Blog 1 Product-Oriented Human

(Please only take part 3 and part 4 directly counted as the blog. Part 1, part 2 and footnotes serve as backgrounds and clarifications.)

Part 1. Let’s begin thinking with an example of the “autistic”
Youtuber Digibro [1] has, as part of his long-standing theoretical repertoire, a layman’s theory about how the spectrum of “autism” (not in the clinical sense of course) correlates with the reception of cultural products. And I should recapitulate in even more layman language as this: The more one is “autistic” (on the far end of the spectrum of being autistic), the less compatible or potentially useful is one for the society. To clarify, Digibro, being slightly more on the side of the political Left, thinks autism as a word (even in the clinical sense) does not denote an essential state of affairs in the world, but is instead made up by people to serve some practical goals. And “autism”, used by Digibro as blanket term and used most broadly, simply practically denotes the human traits that make one incompatible with society, therefore useless to the society. This denotation arose from observing the “autistic” from a point of view external to the “autistics” themselves, as if from the view of the society, the greater public.
Continuing on, the less useful one is for the society, the more one is excluded from the internal actions supporting the livelihood of the society. The less compatible one is with the society, the more unlikely one’s ideas, thoughts, emotions, needs can be successfully communicated to and get circulated around the society. The end result from this pair of causations is that the most autistic don’t get any cultural products purposively targeted at them. They don’t get products designed to suit their needs and thoughts.
And interestingly, that is not a problem for the autistics at all. Digibro defines his blanket term “autism” from the point of view of the “autistics” as “the inability to understand the world and other people through any lens other than [those of yours, or the lens of the ‘autistic’]” . Because the “autistic” finds it harder to directly and intuitively seeing the other as the other, “media”, cultural products targeted at the majority of people, are most valuable. These products are tools or handbooks with which the “autistic” can map her emotional life or world into more public-compatible meanings, words, behaviors, so she can try to communicate herself into the world. Media is likewise the codebooks for the “autistic” to decode the intuitively synthesized and nuanced expression of meanings and emotions of other people.

Part 2. A pragmatic map for thinking
I firstly need to sketch a gross picture that encompasses the full range of my discussions: (1) Some cultural products create a small, cliquey group of people (in virtue of that group of people being exceptionally well resonated with those products); (2) this group form a more or less distinct type of humanhood; (3) this new type of human is still an emotional human.
You might have noticed my jarring choice of words here: the paradigm would sound much more normal if I replaced “group” with “subculture”/ “community” and “type of humanhood” with “identity”. I made this choice of course because of the subject matter doesn’t allow me to. Specifically, the products are ACGN (anime, comics, games, light novels); the group is Nijigen (or otaku); and the humanhood and the emotions of this humanhood, are what I try to theorize on. Being aware of my virtually incapacitating lack of knowledge about and from within Nijigen, and the narrowness of the scope of my discussion, I admit the specific choice of Nijigen is just the singular paradigmatic instance that I always refer to as I pursue my line of thoughts, rather than the site from which my observed phenomenon strictly or typically arise. The purpose ultimately is to potentially gain a potentially new observation about us humans in the present tense.

Part 3. Background of “products”
Cultural “products” were prioritized due to historical conditions, so, I tend to say that a contemporary human is by default oriented around products, rather than around pleasures, emotions, values, projects/work or other humans. This is so because there had occurred conditions that to some extent invalidated them to be the normalcy of one’s engagement with the world. To put in clearer words, a person might very well, in her genuinely self-conscious and self-reflective state, assert values or work as the priority of her life. Nonetheless when she returns to her normal, mundane state of living (as she necessarily at some point will be broken off from her meditations, or simply get tired at it), she most commonly is among products, and she navigates with products. She, as if to be able to at least live normally, loans out herself out to the world of products for the durations of necessary mundane living. And when she is loaned out, the heights and depths of her consciousness or her being human shut off, because, realistically or pragmatically, they have to.
Dr Justin Jennings inspired me to this thought by explaining to me the gap between the normal and functional attitude and Descartes’ strictly meditative attitude of trying to know if I exist or not. If we see that the latter attitude, being deep in one’s own thinking, is an attitude that has the ability to most actively, dramatically structure, innovate, variate or destroy my personhood, we can see why Descartes thinks our essences, our most self-defining stuffs, exist more in the proximity with the meditative attitude. What I described is just a necessarily conscious and compromising withdrawal from the meditative attitude back into the everyday living attitude, the “jarring” feeling Dr Francisco Gallegos mentioned. The withdrawal is conscious because one really needs to decide, (or at least to reluctantly agree with oneself,) if one will break off from intense metaphysical thinking at this moment.

The conditions refer to the needs and intuitive concessions to be alive and live at least normally, which, in fact are such extremely bare conditions they hardly ever enter the sphere of the intersubjective, or ever get articulated in language. Yet I have to point out this very bare and very absolute condition of being alive, because I observed traits of cultural products seem to be able to leak into the human all the way down to and just above this condition, (for intruding into the condition of everyday living, prima facie, one is considering active suicides). People allow these products to enter into their hearts, to move them and occupy their depths and essences, (and bodily replace these depths with themselves,) because nothing else, be it other people or moral self-questioning or Dasein’s projects, do these nearly as effectively, nearly as easily. To seek pleasures and some illusory sense of salvation is most easy in the everyday state of living, attitude of “just passing time”, of general boredom[2] and disinterest (stemmed from a concession to an even more general cynicism[3]), of barbarism[4].

Part 4: Cognitivism and the possible new product-oriented human
My proposal for the application of the Robert Solomon’s theory of emotions is targeted towards the emotions of the new product-oriented human. (For the following passages, I’ll abbreviated it as POH.)
Admittedly, POH exists as a fictional human[5]. I refer to the appearance of a collection of pre-theoretic and partly pre-linguistic emotional knowledge that allows one to work as still a human, but a strictly fictional one . The collected emotional knowledge meant for the real person herself, is easily distinguishable from this collection meant for POH. Acts of trivial product or mass media consumption were able to phenomenologically congeal into a personhood separate from the real person, because of: (1) The near ubiquity of product consumptions, that it’s convenient and innocuous to consume media; (2) The seeming inability to act as a human without reductions, apart from easy product consumption, or the instance where one gets more “autistic”, where one is diseased with barbarism; (3) As a supply-demand response to (1), the industries of products form a self-defining sense of interiority, by which the products can (from the perspective of us humans) exist ontologically in their own product-world. The sense of interiority means that a product as a world seemingly is capable of holding meanings and complexities inexhaustible; is alike capable of engaging me with it, in emotions inexhaustible.
The point I made about why POH is strictly fictional serves its use here: that I who see the product as irreducibly or infinitely rich, as having this enigmatic interiority that harbors potentially all meanings, is strictly fictional, and a separate I from the I in the real world, typing this blog and worrying if it’s gotten too long. Rather, this sense of interiority cannot be achieved or seen unless I had encounter it properly in its own quality and terms and ontology, surely before I can conceptualize about their existence. In the terms of the product, means, to return the product’s welcoming suggestion that it will orient me to be me, I answered by giving myself to it as a product-orientation-friendly POH. But that orientation can only be temporary, for any singular state of mind is temporary in the real world. Also, that orientation can only be marginal to how I orient myself. Hence, as I created this POH in the demand or enticement of the product, most likely unconsciously, this POH I can only clearly see as separate from the real me.

If we were to do a philosophy of emotion on this POH, I suggest boldly that cognitivism is the only position to take, and moreover the theory proposed by Robert Solomon that works nicely in the real world, can be transplanted to POH’s emotions with even greater potency. The fictional therefore only mentally construed POH has no worries about relating to the material, the embodied.
This rather narrow branch of cognitivism for POH hopefully will shed lights on the areas and kinds of emotions (of the real us) where philosophies that regard only the real us cannot have access to. Because in spite of the distinctness of POH from a real person, the real person via her all-encompassing and unifying gaze on itself, indiscriminately try to relate to POH intelligently, affectively or bodily. And I had observed many minute, inarticulable yet intensely dividing disjunctions between people on the side of products like ACGN and the people on the side of other products[6]. The possibility that they are arising from the ways a real person might be trying to relate to her POH is heartening for me, especially in comparison to the usual, pessimistic view that humans divide from each other because that’s just how humans are.
Looking forward, a future philosophy inquiring about that kind of relation (such as to see if those relations give satisfying portrayals and understandings of those disjunctions), would in the first place be in need for words that had given a good grasp on the personhood POH.

At last, I propose a possibly separate type of happiness tied with the outlooks for the cognitivist philosophy that takes POH as its subject. Cognitivism can phenomenologically study the emotional POH as suspended from real humans or even the products. A greater variance can be granted to this cognitivist philosophy, and borrowing from the “autistic”, self-focused and always self-entertained mood of POH, this cognitivist philosophy can perhaps be appropriately playful, congenial without being twisted within ironies, absurdities and vicious intent to make the reader/ viewer suffer. A happiness, as Zizek conceptualized in his recent lecture, “Disorder Under Heaven”, not as part of the forever desiring therefore forever disillusioned death drive, but an emergent property of several fragile stabilities. We can be narrowly happy as our philosophical devises have been exerted sufficiently, yet leaving our subject matter, POH, still invisible, therefore pardoned to keep on generating paganistic self-destructive happiness at properly small scales. The fugue-like complexity of the structure observed by this philosophy had been made manifest. While I observe the POH’s more ideal meta-emotion, happiness, to be an evaluation made about the POH as a whole, made by POH itself, the happiness of the real I was being carried out by my act of observing POH, albeit in a directly contradictory model. The pleasure of philosophizing POH comes from pursuing an interiority that opens itself in intricacies and complexities, that seems to aim to only create in its infinite and fantastical complexities by fragmenting a new person out of my real person. Meanwhile the content of this philosophy, POH’s happiness is studied as though it pursues the ideal of happiness in holistic internal richness of its only one, undivided emotional life.

Footnotes:
[1] The original is “the inability to understand the world and other people through any lens other than yourself”, found in 14:04-14:22 on “Artso Fartso’s Whirling Dervish Podcast #7: As I Walk Thru the Valley of the Shadow of Autism”.
It’s immediate to see how meta-ethical evaluation as Emmanuel Levinas meant for “ethics of ethics”, is carried within this definition. I saw this connection from a class discussion about Hemingway and Melville’s being so fundamentally and unreflectively caught up in their own worlds, that even when they are strenuously trying to invent characters for the worlds of their novels, that even when they are self-aware about their tendencies to mechanically transplant themselves into their works, all the characters still end up being just bits and parts of Hemingway, Melville, with little meaningful alterations made for these characters themselves. One asks, why this is seen by the reader to be the case? Is the reader obsessively being (auto-)biographical about the texts? Take the reader’s judgment to be true for now (in which case, we see how Hemingway and Melville are “autistic”), 2 reasons can account for why the characters are simply the author: (1) The author is in her basic abilities to create fictional humanhood genuinely independent from herself; (2) The author is eager to channel those part of herself that she doesn’t understand nor has maneuver over, into the characters, (perhaps vaguely motivated by the pleasure, satisfaction of passive artistic creation; to hedonistically give one’s whole self temporarily over to the part of oneself towards which one is utterly powerless.)
I say a meta-ethical evaluation had passed from the reader to the author, even in pure conjectures, because giving the reader even an impression that the author is only dumping herself into the reader’s plate, and that the author is incapable of not doing so, is incapable of realizing the full extent that she is in fact doing so (even though she is being self-conscious of her dumping tendency!), is painfully telling. In the product-oriented human, phenomenon of radical moral asymmetry found in Kierkegaard’s relationship to God, or Levinas’ encountering with the Other or the face of another person appears as well and just as strongly.
I should add to Digibro’s definition as following: The “autistic” finds it difficult to intuitively see the other as the other in a way that the other sees intuitively that, she had been seen as just directly herself. Plus, the other’s intuition needs to be strong enough to preclude herself from suspecting that “the autistic is dumping his autistic self into me.” In this strongest meta-ethical sense, indeed, I tend to say all humans are more or less “autistic”.
[2] By this “general boredom”, I mean being bored about most things with the strange exceptions of a handful of products.
[3] By this “general cynicism”, I mean there are cynical “facts” of evil and wrongness that people generally cannot wholeheartedly agree with yet concede begrudgingly to their overwhelmingly powerful “facticity” – they can see neither solution nor alternatives to it. For example, the statement that “All humans are by nature more covetous than morally good.”, if singled out and genuinely thought about, is a statement hard to agree with. However, when in real or everyday situation, when one faces the threat of thefts and frauds, it’s mostly likely that one will act as though that statement is true. This choice is in effect a concession to that cynical statement, actively adding on to the power to that statement’s already unconquerable “facticity”.
[4] Without being able to dwell on this concept here, I quote Michael O’Sullivan from “Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism and Belief: An Introduction to the work of Michel Henry”, “Henry defines the practices of barbarism as ‘all those modes of life in which this life accomplishes itself in a rough, coarse and rudimentary manner (B 165); barbarism is also described as ‘an unemployed energy [Henry’s italics]’ (B 177).” O’Sullivan is in turn referencing Henry’s “La babarie [Barbarism]”.
[5] Think of how easily accusations against loli hentai as pedophiliac are refuted: it makes no sense that someone cannot distinguish the fictional mode of being in the fictional world (that is the product), from the mode of being in the singular real world. In fact, it is by virtue of the clear nature of fictionality, that a lot of ridiculous radicalizations can even take place in ACGN. The assuredness of fictionality entails a lack of real existential threat to question about one’s morals. The certitude about the players’ mere pretension or roleplaying, allows the fantastical in a theatre work to be whatever it wants and could.
[6] I must admit that it is not inconceivable, even for now, that a person is not suffused with product consumptions. And if that conceivability was possible, I would include a disjunction felt from people without having been “thoroughly corrupted” by products.

References:
Informal:
1. “Explaining -Autism!!”. Digibro After Dark (name of channel). Sep 6, 2018 (published on YouTube).
2. “Artso Fartso’s Whirling Dervish Podcast #7: As I Walk Thru the Valley of the Shadow of Autism”. Digibro (name of channel). Jul 19, 2019 (published on YouTube). 3:45 is the time mark for the exact quote.
3. “Slavoj Žižek – Evening Lecture – “Disorder Under Heaven” – 2019-06-13”. European Graduate School Video Lectures (name of channel). Jul 19, 2019 (premiered on YouTube). 28:20 is the time mark where Zizek lays out “three conditions of happiness”. 32:40 is the time mark where Zizek talks about “why happiness is a pagan category”.
Formal:
1. O’Sullivan, M. (2006). “Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism and Belief: An Introduction to the work of Michel Henry”. Bern, Germany: Peter Lang AG.
2. Bergo, B. (2019, fall). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Emmanuel Levinas. Retrieved from
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/levinas/
3. Solomon, RC. (2007). “23. Happiness, Spirituality, and Emotional Integrity.” In “True to Our Feelings – What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us”. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

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