Atomized Selves and Solarpunk Dividuals
Defining the Solarpunk Self, Part 3
The ideology of the autonomous, rational liberal individual is, ironically, keeping people from becoming romantically autonomous. We are created from our relationships with others, but sexual relations are, as Levinas and Beauvoir describe, exemplary of the ethical.1 The fact that 86% of men struggle with flirting becomes incredibly worrying when we consider how we can create ethical relations that produce solarpunk selves that produce solarpunk societies.2
Such dilemmas have led me to this series of essays on an attempted redefinition of the self in a solarpunk culture. While each essay is written to stand on its own, together they constitute a full picture that is important to see in its entirety. As with all of my essays, I apply theory to my own life and experience, but end the essay with principles for application for your own situation. So, if you like this essay, which is the third, then consider starting at the beginning with Solarpunk Selves and Sexual Ethics.
Within the ideology of the liberal individual, there is a discrepancy between expectation and education provided. We believe we ought to be able to take responsibility for ourselves regardless of whatever life experiences we’ve had or lack thereof. Dr. Held writes about this specific view of the individual as:3
“a concept of the person developed primarily for liberal political and economic theory, seeing the person as a rational, autonomous agent, or a self-interested individual. On this view, society is made up of ‘independent, autonomous units who cooperate only when the terms of cooperation are such as to […] further the ends of each of the parties’”
This liberal individual, often referred to as atomized, is conceptualized as being separated from every other individual.1,4,5,6 This leads to a privileging of personal agency, or the pursuit of one’s own self-interested goals. Taken to the extreme, people are seen in terms of their value proposition, measured in their ability to further one’s own self-interested success in the games of capitalist achievement. If someone doesn’t provide enough of this definition of value then they are responsibilized, made responsible for increasing their value by conforming themselves to the demands of a specific market whose shape determines what is or is not valuable.4
This violates the first of Dr. Nussbaum’s forms of objectification, instrumentality, in which:7
“the objectifier treats the object as a tool of [their] purposes.”
The very foundations of our society, the economic, political, and social pillars that hold Western civilization as it stands today, are all rooted in a notion of the individual that has objectification as an inevitable consequence. You cannot be an individual functioning in our society without objectifying other individuals.
That said, Nussbaum also makes the claim that:7
“the evaluation of any of [the forms of objectification] requires a careful evaluation of context and circumstances.”
Objectification may not necessarily always be a bad thing. In fact, it’s likely impossible to function without some level of instrumentality. This is precisely the reason I’m redefining the self through the case study of heterosexual relations. While the enterprise as it currently stands can be misogynistically objectifying, the issue isn’t necessarily its objectification. It’s the objectification as it exists within the entire ideological package that makes it so misogynistic. As Nussbaum herself says:7
“We will see how at least some of [the forms of objectification] might be compatible with consent and equality, and even be ‘wonderful’ parts of sexual life.”
As such, if we want a democratically hedonic sexual culture, one in which most people have access to the intimacy and pleasure they desire, then we need to get to the bottom of objectification and how it can be much less misogynistic.6 As I’ve been saying, that stems from the conception of the liberal individual itself.
In the first essay, I discussed the discrepancy between cultural expectations and education. By expecting the liberal individual, we demand that men have both the capability to flirt in a fun, respectful way and the capability to learn how to without ever being boring or disrespectful. The obvious catch-22 here is as unjust as the damage done to women in the process of such men getting better. That, again obviously, presents us with a wicked fucking problem.
How do we get men better at dating when they lack the capability to do it themselves while simultaneously not disrespecting women?
No one practicing a skill they suck at is going to be able to do it well, and a lack of flirtation skill can be especially unwelcome given the unavoidably tumultuous waters of sex and romance. Asking women to be extra nice to every guy who flirts with them so that he can learn is an unjust obligation that assumes every guy is just an awkward guy, doing his best without any bad intentions. It’s also, simply, counterproductive.
That would be like asking the ocean to go easy on the surfer. You can’t learn without failure because surfing reality requires you to learn how to face challenges that surpass your capabilities. Reality is messy, relationships are messy. You can’t expect everything to flow smoothly because that’s simply not how reality works.
I want to be careful not to say that flirting with women is like a surfer on a chaotic ocean. I get that there are potentially misogynistic implications in that analogy. From the perspective of men or women, they are the surfer and the other is the ocean. My most important point is that romance can’t be manufactured into a training program specifically tailored to the needs of men. Again, that is an unjust obligation on women.
Please understand that my sometimes one-sided analogies can go both ways. I’m just focused on men’s side of things in this series because I’m trying to understand my own experience as a man and how I wasn’t given the education I needed. In fact, men are often given education that prevents them from learning how to date properly, whether that be misogynistic advice or social ostracism from honest mistakes. Women ought to be entitled to boundaries and to their own sexual self-determination. If a guy they’re not interested in approaches them, they’re entitled to reject him. If a guy disrespects them, they’re entitled to reject him.
But…don’t “boundaries” assume a separated individual, an entity with a membrane that divides them from the rest of reality and decides what can be let in or not?
From the perspective of the liberal individual, yes.
From the perspective of the relational dividual, not necessarily. It’s a little more nuanced.
I’ve used this term, “dividual”, several times now without defining it. This term comes from the philosophy of Deleuze, but Hanzi Freinacht describes it in the following way:8
“we all are in fact part of one another and affect one another. We consist of many different influences, roles and perspectives, within a multitude of contexts. […] Nowhere can you find a single, individual ‘self’; it’s always connected to everything around us.”
To have boundaries then is not to see oneself as separated from the rest of reality, but instead to determine the conditions and quality of relation itself. As Dr. Held writes:3
“The point, for relational persons, is that as we modify and often distance ourselves from existing relations, it is for the sake of better and often more caring relations, rather than for the splendid independence, self-sufficiency, and easy isolation of the traditional liberal ideal of the autonomous rational agent.”
Even the idea of self-interested individuals deciding the terms of their relationships based on the value proposition of the other is because they hope that value proposition includes a care in terms they desire. I want to be conscious of the fact that I’ve equivocated care as nurturance and care as preference. It can be both, but the point is to say that we want our relationships to give us something more than financial benefit. Even as we aspire to not need non-valued people to like us, to be non-conformist to those we don’t care about, that itself is because we want to be liked and accepted by the valued people whose opinions we care about and how they can help us be the person and live the lives we desire.
Dr. Held adds to this:3
“We maintain some relations, revise others, and create new ones, but we do not see these as the choices of independent individuals acting in the world as though social ties did not exist prior to our creating them, as does the contractual [instrumental] model. Moral agents guided by the ethics of care are ‘encumbered’ and ‘embedded’ in relations with actual other persons, but they can still be free moral agents.” (internal citation number removed)
This all fits in perfectly and tragically with everything we’ve been discussing in this series. Pickup artistry and Red Pill are precisely the aborted solutions men turn to because they fail to maintain, revise, and create relationships that support them in the ways they value. This solution gives them much agency over their relationships in that they become better liberal individuals who are capable of instrumentalizing the people around them. By definition then, they become better at perpetuating the very conception of the person that creates the sort of system that leaves us divided and separated.
According to Dr. Held, this is the logic of the worldview that justifies and legitimates the liberal individual:3
“in dominant moral theories, values such as autonomy, independence, noninterference, self-determination, fairness, and rights are given priority, and there is a ‘systematic devaluing of notions of interdependence, relatedness, and positive involvement’ in the lives of others. The theoretical-juridical accounts, Walker shows, are presented as appropriate for ‘the’ moral agent, as recommendations for how ‘we’ ought to act, but their canonical forms of moral judgment are the judgments of those who resemble ‘a judge, manager, bureaucrat, or gamesman.’ They are abstract and idealized forms of the judgments made by persons who are [already] dominant in an established social order.” (Internal citation numbers removed)
The ideology of Red Pill and pickup artistry glorifies a man who climbs to the top of the economic dominance hierarchy. The individual who is capable of doing that perpetuates the system that most makes the ideology necessary for success in dating, and which often defines romantic success in terms of conquest and acquisition of objectified tools, instrumentalized for sexual pleasure. This cult of the liberal individual is almost inevitably taken to the extreme with the objectification of woman as sex-object and man as success-object.
Dr. Fischel, in quoting Nedelsky, adds to this further:6
“Contra Kant, Nedelsky’s autonomy does not depend on sacralizing ‘independence’ and ‘control’. Because Nedelsky understands the self as multidimensional, relational, and (variably) dependent on others, independence and control are neither possible nor desirable. Independence, were it achievable, would lead to an impoverished and isolated existence. And total control ultimately necessitates domination. Attempting to master intimate relations, social scenes, and political bodies implicates a refusal of receptivity to others’ creativity, spontaneity, and input; control requires the refusal of others’ autonomy. And because we are relational beings, because we become autonomous through ‘constructive relations,’ dependency may be exemplary of autonomy. Those relationships that are explicitly or particularly dependent—say, between a teacher and a student—reflect acutely how intersubjectivity amplifies autonomous action” (Internal citation number removed)
The solarpunk self cannot perpetuate the very system that makes the worst manifestations of human becoming so attractive, and so powerful for agency and denigrating for communion. It certainly cannot valorize the woman as desiring the removal of her own autonomy in the face of a superior, alpha male.
As such, our dividual as fundamentally relational must rise to the standard of the sexual citizen, a person who is capable of sexual agency, the pursuit of self-interested goals, and sexual communion, the pursuit of other-interested care. We will come to see that it is through this standard that we are far better able to answer the wicked problem of men learning how to flirt in fun, respectful ways while minimizing as much as is possible their being boring or disrespectful.
Beginning with the quality of our relating with others naturally leads us to the work of Martin Buber and the distinction between I – It and I – You. A key point I want you to keep in mind is that by saying “we are relational”, I am in no way saying that we as sovereign persons shouldn’t be taken into account. However much I am created out of my relations with others, I am still a sovereign person just as much as they are. Thus, our conception of the self must take into account our relationality and our sovereignty. This is where we turn to in the next essay.
Principles for Application:
1. Each essay I write has this section. Sometimes multiple essays’ will build on each other, other times they’ll be self-contained. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk.
2. In previous essays, you selected a domain of your identity, political affiliation, religious history, etc., so now apply the idea of the liberal individual to it. In what way has this domain assumed the existence of the liberal individual who doesn’t need relationships?
3. How has it valorized independence, control, and instrumentality? How has it demanded responsibility and it demonized dependence?
Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
References:
1 – Anderson, E. (2019). From Existential Alterity to Ethical Reciprocity: Beauvoir?s Alternative to Levinas. Continental Philosophy Review, 52(2), 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9459-3
2 – Apostolou, M., O, J., & Esposito, G. (2020). Singles’ Reasons for Being Single: Empirical Evidence From an Evolutionary Perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00746
3 – Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford University Press.
4 – Brown, W. (2017). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books.
5 – Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford Briefs.
6 – Fischel, J. J. J. (2019). Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice. University of California Press.
7 – Nussbaum, M. C. (1995). Objectification. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 24(4), 249–291.
8 – Freinacht, H. (2017). The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One. Metamoderna ApS.