Jam

Q: When is a self-help book like a philosophy book?

A: When it's ajar!

[Laughter/groans of dinner guests]

Or! Shakespearean variant:

R: Prithee, sir, tell me - for when is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis Flow like unto Guattari's Machinic Unconscious?

F: Why verily, sirrah, when one is reading them at the same time.

F is correct. I have been reading both at the same time. So I thought, for a fun bit of bonus content (bonus to what? I have promised, and you agreed to, nothing! Actually that's a lie, I've made noises about posting regularly all sorts of times. And today is, by a variable definition held only in my own head and a series of different todo lists - some of which I am still building and are themselves on the todo list - regular. So it's not even bonus to that), I could do a quick comparison of the two! ("worse". The word you are looking for is "worse". Bonus taken from - oh, I don't know, bellum, the war with oneself? I'll look for something else later).

Flow: Talks about how we should (I'm finding it a bit preachy tbh) construct our consciousness.

Machinic Unconscious: Talks about how subjectivity (and other assemblages) constructs itself (no shoulds! Although there's definitely an ethics in there).

…

Okay, they are pretty different, but I'm minded to find similarities today (because they feel harder to look for? Hybris! Or maybe I just want a Guattarian self-help book. Back to the hybris, there's no shame there...)

I have developed a morning ritual with one of the cats (the cats are all about ritual, as it turns out. This is why pets can be an effective and fluffy alternative to addiction for managing depression). The cat wants to jump on the bed. I want to put a blanket on the bed first. So now, from the point I open my bedroom door, we race to the bed. The cat always wins. So I put the blanket on the bed anyway, and for a moment there is a burrowing cat worm beneath the blanket, before I throw that part of the blanket back again to reveal the cat. It's very cute.

And this morning, as I was commentating this game, I remarked that the cat was playing the game of being a little cat. which reminded me in turn of the title of "A Game of You", Vol 5 of the Sandman, which I read recently. One could, I think, develop a reading of Flow that is about the construction of our subjectivities as a game. Csikszentmihalyi seems - I haven't finished the book yet - to be about how we can unify the different aspects/subjectivities that construct us/we construct (note to self: look again at - was it deponent verbs? In ancient Greek? We need a bi- or rather multi-directional voice). I think Csikszentmihalyi may have a lot in common with Nietzsche here (more than he realises/lets on on the one time he's mentioned Nietzsche anyway) - meaning being something we give to things, wonky arrows as the intentional activity being important rather than reaching a goal, and the binding together of ourselves into a person as a process of making a coherent narrative/playing in a manner where even the "wrong" notes sound like they fit. The crossover with stoicism is one of the things I'm finding more icky with the Csikszentmihalyi, thinking about it. Maybe play can save us from stoicism (apart from sleeping lions). Fuck acceptance. But the difference (?) is that the wrong notes are the things that we are making (we should only accept our own mistakes, clearly!). But "we"/"I" is hard to outline - we affirm ourselves, we affirm fucking everything (that's [the takeaway from] four years of eternal return, baby!).

The building of subjectivity as a (non-stoical) game. New project!