“The Ego and Its Hyperstate – a Psychoanalytically-Informed Dialectical Analysis of Self-Interest” by Eliot Rosenstock, 2021
Woo. This is a weirdly written book, like some
breathless podcaster or telemarketer telling you he is going to reveal the
secrets of the universe – or in this case, reality – but then keeps avoiding
the ‘secret.’ Rosenstock’s main point seems
to be that self-interest is the continuing motivation for all human beings, and
that this does not lead to either capitalist self-centeredness or its seeming
opposite, religious moralism and ‘unselfishness.’
Human
‘nature’ requires food, clothing, shelter and more. It is well known that individual survival
relies on aide from other people. This
is folk wisdom that every person knows and lives every day. Social reality
contradicts the vicious reactionaries who promote a ‘human eat human’
capitalist ethos. Those individuals living
in isolated cabins, who have NO contact with the outside world, are few to
none. Even Dick Proenneke, the guy who hand-built
his Alaska cabin along Lake Clark in the 1960s, used regular air resupply of
certain items over his 30 years. Is community Rosenstock’s point?
In
what can only be described as a constant, repetitive word salad of
semi-Freudian, semi-Structuralist rhetoric avoiding concrete examples and
method, Rosenstock tiptoes around using veiled illusions, obscure tacks and
archaic jargon. Do academics get paid by
their use of the most jargon or the substitution of clear language for
semi-nonsense? Capitalizing words in the
middle of a sentence to give it fake gravitas?
Do they win points by having no empirical basis or references? You basically have to interpret certain words or text into
clear terms. For instance, ‘fantasy’ in
his usage means ideas like racism. Yet
racism is not a fantasy, it is materially grounded in capitalist society and
has very real effects. Why call it a
fantasy, unless you are breezily blasting some witless racist Twitter post?
This
is a familiar philosophic style that reads ‘bullshit’ to the layman. It occasionally occurs in the Lacanian wanderings
of Zizek. (By the way, I just drove
through Slovenia but did not stop at the statute of Zizek in Lubjiana.) Here is a sample: “Self-interest
in process, which is what we are calling the Hyperstate due to its nature of
being both outside the realm of consciousness, process-based, and frankly just
quite large, is used to understand self-interest through the basis of fantasy.” Which might mean: The unconscious promotes self-interest and
bad ideas even when we don’t know it. You tell me.
You
could probably write a parody of this bad Freudian game-playing, much as Sokol
and Bricmont made fun of post-modernist French merde and got it published by a reputable academic journal. (“Fashionable
Nonsense – Post-modern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science” reviewed
below.) Where are Orwell and DF
Wallace’s clarity when you need them? (“All Art is Propaganda” and “Consider the Lobster” reviewed below.) But I digress, or perhaps not. Maybe his unconscious self-interest prompted him
to be a pompous writer? Perhaps getting a higher profile for his LA clinical psychology
business called “Mind Diagnostics?” Odds
are not one health plan covers his business, so its mostly rich people that use his services in Freudian talk therapy. Businessmen gotta do what they gotta do...
Anyway, I can draw
no sensible analysis of this book, the first time ever. Unless you are truly obsessed by very, very
abstract Freudianism – a hyper- mirror of dream analysis, ego / superego, the
unconscious and cockeyed dialectics - do not buy this book! It is like a bad dream.
Prior reviews on
this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year
archive, using these terms: “Zizek,” “The Melancholia of the Working
Class,” “Psychology and Capitalism,” “Bright
Sided” (Ehrenreich); “The Happiness Industry,” “Lost Connections” (Hari);
“McMindfulness,” “Love or the Alternative.”
And
I unfortunately bought it at May Day Books, which will not stock it again.
Red Frog
December 27, 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment