is this echolalia? That apparently pathological repetition absent of tonal shift? The perpetual cycles of suffering, violence, trauma, oppression, and suppression repeated seemingly without variance or deviation beyond the technology employed? But no, this is rational and sacred behaviour.
I suggest that desire allows us to diverge from these cycles and seek ways out of these feedback loops. When we desire, we can imagine, we can dream, and most importantly, we can transform.
I hold divergent desires and I desire divergence. I desire things that do not yet exist. I desire futures that might be, realities that break out of millennia-old cycles; I desire ways of being that aren’t the Same. Old. Shit. I desire liberation and freedom; collective visions that excite and connect; and new stories that evoke a sense of purpose and communalism. Maybe we can imagine it together?
2. The past, the present, and the future
“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.
Karl Marx
Looking backwards:
What we remember of the past using various forms of memory (internal-embodied, written, video, image, art, electronic memory devices etc) influences our present-selves. We reach into past experiences (direct in the first-person and indirect in the third-person) in order to formulate desire from drive.
For me this is a primarily subconscious process, although I am sometimes aware of the influences and their effect upon my desires. Stiegler refers to the process of archiving and the subsequent consultation of the archive as Retention.
Looking forwards:
What we project into the future through imagination, anticipation, and planning, is influenced by our desire. What we desire becomes a possible future that we might strive for, take action to achieve, or organise to create. Desire enables transformation, as opposed to interpretation or repetition. Stiegler refers to this projection into the future as Protention. Protention is magic.
We revise reality by altering our consensual agreements about what is real, what is just and fair. We can trans-shape reality by changing our perspectives and perceptions. By choosing a different future, we bring it into being.
Gloria Anzaldua
3. THE FULCRUM
Desire inhabits the pivotal point sitting between the past and the future. It is influenced by the past and its interpretation, and influences the future through its potential to incite transformation. In its pivotal — eustasian — position, desire becomes an arena of conflict. Competing forces seek to shape Retention processes, in order to affect our Protention — to capture and attenuate our magic. Power is invested in the constitution of the past, in order to create the future. Or, in order to halt the creation of the future, for the perpetuation of a present which is the past. Dominating power will attempt to mitigate transformation, because transformation inevitably affects the structural arrangement of power and disrupts its investments.
Stories [memory devices] that are told again and again in different ways and with different characters — but containing the same underlying logics and beliefs — recreate the past in the future, bypassing the transformative effect of desire. To produce a different future, we may need to remember some things that were forgotten, and forget some things remembered: to actively engage with Retention and Protention.
To take such an active role in the formulation of Desire, and hence, in the transformation of reality, we have to write new stories. Stories that imagine new worlds with new choices to make, new relational forms, new power, new consensual agreements about what is real; and new avenues for becoming, holding, and caring.
I try to explore desire with curiosity and interest, moving through the paralysis of shame, uncertainty, and fear. I find myself moving through this tunnel as I write; grappling with these difficult feelings, traumas from past experiences, and intensities that I sought to avoid for most of my life.
Belief guides me through. Through creative and radical reconstruction and reimagination, we have the capacity to enact revolutionary transformation. By exploring and interacting with desire as an embodied guide, I reclaim desire as a transformative force.
I believe that by recognising the erotic in life and choosing to move towards it, we project our desires onto the present. The image resolves into denser and more solid materiality as it is exposed to light and the passing of time.
Where might your desire take you [us]? What reality might it conjure? Your Desire, in Your Body, offers Us All a liberatory pathway.
With love and solidarity