BDSM as M/s Praxis

“Any form of skillful coping in which you can become an expert, in which you get into a kind of flow in which you don't have to think at all, your mind is out of it and the skills in your body are doing it, we've done all of that and we've done it taking a risk too, that when you do that: you end up lost or you may end up saying things you regret having said, and if you aren't ready to take that risk you'll never become an expert in that. So, I could predict that you have taken the risk and done it and felt bad about it, and you've done it and felt good about it, and when you've got that, you've got a kind of mastery. “ - Hubert Dreyfus.

Merleau-Ponty had an important insight. When we look at certain types of expertise (and I'm betraying less philosophical interests of mine, lol) such as the expertise of an athlete, we see embodied expertise, the expertise that is not simply “unthinking” in its operation but is required to be unthinking, such that the athlete wouldn't be able to do what he/she in fact does if he/she had to think about it while doing it. In this context we have to look at such things as “muscle memory” etc. where the brain simply doesn't contain the whole representation of what is going on. Merleau-Ponty recognized, in his idea of intercorporeality, that our usual and normal interactions with the World were bodily in nature, that we don't in fact keep a mental representation of the World, the World is immediate to us through our bodying forth into it. The skill of an athlete is an extension of our normal bodying forth, not an unusual or fundamentally different manner of relating to the World, or meaning-context, in which we exist.

The “play” aspect of bdsm is related to this, as part of the praxis of M/s relationships. Most M/s relationships do in fact incorporate aspects of bdsm play, and this is not an accidental relation. Dominating someone is not, fundamentally, simply a mental thing, and as a result purely psychological or psychosocial theories of M/s fall down when it comes to praxis. The physical aspects, bodily aspects of domination and submission come to the fore in bdsm “play”, and the scare quotes are there because in an M/s context “play” is in fact very serious and very much a part of the real dynamic between the people involved. That bdsm involves skilled play, mastery of technique in a more limited sense of the word mastery than I usually use it, is part of the way that M/s is embodied and brought to a fullness beyond its psychological expression.

When mitda and I first became involved it was in both a romantic (in the old fashioned sense) and practical manner. We were not an M/s couple in any sense, in fact neither of us understood the M/s dynamic as a real possibility. But the combination of a psychological bond together with a penchant for bdsm play resulted in a very tight relationship with one another, and an unplanned but powerful tendency towards M/s within the relationship. After getting together in a physical sense, living together as a couple, and engaging in such play our relationship dynamic inevitably tended not just to M/s, but M/s in its absolute form. Without having any conceptual transparency, we lived together, played together, and developed a total power transfer dynamic. As we became more aware of the tendencies that were expressing themselves within the dynamic and attempted to achieve some sort of conceptual transparency for what we were in fact doing, ideas such as TPE/IE suddenly made sense to two people who had run across and essentially written off such ideas. One of the things this made me aware of as a person who writes on the subject, is that while I can provide a framework for thinking about such relationships, I can't justify its existence or prove anything of what I am saying, and viewing it as a framework for my reality is something that could be accepted or rejected by the reader, but probably not really understood by the reader unless they themselves had experienced a similar dynamic. And this dynamic cannot be experienced purely mentally, it requires a bodily expression, it requires the bdsm practice aspect that from a conceptual point of view seems extrinsic.

In the relationship that developed with emmie that this praxis was intrinsic came more to the fore, in that she was not, is not a masochist in the conventional sense. She doesn't engage in bdsm praxis for the sake of the physical pleasure that a conventional masochist derives from it. She engages in it, and it has felt and become necessary to both of us to engage in such practices, from a purely dominance/submission aspect. As a result it is impossible to make the error of viewing the bodily aspect as essentially separate and different from the psychological. Her enjoyment of s & m play is purely the enjoyment a submissive derives from being submissive, palpably, physically. It is the bodying forth of her submission and the bodying forth of my mastery. Our play doesn't, as a result, have the comfortable and easy feel that mitda and I attain, where mastery and submission is bodied forth in concert with deep mutual pleasure and satisfaction. Instead it results in a tension of necessity, an expression of dominance and submission with our bodies that we cannot choose to forego simply because it isn't a fundamentally pleasurable activity.

A Slave's Situation

I've had various thoughts today surrounding absolute enslavement as a limit-situation, something I've blogged on previously, and the idea of situation in general and how it relates to consensual slavery. Situation in general is my term for the human condition, a condition of possibilities proffered and decisions required. Even the most brutal poverty, for example, remains a situation, no matter how limted the possibilities or how painful the decisions. Whereas total destitution, were it possible (without termination of life) would no longer be a situation. In total or absolute destitution there are no longer any options and no decisions to be made, and this non-situation is essentially inhuman.

So an absolute enslavement viewed as an actuality, rather than a vector of possibility, would by the same token be inhuman. Not simply in some sense of inhumane, which would be to reposit a priori human rights and the rest of the metaphysical baggage, but inhuman in the sense that the human condition always contains possibilities and always requires decision.

So what then could absolute enslavement mean or look like? It means that the options put before the slave are those of his/her Master's choosing, and the decisions made are made, to the highest degree attainable, as the decisions that his/her Master would take. This in its turn is made available to the slave through the shared world, or meaning-context, that the Master gives the slave. It looks almost like a normal relationship to the outside world, because the slave is seemingly free to make decisions and choose from given possibilities just as any other human being is. That the slave will in all probability choose the Master's will is inherent, but not necessarily apparent.

A limit-situation is defined as a situation in which the absolute, in some way, irrupts into the world of finite beings, mortals, humans. Being mortal itself is the fundamental limit situation, because death is a limit that we can never outstrip or breach, and that we are always in some way, dimly, aware of. Absolute enslavement is a more specific and determined limit-situation where the limit is, quite literally, that of being human and in a situation at all. As an absolute enslavement relationship progresses along a vector that approaches the limit, the slave's meaning-context becomes more and more aligned with that of the Master until the it approaches a probability of one that the slave will, in any specific situation, act as his/her Master would have them act. As a vector it never quite reaches a probability of one, because in remaining a human situation the slave never has 100% of the information required to be perfectly aligned, and thus is never perfectly sure that the Master's wishes are in fact being carried out until after the decision is made and enacted. And in never reaching it the slave's humanity is never lessened, nor his/her ethical responsibilities removed. The ethic involved here, a slave ethic, is the inherent rightness for the slave of doing what his/her Master would will, and it remains an ethical problem and not a moral imperative because what the Master wills cannot be predetermined in an always changing and new situation.

A Daedalus Christmas

Realizing I neglected to post over the holidays, I decided to wrap up what went on at House Daedalus. With mitda having put in a ton of effort to Christmas we had a pile of wrapped presents under the tree, the four usual adults, mitda's mother (also technically an adult :) ), kid-who-is-18 and the kidlet (9) all here to open them on Christmas Day. The presents were really quite good all round, me probably doing the best overall because mitda managed to score the last 5 Terry's Dark Chocolate Oranges available in Austin Texas. And I do love the Terry's Oranges. So I have enough of them to both share and be selfish with them. I also received a new copy of Sein und Zeit, my old one having oddly disappeared during the period when we lived with the MIL, and an apropos t-shirt emblazoned “If I'm not happy, nobody's happy”. For all the gift recipients mitda had put together a bunch of cool stocking stuffers last minute on a very slim budget, and opening them was one of the highlights of the day.

Generally mitda herself doesn't celebrate Christmas and so she had the slimmest pickings of the bunch (she remonstrated to everyone not to buy her presents in the weeks leading up), which didn't feel so good when she worked so hard to make it a good holiday, even though she will always do well on her holiday of choice for gifts, Valentine's Day. She and I had exchanged new rings in stainless steel, which appears to be the only metal she can wear these days without a reaction. And I have not-so-subtly brought her over to the 'dark side' of logic and set theory, and the two books she got on those subjects were a bigger prize for her than I expected.

Aside from trifles emmie's presents were a bit, ahem, virtual. She is in line for some big gifts this year but it simply was impossible to make the giving of them coincide with Christmas, so she received pictures of the items in question and the family's promise that the pictures would eventually have a material aspect to go with them. Materially she did get a wireless remote control for her digital SLR which will come in handy for getting herself in her photos. E received a bluetooth earbud from the family, which he seems to really get off on, and various and sundry smaller gifts from his birth family et al. Both kids did pretty well, although kidlet was disappointed to not get a new video game for his DS and made such known. With his recent grades (a number of F's, although most were in spelling and spelling has always been a bane), it might be better that neither of his parents saw new video games as a necessity. And the MIL also had a few nice gifts, including some from mitda's twin brother who lives some distance from here and couldn't be here in person. He was sweet enough to include gift cards for mitda and I as well. The family received a gift card from the MIL that she really shouldn't have budgeted herself to purchase, so every dollar on the card feels like twenty would have from anyone else. She has worked very hard this year to get herself back on track after a financially disastrous move a few years ago from California (occasioned by the very real need to take care of mitda's grandmother during her last years) and shown incredible toughness of spirit and resiliency in handling very difficult circumstances.

Holiday Job Realization

The holidays made me realize how burned out I've been with work, not merely due to the 2 hour each way commute, but due to the lack of direction and progress during the 8 hours in between, while I'm there, which is made palpably worse by the restrictions and rules on me while I am there. As a result I gave notice yesterday, something made rather easier by the fact that I was offered a position at equivalent salary at a place without such restrictions that happens to be 10 minutes from home : ). Given that I live in the middle of nowhere, the chances of getting something 10 minutes from here are slim to none, and slim usually left town, but there just happens to be an engineering site in a little town 10 minutes away from this little town, and they were looking for just such a developer as me.

So today I go back to my old job after the holiday and get to piss around until they get sick of me being there and tell me not to finish up my notice, or like everything else there nobody pays any attention and I put in the few days I have to give and then quietly disappear. Either way it's much better than the stress I was under, and I'm looking forward to a better milieu beginning January 7.

A Lazy Day before Christmas

The family is at a coffee shop, me included, today. E and emmie are sitting inside while mitda and I are outside enjoying a cool but sunny Texas winter day. We spent a quiet evening last night after the solstice celebrations, mitda studying symbolic logic while I messed around on the net and spent some time with emmie – E watching a movie on his laptop. It was nice, settled, after getting so much out on solstice. This morning I was up early to watch the Man U. game, which they pulled out in the last five minutes : ). Generally it feels like a good weekend, getting the last few weeks of job hell out of my system and preparing for something new, and just feeling a bit more capable of unwinding and enjoying myself.

My Little Girl

Today emmie and I went probably the furthest into age play that we have so far allowed ourselves. She coloured in a colouring book while wearing a cute little girl dress, then pleasured her daddy in multiple ways. It's a fantasy I've never really gone to before – having a personal history there it was something very odd to think of doing at first. But it is working out rather well with emmie being my little girl and she seems to really enjoy having a daddy. E and mitda have been very encouraging as well as far as this aspect of our relationship goes, even as far as to prod us to actively go further in exploring it. I adore emmie and want to do everything I can to ensure it's safe for her to explore this fantasy, and I adore all of my family for being open to what can seem like a very strange kink at first to non-initiates.

The Ontological Fallacy of Science

“ Realism is not a conclusion that can be proved logically either by science or in any other way.  But all persons are experientially aware of reality from the awakening of consciousness.  That awareness is a primordial prejudice .  One is reminded of Bertrand Russell’s “proof” for realism: after announcing his intent he simply raised his hands.  Nothing spoken, but enough said.  This awareness grows in sophistication with the acquisition of language including in due course the acquisition of the language of science.  The advancement of science is the increasing adequacy of human knowledge of the real world.  For the empirical scientist the consciousness of reality becomes astute when theory reveals reality, and acute when reality refutes theory.  A falsifying test outcome is no time for Cartesian doubt that the first object of human knowledge is the recalcitrant real world.  Such is the basis for scientific realism .  Scientific realism is the thesis that the most critically empirically tested and currently nonfalsified theory, i.e. a scientific law, in science is the most adequate available description of reality.”

Here is what I refer to as the “ ontological fallacy” of Scientific Realism enacted in a single paragraph. While “awareness” of reality may indeed come with the awakening of consciousness, the in-itself nature of reality does not thereby become transparent. A “test outcome” qualifies the predictive validity of a given theory about the way reality behaves, giving a model of what may underlie the realities we experience, but it remains a model that has no intrinsic connection with the in-itself it models other than behavioral symmetry. If “ for the empirical scientist the consciousness of reality becomes astute when theory reveals reality”, for the astute philosopher the empirical scientist has modelled the behaviour of reality more or less accurately, but cannot “reveal” reality, since his only access to reality remains the same presentation in its representation in consciousness that was there to begin with. That there is a reality is a posit that science simply has to accept in order to function as the science that it is, that the in-itself of reality has anything fundamentally to do with scientific theories other than behavioral symmetry is a prejudice unsupported by experience and rendered observably unlikely in the history of changes of particular theories of the particular sciences.

Solstice and Fuckery

I survived the Solstice celebrations, actually survived them quite well :). We all declared the things we were going to let go of this year, and the things we are grateful for, and it brought us very much back to why we are all together in the first place.

Afterwards we had fuckery and a great time. It was the first day (by happenstance) that mitda was cleared by her doctor for fuckery after the surgery and it seemed like it had been forever since she was able to fully indulge in the pleasure. Needless to say having been very missed it was absolutely great to have her back. If last night is any indication her libido wasn't a casualty of the surgery, and in fact is stronger than it has been in a long time, because she isn't dispossessed of her joy by constant pain.

Solstice Time Again

“ During Babylonian and Persian solstice celebrations masters and slaves exchanged places. In each household, one slave was picked to be the master. In the palace, a mock king ruled in place of the true king.”

Tonight is Winter Solstice, and House Daedalus will be celebrating Persian style, with mitda reigning as Master for 12 hours from sundown to sunup. Wish me luck – I'll need it : ).

One job, two jobs, three jobs Oh My!

So now I do have two jobs to choose from, one offer is more verbal the other more concrete, but they're both pretty much 100%, and so I have to decide. Ah the joy of being the one in control! For the moment I'm just letting things settle in my mind and working out the full advantages and disadvantages of each. It's a much nicer place to be to have a job and be offered two new ones than to not have one and be in the market.

Frustration

IT tried to uninstall/reinstall my dev environment yesterdqy, only to
corrupt windoze swo that I have nothing to work on until they get the
machine restaged (OS reinstalled and apps added). This will take most
of the day so I'm without distraction.

Hump blahs

As it appears I can blog now from my 'berry, I thought I would put in
a Wednesday update.
I've decided to go for the interview - although the money's less it
may be worth my sanity to leave this job. I gave it a serious go this
time but the personal and professional restrictions just did me in
eventually, and made it not worth the 2 hour drive to work.
So hopefully something new for the new year. Even if it means
pinching our belts a little.

Mood Stabilizer A-Go

So emmie and mitda arrived home from the pdoc. Most of emmie's medication plan has remained the same with the exception of raising the dose on one drug that I felt really needed to be raised to be at all effective. Given that it is one of only two true mood stabilizers my hope is that we will see some lessened mood lability in the girl :).

JAggregate

One of the most common complaints about Java is the JCF, or Java Collections Framework, the amount of simple typing necessary to work with sets, bags etc. in the JCF is annoying to say the least, and the framework just isn't intuitive to someone used to other collection frameworks such as the Smalltalk Collections. So along comes Jaggregate (yes it's been around a while) on Sourceforge.net. Jaggregate takes the Smalltalk Collections ideas and implements them in Java, giving quickly accessible and manipulable collection classes that can be used extremely easily by any qualified Java programmer.

JAggregate

Depression, Anxiety and other Fun Stuff

Currently emmie and mitda are visiting emmie's new pdoc (psychiatrist). I am waiting at home, hoping things go well and that emmie can get a more viable treatment plan for her depression and anxiety issues. While she is bipolar other than blips mania hasn't been an issue for a long while. I am bipolar myself and having two bipolar slaves is an interesting, if somewhat difficult, task to put to oneself. While mitda was diagnosed years ago (myself hundreds of years ago) it is all very new to emmie, who was just diagnosed formally this year. We do attend a local support group on Monday's (although emmie and I were too tired to go last night, mitda did meet up with E. there – as the only normie in the quad it's great of E. to bother showing up to support the family).

Xmas and Migraines

I took emmie to a wine cheese and widgets party Saturday afternoon, where the point was to objectify (or de-subjectify as I prefer) one's slave by not addressing them and simply using them as whatever tool one needed at the moment. It was interesting to see her reaction and the reaction of the other slaves at the event, and also to have some conversation with other Masters. More events are planned that will be different than the more common bdsm style get togethers, the first being a protocol dinner with entertainment by the slaves in the group. While mitda wasn't quite recovered enough to attend the event she did make it to the xmas party that followed (at a different ranch) and we had quite a lot of good conversation and good times. I played emmie for only the second time publicly, (the first was a very private sort of publicness at a small party) and she did very well, given that I played her rather hard, if only for a short time. She did well with being publicly nude during the playtime as well.

There are a few more xmas events in our community but this party was the big one as far as I was concerned, with a huge white elephant gift exchange (which our family did rather well at) and various other holiday attributes :).

I am definitely planning on switching jobs in the near future. One company has interviewed me but there is some distance between their offer salary wise and my expectations. Two more opportunities came up today (I am taking the day off due to a migraine and the resulting dozyness from migraine meds).

The Enigma of the Nothing

I haven't posted in a little while, what with working and driving all hours of the day. However I have been working on thoughts surrounding Badiou (current French philosopher) and the relationship of Set Theory to Ontology as he discusses in “Being and Event”.

Not that I'm ready to write on it yet. I still have some way to go in understanding it and relating it to my own central concerns. Some posts on it will come later. For now I'll content myself with putting forward the enigmatic fact that the void-set (set of multiples of nothing) also contains itself, leading to a fundamental excess of the Void that cannot be captured in either formal or natural language.

Munching Again

Tonight is the first munch we have been to since mitda's surgery, and an end of term party for E.'s university friends. While I feel a bit like a member of “E.'s freaky family” at the latter we will put in an appearance, as he would likely be disappointed if we didn't. The munch should be fun, see some people we haven't seen for a few weeks and see what people are planning for the holidays. (BDSM'ers celebrate holidays too :p ).

Meeting all the Responsibilities

I've officially put myself back in the job market. Some things have come up already, and I'm just finding it unrealistic to live the lifestyle I do and spend 8 hours at work + 4 or more hours a day driving. Not to mention that the personal and professional restrictions in the work environment make it difficult to do a good job, the job I expect from myself, which gets rather frustrating. Fortunately there are lots of tech jobs in this area, and I can keep working where I am and drawing a good paycheque until I have a firm start date somewhere else.

Taking on two slaves has turned out to be a deal of responsibility, and takes a deal of energy and time. It's time I enjoy and effort I love to put in, when I have the energy to spare. Right now has been difficult for both emmie and mitda in that they are not getting the level of dominance they require for their own personal comfort level. Lack of a dominant presence = lack of care to a submissive, and while I care deeply about both of them it has been difficult to show it, when I leave home at 4:30a and by the time I get home around 7 I'm exhausted and just want bed.

Ontology and Mathematics

It occurred to me lately (not much wonder since my background is in symbolic logic and philosophy) that mathematics is actually the true language of Ontology, the language that specifically speaks about non-objects, things that are not things, that don't take part in being, because it is a topology of Being itself, which is never a being. While many things have followed on from that thought I am still working out the most basic of them – the poietic descriptions of Being have been followed by philosophy from Plato to Heidegger, and are therefore far more developed than conclusions that might be able to be drawn from mathematics, but the mathematical conclusions have a much better chance of being communicated to a population no longer in love with or trusting in poetic license.

A Short Time Away

Tonight mitda and I are spending the night in a cheap hotel, mainly because I couldn't stand another weekend at home with the number of people living in a household. I guess having been a privileged child I grew up with 4 bedrooms and 3 people living in the house, so 6 people in a 3 bedroom is too much for me sometimes. With the stress from work I don't currently need additional stress at home.

I also thought it would be nice for mitda and I to get out as husband and wife. As Master/slave we do so much together but sometimes it can take away from the other side of our relationship. Unfortunately emmie didn't take us going away for the weekend very well. We will see her and E tomorrow at the munch and plan to go to a party for E.'s classmates afterwards, perhaps emmie will want to come back to the hotel with us after that so that she can have a night away from the kids.

After coming down with a serious migraine Thursday (tg I made it home, driving 130 mi. with a migraine is no fun) I woke up today lethargic and serotonin crashed from the migraine meds. I managed to do next to nothing all day and am finally feeling more like myself now that it's nearly bedtime.

Diagramming for Pennies

Today was another day of diagramming and generating code. Oh sure I have to write some code once the generation is done, to make the code actually do something, but much of the work is done for me by the latest tools. Automation is coming to software development, finally.

Not that anyone at work is really picking up on it awfully quickly. In fact today I redid two peoples' work, that they had hand coded, and redid it using the generating toolkits. It probably added up to a couple of days coding, plus testing and debugging time, that was completely unnecessary.

It occurred to me the other day while playing with mind mapping software for brainstorming ( http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download ) that, given that the Autism sites recommend mind mapping software for autistics/aspergers, diagramming and generating things from diagrams is particularly suited to an aspies mind. Like mine. Because that is most of what I do these days. I never was an incredibly good heads down coder, more of a program designer (internal program architecture and design, not GUIs).

So the industry seems to be going my way. Hopefully this job will continue to do so for the immediate future until I can find something closer to home and with a less restrictive atmosphere.

Goodbye to November and All That

I've been torturing emmie by making her listen to live Ministry, who we are going to see when they visit our town in April. Sure it's from a while ago but hell they're a good live band. Poor emmie is more into pop-hip-hop than Ministry, <sigh>, you can't always find good musical taste in a slave :).

It's been a difficult week and a half and I'll be glad when this week is past. E. has been focused on getting ready for exams, mitda is recovering rather well all things considered but not yet up to her usual self, emmie has had a few difficult things to deal with personally, and I've had my issues with personal and professional restrictions at work, not to mention my jaw being half ripped out. I'm hoping that during December we can rally around each other a bit more and not have shit dumped on us from without..

Turkey and Obsession

We had an odd sort of family Thanksgiving yesterday, not that things aren't often a little odd around here. I was unable to really take part in the eating due to having had two wisdom teeth out (one was growing in underneath another). The pain and being unable to function fully for a few days left me extremely depressed and lethargic.

After changing from one neuroleptic to another emmie had a brief but intense psychotic episode. Unfortunately mitda is feeling very vulnerable both physically and emotionally as a result of her hysterectomy and responded in fear. E helped to calm the situation down quite a bit and by the time mitda's mother had been retrieved from her home (she doesn't like driving in heavy rain) emmie had done a wonderful job cleaning up the house and was ready for the company. The meds I had given her during the episode left her feeling tired though and she retired to bed shortly after dinner. I had been tired and pretty much lolling around in bed anyway, so I stayed with her there until mitda's moth was ready to go home. E and mitd and her mother watched a couple of movies and seemed to have a good time overall. Apparently the food was good – as I said earlier I didn't eat much of it – but it seems E did a good job with the Turkey (his first time) and the rest of the stuff at least looked and smelled good.

Tomorrow emmie will try to find a new pdoc as we are not happy with her current doc's medication knowledge. She will also call her current pdoc and relate the incident to see if in fact he does have any ideas. I don't personally believe, having met him, that he is particularly comfortable treating bipolar. Bipolar disorder requires treatment by a good psychopharmacologist, someone who knows the illness and the medications for it (there's literally hundreds) inside and out.

Voidy numbness ...

I have been considering the Void lately. Not that void that science deals with that stands in for not-matter wherever there isn't matter, that void is still in space, in time, in the universe. The Void I am thinking on is neither in space nor time, but exceeds both, nor is it a part of that finite but unbounded thing we call the Universe, it exceeds that also.

This particular void is not graspable, it can't be conceptualized in any conceptual en-grasping. It doesn't take part in mankind's en-framing of the universe into calculable resources, it remains outside, incalculable, unresourceful. It can't be presented to someone or represented to oneself, and yet, terrifyingly at times, it remains experienceable.

One might expect that experiencing this would cause one to cling to one's fellows, much as people gather and hold one another during a storm. But it is not a storm, it is calm as death, and perhaps it would have this effect on another, in fact perhaps half the distractions of society exist in pure response to it, but on me it renders me distant, alone and with the desire to be more so.

I have taken things to become more calm, taken other things that I hope will bring me back towards some form of integration with the World. It could look like depression and perhaps there is some of that lurking around. In the meantime I have to try to balance my responsibilities within-the-world with the undeniable situation that a good part of me is not there.

My vocabulary, its origin, and a kid difficulty

Someone I know, a thoughtful person herself, complained recently about my “reinventing vocabulary” in reference to how I write and speak, and it triggered a number of thoughts about vocabulary in general and mine in particular, which in turn triggered thoughts on issues I have had in my development as a whole.

Not that I do, or do intentionally, reinvent vocabulary (well maybe sometimes I do prefer my own terms for certain things, such as "absolute enslavement" :P ). I have a fair background in both phenomenology and the philosophy of language, particularly with reference to Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida, and so the language that I most naturally use includes terms and structures that are not unusual in these writers but are not so commonly used. But along with this I have some Asperger's traits, and fundamentally for me all language is in the first place a foreign language, English as much as symbolic logic, and am often non-verbal for long periods, so language that is unusual and seems foreign to other people doesn't seem any more foreign to me that what is deemed common parlance. I developed my sense of language despite, rather than because, language in general is a natural or easy thing for me. But I developed enough of a sense of language to serve me decently in what I do because I also had an ability for languages, whether foreign or not :).

My aspies traits have been a concern for me very recently in general. I'm not unhappy about having them – I enjoy the abilities I have as a result and I'm not upset by having had to make a slight extra effort with things like language. I learned language quite well in spite of aspies, and learned other things - such as how to judge people's perceptions of oneself - that are more difficult for aspies people than for the general population. Overall I'm quite content with the combinations of abilities I have developed - I was lucky enough that my aspies traits weren't so severe that I couldn't overcome things that I found necessary to overcome, and I learned many of the things I learned when I was too young to actually notice that it took me more or less effort than other kids.

The reason it has been a concern, then, is not particularly regarding myself, but regarding emmie and her son. Both of emmie's sons are diagnosed autistics, but the younger one really fits the description of someone with aspies more than autism, while the older one fits the description of a medium to medium-high functioning autistic more accurately. I haven't spent a great deal of time with her older son, who lives with his father in another state, but her younger son lives with us and is currently 9, which seems to be an important age for a kid with aspies. According to child development guidelines 9 to 11 is the age when children generally become social personalities. Up to that point children are an odd combination of self absorption and parent-centrism, they don't come across as completely self-interested, simply because their “self” is still integrated with those that raised them, usually their parents in this society.

But between 9 and 11 years this changes, and kids suddenly take an avid interest in one another. Peer pressure first really develops at this age and so does the need to be close to other kids, rather than first looking for parental/teacher acceptance and only later for acceptance by peers. Along with this comes the development of, not self-awareness, but awareness of how one is perceived by others. Aspies and autistic kids are often labelled not self-aware but this is a mislabelling of the fact that they are not aware of how others perceive them. They are aware of their actual “selves” quite strongly as far as I can tell. A striking difference between a fully autistic child and an aspies one, for me, is the difference between not knowing that one is perceived as “ different” or “odd”, vs. knowing it, but not necessarily understanding it or being able to change it.

So her son is having difficulty integrating with other kids at the age that they are all beginning to do so with each other. This could be a very temporary thing, where her son is delayed developmentally and will start to develop that kind of other-kid-awareness a bit later, or it could be a fundamental short-circuit in his wiring – I simply don't know enough about aspies or her son to be able to judge. From being aspies myself, in a less apparently severe way, I know that an aspies kid “can” learn that kind of awareness even if it's not altogether natural or easy. But I don't know if that's true for every aspies kid or just for some. And if it can be learned by any kid that is by definition aspies and not fully autistic (if there is a hard-and-fast line, which seems doubtful) I don't know about the best way to go about helping a kid learn it. The kid has ample reason to learn it – at present he gets picked on and his reactions to things – or more precisely how he allows people to see those reactions – makes it all the more likely he will continue to get picked on. Kids are sensitive and emotional creatures. It's not that “normies” don't get sensitive or have emotional reactions to things, but they learn more quickly than an autistic child what reactions are acceptable to show in front of whom, and what reactions will cause them to be made fun of or treated as “weird”.

This kid has it both good and bad when it comes to the severity of his difficulties. From the limited exposure I've had to his elder brother, he has much more of a chance than the elder sibling of living an apparently “normal” life. Where the elder child will always be treated as disabled in certain functional ways, the younger one may be treated as having been “developmentally” delayed, and may always be “odd” in certain ways, but will likely generally be treated as having “caught up” with everyone else. I use scare quotes on “caught up” because, as with many aspies kids, he has definite abilities as well as disabilities, and overall is very intelligent, so much so that despite an obvious learning disability he is in a regular school at the right grade for his age and is on the school's honor roll. There are many ways where he will always be “ahead” of the average kids in his classes. Not that you have to have aspies to be intelligent or have abilities, he is simply one of the lucky kids that despite whatever problems and issues he might have, he has these abilities to fall back on.

I hope that with further study, partly of aspies syndrome, mostly of emmie's son himself, we'll be able to figure out ways to help him overcome the areas where he does have difficulties. The extra effort it takes him will be worth it in terms of living the life that he will eventually want to choose for himself, and with certain other things being relatively easy for him, he should have spare energy to use on overcoming his issues.

mitda on the road to healing and recovery

All things considered mitda is doing very very well. Many thanks to all the well-wishers who have called, emailed or stopped by to make sure of this. Yes she's still very tired and rather sore, and it will probably take the full six week recovery period to get my mitda back to where she is the full of life, vivacious person that some lucky people have gotten to know, but already I can see some of the glimmer, some of the hope that with the inordinate pain that has been dogging her gone she can continue becoming the person she wants to be, which is the person we all want her to be.

She and emmie and Jubal are the 3 biggest joys in my life. As her Master I expect her to do anything I tell her, as her husband and best friend I expect to do anything she requires. A real M/s relationship is as symbiotic as a real husband/wife relationship but with a little more intensity than most people are used to in their relationships. I hope we can strengthen our bond even further now that a significant distraction is gone and she is on the healing road.

Objectification and the end of the Subject-Object Split

Tonight I was corresponding with another Dominant about an “objectification” social she is planning, and which emmie and I will likely be attending. While objectification of a slave is interesting to me, the de-subjectification that I think is likely will be far more so. Having one's slave see him/her self as no different than the other objects in one's world is a very tangible way of breaking the habitual subject-object split that one makes in one's perceptions, and it is my hope that emmie will begin by viewing herself as though she were an object, but end by ceasing to see objects as such, as separated from herself by a fictional subjectness of her person.

I want to explore this further in thought, particularly in the direction of the personality and its fictions (including its own reality) but I think I will let the thoughts develop a little further on their own and leave it here for tonight.

End of Misery, Hopefully

I haven't been blogging much, what with work, a slave in hospital and much else. But now mitda is home and while she's more than a little sore she's in pretty good spirits, which helps mine significantly. As for that work thing, I'm working from home today, partly to save the cost of travelling to work (we've not managed to cash a cheque yet so things are tight although they shouldn't be, but that's another story) and partly to spend time with mitda.

Although the operation was supposed to be lapiroscopic in nature mitda ended up with a full abdominal courtesy of a nasty cyst and subsequently enlarged ovary – enlarged to about the size of her fist. I do feel really glad that all that stuff is out of there, it was causing her nothing but misery. Now we have to see how her moods do without hormones and find out whether she'll need HRT, altogether a lot to think about for someone her (young) age. But the pain she was in should be gone for good. Thank you the gods of surgery.

The family has been really good with her – emmie was with her much of the time in the hospital – even through the first crying jags when she was still way stoned on the morphine drip and feeling a little empty. It's a deal for emmie to handle strong emotion so it was nice to see her come through it so well. Jubal has been great, reliably there every day to see her, helping with the house to get it read for her, etc.

And me? Well, I made chili con carne for dinner her first day home. First time I cooked (other than the grill) in this house. Turned out ok I guess ;).

15 Hour Days ...

Another 15 hour day. This one went relatively well – I'm able to design the system the way I want to – since it is new I have very few restrictions, which gives me a chance to try a few things I've been wanting to try.

It does make home life more difficult though. I am trying to set things up in a way that I can assign tasks without being here but restrictions at work on use of email etc. make it that much more difficult than it should be. The girls are feeling the lack of attention and it's not a positive experience for them.

Back to it

I haven't had much time to keep up with my blog lately, what with working an 8 hr day and spending 4 hours in the car in total to get there and back. Not that I don't want to keep it up, but it gets grinding and I was definitely looking forward to the weekend.

Keeping up an M/s relationship in these conditions poses its challenges as well. The girls need direction and I'm often not as available as I would like to provide it. I have ideas as to making the task of setting tasks and reviewing them more efficient but that in itself takes energy and time to implement. So we're all getting by.

Preparations for mitda's surgery are not as far along as I would like, as a family we have to realize that the person primarily responsible for meals, shopping and a host of other things will be completely out of commission for some time, and everyone has to pick up the slack no matter what their personal schedules look like.

We went to a dinner party mostly made up of M/s couples, triads etc. tonight and it was a welcome social relief from the draconian world where I work, and the current pressures of home life. It made me remember why we do these things. Not, obviously so that when we go out we have M/s people to go out with, lol, but watching the interaction and feeling so at ease because these people understand how we are and how we choose to live confirms me again in following our hearts and minds and living as we want to.

Dasein, Mineness, Authenticity and Authority – the Origin of Existential Decisionism

“Dasein is not of the mode of vorhanden because it is not something that we ‘come across’ as we go about (BT, 69), but rather it is close to us, and is well known because it is inseparable from ourselves, but it is little understood in everyday experience because it is very close to us (BT, 69). In addition, Dasein is not zuhanden because it exists but is not for the purpose of effecting something.”

“Heidegger introduces the idea of ‘mineness’ as a quality that belongs to Dasein, as being that which is the true nature of Dasein”

Mineness, indeed replaces “an entity’ as the mode of Dasein’s authentic encounterability. However Dasein in fact is encounterable in an ‘inauthentic’ but primordial’ manner through the idea of ‘das Man’, or the “they”, the “one”.

Authenticity and inauthenticity = decisionism – the “they” as consensus, liberalism, against authenticity/authority, the “discourse of Mastery” as per Derrida. Authenticity in Heidegger’s early sense only comes with en-ownment of the Master by the en-slaved. The early sense hence not primordial. The ‘Lord’ is master by virtue of en-ownment by the en-slaved bondsman, therefore reducible. The en-slaved as not reducible. ‘Lord’ is Master only in a relative sense, in relation to the specifically en-slaved. En-slavement by en-framing (technology as techne) as ultimate reductio ad absurdum of Lordship to the en-grasping of the con-cept (Be-griff … “griff” grip or handle, old German). Origin of Heidegger’s transgression - the crucial philosophical mistake of favouring the Lord over the bondsman. C.f. the re-estimation of Being as Ereignis in terms of the mastery of the last god in “vom Ereignis.” Dasein is only encounterable as “mineness” by the Lord after a dialectical sublation, “not-mineness” is primordial.

“The possibility of seeing Dasein as either vorhanden or zuhanden results from the fact that in ‘being-in-the-world’ Dasein is constructed of stuff like the world and could be mistaken. Such a mistaking of Dasein for one of the other kinds of being would result in inappropriate relations and behaviour because it would reduce people to being either equipment or mere objects.”

Inappropriate relations or appropriative relations? c.f. the “event of appropriation”. Appropriating as the bringing into what is most proper, das eigen., “own”, ownhood, en-owning.

“Previous western views of humanity regarded people as either bipartite, body and soul, or tripartite, body, soul and spirit, and lead to the assumption that a person is a synthesis of the parts, but in Heidegger’s view Dasein is existence, not a synthesis of separately existing parts (BT, 153). Thus, Heidegger argues for regarding Dasein as a complete and indivisible being that enters into relations and intrinsically is a complete, unified, entity. There are multiple Dasein, which necessarily have some kind of relation to each other, whether warm and friendly or hermitic or otherwise, and these relations are characterized by Heidegger as ‘Being-with’ (BT, 160).”

Dasein is not the knowing Subject of Descartes but the unitary facticity of existence as disclosed. “Disclosedness” also involves “being-with” and allows truth to appear and be known as shared truth. “Eternal truth” depends on eternity, something we are entirely unsure about in a finite universe. “Objective” truth depends on the separation of subject/object, but the implicit intent of these notions – shared truth, or truth outside the individual existing human, is validated by Heidegger in the concept of disclosedness. “Truth” may only be disclosed to Dasein, but it “is” disclosed to, not determined by, the particular Dasein. Without requiring the basis in absolute knowledge of Hegel (only valid for beings within metaphysics) Heidegger offers support for the idea of shared truth about facticity.

My Own Personal Reactance Tale Pt 1

I think I've mentioned wage-slavery before. Perhaps. Of course I've been aware for a good number of years, practically since I started working, that we still live in such a system, however it suddenly became a lot more overt for me, triggering my own reactance and leading to some interesting observations.

My new position carries with it a lot of restrictions, from not being able to smoke on campus to not being able to bid on eBay. But the two restrictions that caused me the most angst were the lack of ability to use email or IM from work. Given that I will probably end up working 8-10 hours a day with a 4 hour combined commute it adds up to a lot of time spent incommunicado, at least as far as computer initiated contact goes. I've known for years that rights are societally granted, that there is no such thing as a bare unsocialized human being that could own “ human” rights, but to be in a situation, within a supposedly “free” society, where I cannot exercise things I have taken for granted for a long time puts me in a very similar position to mitda and emmie, when they run up against restrictions I put on them.

My first reactions, predictably, are to restore my freedoms, either by quitting the job, smoking by leaving the campus during the day or using my skill as a developer to access my own email system from work. Some of these I can do, some not. Other responsibilities weigh in, just as they do for my girls. Next comes the phase of analysis of the situation, and finally self analysis to see the reasons and results of my reactance.

It has been quite an eye opener, not that I thought life was all easy going and roses for the girls, but to experience it firsthand as a dominant personality was certainly disconcerting. Things at work will get better, as I work around one or two issues, and accept the others more easily by being distracted with the work at hand and not bored into focusing on the restrictions due to lack of work (it often takes companies a few days to get systems in place for a new developer and this is no exception).

Azureus Vuze for OpenSolaris

It got to irritating me that Azureus is not available for OpenSolaris. So here is a completely unsupported port of the program for OpenSolaris. Your mileage may vary but it seems to work here. Took all of 15 minutes to convert the Linux version. Of course the OnVuze features don't work, but it does pretty much what Azureus 2.x (which at least came in a Solaris/ultrasparc version) did. Given there's lots of programs to view vids etc. on Solaris Azureus comes in handy to download the torrents.

Azureus Vuze for OpenSolaris

A Long Day

We spent much of this rather longish day a little high on vicodin and flexeral. After the stress last night and the sorting it out this morning we all needed a mental vacation, at least I did.

The girls remain as they were as far as our relationship goes. There will be no more “topping from the bottom”. They can make requests, yes, but they cannot and will not be upset if the requests aren't granted.

On a happier note they get fitted tomorrow for their hallowe'en constumes. God knows what I'm going as though. Maybe I'll go as the host, who always dresses as a Texas rancher. Of course he has the ranch to back him up, our 12 sq ft or so backyard doesn't really count :).

Topping from the Bottom

Most of the time the slaves are quite happy doing what they are supposed to do, and quite happy with what Master does. Occasionally, though, Master does or intends to do something unwanted, and despite their vows to the contrary it becomes an occasion where it is tempting to “top from the bottom”.

This doesn't work altogether well for anyone. I don't, and won't indulge it. And it makes me angry and irritable. It makes me second guess doing the things the girls do want me to do, and if I'm not careful it can generate the very resentment I'm trying to avoid with this relationship.

Crrrriiiitttic !

During a conversation Saturday night a Master friend of mine brought up the “Master's inner critic”, in the sense of the following situation. When living 24/7 in an absolute enslavement relationship it can be easy for the Master to get lazy at times. Suddenly there's a “wait a minute, s/he didn't do ... while s/he was doing ... - ah well, let it go this time, the game's on ...”, and this happens a few times in a day, maybe multiply that by a few days, and you've suddenly let a few dozen “ little things” slide.

Then suddenly you decide you have to correct him/her and set things straight. But the “inner critic” is saying “oh yea, come down on him/her NOW after you were too lazy to do it the other three dozen times”, and it becomes a difficult thing to do. And if it keeps on going the AE dynamic is lost completely, the slave no longer expects correction, and the Master loses the ability to do it and just lets the relationship lapse.

Ironically that very thing happened to me seemingly directly afterwards. Having been faced with two slaves suffering from the muted grays, browns and blacks of the depressive end of the bipolar spectrum, and having been home to take care of some things that I wouldn't normally have time for, I found that all of a sudden E. was making dinner every night (or scrounging McD's or KFC for the family), the bedroom, master bathroom, kitchen and closets all looked like thermonuclear test sites and at 7:30am the only person even close to being awake and prepared to leave the house was myself, so I was taking the kidlet to school while E. got ready for work, and my two slaves snored peacefully in bed.

Time to bring out the heavy guns! Yep, I sent an EMAIL, lol. Detailing what wasn't done and that it had to be done from now on.

Or else!!!!

Or else what?

The inner critic was hounding me on that one but I went ahead anyway. Tonight the kitchen, bedroom, master bathroom and closet have all been cleaned and nitpicked over, we had a wonderful birthday dessertfest with mitda's mother, and while these sorts of things are not a cure for bipolar depression we've discussed emmie's situation in particular and come up with what I think is a workable plan to help her learn some new coping skills, as well as get her medications sorted out in a short amount of time, all without taking her near a hospital.

Critic, be damned.

Busy Weekend

One of the big local BDSM groups held its annual voting munch last night. Although we had a party to go to we dropped by the munch and passed our ballots. Mostly the same people won as last year, which is ok in most ways but a couple of our favourites didn't get the ballot.

Afterwards we went to a very intimate gathering of a BDSM group that, while inclusive, specifically tries to reach out to the black BDSM community, which is fledgling at best apparently. While emmie and I had some sexy S&M playtime Jubal warmed up mitda. I don't play emmie very often but when I do it means a lot to me because she submits for my enjoyment purely. Once she had had more than enough I did a “scene” with mitda that garnered a very unusual comment on its beauty from someone else at the party. We also enjoyed some great conversation. It's unusual for us to be able to spend significant time with other Absolute Enslavement couplse/triads etc. but we talked to a couple at the munch and then another couple that we have a great deal of respect for hosted the party. The slave of that couple mentors emmie and mitda on their enslavement and it seems to help them a lot, particularly emmie.

This morning we dragged ourselves from bed and went to brunch with the same people from the party. Again we had some great conversation and more than a little good food at a pancake house.

All in all an enjoyable M/s oriented weekend.

OpenSolaris with Audio and Everything

Well I finally got audio working on OpenSolaris thanks to the good folks at OpenSound System. Now everything on my laptop works under OpenSolaris. Everything worked by default, actually, upon installation except the audio. Wifi is built in. And of course being an X Windows based GUI I can load the GUI from any of my unix servers and run applications as if they were local to the laptop, while they use the CPU and disk space of the server.

Fitness for Master

As the most unhealthy member of the family it behooves me to try to get a little bit healthier. E is quite healthy, running a half marathon or so weekly and working out nightly before bed. And mitda has surprising stamina, after starting to run again she is quickly up to 6.5 miles. That leaves emmie and I, who would both much rather be sitting our asses on the bed than moving them in some useful fashion.

So we have started soccer practice in the mornings. I enjoy kicking the ball around, at one point I was actually a decent player. Neither emmie nor I get the “runner's high” from exercise, but I do get some excitement from the skill of handling a ball with one's feet.

As a result my legs are sore. Particularly my groin, which doesn't get used so much outside soccer as it does within soccer. But it should be worth it to keep it going. We all enjoy it and it's a good way to spend time together as well as getting some fitness happening.

Goodbye Windows Server 2008

Well it's back to OpenSolaris as Windows Server 08 had one problem after another, first the network list service crapped out, then COM+, then FTP no longer worked. Sigh, I guess RC0 is still not ready for prime time.

Trying Windows Server 2008

So I'm trying out Windows Server 2008 RC0 64 bit on my Thinkpad. So far, so-so. It's pretty fast, much faster than the 32 bit version of Vista on the same machine. Not quite as fast as OpenSolaris but probably about the same as Fedora Linux 8. I've had some problems with Com+, probably caused by the wireless driver for the atheros chipset but still unsure about that. I would probably rather go back to OpenSolaris but for the fact that the OpenSound drivers don't work on this particular intel hda soundcard as of yet. They're close, but not there.

Headachy Night

I woke in the middle of the night with a sharp headache. Some Excedrin is taking the edge off but no way can I lay down. I pounded a bottle of water and a coke and am hoping the fluid and caffeine work some magic. It takes me back to the period where I had a migraine that lasted for years. I somewhat got used to it. I somewhat just took a lot of painkillers – codeine, morphine, fentanyl. I don't ever want to go through that again.

Thought at its Limits

Foucault praises linguistics and psychoanalysis as examples of thought at its limits which discovers at the center of knowledge not humanity, but a sort of anti-humanity, a dead end if you will. Both linguistics and psychoanalysis find humanity suspended in a web of language, a language which mediates humanity and allows humanity to constitute an image of itself. But language is not such a stable support network; rather language's promise of solidity is something like quicksand, an infinitely regressing system which cannot comprehend its own foundation since it has no center or originary meaning to rest on. "From within language experienced and transversed as language, in the play of its possibilities extended to their farthest point, what emerges is that man has 'come to an end', and that, by reaching the summit of all possible speech, he arrives not at the very heart of himself but at the brink of that which limits him; in that region where death prowls, where thought is extinguished, where the promise of the origin interminably recedes." If humanity reveals itself only in and by language, humanity must accept a certain condemnation of silence to never be able to speak of its own origins and ends. Humanity is thrust into the foreground only to be distanced from its foundations, its background, a horizon which cannot speak and which, when approached, undoes thinking (as meaning is undone at the roots of language, the self at the roots of psychoanalysis), leaving only a horizon of the dead.

It is, then, in this context that Foucault speaks of humanity as a recent invention. Only with the elaboration of specific systems of thought which could inquire not into humanity's ideal or essence, but the functioning of the foreground and the silhouette of humanity against the enabling background. "We shall say, therefore, that a 'human science' exists, not whenever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis - within the dimension proper to the unconscious - of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and contents." The subject of humanity was constituted during a certain moment in history which "dissolved" language, that is, an era which knowingly constructed its understanding of humanity "objectively," in between the spaces of representationality which show how humanity is deployed. According to Foucault, the human sciences address humanity in so far as people live, speak, and produce (biology, philology, and economics), and create its model by isolating and questioning the functioning of humanity when the norms and rules break down, and on that basis rebuild knowledge by showing how a functional representation of humanity can come into being and be deployed (and thus, Foucault will later argue, perfect the techniques of normalization and socialized encoding of rules via totalizing methods of power).

As language is now re-coalescing at its limits, combining thought and unthought, the Other of knowledge must give itself over to the Same. Where the limits of thinking reveal its own basis as its foundational limitations, a new way of thinking is constituted which, as Levi-Strauss says, "dissolves humanity." Foucault writes, "Since man was constituted at a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity?" The "death of man" seems a relatively peaceful event, not where humanity explodes with enormous violence, but a moment where humanity withdraws into the background such that a new array of knowledge can be foregrounded. Foucault does not yet have the advantage of a fully elaborated theory of language; however, if such a unity of language is not philosophized, humanity will forever find itself in a dying state, undoing itself by its own logic without our awareness. Foucault seems to ask that humanity die gracefully so that we can direct our energy to elaborating what is not yet thought, and approach a new horizon of articulation.

The Discourse of Mastery and Unlimited Responsibility

A “discourse of Mastery” is by definition ontologically (study of Being) penetrating. By this I mean that it gets at the totality of its subject matter in such a way as to have conquered it. To take an example Euclidean geometry, which carves pure space into dimensions, angles and arcs, is a discourse of Mastery of spatiality. As such it is repressive, in that it subsumes other perceptions of spatiality.

This repression can be very much freeing. Euclidean geometry frees the architect to do what he does knowing the basics will work, knowing the rules of the game. What happens when we bring quantum spatiality into the equation?

Essentially nothing, because while the architect may nod to quantum spatiality it doesn't have ontological penetration for him. It doesn't describe the beings he works with and utilizes on a day to day basis. Another Master's Mastery is as such only of a similarly comprehensive interest to myself or to my slaves. It might well be a discourse of Mastery, but it is not mine.

Mineness is a human trait, a trait of human being itself, that it is in each case mine. Or rather, is in the first place, but with the possibility of being given to another. This “giving”, or “ giving up” is en-owning, a giving of one's Being, an event (ereignis), an appropriation (bringing to the proper, to one's own). This giving up brings en-slavement, the Master's absolute subjugation of the slave. This subjugation brings its kind and tenor of Mastery.

With Mastery comes unlimited responsibility through the “ Mineness” of the slaves new mode of Being. The slave is, in totality, Mine as Master. I am therefore responsible for what my slaves do, say, imply, as much as I am for what I do, say, or imply from that event of enownment onward. From the event onward a slave is a human being with a difference, a modality of toolhood, they are some of the beings that I work with and utilize on a day to day basis. Mastery works itself out through the unlimited responsibility of using those tools daily, without hiatus. Mastery is a working through, a going through, and its workmanship is absolutely restless. It is restless in the way it moves and arranges its equipmental totality, its World, which is also the World of its slaves.

Operating System Fun

I have given Fedora 8 three goes without success. Granted it is still in beta, Test 3 is the current edition. But rather obvious problems have prevented me from dual booting OpenSolaris and Linux on my laptop using it. Such as the wireless not working on Test 3. It worked on Test 1 and Test 2, now it doesn't work. C'mon guys, this is almost as bad as Windows. Actually I expect that the hiccups will be fixed by November's release date and at that point I will try dual booting again.

While, in fact, I have gotten Windows Server working on emmie's laptop. Windows 2008 Server RC0, to be specific. And while it is slow as molasses compared to OpenSolaris it is reasonably stable and reliable. E. is getting along ok with Vista, it should be faster on his dual core than it in fact is, but he has enough hardware power to make it livable.

And I'm back to OpenSolaris. The next upgrade is a hardware upgrade for mitda's laptop which is dying a slow death after quite a good amount of usage. Her new one should arrive any day now, and while I let her make the decision about what OS to run, she surprised me by saying OpenSolaris. She gets along with XP Pro ok but is in slight envy of the speed and stability I get with Solaris. And the fact that StarOffice (Sun's supported version of OpenOffice) and GIMP and Firefox and Pidgin all come installed instead of requiring download and manual installation.

Self-Identity

Self-identification is a mysterious thing to me. People self-identify in all kinds of ways. For me it can be Master in an M/s relationship, bipolar, software architect, English-Canadian living in the US, all kinds of things that have overlapping and contradictory features.

For instance the English-Canadian background I have tends me towards socialist ideas. It can be difficult working out human ownership when one doesn't fundamentally believe in private property. And the bipolar throws a huge curve into everything, especially when both of my slaves are also bipolar. But being a Dominant is obviously not a bipolar tendency, if only proven by the fact that my two slaves ARE also bipolar.

So we tell ourselves our self-identifying stories and try to make the best of our possibilities. I am enjoying things the way they are going and I very much credit my family (current) for that.

Sleepy ...

After going out for coffee with emmie and Jubal I find myself too sleepy to think much on anything – mitda was too tired to even go out for coffee and stayed home.

Which isn't to say I don't have a lot on my mind. It'll just have to wait to make it into the blogosphere.

My Conflagration had a little Conflagration

Last night mitda decided to try her luck grilling some chicken quarters. After all, it can't be that hard to grill something, men do it!

So she caused a bit of a conflagration. By the time she called me out to

help the grill temperature gauge had hit its maximum of 800 degrees and the chicken was literally on fire. The bacon she had wrapped around the chicken didn't help matters, but the fact that all three burners were on high and the lid was closed was the real issue.

After letting the grill cool I went ahead and baked the chicken at about 350 degrees to cook it through, and we had very blackened chicken for dinner. Surprisingly it didn't turn out that bad. It was quite edible.

Counselling and Mastery

I had an interesting experience last night. Jubal is in grad school to get a Master's degree in counselling (yes he plans a kink-aware practice). He interviewed me as part of his schoolwork. The particular thing he was training himself on was how to ask open ended questions. I found it quite neat that, despite knowing he was testing some technique, the technique remained effective.

With slave training I believe the same thing applies. Although the slave is aware of his/her training and the techniques applied the techniques still work just as well. In some ways they work better because the slave is involved and immersed in his/her training and is optimally working as hard at the training or harder than the Master.

I had a few criticisms of Jubal's techniques but overall he did a good job. Talking about personal issues with a family member is never easy, and it worked quite well and helped me personally somewhat in figuring out an issue I have at the moment. Not that it's a big issue like childhood molestation or anything, it's a simple work issue. But it's all the little issues that add up.. And it's the little issues that slaves have that a Master has to take the most time dealing with.

Test of Staroffice / Openoffice Weblog Publisher

This is a test, I repeat, This is a test.

I just installed the weblog extension for Staroffice/Openoffice on my laptop. In my case I'm using Staroffice, which comes with OpenSolaris and has a few extra features over Openoffice. Both my girls run Openoffice on their Windows machines rather than Micro$oft Office and it seems to work for them quite well. Now that Lotus Symphony also supports Opendocument format we actually have a competition in free office suites. So don't pay $$$ for MS, Openoffice reads and writes MS files just fine, and a number of governments and institutions are stopping the glut of asking for .DOC format files and starting to request Opendocument files instead. It works. It's free. And it's not so ugly as Office 2007 with its messed up skins.

Helplessness and the Passing Under

mitda in her current blogpiece talks about an experience we shared on Friday.  She had been rendered helpless in a play session completely, and suddenly "something" came over us.  I put something in scare quotes because it didn't have attributes or anything one could describe, it was just presencing pure and passing over, with a simultaneous (for me) passing under.  I have had this experience before but under very different circumstances.  I felt from it a huge sense of refusal, refusal of worship, refusal of description, refusal of communication.  It seems to be a rare occurrence, and one that one needs to be partially prepared for, but the preparation can never be enough, and it remains the most overwhelming, the definition of overwhelming itself.  The Abyssal.

Vorhanden, Zuhanden, and Dasein, three modes of being

Vorhanden - Abstract Presence

The concept of vorhanden is translated ‘present-at-hand in BT. This is one mode of being in which being lies in the fact that something is, and is as it is in reality, which provides the mode of vorhanden for that entity (BT, 26). Awareness of the vorhanden character of an entity has a temporal structure because awareness is an event, which is necessarily tied to time and cannot be eternal. Thus, the awareness of vorhanden is a making-present of the entity (BT, 48), and thus brings the entity to a state in which it can become the object of some kind of relation to that which is aware of it, Dasein. The process of appearing that results in entities of the mode vorhanden being known is not a showing of themselves, but rather that they are evidenced by something else (BT, 52). These attributes of that which is vorhanden demonstrate that the word ‘what’, rather than ‘who’, is properly associated with the concept of vorhanden (BT, 71). Another characteristic of the vorhanden mode of being is that it is ‘in-the-world’ where ‘in’ means “sharing the same space as” (BT, 79).

The consequence of ‘being-in’ is that all entities that ‘be-in’ have a mode of being that can be reduced to vorhanden, but any such reduction of a view of the entity to merely vorhanden results in a denial of the higher modes of being that properly belong to the entity through the abstraction necessary to regard the entity as vorhanden. In contrast to things that are ‘in-the-world’ hut have a higher mode of being than is expressed in vorhanden, entities that only exist with the vorhanden mode of being are ‘belonging-to-the-world’ and so are a part of the world (BT, 93). The effect of being a part of the world is  that such entities become a part of the context o0f which Dasein is aware and with which Dasein interacts. 

Zuhanden -  Tool-Being

Heidegger identified zuhanden, ready-to-hand, as a mode of being that contrasts with vorhanden. He argues that entities become accessible when we concern ourselves with them in some way, that is, when we care about them (BT, 96). To care for entities is to become interested in them in some way so that the entity is no longer a mere object at a distance from us, as something observed and analysed, as described in the vorhanden mode of being, but rather to come into some interested relation to the entity. The fact of care makes the entity of
the kind described  ‘equipment’, zeug, that which is useful for something, and so to have a mode of being zuhanden (BT, 96).

Heidegger argues that strictly there is no such thing as ‘an equipment’ where ‘equipment’ means ‘something-in-order-to’. The ‘in-order-to’ character of the zuhanden mode implies a reference of something to something (BT, 97). That is, in the mode of being zuhanden the equipment is always linked to something else as an entity that has the purpose of effecting something other than itself for something other than itself. That which is zuhanden is known
in its relational nature as equipment for a purpose, but is not known as what it is in itself because when we use something our awareness is of its purpose rather than of it in and of itself, that is, its mode of being vorhanden (BT, 98). Thus, in order to be zuhanden the  vorhanden character must withdraw to release Dasein to perceive the entity as for a purpose.

This relation of vorhanden and zuhanden follows because when equipment is used the awareness of the user concerning the purpose of the entity rather than awareness of the entity in and of itself (BT, 99). Now, work involves using something for achieving something, whether the purpose is public or private, and thus is dependant on use of equipment (BT,  100).  However, that which is zuhanden must also be reducible to vorhanden, since there can be no
equipment where that equipment does not tangible exist as something that can be apprehended and analysed if one is able to penetrate beyond the perception of that entity as equipment (BT, 101). Consequently, that which is to be useful, has a mode of being of zuhanden and must have a mode of being vorhanden, and the difficulty in perceiving the  vorhanden character arises because it is obscured by the zuhanden character that is most immediately perceived by Dasein.

Should an entity normally perceived according to its zuhanden character be broken then it is perceived in its not useful vorhanden mode of being (BT, 103). In addition, should an item perceived by one as zuhanden be apprehended by another, who due to a lack of appropriate  experience or knowledge, is unable to perceive it as that particular zuhanden the latter may perceive it as a different zuhanden, that is as for a different purpose, or possibly as purposeless, and thus only as vorhanden.  All uses of that which has a mode of being of zuhanden relate somehow to serving one or more purposes of Dasein (BT, 116). Thus the generation of the zuhanden mode of being is dependent on Dasein generating it as an additional mode of being for an entity that is first of all vorhanden. However, having effected this transformation of vorhanden to zuhanden Dasein then primarily perceives the entity as zuhanden, and only with difficulty, if at all, as
vorhanden.  Heidegger also suggests that there may be some entities known as zuhanden that may not be encounterable and thus not knowable as objective entities that could be analysed, and their vorhanden character cannot be separated from their zuhanden character (BT, 122).

Heidegger does not posit examples of zuhanden that cannot be encountered as vorhanden. It may be worth contemplating whether such entities as knowledge or inter-personal relationships may be such unencounterables, and thus only perceivable as zuhanden because we are unable to remove the interpretative overlays of the underlying vorhanden entity in order to be able to encounter and perceive that vorhanden entity in an of itself. If this is so it would provide a foundation for our difficulty in understanding such entities.

Dasein

Heidegger uses Dasein to name and describe the mode of being experienced by humans in their own existence (BT, 32). However, Heidegger does not definitively limit Dasein to humans, and so it is possible, or plausible, that there is some other non-human entity that may also have the Dasein mode of being, but Heidegger does notdiscuss this perspective on the issue either. The distinguishing characteristic of Dasein is that Dasein is aware of Dasein’s
existence, and is aware of the question of existence, and anything that is not Dasein is not so aware (BT, 32,33). Since Dasein is aware of its being and understands the question of being, one of the pursuits of Dasein has been to pursue and explore the nature of Dasein’s being seeking the authentic meaning of being (BT, 62). This pursuit contrasts with the other pursuit that Dasein conducts in parallel, which is shared in various ways by other entities, of seeking
to support its material being. That is, in parallel with pursuit of questions of the nature of being Dasein also pursues the mundane matters of life that enable physical support of the body in a desirable manner. Dasein pursues these mundane matters in a more sophisticated manner than other entities, but the other entities do pursue the mundane in some way, as their primary activity.
Dasein is not of the mode of vorhanden because it is not something that we ‘come across’ as we go about (BT, 69), but rather it is close to us, and is well known because it is inseparable from ourselves, but it is little understood in everyday experience because it is very close to us (BT, 69). In addition, Dasein is not zuhanden because it exists but is not for the purpose of effecting something.

The traditional view of people has been as rational animals,  through
rationalist concepts such as Decartes’ “I think therefore I am”, cogito ergo sum, but this yields Hiedegger with the problem that ____ is of a vorhanden kind and _____ is of an unclear kind of being, resulting in a person, viewed in this way having an indeterminate kind of existence (BT, 74).

At this point Heidegger departs from Ancient Greek and Christian anthropology, which both  define man as essentially an entity (BT, 75). Heidegger introduces the idea of ‘mineness’ as a quality that belongs to Dasein, as being that which is the true nature of Dasein, which results  in the possibility of Dasein living either authentically or inauthentically, depending on the way of life lived by Dasein (BT, 78).
Now Dasein experiences ‘being-in-the-world’ as sharing in the space of the world, but not as being a part of the world (BT, 79). Thus Dasein lives in the world as it is, and interacts with the world, but is of a different kind to the other entities in the world. A result is that it is possible to say Dasein is of vorhanden kind, but this either is a wilful disregarding of the ‘being in’ state of Dasein or an unintentional not seeing of that ‘being-in’ state (BT, 82). The possibility of seeing Dasein as either vorhanden or zuhanden results from the fact that in ‘being-in-the-world’ Dasein is constructed of stuff like the world and could be mistaken.   Such a mistaking of Dasein for one of the other kinds of being would result in inappropriate relations and behaviour because it would reduce people to being either equipment or mere objects. That Dasein can be ‘being-in-the-world’, Heidegger’s defining concept of Dasein, is the consequence of Dasein being able to know and to conduct I-thou relations, which are entities that cannot be known as of vorhanden kind. The view of Dasein as ‘being-in-the-world’ contrasts with the vorhanden which are, ‘in-the-world’ or ‘belonging-to-the-world’ and so parts of the world (BT, 93).
Previous western views of humanity regarded people as either bipartite, body and soul, or tripartite, body, soul and spirit, and lead to the assumption that a person is a synthesis of the parts, but in Heidegger’s view Dasein is existence, not a synthesis of separately existing parts (BT, 153). Thus, Heidegger argues for regarding Dasein as a complete and indivisible being that enters into relations and intrinsically is a complete, unified, entity. There are multiple Dasein, which necessarily have some kind of relation to each other, whether warm and        friendly or hermitic or otherwise, and these relations are characterized by Heidegger as ‘Being-with’.

Zuhanden  - Slave-Being  

In a sense then with slave-being we do take the slave as zuhanden, ready-to-hand, useful, a tool for use.  In consensual slavery the slave agrees, wants, needs to be taken this way.  As dasein he/she is still being-in-the-world but in this case, the world is not his/her world, but her Master's world.  The slave is never merely an object, and in fact all 'objectification' of the slave is in reality de-subjectification, because the slave remains at the same time dasein and equipment, a tool and a being with its own sense of being, but the sense of being a tool in the equipmental totality of the Master's world.

Slave-Being 1 - Tool-Being

Slave-Being 1

Tool- Being

"
(1) entities do not manifest themselves as things (Latin:
[i]res[/i])

(2) the entities with which we deal with manifest
themselves as 'tools' in the wide sense of the Greek "pragmata"

The question now becomes 'what is the Being of this pragmata'?
This is the present task.

The clue for answering this
question lies in our understanding 'tools' as equipment (Zeug),
in our understanding "equipmentality."

Understanding
the structure of equipment:

[list]

(1) there can be no such expression as 'an' equipment -- a piece
of equipment is place within a totality, it is bound to an equipmental totality.

(2) Equipment is essentially
'something in order to...' e.g., a hammer is used in order to hammer
a nail, this, in turn, in order to build a shed -- in order to
provide shelter etc.

This indicates that 3) Equipment is involved in references and
assignments i.e., it is always involved in certain contexts:
e.g., a pen is involved in the context of ink-wells, pads, a desk,
lamp, being near a window etc.[Note that in our dealings with this equipmental totality our
primary relation is one of use [using equipment 'in order
to...']

And this provides the key for understanding the Being
of entities in this context --

They (entities as tools)
manifest themselves as ready-to-hand.

This is the
primary ontological category ascribed to entities dealt
with in the everyday world of our environment: Zuhandenheit
(readiness-to-hand).

****

Heidegger notes that
our peculiar manner in which we deal with these entities is
circumspection  and with this he indicates that
Dasein's active comportment to this categorical structure is one of circumspective concern (more of this later).

****

Heidegger
then proceeds to look further into this way in which we deal with
things ready-to-hand.

The Analysis deals with the notion of
work.

A reflection on the sense of "work" fills out
the notion of environment and the 'in order to...'

(1) The
'towards which' indicates the work to be produced e.g., a shoe, a
shed, etc. This, in turn, points beyond the immediate work
environment to the larger context of materials -- this, in turn,
involves the 'wider' environment of animals (and those who raise
them) and nature etc.

Also,

(2) the 'where of': the
purpose of the work (e.g., the purpose of making a shoe, a traffic
sign etc.)

This, in turn, points beyond the immediate work
environment to the user of the product and its material -- whether it
be one's own Dasein, or other Daseins, or the public world (a road
sign, etc.). Again, these notions tend to expand and make clear the
sense of the environment (Umwelt).

All of this goes to make
up the Unwelt -- and in this is located our relation to entities
which Heidegger has characterized as our dealings with things in
circumspective concern --

And the Being (i.e., the
ontological-categorical structure) of entities so involved is termed
readiness-to-hand..

****

But this has yet to become
explicit: For when we are caught up in our dealings, e.g., in using a
pen in order to write a paper for the purpose of giving a lecture,
one is not aware of the ontological structures underlying this work.

Situations and Limit Situations

Situations

When we do this we discover immediately that people are always connected to the world in a number of concrete ways. Heidegger (1927) in this context spoke of our 'thrownness'. He said that we are always thrown into a world that is already there to start with and into which we simply get
...amounts to the disclosedness of the fact that Dasein exists as thrown being towards its end. (Heidegger 1927:251)

In other words: death is part of me and to accept my living towards this end gives my life back to me in a new way.

Jaspers (1951, 1971) spoke of limit situations as those situations which define our humanity. Sooner or later we inevitably come up against guilt, death, pain, suffering and failure. The philosophical take on this is that it is more helpful to encourage people to come to terms with some of the inevitable conflicts and problems of living than to help them cover them up. Limit situations are what bring us in confrontation with ourselves in a decisive and fundamentally disturbing way. They evoke anxiety and therefore release us from our tendency to be untrue and evasive about ourselves and our lives.

inserted. It is important to recognize the factual situations that we are confronted with. We are part of a certain culture, a certain environment with a particular climate and history, a certain society and a specific situation. It is only within the givens of that situation that we can exercise our own choices. Sartre (1943) called this our facticity and he recognized that we can never release ourselves from this, even though we can choose our position in relation to it. In terms of psychotherapy it also means that it may be necessary to look at people's problems in a structural way. Instead of seeing everything as the person's psychological, emotional or internal problem, difficulties can be seen as part of an overall situation. Context is crucial and has to be taken into account.

Limit situations

Of all the situations in which we can find ourselves there are certain ones that are irrevocable. These situations have to be accepted and worked with. We cannot avoid them or overcome them: we have to learn to live with them. Heidegger emphasised the importance of death as a marker of our finite nature. Death in this sense is not to be taken as something happening to us at some point later, but as something that is relevant to us right now. The realities of our mortality and of our incompleteness have to be faced for us to become aware of and true to our nature, which is to be finite. Heidegger considered that the reality of our death is that it completes us. The recognition of the inevitability of death gives us a certainty that nothing else can give us. The fear in the face of death allows us to claim back our individuality, our authentic being, as we are inevitably alone in death and find ourselves much sobered and humbled by the knowledge of our mortality. Death, according to Heidegger:

...amounts to the disclosedness of the fact that Dasein exists as thrown being towards its end. (Heidegger 1927:251)

In other words: death is part of me and to accept my living towards this end gives my life back to me in a new way.

Jaspers (1951, 1971) spoke of limit situations as those situations which define our humanity. Sooner or later we inevitably come up against guilt, death, pain, suffering and failure. The philosophical take on this is that it is more helpful to encourage people to come to terms with some of the inevitable conflicts and problems of living than to help them cover them up. Limit situations are what bring us in confrontation with ourselves in a decisive and fundamentally disturbing way. They evoke anxiety and therefore release us from our tendency to be untrue and evasive about ourselves and our lives.

Googlewhack

After mitda discovered the concept of googlewhacks I proceeded to see if I could find one. A googlewhack is a pair of words that, typed into google, produces only 1 result. After a few tried (got 21 hits on one phrase) I came up with a googlewhack. "disempowering peameal". Of course once Google indexes this page it will no longer be a googlewhack, as there will be two entries.

The other entry was found on the http://www.visualthesaurus.com.

On a day when ...

... my back is killing me, I'm working from home and not getting much accomplished ... the girls are out at the doctor/drug store/market ... and wev else, I'm thinking about the issue of Mentally Interesting persons involved in D/s type relationships.

I had someone (a submissive) yesterday telling me why their husband couldn't dominate them them (whisper: he is bipolar). Ahem. So am I. In discussing it with her, though, it came out that he also has BPD. This is a very different matter as BPD's have emotional and not just mood issues. Let me clarify a bit as to what I mean by this.

Mood is defined by a philosopher of note to me as the self-disclosure of the current "how" of one's being. This is as much as to say, that when one asks how one "is", i.e. the question about the how of one's being, one is really asking about mood. Which is, in fact, pretty accurate. Emotions are different than moods from the get-go, because we have emotions in reaction to things, events, people, that are in-the-world.

Someone with emotional issues, then, is reactive to the world (and to him/herself) in a problematic way. This is not good for a Dominant. In terms of dominating someone one first has to be in control of one's reactions, and to a greater degree than most, because one's own actions and those of one's submissives will both tend to push one's buttons, assuming one has buttons to push.

There can be issues with having a bipolar Master, to be sure, such as inconsistency in different moods, and a tendency to be extreme and to expect extremes from one's submissives. But these issues can be dealt with, particularly if the submissives involved know mood extremes themselves and have similar tendencies. BPD is problematic, though, and I would expect that a BPD would have to have explored themselves to a very high degree, and probably in specific form have had very successful dialectical therapy, before one would wish to submit to their overly reactive personalities.