Domination and Mastery

Master, Slave, Humanness and Truth

2011-03-29T20:50:00.005-07:00

In the crossing from conceptual thinking to inceptual, truth interpreted as relational and externally founded (correspondence theory of truth) is initially rejected by Nietszche as mere valuation, and not the 'highest' value. But with the second Nietszche remains wedded to the notion of valuation in general. Valuation goes hand in hand with the nature of technological (metaphysical, conceptual) revealing of beings in general. The enframing nature of technological revealing requires a posited identity between differentiable things, in order to be able to 'have' them at one's disposal - as a resource any given example is equivalent to any other of that type.

Nietszche then brings in the valuation of humanness as rank. Truth as valuation renders the difference null, they are both 'human resources'. Within any enforced Master/slave pairing the metaphysical notion of truth is always advantageous to those looking up. Maintaining the differentiation though is not merely in the Master's interest but in the interest of undermining valuation in general.

Within consensual Master/slave dynamics the metaphysical valuation is disadvantageous to both, since it renders them effectively equal, and their dynamic is posited on inequality as in itself desirable. Truth is re-posited in an inceptual manner, as the self-presentation of something to a human being, and thus founded on humanness in general.

Mastery / slavery ? Digressions in Terminology

2011-03-29T20:50:00.003-07:00

How the more extreme forms of domination and submission oriented dynamics acquired the terminology "Master/slave" is an odd question at first glance, and one related to another form of terminology, that of "Owner/property".

A slave, defined by being-owned, would by definition have an owner. One who owned a human being would by definition have a slave, owning simple "property" would not distinguish one from any other in our current society. Masters in various areas of endeavour might have servants, novices, acolytes, initiates, apprentices, etc. But in the specific area of consensual slavery the slave's owner appropriates the designation "Master". Seemingly in reaction to the ability and responsibility mastery requires, some in domination/submission dynamics opt out of the issue of what mastery entails, preferring to return to simple ownership, but the simulaneous reduction of human property ("slave") to just "property" signals a felt lack, as if owning a human being without mastery is somehow inappropriate.

Consensual slavery has multiple defining features, but one of the principle features is a vow of obedience that overrules further need for consent, in most cases perpetual, at least in intention. Perpetual vows of obedience are found in a number of other areas of human endeavour, but are most associated with the religious life. Within many religious orders a vow of obedience to the order is prescribed. While it is unusual today, vows of obedience to a particular person were at one time also common within Christianity as in other religions.

The justification for vows of obedience within specifically Christian theology stemmed from the limited perspective available to any given individual, together with the notion that community ameliorated that limitation and provided a brake on unconstrained and potentially mistaken willing by the individual.

Will as Will to Power, in the consummation of metaphysics and therefore Christianity itself, however, is the term for the essence of being itself, rather than a specific faculty of a specific being. As the essence of being itself the slave's being is as fully Will to Power as the Owner's. Rather than ameliorating the expression of Will to Power, the being of the community, religious or otherwise, is also Will to Power. A vow of obedience could not in post Nietzschean terms accomplish any constraining of the Will to Power but would simply make the perspective panoramic, and as panoramic all the more perspectival.

A vow of obedience, as central to the slave's being-a-slave, and hence the slave's expression of Will to Power, serves two other purposes. First the vow is a shield against the tempting, in particular the most tempting itself. Second it is the focus for the more understanding and creative expression of that will demanded by its continuing alignment with the will of the Master.

It is in the radicality of the demand of obedience that it functions as a shield against the tempting. "The most tempting itself" is an odd phrase at first - temptation is often conflated with desire, yet in a sense it opposes and frustrates the pursuit of that which is most desired itself. Temptation diverts from the pursuit of desire as much as from the pursuit of perfection, or any other particular pursuit. As the "most" tempting fundamental temptation is something we always find ourselves in in advance. Radical obedience, in either expectation or fulfillment, opposes the most tempting in an essential way because it is an extraordinary expectation, and an extraordinary thing to attempt. "The most tempting", the founding temptation in which we always find ourselves immersed is essentially the temptation of the mediocre, the averageness of everyday understanding and levelling off any distinctions that might threaten that tranquillizing mediocrity of everydayness itself.

Expecting this kind of vow implictly requires a sense of one's own unique abilities, a sense that develops with mastery of those abilities itself, a sense that breaks and continually re-breaks the temptation towards a tranquilizing common mediocrity. Consenting to such a vow requires an honouring of the uniqueness of the Master's abilities that accomplishes the same severing from the temptation to mediocrity.

Obedience in an M/s Relationship

2011-03-29T20:50:00.001-07:00

Within non-consensual slavery begun by the initial consent to becoming-a-slave, to obey is to hear and to follow-after the words of the Master. Following-after cannot be conceptualized, turned into a program that could be justifiable ethically or otherwise. To follow-after according to one's understanding is to negate following-after as obedience. Instead following-after involves obedience to what is at that moment beyond the understanding: blind in terms of comprehensibility, revelatory and immediately factical. Performing any act without the mediation of the understanding requires absolute trust and courage. It is a way of being resulting from one decision, and not a continual decision-making stance. There is no temporal cause / effect relationship between hearing and obeying, it is one and the same act.

Proper obedience as following-after negates the systematic and the conceptual apparatus of the understanding in an unjustifiable manner that brings together hearing and obeying as one movement. In following-after the words of the Master are heard-obeyed in a way that may negate even the teachings of the Master, since any such teachings would have to be interpreted anew by the slave rather than the Master. Interpretation and the resulting understanding is dispensed with in favour of a direct hearing-obeying of something said in a shared place, a sharing in which the self itself is the shared.

In hearing-obeying the words of the Master the slave responds to an external ground that names the way in which the slave's identity as a slave is formed and develops. The ground of following-after is outside the slave, shared by the Master through the sharing of the Master's own being-there, a being-there-with the slave. It belongs to the Master inherently as the slaving of the slave. A slave cannot supply the grounding - in being-a-slave and following the words of the Master the slave is moved according to the words of the Master in every specific facticity. This grounding is necessarily a grounding in the abyss brought about by not-understanding, where the void at the base of the slave's being allows the immediate presencing of the Master's will to the slave. It expresses the sheer facticity of belonging, a facticity that places the slave in the originary historicity of being-a-slave as having-become-a-slave. As such, obedience defines the slaving of the slave, thereby defining the slave as being-a-slave in the factical situation.

The slaving of the slave is the root of the historicity of being-a-slave. The radicality of this personal position is only to be uncovered within the progression initiated by having-become-a-slave. The courage required by such radicality is the courage that makes the slaving of a slave a constantly demanding and difficult task. The commanding that the slave hears-obeys is itself revelatory of the Master's being-a-master to that slave in all its particularity and within its own historicity of having-become-a-master to that slave.

Direction and Directives

2011-03-29T20:49:00.003-07:00

Is it enough for Mastery that a slave obey his / her Master's directives, while his / her thoughts, desires and will remain free? Or does the act of directing implicitly require that the directed align those thoughts, desires and will with that of the Master?

In directing the Master points in a direction and sets the slave moving in that direction. This of course requires that the Master have a perspective from which to direct. The perspective itself comes from the positing of viewpoints inherent in mastery, power itself is perspectival in the sense that it is always an empowering of overpowering, a will towards a horizon, enacted through the slave, that comes back to itself in the slave's obedience and the Master's self obedience.

The slave's obedience in merely accomplishing the activity is never sufficient in itself to satisfy power. At best it can allow power to be maintained, but power is always overpowering as mastery - mastery of the slave and self mastery. If it is only maintained as measure it dwindles temporally. Mastery must empower its own overpowering and for this it requires the overpowering of its perspective itself via the merging of the slave's will with its own, the merging of viewpoints into one panoramic perspective.

Directives are obeyed by the slave in the sense of moving in that direction, but they empower the will of the Master when the directive's viewpoint and perspective are adopted, such that the slave's obedience returns and empowers the Master's self obedience. In this the directive reaches its panoramic completion, empowering further perspectives, viewpoints, and directives.

The Enchantment of the Extreme

2011-03-29T20:49:00.001-07:00

One thing that I've tried to be clear in discussing M/s with other subgroups within the BDSM community is that I don't consider M/s "higher" or "more developed" than other relationship types, but I do consider it more *extreme". While many are wary (for good reason) of extremes I believe the extreme carries with it its own special fascination.

Nietzsche talks about "us immoralists" as the "outermost", the extreme. As such "we" do not need the lies of other powers. All other powers are force hiding behind the semblance of law, hence lying and dissimulation are necessary to veil true intentions, to display goals that are ostensibly sought after, and so make the subjugated happy.

Within the M/s dynamic, Masters refer to themselves as such, slaves know themselves as slaves. There is no false set of goals promulgated by the Master in order to underhandedly subjugate the slave. There is no expectation of eventual equality or even a specific reward for servitude to be sought after. The power differential is decided on in advance, and maintained and welcomed by both sides. The extremism of the dynamic, far from putting people off, exerts a powerful fascination, seduction and enchantment.

The "magic" of the extreme is the power of the most powerful. Most powerful because it hides behind no false pretenses of humility. Masters do not seek power over slaves "in the slave's interest", nor govern "as servants" (think public servants). We seek power solely and purely for its own sake and enjoyment. Slaves do not submit to their enslavement in order to gain a future advantage. This power transports members of the dynamic to another world with its enchantment and there brings them to themselves in a different way.

Who are, then, "we immoralists"? Are we an unethical gang of bandits on the fringes of society? No, we immoralists are those who stand outside the distinction between the true and the apparent worlds promulgated by metaphysics, and the hierarchy of moral rules and values that sustains it. We stand outside the distinction that sustained metaphysics and all its correlates, instead standing in the seduction of truth. We know that ethics is always concrete, always particular to the situation and are not confused by childish a priori rules.

Topology and M/s

2011-03-29T20:48:00.001-07:00

In the topology of an M/s situation the members are situated in such a manner that the "between" of each member's place is the conjoining of the members themselves, in that they are not isolated subject-things but are the "open" that creates the place in which they can appear to one another as the people they are. As a result there is no "between" in the common sense of a space between objects (subjects) but a shared place that is constituted by the members themselves. Each "place", and the situation-place as a whole has differences that imply what is appropriate for each member as far as duties and comportment to the other members and to any other beings that appear in that clearing. Since there is nothing fundamentally relational about the topology I dislike referring to it as a relationship.

Each M/s topology, as well, is unique, being a topology of the individuals within it and their proper places. The event of appropriation itself determines what "proper" means in this instance, made more explicit through the alternative translation as the pairing of enownment/enslavement.

The underlying difference between the Master and slave in their comportment is that the Master's comportment is always firstly a listening, while the slave's is always firstly a hearing. The similarity is intentional, but the implied difference is crucial. Hearing, horen in anglo saxon, meant both to hear and to obey, with no differentiation. A proper hearing, then, implies obedience. The Master, though, listens. Any speaking, especially an ordering speaking, is simultaneously a careful listening. The care taken in the listening is what determines the appropriateness of the ordering. Without careful listening the ordering is arbitrary and leads to tyranny rather than mastery.

Mitdasein and Enslavement

2011-03-29T20:44:00.001-07:00

"Mitsein and Mitdasein are posited as co-essential to Dasein's essence,that is,to its property as an existent for which Being is not its ontological foundation but rather the bringing into play of its own sense of Being as well as of the sense of Being itself. Therefore, Being-with, and more precisely Being-there-with,constitutes an essential condition for Dasein's essence."

"This is a property of Dasein as da-sein, as Being-the there:it is,or rather,it has to be the ''there''of an opening, that is,of its own(or in each case its own) way of letting itself be or of deciding to be according to this exposition which is also its Being-in-the-world.

.(Let/decide:two faces,two possibilities or two aspects of the same exposition.)

Dasein has to be the singular ''there'' of an ownmost way of wording that is of making and/or opening onto a totality of sense. In sum, the da of sein is its exposition. Therefore,one can say Dasein is a singular, unique possibility of making/letting an ownmost sense of the world and/or the world of an ownmost sense open itself. This sense has as an essential property; its ultimate sense in its own suppression. Death,or the cessation of this da, means as well that the da does not open onto anything but its own opening. To assume this horizon, which is precisely not a horizon, to assume the ﬁnite

horos of an inﬁnite apeiron , is exactly what is at stake in Dasein's Being at stake.In sum,is it the making mine of that which cannot be mine,or the letting myself be disappropriated at and from the fullest point of mineness(an inverted version of the Hegelian death)."

- Nancy, Jean-Luc - The being-with of being-there

Moreover, Dasein is essentially Mitdasein. This means that Mitsein is essential to Dasein : it is a Being-with unlike the putting together of things, but an essential with , intrinsic to Dasein's own Being..

That Dasein is also and essentially Mitdasein ensconces the relationship between Master and slave with the there of the Master's da. Since the Master opens that world and invites the slave to be an integral part of it, joining their own da, their being, or in Nietszche's term, their will, to that of the Master, Mitdasein provides the shared space, meaning, and equipmental totality that allows both the Master and slave to "be" in an appropriate place and manner.

Discourse of Mastery and Unlimited Responsibility

2011-03-29T20:43:00.001-07:00

"

Unlimited responsibility is both a theme that pervades the space of intersection in which

Heidegger and his best readers meet, and also the challenge that Heidegger offers us in reading him. Heidegger is one of 'the few and the rare' who set a standard by which even those who disagree with him may be judged.

"

David Wood, Thinking After Heidegger.

One of the things that caught my attention in reading this book was it's wariness of anything that might resemble a "discourse of mastery". It interested me because, in my terms, vom Ereignis could be translated as "from Mastery", as much as "from Enowning" or "from the Event of Appropriation". Heidegger does certainly mean the term in multvalent ways, but the intersection of mastery, particularly the discourse of mastery, with unlimited responsibility seems like an appropriate place to begin

What, fundamentally, is wrong with a discourse of mastery? Mastery involves many things, not the least mastery-over in the sense of over another. This is where, I believe, mastery becomes problematic in a postmodern scenario. Mastery over another without their choosing is the real issue, rather than mastery over another in general. Without a common goal the postmodern situation is indeed an-archic, and this an-arche can and should precede any defined and chosen arche, or goal (telos). So a discourse of mastery that doesn't accept its own limitations and does not choose its own field of endeavour is precisely to be avoided. In other words, WIITWD is solely and simply for us meaning myself, mitda, and emmie, and any discourse that comes out of it can only be judged as it applies to our situation. Applying it elsewhere is to be done at the reader's peril and only to the degree that it resonates with the reader's own state of being.

Unlimited responsibility, then, is itself a chosen situation, or a decided event. Why would a master choose to be a Master, if it implies unlimited responsibility? Because that responsibility is the appropriate response to his/her slave's giving up their self-ownership. Dasein (human being-there) is always, in the first instance, mine to each individual. Only in that situation of personal freedom can a truly consensual giving up of freedom occur. Only to the degree that my slaves were their own persons can they give up that ownership, in which they enown their Master to mastery in the first place. And only in a situation of personal freedom can the Master enslave the slave and take ownership of his/her being-there. This is the foundation of our Mitdasein (being-there-with) in which we choose and have chosen to exist. From the beginning this unlimited responsibility was the focus of my longing, the prize for which I endeavoured to become who I am. I didn't 'accept' unlimited responsibility 'in return for' my slaves' being-there, I responded to their giving of their dasein with the willful and appropriate response of appropriating their responsibility in an unlimited manner.

Kinky Wilde-isms

2010-02-02T09:39:00.000-08:00

These are posted without attribution ... since attribution would only indicate a nickname on an anonymous site.

kink is the refuge of homely, limited people; but the ruin of attractive,
talented ones.

after illusion, perversity is the greatest of life's pleasures, and the
preoccupation of genius.

there is no such thing as a "kinky" or "vanilla" person; people are either
interesting and charming--or boring and charmless.

polygamy is having too many partners; monogamy is exactly the same.

Kinksters refuse to be constrained by the pointless rules and expectations of
mundane society, preferring to be constrained by the pointless rules and
expectations of other kinksters.

To regain consciousness in a paramedic ambulance after ONE play session is
merely an accident; for it to happen TWICE is outright carelessness.

I like talking to brick walls, doormats and my property; the only things in
the world that don't dare contradict me.

a little submission is a charming thing; a great deal of it, grotesque.

ownership and control-freakishness are really the same thing.

other masters and slaves are quite phony; the only genuine ones are me and
mine.

A man in his vice is an ugly thing, a woman in it is heavenly.

Sadist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.

"patio": the name breathplayers give to their mistakes

Consensuality is the last refuge of the timid.

I like women better than clothes, and I like women with no clothes better than
anything else in the world.

The only difference between pain and ecstasy is attitude.

A Man's face is his autobiography; his sub's ass is his blog.

Blind ambition is an excellent start, ballgagged ambition is better.

The moment a Dominant must declare he has the authority in a situation he has
lost it.

To see yourself in your submissive is the product of incessant narcissism, or
fantastic oral.

If one could merely teach submissives how to talk, and dominants how to
listen, FetLife would be quite civilized.

People are not good or bad, they are merely charming or Gorean.

The ability to whimper is a serviceable substitute for passion.

It is better to stay silent and be thought a fool, than to be punished for
speaking without permission.

There's a love that dare not speak its name; sadly, there's also a love that
won't ever shut the fuck up.

Many bdsm intimacies begin on the internet. and end in disaster.

There are many men a woman will submit to just to get rid of them.

"I've had a lovely beating... But this wasn't it".

I no longer attend play-parties; some of the women look as if they were poured
into their corsets and forgot to say "when!"

Many slaves are so grotesquely unattractive that I must resist the urge to flog
their mothers.

You can tell a lot about a man's background and breeding from the cut of his
assless chaps.

He wears his leathers as if they were thrown on him with a pitchfork

There's no way to distinguish between a good pro domme and a bad one. sooner
or later, out pops the fat ass.

She was raised in a poly household. they were too poor to practice monogamy.

If a "piece of property" wants to remain with her owner, all she has to do is
cater to what is most ugly in him.

Fetishes do not cease to be funny when people die any more than they cease to
be serious when people laugh.

24/7 master/slave is the marriage of meanness and martyrdom

bdsm divides people into sadists and masochists, or dominants and submissives;
it has no category for the truly original and unique.

bdsm with a woman is sometimes a vast improvement over wanking; but it takes
more imagination than most people have to really make it work

there is no sadder creatrue in the world than a woman who craves a man's
spanking but has to settle for the whole man

bdsm "morality" is like a sexually-transmitted disease; the first stage is
called "honor, the second stage "honesty", the final stage "community".

there are many unfortunate women in bdsm who have to play mommy in order to
hang on to their daddy

romantics place their loves on a pedestal; sadists tie them across it

masters are the bosses in their homes; their slaves merely make all the
decisions

when their "property" demands release, most owners swing into action; they
immediately clean out the cage for rental.

People ask who is more imaginative, male dominants or female dominants? If you
ask me, the most imaginative creature is the male submissive who arrives late
to see a domme.

perversity is the daddy of invention

if sex is the spice of life, than sadism is the industrial acid

it's fortunate that most bdsm "mentors" are too stupid to conceal their
dishonesty with deceit

I will never tolerate being called "master" in my own home

I have no issues with most doms calling themselves "sir", "lord" or "master";
after all, they are all napoleons of stupid.

I will never pay for porn nor support FL; I have no intention of bolstering
the capitalist system.

I have tremendous respect for her; she worked herself up from homeless teenage
runaway to beta-slave in a leather family

_many women face a terrible dilemma on FL; is he cheating on his wife or
hiding from his mother?

what's the point of having a switch if you can't turn her on and off?

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a real slave, it's a thing
that no Master knows anything about.

the amount of female gossip on these threads is shocking. it's like washing
one's dirty hitachi in public.

self-control is an essential element of a dominant's character; it allows one
to peruse FL pix without bursting into laughter or puking.

the problem with human "property" is not that it depreciates, but that you
can't even recycle it.

living with an extreme mascochist is not for the frugal; your water and
electrical bills go through the roof

If it's not cheating as long as your spouse doesn't know, is your spouse
really filing for divorce if you don't know?

pervs confess to their more harmless fetishes in order to conceal the truly
sick ones

for most people, virtues are vices in disguise; for pervs, it's the opposite

neither the sun nor death nor a fat slob in leather can be looked at with
unflinching gaze

I only engage in pervy sex to remind myself I'm not the center of the universe

the real art of topping is to know how far you can go too far

your problems getting laid are not necessarily due to gender politics

it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like jay wiseman

To have one's fist stuck inside a dubious girl, may be regarded as a
misfortune; to have both stuck looks like carelessness.

never judge a person by the clothes (s)he wears; never judge fetish-clothing
by the person wearing them

if clothes make the man, fetish-clothing usually ruins him

riding a new york city subway is perfect prepartion for attending a new york
city fetish-party

if FL wants to attract an even edgier crowd, it should be renamed as
facefuckbook

slaves are like sphinxes without secrets, but at least they have noses.

male sadists can often be very humble people, except when their ejaculate goes
to their heads

I no longer attend dungeon parties. I dislike the feeling of deja-flog

it's not a good idea to fall asleep when whipping someone, though it's often
difficult to stay awake

I'm in favor of capital punishment, as long as it's between consenting adults

a dom with a beltful of floggers is like a frenchman with a chestful of medals

a legend in his own toy-bag...

my fetish is nursing-home sex; you wait inside all day and nobody comes.

when a maso woman says "you're breaking my heart", it's usually with a tone of
admiration

the critical period in establishing a polygamous household is breakfast

most people become confused when they get "things all mixed up"; d/s people
are more likely to blot out all reason and memory

a genuine male dominant makes a woman either shudder or surrender

dominance complicates a man's character and simplifies his submissive's

A true gentleman is someone who never leaves a mark unintentionally

I disapprove of the way you dress, but I will defend to the death your right
to dress that way--once I stop laughing uncontrollably

he has the sort of bdsm experience that only comes from years of experimenting
on rubber dolls

many people on FL complain about "drama"; that's because they have no talent
for it--buffonery, slapstick, vaudeville and farce are all they're capable of.

A true sadist is one who can hit harder than a masochist can stand. A true
masochist is one who can find such a sadist.

We can forgive those who know less than we do. We cannot forgive those who
know more than we do.

I once spent a year at a leather household -- I think it was a Sunday.

Masters spend the first part of training teaching you how to walk and talk, and
the rest of it telling you to sit down and shut up.

when weird creatures at some fetish party waddle up to me and introduce
themselves as "Lady Gusset" or "Lord Merkin" or whatever, my reply is always
the same: "That's ok. I'm sure its not your fault."

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, FetLife keeps us in touch with
the ignorance of the community.

One's FetLife is so often the life that one does not lead.

The one charm about 24/7 bdsm is that it makes a life of deception absolutely
necessary for all parties.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are playing with our slave's tits.

When good kinksters die, they go to Berlin.

Submissives begin by resisting a Dom's advances and end by blocking his
retreat.

Submissives are made to be beaten, not understood.

I feel most at home in the kink community, not because it is intrinsically
more interesting, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do.
We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.

Dominants were only made into such with great difficulty: the Dom is not
naturally dominant any more than the submissive. He has to be propped up into
that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.

A Master, like his cousin the college professor, becomes one because it's a
great excuse to stop learning anything.

The Anonymous Referential Contexture

2009-01-23T03:27:00.000-08:00

" A brief while ago, we recalled both the invisibility and the totality of the tool, traits that emerged from Heidegger's own account of equipment. These features described the character of entities in themselves, their primary mode of being, and not just the primary way in which people encounter them. Obviously, if entities were invisible and total in the strict sense, we would not encounter individual beings at all. All objects would fade away into an instantaneous, global action- a system without organs. But experience shows that we do encounter singular entities; life is absorbed in nothing but such specific beings: sun, melons, puppets. How does Heidegger account for this duality? The most famous place is in the discusion of the 'broken tool'. The working piece of equipment is unobtrusive; in contrast, the malfunctioning instrument thrusts itself rudely into view. In this new, "broken" situation, we gain a view of what was previously taken for granted. Equipment is no longer a silent laborer; it has surfaced as a visible power. It is a tool which has suddenly reversed into tool 'as' tool. The visible world is the world of the 'as', a tangible and volatile surface that has been derived from a more primary dimension of being.

The realm of the broken tool is the realm of the 'as'. But just as the term "equipment" could not be limited to tools in the narrow sense, so the broken tool quickly reaches beyond the strict boundaries suggested by its name. Even a rough examination will show that Heidegger begins to define virtually everything in the same way as his concept of the broken tool. Space, for example, comes to be defined as nothing other than the freeing of entities from the anonymous referential contexture, in such a way that they take on a specific unique location of their own;"

- Phenomenology and the Theory of

Equipment

By Graham Harman

If it is merely the "malfunctioning" piece of equipment that primordially reveals the as-structure that we call " world", the sum total of meanings both shared and private that we hold, and that this type of revelation also applies to things such as location in space, concept in theory, and a host of other things, then in some way the undifferentiated primordial "da" must also be shared in order for a being-there-with to be at all possible. How do we at all share an "anonymous referential contexture" except by virtue that thrownness into the world is an equiprimordial structure of Dasein's being, along with Being-in-the-world, Being-the-there, Being-there-with and the other existentials analysed in Being and Time (Heidegger, 1929).

In this sense the Master and slave are equivalent, both finding themselves thrown into a world in which they can only make sense, meaning, by isolating specific things as those specific things from out of the anonymous referential contexture. What is different in the dominant vs submissive mindset is the ownership of those islands of sense.

A Tale of Chantix and Psychosis

2008-02-03T13:59:00.001-08:00

I've been AWOL on the blogging recently, mainly because I tried to quit smoking using Chantix ® . Suffice it to say this is not the drug for those with mood stabilization issues. I spent four days that I barely remember in and out of psychosis. Not that I'm saying this drug doesn't work to help others quit, but for a bipolar with psychosis it's a recipe for disaster. By Friday I apparently threw up all over the bed, leaving emmie to clean up, which she had terrific difficulty with as she is not fond of bodily fluids. I have no memory of it. I have little memory really of the whole episode – nothing I took helped (and I have a cornucopia of antipsychotic drugs at my disposal) – but finally I slept so much on the last day that I never got around to taking the anti-smoking drug. Lo and behold, I got better, immediately better. Apparently the FDA wants to put a stronger warning on the drug, I say definitely do, and put something in the warning about bipolars, hey, we're people too!

Munch and Play Time

2008-01-23T14:37:00.001-08:00

This weekend is the big play party (for us, at any rate - there is a bigger one but it's not really our scene). I'd like to play with both mitda and emmie but it is sometimes exhausting to play with more than one slave, especially in a (relatively) public space.

Apparently mitda does want to play with other people so I could let her do that and play with emmie. At the same time emmie might not mind the reprieve as she is does not so much enjoy pain but instead likes to please.

I will think on it some more between now and the party. There is a munch the night before which will be enjoyable as the group usually has a good conversational atmosphere.

Nurturing

2008-01-20T15:40:00.001-08:00

At times the Master's role is to protect, to nurture, rather than opening up a World to the slave. It is in the hidden roots in the earth that things grow and mature, and come to fruition. Pushing the slave into doing things to boost his/her confidence, and promote his/her abilities by giving room for trial and error, failure and eventual success, is a major part of this nurturing process. Stepping out from what we already know into those areas that have remained opaque and mysterious grows the slave into a fuller human being and more valuable property.

Presence, Presencing, Presentation and Being

2008-01-20T07:19:00.001-08:00

In terms of Being and Place, Topoi, it seems necessary to work out the differences at play between Presence, Presencing, and Presentation. Beings have presence, that is to say they are present in the present and abide by for a while. Presencing is the event of presence, therefore the event of the Being of any particular being, it's uncovering, its truth. Presentation is the situation within which the being may presence, and different beings may presence in different situations. Being itself is the hidden core of presentation, the point of excess that always threatens the situation with its overabundance. As punctual Being is the limit of the limit-situation itself.

The Situation, State of the Situation, and Training

2008-01-20T04:10:00.001-08:00

To every Situation there exists a metastructure, the State of the Situation. This reduplication of the count-as-one of the multiplicitous Situation serves to protect the Situation's unity from the danger of the point-of-excess, the Void, or Being. In a nation the State's laws and regulations decide what is permissible and possible in the Situation - “Sitere” originally meant ot let, or permit. But the State is not merely an image of the situation. There are elements of the situation not contained in the State, and elements in the State's image that are extraneous to the situation. These elements, respectively, are the Singular and the Excrescent.

In the M/s Situation the State is represented by the authority of the Master. When I claim a shared Situation with my slaves it is my reduplication of the Situation that is shared along with it, with my interpretations, as-structure, and meaning. However my slaves always have things “of their own” that are not part of the State, but still belong to the Situation. Incorporating these things into the State of the Situation when they are singular, and driving them out of the Situation when they are excrescent, is at the heart of slave training. By careful repetition the purview on the World that the Master possesses is imprinted on the slave, until he/she cannot experience that which the Master does not permit to be experienced. Governance, then, becomes a tightening of the grip on the slave's very World-experience, performed in the safe, protecting, nurturing cover of the Master's secure hand.

Topology and M/s

2008-01-20T03:49:00.003-08:00

“Place”, Topos, is always the proper place of some “thing” or some “one”. To bring into the proper place is the full meaning of appropriate used as a verb, rather than the common usage of to “take”. While I certainly do “take” mitda and emmie as slaves, it is truer to say that I appropriate them and in so doing bring them to their appropriate places. This “event of appropriation” is one way of translating Heidegger's Ereignis, the other way is “Enowning”, and the event of appropriation is in fact how one comes to enown another. That this requires enacting on the part of the slave as well as the Master should be obvious in the enowning/enslaving dialectic that takes place. Topologically a map is drawn of our combined being such that mitda and emme “belong” to the multiple Mitdasein. They of course are multiples themselves, so the set is always a set of multiples. I don't call the set by my real name, but by Mitdasein, because Mitdasein intimates the shared being we have together. As Master, I am of course Mitdasein, but they are integral to my Mitdasein as those with whom I share the Da, the “there”, the World.

Mastery vom Ereignis

2008-01-20T03:49:00.001-08:00

To situate means to place, to put in it's (own) place. M/s situates both the Master and slave by placing them in their appropriate places relative to one another. My slaves are slaves in relation to me, not to anyone else. There is no expectation, other than general politeness, for them to act slavely to anyone else. By the same token I have no expectation of being a Master to anyone else. By enslaving them they have enowned me (enabled to own) and in a strong sense we are enowned over to each other. Via Mastery of philosophy Heidegger was able to write “vom Ereignis” or “from Enowning”, I can also write “vom Ereignis” through the deference shown me by mitda and emmie, but my Mastery is limited to their persons.

Feeling Blah thought Things Are GOOD

2008-01-19T17:07:00.001-08:00

I've been really fighting a bad mood today. No really, I have been trying to be reasonably cheerful when every little thing is a monstrouis irritation. I've taken Ativan to no avail, put on relaxing music, even had a bath; nothing seems to be helping. The kidlet is a huge and near constant source of annoyance for me. I think because he watches so much TV or plays video games he thinks he needs a soundtrack of his life to go with whatever he's doing. So he babbles, sings off pitch and asks annoying questions constantly. Of course he's only 9 and has his issues. But I find myself wishing sometimes he has the autistic trait of being non-verbal, rather than overwhelmingly verbal as he currently is :).

Things aren't going so badly though really. House Daedalus has dealt with what seemed an insurmountable debt crisis by simply working out better terms with creditors (thank Luc and emmie for that), and we managed to scrounge enough cash from family to be solvent until I get a paycheque. With all that relief there maybe came a let down of adrenaline leading to this miserable mood.

Earth and World of the Master

2008-01-18T15:15:00.001-08:00

Every site has its share of covering/protecting/hiding (Earth) and uncovering/revealing/showing (World). The M/s situation takes its part of both the nurturing and protecting and the uncovering and revealing that is the shared World of Master and slave. The Master's gesture in covering and protecting simultaneously leaves the slave safe to uncover his/her self and show his/her truth to the Master.

Narcissism, BPD, Bipolar, Mastery and Slavery

2008-01-17T14:36:00.001-08:00

"and the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder came up. These include "has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations"".

This quote is from a well thought out post by Tanos on Entitlement, posted in his weblog and linked from the ownership wiki on The Slave Register

I lived with someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Looking back on it he had a somewhat D/s relationship with his lover, who had obvious Borderline traits. However there was no sense of mastery in his actions, attitudes, etc., merely entitlement without responsibility. Looking at my own behaviour I do, of course, act entitled, while at the same time discouraging such acting in my slaves. But I have a sense of responsibility and a dedication to them and their lives that is simply lacking from the purview of someone with NPD. I will and do take risks, including the risk of simply being an overt Master in a country where human ownership, consensual or not, is simply illegal. And that is a minor one given all the things in our lives.

A couple in our local scene are an obvious NPD/BPD couple, and the two tend to go together. While he seems to take reasonable care of his charge I feel a sense of creeping unease in their presence. Although emmie and mitda (and I myself) have all been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder 1 it doesn't seem to have any direct bearing on our M/s relationship. Obviously my moods and theirs impact the day to day functioning of that relationship but I can't say I see an overall tendency that runs from BP symptomology to M/s dealings.

Migraine

2008-01-17T14:25:00.001-08:00

This afternoon I came down with a severe migraine. I've had to get up as laying down sent the blood to my head and made the pain all that much more intense. I feel like I've taken a bullet to the head although that might hurt less.

The girls have gone to fetch some Amerge from the drug store, fortunately enough one of them has a prescription for it. So I'm waiting while they make the 15 mile trek to the drug store and back. Damn I hate migraines, I don't know how I survived my 20's and early 30's when I had a near-constant migraine for about 11 years.

Being and Time; and Place?

2008-01-17T12:35:00.001-08:00

I am currently reading a book by the name of “Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World”. Why topology when Heidegger's most famous book is “Being and Time”? Heidegger's notion of Being and his notions on philosophy imply a certain situatedness and site, and he was certainly aware of Jasper's work on the limit-situation, having been the first reviewer of “The Psychology of Worldviews”. I will post more on this topic and how it relates to the M/s situation as I assimilate the ideas therein with the work on the mathematical topology of Being by Alain Badiou.

Master as Proxy to the Void

2008-01-17T06:29:00.001-08:00

What does the Master, as the State of the M/s Situation, accomplish for the slave? In essence the Master keeps the Void at bay and serves as the point of Being for the slave by proxy. For the slave this results in lessened anxiety that more than makes up for the anxiety generated by the loss of freedoms (see the Reactance essay on Tanos' Ownership WIKI).

The Situation and State of Absolute Enslavement

2008-01-16T17:46:00.000-08:00

The situation in Absolute Enslavement is that of a limit-situation, but in a sense every situation is a limit-situation, though this is not always transparent to those within the situation. In a transparent limit-situation something of the Absolute comes to the fore. It is my contention that the Absolute is that which partakes of the always excessive-to the-situation, or the Void.

Firstly the Void is not the classical physics notion of “Space”. Unformed matter, as Aristotle pointed out correctly, would be indistinguishable from such a concept of Void. Matter is formed space, as the fundamental particles of matter have no mass, and space has a “fabric” that can be distorted into form.

The Void, then, is punctual (there is a proof of this in the ZF system of set theory but I'll leave that alone for now). This point is, in itself, the point of Being, that is always in excess of any given situation. This is the Void, the unpresentable, the unnatural, the source of terror to any given Situation, that is hidden away by the situation's reduplication in the State.

The Site of the Situation is the proper place for some “thing”. Each situation has a “point of Being” that in a hidden way structures the Situation and makes it appropriate or proper for that particular being, yet always remains excessive to the Situation and therefore the point of that Situations finitude and destructibility.

Site and Situation come from the Latin Sitere, which also means to let, permit. “What is permitted” is what is appropriate to the situation. The State of the situation then is what is expressly permitted, while the Situation is the extent of the real possibilities inherent in it. In the M/s situation what is expressly permitted is up to the Master, and is made explicit in the slave's ongoing training. In this sense the Master is the State. In large part, then, the slave has to follow the Master's directions, however there are always things extant in the situation that are excrescent or singular to the State.

The Absolute Enslavement WIKI

2008-01-11T18:45:00.001-08:00

It interestes me that topoi.net is a site dedicated to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. I'm not altogether familiar with Lacan's work although I know some of his work in the specific area of mathematical topology rather than psychotherapy. It might be an interesting thread for me to follow in the future and perhaps a way of bridging the ontological (specifically, the topology of Being) tendency at work in my writings on Absolute Enslavement and the psychological theories that underlie the writings on Internal Enslavement by Tanos in the UK.

Not that Tanos needs any assistance, lol, although I'm sure he has more traffic for The Slave Register boards than for the Ownership WIKI, the Ownership WIKI remains one of the few internally consistent set of writings on M/s available on the net, and I am highly indebted to it.

There are those malcontents, of course, like myself, who are looking for a less psychological and more philosophical view of M/s. And for those people I set up the Absolute Enslavement WIKI. Have a drop by sometime and take a look around, maybe even add something or correct something I've written. It's open to the public and the M/s public can write, correct, or dispute anything in it. While it gets a good amount of regular traffic and those that do visit linger a while, nobody has so far delurked to add their $0.02 on what the various terms used in M/s really mean.

Mitdasein

Stories and Place

2008-01-11T07:47:00.001-08:00

I came across a couple of great quotes the other day from a book I've read a number of times, but lost somewhere in my travels. The book is called “The Pound Era” by a certain Hugh Kenner and is a work of literary criticism focussed on the modernist writers Pound, Lewis, Eliot and Joyce. “That people live in stories that structure their lives”, and that “they contain the stories people tell themselves.”.

The closer the story one tells oneself comes to how one “is” at root, the closer one is to one's appropriate place. By place here I mean it in Aristotle's sense, as the goal of movement, and also in the topological sense that Heidegger uses it ( Topos = Place). As we move in and out of subcultures our personality, the effulgence of the stories we tell ourselves, morphs topologically as we feel more or less “in place”, more or less appropriate.

Is M/s a fiction then, a story emmie and mitda and I tell ourselves? Yes, but no more so than any other lifestyle that others engage in, whether their fiction is to be a politician or a cop or a mother. It is in finding the appropriate place that we appropriate each other and come to share a World.

Unlimited Responsibility and the Discourse of Mastery

2008-01-08T06:41:00.001-08:00

I have been reading Derrida and others on the dangers of a “Discourse of Mastery”. The (vom Ereignis) in the subtitle of Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, pointing to the author as “enowned”, is of course a subtle indication that it contains a discourse of Mastery, and in fact Mastery comes up quite often within the text. As has been pointed out by Derrida, a discourse of Mastery implies “unlimited responsibility”, and while I do not think this is defensible in a horizontal manner (my responsibility for my cat doesn't imply responsibility for all cats) it seems to me appropriate that it imply an unlimited responsibility to the cat I in fact own (assuming I owned a cat, which I don't).

What does this do for human ownership? It means I have unlimited responsibility for the people who are consensually enslaved to me, through their enowning (enabling to own). Working this out in practice is always a situational, ethical problem, but it's one a Master cannot shirk or shy away from.

Code of A Herdsman

2008-01-08T06:31:00.001-08:00

The Code of a Herdsman by Wyndham Lewis

Lewis was an 'avant-garde' all by himself, the greatest pictorial draughtsman of his time, the most controversial prose stylist of our day.

Marshall McLuhan

1 N ever maltreat your own intelligence with parables. It is a method of herd hypnotism. Do not send yourself to sleep with the rhythm of the passes that you make. =As an example of herd-hypnotism, German literature is so virulently allegorized that the German never knows whether he is a Kangaroo, a Scythian, or his own sweet self. =You however are a herdsman. That is surely Parable enough.

2 D o not admit cleverness , in any form, into your life. Observe the accomplishment of some people's signatures! It is the herd-touch.

3 E xploit Stupidity. =Introduce a flatness, where it is required into your commerce. Dull your eye as you affix it on a dull face. =Why do you think George Borrow used such idiotic clichés as ''The beams of the descending luminary — ?'' He was a great writer and knew what he was doing. =Mock the herd perpetually with the grimace of its own garrulity or deadness. If it gets out of hand and stampedes towards you, leap onto the sea of mangy backs until the sea is still. That is: cast your mask aside, and spring above them. They cannot see or touch anything above them: they have never realized that their backs — or rather their tops — exist! They will think that you have vanished into Heaven.

A s to language: eschew all clichés implying a herd personality. Never allow such terms as Top-Hole, Priceless, or Doggo to pass your lips. Go to the Dictionary if you want an epithet. If you feel eloquent, use that moment to produce a cliché of your own. Cherish your personal vocabulary, however small it is. Use your own epithet as though it were used by a whole nation, if people would have no good reason for otherwise accepting it. Examples of personal epithets:

That man is abysmal. That is an abysmal book.

It was prestigious! Here comes that sinister bird!

Borrowed from the French

He is a sinister card . (Combination of French and 1890 Slang) He has a great deal of sperm . I like a fellow with as much sperm as that.

B orrow from all sides mannerisms or callings or classes to enrich your personal bastion of language. Borrow from the pulpit, from the clattering harangue of the auctioneer, the lawyer's technicality, the pomposity of the politicians. =Borrow grunts from the fisherman, solecisms from the inhabitants of Merioneth. =''He is a preux, ah, yes-a-preux!'' You can say ''ah-yes-a-preux'' as though it were one word, accent on the ''yes.''

5 I n accusing yourself, stick to the Code of the Mountain. But crime is alien to a Herdsman's nature.

6 Y ourself must be your Caste.

7 C herish and develop, side by side, your six most constant indications of different personalities. You will then acquire the potentiality of six men. Leave your front door one day as B; the next march down the street as E. A variety of clothes, hats especially, are of help in this wider dramatization of yourself. Never fall into the vulgarity of being or assuming yourself to be one ego. Each trench must have another one behind it. Each single self — that you manage to be at any given time — must have five at least indifferent to it. You must have a power of indifference of five to one . All the greatest actions in the world have been five parts out of six impersonal in the impulse of their origin. To follow this principle you need only cultivate your memory. You will avoid being the blind man of any moment. B will see what is hidden to D. =(Who were Turgenev's ''Six Unknown''? Himself .)

8 N ever lie. You cannot be too fastidious about the truth. If you must lie, at least see that you lie so badly that it would not deceive a pea hen. — The world is, however, full of pea hens.

9 S pend some of your spare time every day in hunting your weaknesses, caught from commerce with the herd, as methodically, solemnly and vindictively as a monkey his fleas. You will find yourself swarming with them while you are surrounded by humanity. But you must not bring them up on the mountain. =If you can get another man to assist you — one, that is, honest enough not to pass his own on to you — that is a good arrangement.

Lewis is the most fascinating personality of our time . . . the most distinguished living novelist.

T. S. Eliot

10 D o not play with political notions, aristocratisms or the reverse, for that is a compromise with the herd. Do not allow yourself to imagine ''a fine herd though still a herd.'' There is no fine herd . The cattle that call themselves ''gentlemen'' you will observe to be a little cleaner. It is merely cunning and produced with a product called soap . But you will find no serious difference between them and those vast dismal herds they avoid. Some of them are very dangerous and treacherous. =Be on your guard with the small herd of gentlemen!

11 Y ou will meet with this pitfall: at moments, surrounded by the multitude of unsatisfactory replicas, you will grow confused by a similarity bringing them so near to us. =You will reason, where, from some point of view, the difference is so slight, whether that delicate margin is of the immense importance that we hold it to be: the only thing of importance in fact. =That group of men talking by the fire in your club (you will still remain a member of your club), that party at the theatre, look good enough, you will say. Their skins are fresh, they are well-made, their manners are good. You must then consider what they really are. On closer inspection you know , from unpleasant experience, that they are nothing but limitations and vulgarities of the most irritating description. The devil Nature has painted these sepulchres pink, and covered them with a blasphemous Bond Street distinction. Matter that has not sufficient mind to permeate it grows, as you know, gangrenous and rotten. Animal high spirits, a little but easily exhausted, goodness, is all that they can claim. W hat seduced you from your severity for a moment was the same thing as a dull woman's good-looks. =This is probably what you will have in front of you. =On the other hand, everywhere you will find a few people, who, although not a mountain people are not herd. =They may be herdsmen gone mad through contact with the herd, and strayed: or through inadequate energy for our task they may be found there: or they may be a hybrid, or they may even be herdsmen temporarily bored with the mountain. (I have a pipe below myself sometimes.) T here are numerous ''other denominations.'' Treat them as brothers. Employ them, as opportunity offers, as auxiliaries in your duties. Their society and help will render your task less arduous.

12 A s to women: wherever you can, substitute the society of men. =Treat them kindly, for they suffer from the herd, although of it, and have many of the same contempts as yourself. They are a sort of bastard mountain people. =There must be somewhere a female mountain, a sort of mirage-mountain. I should like to visit it. =But women, and the processes for which they exist, are the arch conjuring trick: and they have the cheap mystery and a good deal of the slipperiness, of the conjuror. =Sodomy should be avoided, as far as possible. It tends to add to the abominable confusion already existing.

13 W herever you meet a shyness that comes out of solitude, (although all solitude is not anti -herd) naiveness, and a patent absence of contamination, the sweetness of mountain water, any of the signs of goodness, you must treat that as sacred, as portions of the mountain. However much you suffer for it, you must defend and exalt it. On the other hand, every child is not simple, and every woman is not weak. =In many cases to champion a female would be like springing to the rescue of a rhinoceros when you notice that it had been attacked by a flea. Chivalrous manners, again, with many women are like tiptoeing into a shed where an ox is sleeping. =Some children, too, rival in nastiness their parents. But you have your orders in this matter. Indifference where there should be nothing but the 'whole' eagerness or compunction of your being, is the worst crime in the mountain's eyes.

14 C onquests have usually been divided from their antitheses, and defeats from conquests, by some casual event. Had Moscow not possessed a governor ready to burn the Kremlin and the hundreds pf palaces accumulated there, peace would have been signed by the Czar at Bonaparte's entrance. =Had the Llascans persevered for ten days against Cortés, the Aztecs would never have been troubled. Yet Montezuma was right to remain inactive, paralyzed by prophecy. Napoleon was right when he felt that his star was at last a useless one. He had drained it of all its astonishing effulgence. =The hair's breadth is only the virtuosity of Fate, guiding you along imaginary precipices. =And all the detail is make-believe, anyway. Watch your star soberly and without comment. Do not trouble about the paste-board cliffs!

15 T here are very stringent regulations about the herd keeping off the sides of the mountain. In fact your chief function is to prevent their encroaching. Some, in moments of boredom or vindictiveness, are apt to make rushes for the higher regions. Their instinct fortunately always keeps them in crowds or bands, and their trespassing is soon noticed. Those traps and numerous devices you have seen on the edge of the plain are for use, of course, in the last resort. Do not apply them prematurely. =Not very many herdsmen lose their lives in dealing with the herds.

16 C ontradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.

17 T he teacher does not have to be , although he has to know : he is the mind imagining, not the executant. The executant, the young svelte, miraculous athlete, the strapping virtuoso, really has to give the illusion of perfection. =Do not expect me to keep in sufficiently good training to perform the feats I recommend. =I usually remain up on the mountain.

18 A bove all this sad commerce with the herd, let something veritably remain ''un peu sur la montagne.'' Always come down with masks and thick clothing to the valley where we work. Stagnant gasses from these Yahooesque and rotten herds are more dangerous often than the wandering cylinders that emit them. See you are not caught in them without your mask. =But once returned to our adorable height, forget your sallow task: with great freedom indulge your love. =The terrible processions beneath are not of our making, and are without our pity. Our sacred hill is a volcanic heaven. But the result of its violence is peace. =The unfortunate surge below, even, has moments of peace.

Wyndham Lewis, 1914

Meanderings

2008-01-07T16:19:00.001-08:00

Today was a frustrating day dealing with bureaucracy. Fortunately I was kept buoyed up by mitda's current euthymia (general mood of well being) and the road trip we had to take to file some paperwork was much easier with her company.

I have decided to put more effort into the Masters' Workhaus group (see sidebar on left for info) and also on a local group called Explorations, where a group of local M/s practitioners get together with specific exercises in mind. The next planned event is a protocol dinner with post dinner erotic entertainment by the slaves. While emmie plans to dance for the group mitda is looking at an erotic reading.

I was sad to find out that the person who penned Married Man's Fucktoy has deleted her blog without explanation, obviously anything personal could happen that would lead to such an action, but it would have been nice to know the reason, and nicer for it to not have happened.

Catching Up

2008-01-06T17:04:00.001-08:00

I have been rather remiss at blogging lately, what with the holidays, dealing with bureaucracy and switching jobs. We have been semi-active in the local scene, attending a play party last night, although we didn't actually play at the party. The party was alright but rather crowded and wasn't conducive to a playful feeling for me, we stayed a while and had a few interesting conversations but were headed home by midnight.

It has been a bit of a difficult week for emmie. Between bouts of insecurity and paranoia she has just generally been in a deep depression. She sees the pdoc this week but in the meantime she is upping her Risperdal a little and dropping the Paxil, which seems if anything to have brought her down rather than pushing her up moodwise.

The kid-who-is-18 left January 1 for the army. E. has heard from him once since then, basic training is a busy time. While I like the kid and hope to God that nothing untoward happens to him in the military, it is a relief to get the extra room back and be able to spread out a bit in the house.

I also, through a social networking site, regained contact with a number of people I haven't seen in over 20 years. Most seem to be doing fairly well, which is nice to see, and one of them fronts a band that will be touring the US this winter, so I will be able to catch up with her at the gig in Austin. Ironically she lives in Los Angeles not far from mitda's residence when we first met.

BDSM as M/s Praxis

2007-12-29T03:32:00.001-08:00

“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

2007-12-28T14:50:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-27T02:39:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-27T02:08:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-23T11:43:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-22T16:04:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-22T15:57:00.001-08:00

“ 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

2007-12-22T05:54:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-21T12:15:00.001-08:00

“ 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!

2007-12-21T04:23:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-20T05:18:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-19T10:17:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-18T16:00:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-18T15:56:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-18T15:19:00.000-08:00

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).

2007-12-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

Xmas and Migraines

2007-12-18T08:51:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-15T06:47:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-08T16:04:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-08T08:32:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-07T18:38:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-07T18:32:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-04T17:35:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-28T17:27:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-25T10:50:00.001-08:00

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 ...

2007-11-23T13:00:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-16T17:13:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-15T01:35:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-14T21:10:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-12T02:40:00.001-08:00

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 ...

2007-11-05T18:29:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-02T22:03:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-26T17:01:00.001-07:00

“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

2007-10-24T18:19:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-18T11:49:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-17T17:38:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-17T05:45:00.001-07:00

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 !

2007-10-16T01:05:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-14T16:21:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-12T14:07:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-11T13:00:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-10T21:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-09T12:32:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-09T01:32:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-08T09:49:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-07T20:39:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-07T12:07:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-03T13:05:00.001-07:00

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 ...

2007-10-02T21:41:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-02T07:21:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-02T03:31:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-01T15:05:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-29T15:17:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-29T15:01:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-27T16:10:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-26T13:40:00.000-07:00

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 ...

2007-09-24T08:35:00.000-07:00

... 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.

New Munch

2007-09-22T05:21:00.000-07:00

We attended a munch for a group we hadn't been to prior to last night. It was a bit of an ego boost for me, as I discovered, partly due to somebody from another group reading it and being offended, that certain people I have great respect for in the community had been reading my wiki ( http://www.absoluteenslavement.com) and enjoying the writing on TPE/IE and absolute enslavement. Sometimes when you write something like a Wiki you're never sure if anyone reads it, certainly not if anyone enjoys it. It turned out that the person who disparaged it in another forum was also not particularly welcome at the munch last night for various reasons. He did however provide me with some fine advertising for the wiki and I have to be appreciative of that. As Oscar Wilde famously said "the only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about."

Psychology of Worldviews

2007-09-20T08:34:00.000-07:00

I came across a few things while helping E. out with a paper on Gestalt Therapy. Not that I was much help except in the criticism department, which seems to be my specialty when it comes to E.'s interests :). This however caught my eye from an essay on Jaspers' Psychology of Worldviews:

"the construction of world views is not a merely neutral process, to be judged in non-evaluative manner. Instead, all world views contain an element of pathology; they incorporate strategies of defensiveness, suppression and subterfuge, and they are concentrated around false certainties or spuriously objectivized modes of rationality, into which the human mind withdraws in order to obtain security amongst the frighteningly limitless possibilities of human existence. World views, in consequence, commonly take the form of objectivized cages (Gehäuse), in which existence hardens itself against contents and experiences which threaten to transcend or unbalance the defensive restrictions which it has placed upon its operations. Although some world views possess an unconditioned component, most world views exist as the limits of a formed mental apparatus"

There is a freedom from anxiety about these limitless possibilities that is the gift of absolute subjugation. This freedom is the cause of the drop in reactance that the submissive experiences in the full acceptance of his/her enslavement.

Frustrations and Panics

2007-09-19T14:41:00.000-07:00

This has been a week of frustration and panic for me so far. Starting at the play party on Saturday night my mood started to go downhill. emmie was upset at being left alone in the midst of a pack of doms while mitda and I played in public. mitda was upset that as a result emmie got attention while she was in dire need of aftercare. Not that these aren't things I can deal with but they triggered a spiral in a very delicately balanced mood situation, and it took me a few days to get back on track. Thank the gods for abilify, geodon and clonazepam.

So now I'm getting down to work and it is going much better as a result. Not that it doesn't come with its share of frustrations, such as the company whose information server we use removing parameters from the installation that we use, and causing us a good deal of a workaround as a result. But that stuff is par for the course in integration consulting. I've been doing a lot of core programming in the last few years and it's kinda interesting to get back to integration. Each has its own set of hassles and its own set of rewards.

This weekend is a weekend to learn rope. As in how to tie somebody up. emmie is very much looking forward to the whole thing, as while she is not too thrilled by pain, bondage is more of a turn on than she expected. I picked up 900 ft of hemp rope for a ridiculously low price on ebay a few weeks ago, now it's time to cut it into proper lengths and get to knot tying with it ...

Tonight we have the kinky happy hour, which is a nice relaxed way to spend time with people in the community without whips flying and people screaming in pain. That is until they get the bill :).

Discipline and Punishment

2007-09-14T17:47:00.000-07:00

In one of my earliest posts to this blog I talked about the conundrum of how to punish a masochist. As it happens this worked itself out over the period during which I didn't post much to the blog, and I never got around to explicating any of it.

There's a "mode" one has to get into in order to punish, it's a mode
that involves "knowing" that you know better than the person you're
punishing, people find that easier with children, obviously, than with
adults If you look at Tanos' site, the focus on "Internal
Enslavement" seems to focus on the slave's mindset, which is of course
important. When mitda or emmie are being punished they are in a
different headspace than when they're being played. But my
introduction of the term "Absolute" or "Total" Subjugation is important
because it deals with the mindset and headspace of the Master. (Tanos does include this of course, it's only the term that seems to focus on the slave's doing, not the site or his thoughts on the matter) In
order for the slave to get into her mindset, the Master has to be in
his, and it's a difficult thing at first to accomplish. If you look at
my earliest blog entries there was the conundrum of how to punish a
masochist, and it took time to solve, but it has to do with getting
into a certain zone and making that felt to the slave.

First, as I said, you have to "know" that you're right, or that you
know better, than the slave. This is difficult to do with someone that
you love and respect as an adult on the same level as your own. You
have to know you know better because, simply, you are the Master in the
situation and it is your world and your set of meanings that are the
crucial ones. The slave, in her enslavement, has given up the set of
meanings she had, what she accepted previously as her truth, and
accepted your reality as hers. As a result, although she might be as
intelligent and capable as you are, she doesn't know the terrain as
well as you do, and within the dynamic in any disagreement she is
always in the wrong, because you are the arbiter of what is right and
wrong to begin with. She needs this grounding by you as much as you
need to ground things in this way.

Second, you need to get this world, this set of meanings, across to her
and put her in the situation where she knows that no matter what she
believed prior to her enslavement, she is now completely in the wrong
and needs to be punished to set her straight and remind her of where
her ground and truth are. Partly I talk to emmie and mitda constantly
about the way I view things and the way things are for me, and must be
for them. But truth lies in manifestation, and having things manifest
to the slave in the way they manifest to you is the key. Human beings
share a world and share the way things manifest to a greater or lesser
degree depending on how close they are - and this phenomenon is what
people mean when they refer to "relating" to someone. Physical contact
I've found is a key - standing at a distance and touching the slave
only when you hit them doesn't bring them into your space, you need to
break the slave's personal space by being as close to them as possible,
touching them with your free hand, and letting them feel the punishment
implement prior to and between hits, so that they know it's an
extension of your hand and your will.

My Complication has a Little Complication

2007-09-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

E., emmie's husband, has found a new interest in mastery over the last little while. He had been making tentative steps towards it for some time now, first recognizing a dominant nature in himself, but wanting to express it by being a "service dom", then moving closer to actually dominating by assisting in mitda's punishments.

Dominating in a TPE sense is very different than the dominating done in a scene or at a play party. While I don't hold, as the originator of the term TPE did, that people involved at a play party or in a time restricted scene are not really dominating or submitting but just playing at it, there is a wide variance between dominating someone in that situation and becoming someone's Master 24/7/365, with all the responsibilities that go with it. Derrida has said that "responsibility is excessive or it is not a responsibility. A limited, measured, calculable, rationally distributed responsibility is already the becoming right of morality." I once made the mistake of trying to take a day off, and as E. himself put it, the results were "clinically interesting" and "personally terrifying".

So despite earlier misgivings about his desire to shoulder the responsibility, E. has decided that he would like to master a slave of his own. Of course this changes the dynamics of our little M/s family just by being a stated desire. Not that I'm against the dynamics changing, we are here to help each other grow in whatever ways we happen to grow, and I'm looking forward to seeing E. develop his mastery. But if / when he discovers the girl he wishes to enslave to himself things will become very interesting indeed.

Changing things has already had its effects felt in such an intimate and complex relationship as we have. E. has altered his relationship dynamic with emmie and they will be working out how the marriage is to progress on a slightly less egalitarian set of terms. And this will not be necessarily a simple or easy change for either of them, with 7 years of marriage behind them. mitda went through a sudden panic of feeling "unnecessary" and had to be metaphorically dragged back into the fold. Of course she is necessary. And she is as involved in these changes as fundamentally as any of us, if not as immediately as emmie and E.

So altogether an interesting and challenging set of developments., I am looking forward, in a sense, to being able to mentor E. with the little I know of mastery. And of course it is a push to me to learn more, so as to be able to share more. Not that I wasn't pushed to learn more already. It will be a push as well, I think, to emmie's submission, and while mitda already behaved towards E. in a submissive manner I expect that to increase and deepen. Of course the girls are still enslaved to me, they pledged their being to mine and I would not trade either of them for the world. If and when E. does find his own girl she will be his and his alone, I am a happy, satisfied, and occasionally overworked Master to mine.

The Pierced Slave ...

2007-09-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

mitda added to her voluminous collection of piercings today with 3 labirets in her left inner ear lobe. This picture shows the last piercing needle while still in her ear. Thanks to emmie for some great pics, can't wait until you get the digital SLR and start having some control over the lighting and filters :).

TPE Dinner

2007-09-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

After a local munch yesterday evening we invited another TPE couple out for dinner. In one of our first public M/s situations we had gone to a conference/party that included a talk on TPE given by this particular couple. They are an impressive study in such a relationship, both relaxed and studious in protocol, skilled in play and knowledgeable in the psychodynamics of M/s, and sensitive to both the spirituality and the science involved in absolute mastery and total submission.

As a result mitda was nervous, emmie less so although her general shyness kept her very quiet for much of the evening. E. was very well mannered, as is his wont, and did a lot to smooth the flow of conversation in a situation where he was, although married to emmie, the only person not involved in TPE at the table. He showed his interest in the subject and his respect for the other gentleman's experience and knowledge of these matters.

It was a real relief for me to spend time with them. Even in the bdsm scene TPE is an oddity, and it's not unusual to hear, for instance as emmie and mitda did at a submissive's meeting, that "TPE is a fantasy". mitda of course countered with a solid argument, but one that was probably understandable to less than half of those present at that meeting, and to a degree if one hasn't experienced the absolute as it manifests one can find it impossible to relate to. Speaking with this couple, discussing similar experiences and our reactions to them, and discussing experiences they have had throughout an extensive history that are new and unknown to me, but from a perspective I relate to, was both satisfying and refreshing. I feel that much more confident in my mastery, and find that much more enjoyment in my slaves' submission, in sharing it with people who understand that mastery is not just being a 2 year old and having one's every want and desire met (although that is a nice bonus :) ), and that "exquisite enslavement" is not just a masochistic need to be used, but a path of self development within the encircling comfort of the Master's world and the unlimited responsibility he takes on.

Needles again

2007-09-08T11:40:00.001-07:00

We played with needles again last night, here is a pc of Mitda's back after the 1st of 20 needles went in. Hopefully just one isn't too disturbing to sensitive types. emmie took the pictures of the event while mitda blissed out into subspace.

Social Contracts and Absolute Enslavement

2007-09-07T23:40:00.000-07:00

In discussing a specific topic on The Slave Register a denizen (Michael XY) of the board brought up an interesting set of propositions culled from various places as well as his own mind.

1. an M/s relationship creates a society of two (or three or four I suppose in a poly M/s relationship) (Originally from Tanos and lili),

2. with any society brings a social contract.

3. A Master changing his mind in a way that affects the relationship itself rather than something within-the-relationship breaks the current social contract and would thus force a renewal.

He also noted some issues that this raises. A slave would need to be freed in order to reenter a new social contract. And in some cases is this even possible? And is the slaves reacceptance of the new contract a sufficient condition of the change in mind on the part of the Master being acceptable and not a "breaking of the Master's word", or would it only be a necessary condition, other conditions requiring meeting as well?

I would like to look at the statement made in (2) to analyze whether this is the case all of the time, some of the time, or not at all, and if some of the time, what differentiates those societies that have a social contract from those where a social contract is irrelevant.

First to look at the definition and history of the term "social contract". The term was popularized in the book of the same name by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wikipedia has this to say as to its definition: "Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), in his influential 1762 treatise The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right, outlined a different version of contract theory, based on the conception of popular sovereignty, defined as indivisible and inalienable - this last trait explaining Rousseau's aversion for representative democracy and his advocacy of direct democracy. Rousseau's theory has many similarities with the individualist Lockean liberal tradition, but also departs from it on many significant points. For example, his theory of popular sovereignty includes a conception of a "general will", which is more than the simple sum of individual wills: it is thus collectivist or holistic, rather than individualist. As an individual, Rousseau argues, the subject can be egoist and decide that his personal interest should override the collective interest. However, as part of a collective body, the individual subject puts aside his egoism to create a "general will", which is popular sovereignty itself. Popular sovereignty thus decides only what is good for society as a whole:

So social contract theory, for its part, rests on the notions of popular sovereignty and the theory of a "general will" which creates popular sovereignty. It also has within its sphere of decidability only what is good for society as a whole.

I would like to propose the following, then. The "society" created in an M/s relationship does not require the notion of popular sovereignty, there is no "general will" requisite to create such a popular sovereignty in any event, the only relevant will within the society being the Master's will. In any Absolute Enslavement relationship there is neither the need nor the basis for a social contract, and thus such a contract can never need to be negotiated or renegotiated, entered into or dissolved.

Working in the Middle of the Night

2007-09-06T01:52:00.000-07:00

It's an odd feeling working through the night at Domus Daedali. For one I tend to work in the bedroom, really I do a lot of things in the bedroom, besides the obvious ones. But this bedroom is home of Bed Major, a 9 ft wide combination of beds put together that serves to sleep all the adult population of the house. Yes all four of us sleep together in one room, one bed. And we all have laptops on wireless. In fact I have two of them. So back to working.

I often work from home, particularly on my latest contract, where due to the nature of what I'm doing (this part of the project is pretty much solo, it involves doing work at a client site I'm not yet allowed to visit, etc.) I gain no apparent advantage by being in the office. One thing people who never work from home don't realize is that you tend to work harder at home. Sure you take breaks whenever you feel like it and such, but you make yourself always available by phone and at least within a few minutes by IM, and you take on and commit to producing much more work than you would have at the office so that nobody will think you're slacking.

So I wind up with work due at 9am, and it's 3:57. And my eyes are damn tired. In fact I decided to blog simply because I can't go to sleep, but for various nefarious reasons have to do my work work on a laptop with a crappy screen, when I own a Thinkpad with a beautfiful clear bright screen, and can only use it for personal stuff. *sigh*

But there are some wonderful things about so often being up while everyone is asleep (I'm an inveterate insomniac even when there's no work due). I can listen to mitda's sweet little snores. emmie cuddles up against my leg in her sleep. Jubal sends me into stark amazement every night by his ability to be asleep within 90 seconds of hitting the bed, and staying asleep barring trips to the bathroom until it is his appointed time to get up.

Damn I love my family.

Pleasant Evening Out

2007-09-05T20:23:00.000-07:00

Tonight emmie, mitda and I went to the local kinky happy hour, which happens every couple of weeks. Unfortunately Jubal couldn't make it as he has night school now, going back to grad school to get his Masters in Counselling.

It was a really pleasant event. Getting to deal with the people we see at play parties in a more vanilla setting helps place them better in one's mind as fully rounded people, not just "bdsm'ers" or some such label.

I'm now unfortunately stuck with a nasty headache having had the nerve to try a local Texas beer on draft. Actually the beer was quite good, but it was a dark, bittersweet brew that was destined to kick my migraines into gear.

Punishment by Proxy

2007-09-05T03:56:00.000-07:00

Last night I allowed Jubal to mete out mitda's punishment for disrespect. He did a nice job with the strop, leaving her pretty much in tears, and a pretty nice job of aftercare.

Not that I want to give up either of my slaves to Jubal or anyone else. It's fine with me if mitda subs to him, after all he is her lover, as well as being emmie's husband. But I don't think I'd like her being "his" sub, which is something mitda seems to want. It just seems that there's a contradiction inherent in being "my" slave and "his" sub, something that doesn't show up in a vanilla sexual situation, where sharing is somewhat easier. One can enjoy more than one lover, certainly, but can one serve two Masters? It definitely seems problematic to me. And how I would reconcile sharing with my concept of ultimate responsibility is another complex and uncharted area.