Intimacy
She says, I loved you so much once. I loved you to the point of distraction. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you imagine it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can’t believe it now. I think that’s the strangest thing of all now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can’t imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven’t been.
Intimacy Raymond Carver
It is not strange that individuals' lives should be dominated by the cycling through of different phases in their behaviour. And it is not strange that these phases, in order that they should serve as enabling functions to the individual, should be conditioned by the underlying pressures of existence. Nor is it at all strange that such phases are triggered by external stimuli linked as signs to those pressures through a responsive communicative structure. The seasonality in signs is recognised by the signs of the seasons.
What is remarkably strange, because it does not appear as such within the mechanism itself, is the dual role the organism plays, firstly as a selective apparatus, an embodied sorting algorithm, that is directed towards those objects which its distinctive seasonal behaviours seek to connect to, and secondly as an embodied set of signals by which it becomes an object or objects for the procedures of selection in others.
We sort the right object we want from the others as we are also sorted from the crowd to be loved. Guarding the gates in our defences it is our main concern that we let the right one in. We are not simply desiring as such, i.e. prepared to take any thing which would take us (as if two quantities were being measured). We are desiring of a particular constellation of signs which conform most appropriately with the programming of the sorting mechanism which is inseparable from our self.
The sorting algorithm begins with the coarsest of signals (for example, the ‘women seeking men’ section in the Lonely Hearts adverts), it passes through physical characteristics, then likes and dislikes and ends with the unexpected fine grain snags and gains of a developing ambivalent intimacy... the way you sip your tea; that thing that you do.
However, the operational selection of the right object is embellished with a surface of distracting complication wherever the sorting algorithm is linked to consciousness. That which was given by a capricious outside now appears to rest on an interior movement of contemplation and decision. Where consciousness is concerned, design supersedes programming.
At the moment of its own appearance, consciousness adopts the function of an environment and seeks to host the entire tripartite apparatus that is made up of (i) a selective mechanism, (ii) a behavioural phase and (iii) a communicative/interpretative system. We could say that consciousness is nothing but the centralisation of embodied selective procedures.
The tripartite structure (or rather structures, as every distinct desire has its own means, goals, and discourse) feeds back into the sense of self which consciousness is constructing from the feedback.
Every operation of the individual that is consequent of the self-consciousness of its selective procedures comes to reflect and give form to that self. Through the operation of its parts, the self comes to recognise itself in the operations of what it takes to be its parts. Therefore, consciousness proceeds on the assumption that its ‘desires’ serve its purpose, thus reversing the actual circumstance.
But the possessiveness of consciousness is not the end of the complications that it sets in motion... it tends to work with fixed units and thus finds itself baffled by the non-commensurability of the various objects that ‘it’ has selected within ‘its’ different behavioural phases: we were so intimate I could puke.
Consciousness asserts coherence and continuity in itself, assuming a totality sited where it is, and projects this assumption over the various operations and objects which it recognises as appearing on ‘its’ territory. But the assumption results in consciousness continually finding itself in a predicament of non-compatibility with and between its parts precisely because the various operations and objects which it claims are not reducible to the project it identifies with.
If we discount the self as an emergent property of externally directed selective processes we should conclude that there is no reason why the objects of one selective procedure should necessarily be accordant with others. Whilst the self's requirement that all of 'its' processes should align into a constellation (something like the constellations of astrology) from its perspective, the actual embodied unity of the processes that produce it as an exaptatation are constellated around a quite other but displaced centre.
At certain junctures, as an outcome of consciousness conceiving of itself as an integrative whole, individual objects register as the result of ‘bad choices’ ('We were so intimate once upon a time I can’t believe it now.') when really they are only the residue of desires which do not fit with the account consciousness gives of itself.
Sometimes, certain parts of the self become utterly incomprehensible on the terms of its own understanding – resulting at first in violent rejection and then in annexation or secession. Intimacy at last appears in the form of that object which once was undifferentiated but has now become incomprehensible, intolerable even, and yet is still active deep within the selective mechanism. Intimacy occurs in awareness only at those moments of reflection when it has been momentarily lost.
