Vorhanden, Zuhanden, and Dasein, three modes of being

Vorhanden - Abstract Presence

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

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

Zuhanden -  Tool-Being

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

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

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

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

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

Dasein

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

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

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

Zuhanden  - Slave-Being  

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

Slave-Being 1 - Tool-Being

Slave-Being 1

Tool- Being

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

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

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

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

Understanding
the structure of equipment:

[list]

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

****

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

The Analysis deals with the notion of
work.

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

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

Also,

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

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

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

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

****

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

Situations and Limit Situations

Situations

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

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

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

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

Limit situations

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

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

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

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

Googlewhack

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

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

On a day when ...

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

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

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

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

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

New Munch

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Today's Reactance Test is Brought to You By ...

emmie is bipolar. Not that this bothers me, as mitda and I are also bipolar, but sometimes it can be a little trying. Add some reactance to a mixed state and you have a volatile, angry slave who has no reason to be either. Of course in that state you can come up with an event to focus your anger on, but it simply isn't the real reason.

So we got through it and got out the real way she was feeling. And I punished the way she had expressed it. But now she's asleep in a benzodiazepine haze, benzos being one of the best temporary escapes from a mixed state I've found. And emmie is a wuss at taking meds compared with mitda, who needs double the usual dose on every med :).

Seeing her sleeping here so sweetly reminds me why, during the acting-out she did, when she asked me if I wanted to reevaluate our relationship I said "no, I don't particularly". I love her and what she brings to me in her role as much as I love mitda and the very different things she brings to me. I hope my response, made without hesitation, helps emmie with her insecurities, helps her know that no matter what I will be there.

Needles, Reactance and Punishment

mitda and I had some interesting and (to me) very hot play at a lakeside play party on Saturday. I made a corset/minidress out of needles in her back and ass, it was quite pretty, but a little overmuch for some of the "weekend ass slappers" ((C) Brutal Antipathy) that were at the party. It did have the desired effect of putting mitda in subspace and me in domspace.

emmie went through a period of what I can only see as reactance against the fact that I plan to take her in hand rather more firmly in the near future. She pouted and decided to be upset by something Jubal did at the play party. Jubal seems to be discovering "his inner sadist" as emmie put it, rather enjoying seeing emmie be punished for arguing with me. I reserve a strop for punishment that even the masochistic mitda can't enjoy the pain from.

I have most of my Sun server set up now with Sun's Java Application Server running a Java forum, wiki, blogsite, chat and project management software. In a little while they will become public, offering a US based complement to Tanos' Informed Consent UK centric TPE/IE site. Stay tuned for the unveiling.

Domspace part 2

emmie and I engaged in some SM sex last night after the Subway experience, and it led to the Domspace feeling of control, and also led to some other fantastically wonderful feelings.  I love the state of mind it engenders and even love the drop into exhaustion afterwards, as it's a satisfied, contented exhaustion far different from the depressive exhaustion sometimes suffered under subdrop.

This morning, very early, mitda and I decided to engage in needle play, I pierced her back and ass, which I then fucked, and then scratched lines down her back and across her ass, just deep enough for blood to well up in the scratch.  mitda went directly to subspace, do not pass go, do not collect your wits.  I was in a wonderful space myself that was hard to let go of for the rest of the morning, although the exhausted contentment that followed made it impossible to do anything but work from home.  Which turned out to be ok given it was the Friday of a long weekend and I had just turned in an important project on time.

Being Noticed

mitda, Jubal and the kid were out yesterday evening, which presented us with a quandary - do we take the risk of eating an emmie-meal or do we fast-food it for the evening.  We decided on the latter, not that I think emmie is totally incapable in the kitchen, however if it doesn't come in a microwaveable package it does cause her undue stress and worry ; ).

So off we went to Subway.  For those not part of North American fast-food culture Subway is a shop that makes long, very good sandwiches.  Not that this is a plug, they certainly charge enough for them.  But the thing is, we live in a very small Texas town, albeit not far from probably the most open minded city in the State. 

Arriving at Subway I pulled into the last reasonably close parking spot, nearly decapitating someone about to leave their car in the process.  He managed to close his door quickly and avoid it, along with his leg, being taken off.  As a result he, emmie and I were on the sidewalk going towards the shop at the same time.  I noticed that this fellow was giving emmie and I an unusually wide berth, without exactly perceiving why, and wondered if I really freaked him out by my driving.  emmie opened the door and proceeded to hold it open for him but he waved us both in ahead of him, as I passed him to go in he said "after all she's wearing the pretty turian".  

Suddenly it clicked, he knew exactly what her collar signified and was simply giving respect to two members of the "lifestyle" as it were.  I said to him "You'd be surprised how many people don't know what it means", and he responded that he knew full well, and in fact remembered us from a  play party we had attended some time before, one where emmie was tongue-tied trying to introduce herself and made more of an impression with her embarrassed silence (very becoming on a beautiful slave) than anything anyone else actually said did.

The incident left me with a weird feeling.  The fellow had been discreet enough, there was noone else really in the store, certainly not within earshot, and I had continued the conversation after he  mentioned her turian, so I had no issue with him talking about it.  It was just a surprise to find someone recognizing the collar in such a vanilla, everyday situation.  And I realized that in a sense this was exactly what we were about.  emmie was happy that she had been on good behaviour, but she usually is.  It's one thing to aim for 24/7 M/s, it's another to realize that in the midst of  a very vanilla neighbourhood we are actually living it.

Dom-space

When we play, sometimes I'm able to find the rhythm and the right kind of empathy to playmy girls perfectly. It results in a heady feeling of control that I term Dom-space, as opposed to the floaty endorphin fueled Sub-space a submissive can go into.

I don't know quite how else to describe it than as the feeling that the slave has become an extension of you, it can come during play, it can come during sex, especially certain kinds of sex. It can come while seeing one's slave(s) go about their business. It's part of the reward of being a Master, the less intellectual and more visceral part. It's a wonderful feeling ...

The beauty of my slaves

Today I've been struck, numerous times, as if I wasn't already overwhelmed, by the beauty of my slaves emmie and mitda. mitda is a word girl, a Joycean full of wonder at the joys of language and full of wonder at the world they give meaning to. emmie is as meaningful in her silences, her hesitations, her stark pronouncements as Beckett. They go together as complementary colours in the beautiful tapestry that they have made my life. I love them both and love them always.

Aftercare ...

Sometimes it's not clear to the Dominant what aftercare is needed in a situation. On Friday mitda wasn't able to do a certain something that we often do - limits change due to physical realities and what a masochist can take one day she may not be able to the next. I understand this, and I understood it at the time. After trying to push her to see if the limit was real, I backed off, lay down and told her to put her head on my shoulder, thinking she would interpret this as "it's ok baby, we won't do that tonight, we'll do other things ...". Needless to say she didn't, she interpreted it as "I'm tired, let's beg off for the rest of the night.".

So the care I thought I was giving her didn't go over. And she needed care. This type of miscommunication is one of the most painful to me as a Dominant. And I'm using the word "Dominant" advisedly here, because when I make this kind of mistake I don't deserve the title "Master".

mitda and I will of course work it out. Other happenstances made the situation worse, things I couldn't and can't do anything about. But the mistake was still mine. She is sleeping now as I write this, softly snoring quite beautifully. And I know from this that things will always be ok between us, no matter what words or actions pass from our lips and hands.

Successful playtime

During the evening mitda and I ate and played. This time I took her close to her limits, scaring her in the process, which I believe was what she needed after a fair period of very little S & M. We eventually collapsed exhausted, much to emmie's disappointment when she arrived at midnight to find us both flat out asleep.

However I did wake back up around 3 am. emmie and I played, in a very different way to mitda and I, as is our wont, and she seemed much happier after that. We continued until nearly 7 am with something of a break in the middle, and then it was pretty much time for breakfast.

All in all I feel that much closer to the two of them than I felt yesterday. We play hard, and we play rough, and it isn't for everyone. But it works for us.

Playtime after a long week

Tonight we have decided to indulge in playtime in a hotel after what has proven to be a long week at work. mitda and I are going to play first, while emmie goes to a dinner with friends, and then emmie is going to join us at midnight and all three of us will play for the rest of the night. It gives us time away from the kids and the household in general, time to indulge in the loud types of play that we can't do at home at the moment, and time to indulge in the type of TPE I feel is possible between the three of us but difficult to engage in consistently with others around.

This doesn't mean I don't believe our normal relationship is a TPE one. It's just that, with the three of us and nobody else, we are able to be further along the vector, the "as-if" of total power exchange that much closer to its totality.

Poetry Thursday (after mitda's post)

Then spoke the thunder
D A
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
D A
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
D A
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

... From The Waste Land, T.S.Eliot

Some of the niceties ...

Some of the niceties of being dominant in a TPE situation are, well, obvious. If I need anything, I can just ask and it will be procured. If things need to be done around the house, I can assign it to one of my slaves and it will get done at the time I propose. Things like this make my life very much easier than it would be otherwise.

Other things are not so obvious, but after a while one gets used to them. Having slaves wait on one, in a literal sense, waiting for one's instructions, commands, compliments or complaints gives one a great sense of personal existence. Not only do I depend upon myself, others depend upon me. And this is extremely gratifying.

And, of course, it all adds up to a lot of responsibility.

If someone is waiting on one, in that sense, then one has a responsibility to see that they get what they need. Not what they want, necessarily, or even what they think they need, but what they actually need, and one has the responsibility of figuring out what that is, before one can provide it.

But this is the nicest nicety of all, at the end of the day. Figuring out what someone needs and providing it is the most satisfying thing to a dominant. To a slave, being told what the master needs and providing it is the greatest satisfaction, to the master, figuring out what the slave needs without being told is the greatest thing.

New work situation

Today I have to guide someone into upgrading a very complex enterprise class software system. The fortunate thing is that the upgrade is being done in the test environment, not production, given that it's the first time I've done it on this software. The unfortunate thing is that by repute the woman I have to work with at the client is utterly incapable of doing anything except following instructions. A colleague of mine has to work with her this morning to troubleshoot a new development server that she installed, and didn't manage to get working, and his initial response to my question about what he was doing with her was "committing suicide".

Guiding people can be both simple and complex. There is a psychology involved in getting someone to do what you want, exactly, precisely, without any open domination such as I have with mitda and emmie. In this case I still need to dominate, but as an "expert" and not a master. I like the following quote on the difference between an expert and a master, though you'll have to extrapolate its meaning since it specifically is talking about the two in terms of art.

"Expertise and Mastery: an expert, like an Aristotelian phronimos, does the right thing at the right time and in the right way (and will be immediately recognized by his or her community as having done so); but a true master inaugurates a new discursive practice, often transforming the old standards of success in the process and so requiring more time to be recognized."

Obviously installing somebody else's software is not "inaugurating a new discursive practice" in any sense. It's as an expert, then, that I need to make myself known and try to garner respect for my instructions by having my domain knowledge validated in practice.

Mastery has to be validated in practice as well. emmie and mitda have been wonderful enough to give me their trust and respect quite freely, but having it and keeping it involves earning it all the more. In this comes the notion of responsibility, which I am currently studying and investigating as a result. As an expert at work, my responsibilities are limited - to this project, these products, etc. - while as a Master to emmie and mitda there are no limits to my responsibilities. Expressing this leads to a limitation in itself of language, and as Wittgenstein suggested, running up against the limits of language is ethics.

It occurs to me ...

mitda, emmie and I have a tendency to use our writing to work things out, with ourselves, sometimes with each other. It occurs to me that as a result the relationship comes across as far more difficult than in fact it is. I've never been as comfortable in a relationship as I am with mitda, emmie and Jubal. Despite the complexities of polyamory and M/s we all enjoy each other and are relatively comfortable with the places we're in. I wouldn't trade this relationship for any other I could imagine.

All along the vector ...

M/s relationships, to me, are a vector that tends towards the true hard limits, those of mortality, finitude, etc. that truly limit the human, and thus both slave and Master alike. Within this limit-situation, then, the relationship can be construed as absolute if it is as far towards those limits as possible given the overall situation of the moment. These situations ebb and flow, they're not linear and not in one direction, a devoted slave becomes a tyrant if there is sudden danger to her child, naturally, and this is not something to descry or regret in TPE relationships, it's part of their fabric and texture and part of the fascination.

Expectation vs Submission

I came to a realization overnight.  I've been resenting my slaves' expectations of me.  It's easy to conflate want, desire and expectation, so I will try to differentiate them, and explicate why it bothers me and triggers resentment.

Slaves should want.  They should desire.  They can express these things without it being an issue, in fact it's an extremely pleasurable thing to hear one's slaves' wants and desires.  Where it becomes an issue is when wants automatically turn into expectations.  It is appropriate and reasonable for a Master to expect things from a slave.  Putting an expectation on somebody holds them to it because it creates in them a desire not to disappoint.  And this desire not to disappoint is extremely important in the submissive's psyche.  But when the tables are reversed, and the Master becomes expected not to disappoint, the power is suddenly in the hands of the slave, the wrong hands. 

Of course this is an issue to the Master.  Loving his slaves, he doesn't want to disappoint, yet he doesn't want to submit to their expectations either, resulting in a catch 22 situation.,  But it's as problematic for the slave, because she fundamentally wants the Master to want, and inside she knows if he does it under expectation it's not 100% his want and desire.  As a result, the satisfaction of the expectation doesn't actually satisfy, and leads to more expectations.  The final situation created is one of the slave topping from the bottom, and being unhappy because at root she doesn't want that.  At root she needs to submit to the Master, but she can only doing that by wanting, desiring everything, and expecting nothing.  In this way everything she gets is a gift of her Master, and only in receiving gifts from her Master is she really satisfied.   Of course an action is required from her Master as well, and in some ways this may be the a priori, that the Master refrain from the desire not to disappoint, because disappointment is the necessary impetus to change that trains the slave.

Thinking Cap On

Recent posts by mitda and emmie have had me thinking about jumping-ahead, or projecting-open, not in the general sense but particularly in their lives.  How does one jump ahead in order to give someone their concern?  In a sense I do so, have done so, and without it I wouldn't be their Master.  But it's an effort that has to be renewed every day, every hour, and preoccupations get in the way.

Luckily I don't think the new job will be altogether that stressful.  The code that needs to be tested, and the new code that needs to be written, are not particularly complex.  Which should give me a bit more time and energy to focus on the girls than I have had recently.  Well, specifically I have had time but stress from the other place has overburdened things and the energy and focus hasn't been there. 

Replaced Vista with Linux Fedora

I made the mistake of thinking the new core2duo laptop I just bought could run Vista ok. Nope. Although it is the default OS preinstalled on the Thinkpad it runs like absolute crap. So I ditched it and went with the beta of Fedora 8, which supports most of the laptop's hardware by default, and only requires patching for the wireless and sound capabilities.

So far, so good. Everthing is now working, except sound. For which I might have to recompile the kernel, but maybe not. We'll see after the current patch list is installed. At any rate the machine now feels like a fast laptop. Vista made the core2duo feel like an old 386 running NT 3.1.

Narcissism, entitlement, rights, mastery and slavery

"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.

It got me thinking, first, in terms of the relationship between entitlement and rights.  If the sense of entitlement exists where rights are specifically not claimed, and even when all rights have been expressly given up, on what does it base itself?  And in a situation where rights themselves have been seen as baseless, exactly what is it that a slave has "given up"?  And what is the fundamental difference between Master and slave if we cannot lean on the notion of rights to distinguish them?

In the notion of slavery that comes down to us from Greek society, we distinguish "citizens" from "slaves".  A citizen has rights conferred on him by the city-state, while a slave does not.  The citizen also has duties to the state, while a slave has duties only to his/her owner.  Obviously in dealing with Total Power Exchange and Internal Enslavement this definition will not suffice, because in terms of current society both Master and slave officially have rights conferred by the state, and have duties to the state, since the state does not see a difference between them.  This lack of societal backing leads some to question the possibility of the Master/slave relationship in modern society, but I believe this idea comes from a misunderstanding of the nature of the Master/slave relationship in the ownership subculture.

If entitlement is appropriate to a Master, while not to a slave,  the specific meaning of entitlement cannot come down to a matter of right.   Positing that "human rights" involves a false equation of "human" with "citizen", we are going to do without that particular crutch of thought, useful as it has been in terms of developing better treatment of human beings.  The lack of progress beyond a certain level of potential egalitarianism in society, and our seeming inability to actualize it, perhaps comes from the lack of a basis for human rights in a real ontology of the human.

If as a Master I am entitled, to what am I entitled?  As a Master I fundamentally find my meaning in my concerns, cares and loves.  And it is my will that puts these first, orders them, and determines how best to promote their well being.  My slaves are fundamentally important to this, as they embody my concerns and cares, and receive my love.   Of course my slaves have concerns and cares as well, and certainly love.  Without these they wouldn't be human slaves.  But the fundamental difference is that my slaves have given up a correlation between their developed personalities and these things.  Instead they are concerned with the Master's concerns, care about those things the Master cares for, and love in concert with the Master. 

As Master I feel entitled because my will is in line with my most basic meaning, as slave they do not have a personal sense of entitlement, because their meaning has been merged with mine, any remaining sense of entitlement or right comes from doing my will.  As a result slaves still feel entitlement, they still feel the urge to do what is right and what they are needed and required to do, but this right of the slave is in reality their expression of the Master's entitlement, of doing what is right for their Master, of accomplishing the expression of his concern, his cares, and his love.

Of course the upshot of this is responsibility, which is what a Master takes on in willing his concerns, cares and loves.  For a Master there is no set limit on this responsibility.  For a slave,  responsibility is there to align their will with their Masters, once that is accomplished (and the accomplishing is a constant effort) their responsibilities are simply an expression of the unlimited responsibility of their Master.

New week, new job.

I started with the new company today, writing management apps for a big telco. Interestingly I'm designing new apps and upgrading old ones, but not writing the new ones, the client, said big telco, wants me to design the adapters but they will write them themselves. Yippeee! No bloody boring coding. And once I'm done this project they want to move me into modelling, providing things work out.

The girls really helped get me together for my first day. So when I got here things went pretty smoothly. It will be interesting to see how this one goes compared to other jobs in a similar field that I've held, I'm hoping this will be one of the good ones.

The Abyssal

The cause of the irrupting of the Abyss is our urge to closure. Responsibility is in this sense an experience, something to be undergone, suffered, endured. And in the undergoing the something, in this case responsibility, itself comes to pass. There is no closure to experience, and this lack is itself the limit of experience. There is therefore only grasping of the experience in the as-if of the limit situation. Responsibility is responsibility only in the as-if of seeing no limits to responsibility, hence the arising of the Abyssal. But the Abyssal doesn't exist in-itself or as something apart from the experience that gives rise to it. The Abyssal's arising becomes the negative confirmation of that experience at the limit of lack of limits.

Collaring

I thought I would post some thoughts on the subject, since although the girls have been collared for some time, mitda for a fair length of time, last weekend we did a collaring ceremony for them together, and as a result it is closer to top of mind than it has been for a while.

Firstly, I love that they are collared.  Their beauty seems that much more radiant wearing their collars, and now that they can both wear their collars 24/7 they are a constant reminder to me of my luck and joy at mastering them.  They are also a constant reminder of my responsibilities in mastering them, and the standard which I have to try to live to.  I am currently studying the concept of unlimited responsibility, something that I think is particularly apropos and necessary in a TPE relationship.

Not that things are always perfect at House Daedalus.  The fact that the collars are identical reminds me of the occasional rivalry between slaves, the envy or jealousy that can poison any poly household.  And treating two very different people differently, as they require, but still equally, as they desire, is a difficult balancing act at times, and one  I don't always succeed at.

mitda and I, as a former vanilla married couple, had the easiest transition to a TPE lifestyle.  emmie and I have a few more hurdles to climb.  We are in a poly married situation as far as our vanilla sex lives go, but it is new and like any newlyweds we are still learning each other's tastes, wants and predilections.  And we have our pre-existing, comfortable relationships with our legal spouses to fall back on when things become tense for any reason.  That my spouse is also her sister slave makes her feel insecure.   That her spouse is a "top" sexually, and beginning to dominate in a bedroom bdsm sense, is an additional element and tension for me.  Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't trade any aspect of my family for any other in the world, but it's only by being honest about the tensions that they will be resolved, as I always trust that they will.  The love I have for emmie, Jubal and mitda, and the love between all of us, makes all the tensions worth it, all the difficulties a temporary thing, and my overall life satisfying and full of joy.

World as Abyss

What happens when World as the totality of meanings exhausts itself without finally providing the context for all our varied subtexts?  World as Abyss.

Does this mean, finally, that all subtexts are relative, and relative to something unknowable?  It seems to.  Does that relativize everything?  No.

Our responsibilities remain what they were.  Even in the situation where we don't, finally, know that we can be right.

Total Power Exchange and Limit Situations -2

“As soon as human beings attempt to
attain certainty about the totality of the world and life, they find
themselves faced with ultimate forms of incompatibility.”

“ It is from our experience of such
antinomy that there arises within us a vital will to unity.”

“Antinomies destroy and bifurcate,
and our experience of them amounts to standing within limit
situations.”

Incompatibilities, or contradictions,
permeate reality. In TPE we absolutize the master / slave
relationship, which keeps the dialectic and both antinomies alive in
a unique manner, affecting our experience of reality in a number of
fundamental ways. I will attempt to point towards them in the next
little section of blogworld. In this particular post in the series I
have a subintention as well, which is to provide an answer to the
objection raised in an earlier post towards use of the term "Total Power Exchange" or alternatively "Absolute Power Exchange".

Self certainty, from the perspective of
philosophical history and epistemology in particular, has a very
privileged place. It is from self certainty that Descartes arrives
at the absolute positing of the subject of the assertion, and the
subsequent subject object split has haunted epistemology since. If
the subject experiences only a representation of the posited
thing-in-itself, the thing-in-itself is never actually known. This
relativizing conception, generally known as subjectivism, has been
fought more or less successfully since in a number of philosophical
ideas. One of these is Hegel's conception of absolute knowledge, or
Spirit. For Hegel we are able to arrive, here at the end of History,
at absolute knowledge, because knowledge is able to know its own
knowing, and this double relation totalizes it, not quantitively, but
qualitatively. The sublation from self certain self consciousness
to absolute knowledge accomplished in the Phenomenology of Spirit
requires that Hegel explicate, and we experience, the unfolding of
the Master/slave dialectic. Hegel has been turned on his head a few
times since the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and for
good reason. But there remains something crucial in its exposition
that returns again in existential analysis.

In an earlier post I talked about the
limit situation and TPE as an example of such a situation. It was
posited there that in a limit situation such as TPE “ ... human
life knows itself drawn by a motive (idea), which extends it beyond
the forms, both subjective and objective, in which it customarily
exists." This is a bold statement. Within a recognized limit
situation such as TPE the human being is drawn beyond the forms of
subjective and objective reality. This totalizing move (totalizing
because it allows us to go beyond the relativizing subjectivism of
Descartes to a reconstitution of the world as a whole), obviates the
subject-object split, not merely within a theory, but practically as
well. Which brings us to another aspect of the limit situation.
Within it, the distinction between theory and practice, thought and
action, disappears as well. This is the second totalizing, or
absolutizing, move of the limit situation.

These things together produce the
situation where the human being can be aware of the totality of
world. World sounds a bit mysterious here, but a simple explanation
would be that World represents the sum total of meanings at our
disposal. We talk of worlds in this sense all the time, in fact,
when we use terms like “sports world” or “fashion world” - by
this denotation it describes a total of meanings that in turn
determine specific meanings, such that something like “walk”
means a positive thing in the “ baseball” world and a rather
negative one in the “business” world. We also call this context.
And the “text” in context is always intimately associated with
language as meaning. Jaspers notes a “splitting asunder” in the
limit situation as “the primary phenomenon of psychical life”.
But that splitting asunder also brings to light an unnoticed, a
priori unity, that must have always already existed before the limit
situation caused the splitting apart. Specifically with regard to
TPE this splitting asunder, that creates the Master/slave dichotomy,
points to the unity in which they exist a priori. And this pointing
at a unity, a totality, an absolute, which cannot be directly
experienced by finite, mortal man, is held fast in the TPE limit
situation, because it does not admit of a resolution.

For these reasons I believe we are
justified in the use of the term “Total Power Exchange” (or
“Absolute Power Exchange” when we are asked to describe what it
is that we do. We do not need to replace this term with the new
“Internal Enslavement”, because while IE is in itself a useful
term, and implies things of matter to the practice of TPE, by itself
IE implies that subjectivism and relativism that we seek to overcome;
implies that the slave enslaves himself, internally, in a
representing activity, rather than being enslaved in a dialectical
process whereby he first and finally becomes himself, as slave, and
the Master first becomes Master.

Nature vs Nurture (sic)

Jubal just had to raise the spectre of the nature vs nurture argument viz BDSM in his post.  Now you should know Jubal and I have very different intellectual backgrounds and very different ideas about most things.  Luckily it creates a healthy, fun argumentative situation and not a nasty type of thing.

In this particular case Jubal states very definitively that all BDSM is a learned thing.  I'm assuming that by "all BDSM" Jubal intends to include M/s and D/s as well as the more playful types of BDSM that interest him more at the moment.  Now I don't fall, this time, on the complete opposite side of his argument.  With just basic knowledge of information theory it seems unlikely that the number of bits required to produce the quantity of memes in a developed human brain could be found in the human genome pool.  At the same time evolutionary psychology has a foothold in demonstrability in the identical twins raised apart studies, which show striking and sometimes unbelievable correlations between the developed behavioural patterns of people with shared genes and different development histories.

Of course neither IT or EP are really close to my own background and methodology for analysing a question, but in order to satisfy Jubal that I am paying some attention to Science and not all my attention to Philosophy I mention them, and what I feel they do bring to the argument.

So what does phenomenology have to say about the situation?  Since here we are discussing psychology in a broad sense, without agreeing with the DSM-IV that these things are deviant in the sense of being a psychiatric issue, I will bring in the most phenomenological of the psychological schools, Daseinsanalysis.

 Daseinsanalysis prescribes a phenomenological approach of paying attention to the things themselves, and not immediately subsuming the concrete phenomena under a already available set of abstractions, such as specific development theories (Freud) or specific meaning theories (Jung).

The phenomenon of personal domination, in my history, is one where it was something I simply did.  It was only later that I realized how much I exerted control in my early relationships, without being overt or, really, honest about it, even with myself.  Partly due to my ex's being a dominatrix, but mostly due to mitda's need for submission and the immediate way I responded to it, I became open to the idea of being dominant in a thoughtful, proactive sense.  And this has continued since, as we've developed from playing at BDSM to entering a TPE triad, myself, mitda and emmie.  So the practice of domination is something I have definitely learned, but it seems to have been learned from a strong pre-existing tendency. 

This feeling I have seen talked about on the BDSM boards when the question comes up by dominants and submissives alike, who can trace their immediate responsiveness to BDSM situations, whether real or portrayed, as far back into their childhood as they can remember.  And while I am sure there are people into BDSM that can trace their interest back to specific events, such as childhood abuse or trauma, when asked on the boards it doesn't seem to have that strong a correlation for most of the participants.

I am asking mitda and emmie to put in their opinions as to how they experience and first experienced the submissive traits they have developed.  How much came in the development and how much (if any) do you feel was a priori present?  My own feeling about M/s, at least, as a subset of BDSM, is that it is learned, but learned out of strong pre-existing traits.  That I happen to share my dominant traits with my mother (who I am similar to in many ways) shows a possibility of a genetic connection also, but since my parents raised me, it being developmentally acquired from her is not out of the question.

Strange world of work part 2

This won't be the long, analytical kind of post the last one on the topic was.  It's just the note to self to remind me later why I dumped the contract, something I don't generally like doing.

An impassable personality clash is normally something that would put my back up.  Especially when, as in this case, I'm justified in my stance on the project.  Simply put, multithreaded and batch shouldn't be in the same sentence in programming circles.  Banks don't do it, and there's good reason for it, if you happen to be interested in accuracy of data.

But this time I've just walked away.  Granted I have another project elsewhere to walk away to, which makes it much easier. 

on perversion re: mitda re: jubal

mitda, commenting on jubal's next-to-inaugural blog post, makes a few comments that make her worldview precariously relativistic.  Here is an adjustment I would make to correct her, since her ideas are my responsibility : ).

"we live in our own worlds- and for the 4 of us, and the kinky people
with whom we associate, those worlds sometimes overlap, creating our
own society with its own norms."

Worlds are shared phenomena, Being-in-the-World is a simple, single structure, not a relation between independent phenomena the way it appears in English.  Even between radically different cultures there is a shared set of meanings that constitute a common world, and allow other structures of human being such as discourse and understanding to occur coterminous.  It's not so much that worlds sometimes overlap.  Rather the result of World+understanding (among other existentials), things that always already have occurred in human being, and are therefore a priori to willed cognition, are unique, and huge contributors to what is variously, and loosely, called character, personality or self consciousness.

To quote Medard  Boss, a Swiss psychiatrist who was very involved with Heidegger's ideas of human being, "We are not individuals locked up inside our bodies; We live rather in a
shared world, and we illuminate each other.  Human existence is
shared
existence."

Total Power Exchange and the Limit Situation - 1

An oddity, but one that often surfaces when pro and con arguments are vetted out, is that they take the same form, and essentially become two moments of one argument. This is the root of the form of thought known as dialectic, particularly the way that Hegel uses the term.

This turns out to be the case in the pro and con TPE argument, so let's take it apart a little. I will provide one of the original formulations of the argument for TPE and talk a little about the argument con, just to set the stage.
"When you "submit" to or "dominate" someone in a situation where safe words are used and when limitations are negotiated, you are not actually submitting or dominating at all - you are playing at it." - Jon Jacobs

The con argument also talks about limits. (In TPE) "The relationship is subject to the physical and the emotional limitations of the participants and therefore cannot genuinely be total or absolute." - From TPE, Wikipedia.

Odd isn't it that the arguments are so similar. What is it about TPE that immediately points towards limits as the crux of its own possibility? Karl Jaspers, in "The Psychology of Worldviews", a book unfortunately difficult to obtain, originated the idea of the "limit-situation", a peculiar existential condition where something unconditioned obtrudes and causes the self to come before itself in a unique way.

"...Jaspers claims that the self-disclosure of the possibilities of human existence depends on the capacity of the individual human life to open itself to the experience of the unconditioned (das Unbedingte). When it experiences the unconditioned, human life’s knows itself drawn by a motive (idea), which extends it beyond the forms, both subjective and objective, in which it customarily exists."

On a personal level, then, the limit situation unique discloses our possibilities, which gives us a better ground for actualizing them. On a philosophical level, if the limit is something unconditioned, and the unconditioned results in transcendence beyond the human's customary existence, being in a limit situation is an especially valuable situation for understanding what that customary existence is grounded upon, as well as experiencing a transcendence from it. And in fact the two things are the same, the subject-object split turns out to be based on an originary transcendence. What does transcendence mean here then? "Beyond" the customary, beyond the subject-object split, is in any case not a very well defined location, as far as we can immediately see. Before we can understand transcendence though, we need a horizon against which to view this new location, which does not admit of either subjectivity or objectivity.

So in order to develop a sense of what this horizon might be I'm going to look closer at the limit situation in general, and the limit situation I believe the TPE relationship to be in particular. In any limit situation Jaspers says that "existence directs itself from its own origin against and beyond its experience of normal subjective and objective reality". Direction then is important, and direction seems promising for understanding something like horizon. But what specifically happens in TPE? In the TPE situation there is an unconditioned demand, that the slave surrender all will, all freedoms, to the Master. Does this surrender equal surrendering all possibilities for the slave? By no means, but the slave's possibilities now all involve those inherent in enslavement, a situation where rather than being an "existence for itself", self consciousness becomes an "existence for another". Of course this act simultaneously creates the Master, who for his part was merely an undeveloped self consciousness as well. This part is well documented by Hegel in his lord/bondsman dialectic, so I will not further pursue it here, though a link might be useful to those not familiar with the argument.

So in the master/slave relationship there involves a complex dialectical process at work, at least according to Hegel. In TPE we attempt to make the enslavement total, or absolute. What does this do to the resolution?

Obviously the easy happy resolution of Hegel's "cooperation" isn't what we have here. We have in lieu of that a permanent tension, a permanent dialectic without resolution, unless you consider the passing of the participants a kind of resolution. It isn't a resolution as far as my thinking goes because the participants are precisely no longer there, but mortality is its own limit situation.

This post has become long and rather than lose the thread I will end for now and bring up the next element in the argument in a further post.

Lazy Sunday

Today the family hasn't been up to much at all, me especially.  The girls and I went for coffee and laptopping for a little while, and then mitda did the market run while we were out, but emmie and I pretty much sat and vegetated.  Well I did some writing about TPE which will likely find its way onto this blog later in the week.  But nothing really useful.  emmie's and mitda's posts today made me feel very good ...

This is a needed change after yesterday, which was wonderful in many ways but extremely tiring to me at least.  We prepared for and performed the collaring ceremony for both girls, with E assisting me in actually locking the new collars in place.  It was fun and we all felt a little special I think, hopefully not in a short bus sense.  Afterwards we went to the local play party and after a rather interminable "discussion period" and an equally lengthy set of personal introductions finally resulted in us watching some interesting rope work and having some reasonable conversation with others into related kinks.

So today, as I said, is relaxation time. 

Collaring

After many fits and starts with various collars, severe allergic reactions, and more than a couple of other issues, we decided that a collaring ceremony for both mitda and emmie, with new collars that do not have allergen issues and can be locked and worn 24/7, was the solution.  And something we wanted to do on its own merit, of course.  So, the two collars having arrived, today is to be that day. 

For the occasion I took up the pen (well, the thinkpad) and wrote out what they are, in fact, agreeing to.  It's fairly comprehensive as you may imagine.  I'm not going to post it here as it is also a little private, and somehow it doesn't seem to suit a public forum.  Even one for a very small public such as this one.

In general, then, the vows made by the girls have them commit to spending their lives living, experiencing and deepening their own enslavement.  And in return they will be taken care of in every possible way, directed in every possible way, and loved in every possible way.  No power exchange can be total or absolute due to the limits and constraints imposed by society, personality and simply the human body.  But it can be considered to be in the realm of such, by virtue of existing in and sustaining a limit situation. 

I plan to explore this application of the concept  of the limit situation in a future post.  But it was necessary to introduce it here to counter the most obvious objections to the vows we are each taking, and by extension the journey we have already begun together, that we are reaffirming in a permanent fashion.

The translators of a favourite book of mine coined one of my favourite
terms in order to literally translate the title in German, which
contains the German neologism "ereignis".  In English it is rendered as
enowning, where the "en" prefix denotes an intensification of the root
word.  mitda and emmie are not merely owned the way non-human property
can be merely owned, they are enowned, in a way that is unique and
proper to who they are, each in their own way.

Sleepy Afternoon

I decided to work from home this afternoon, partly because I have very little to do right now. However mitda and emmie were sleepy from the exertions of taking emmie to her first appointment with her new therapist. The therapist apparently has experience with clients in alternative lifestyles, so she shouldn't have to deal with being called a sexual deviant on top of having bipolar and generalized anxiety . In any event it seems she wasn't given that epithet on this occasion, and they had a get-to-know-you type of session where the therapist asked about and wrote down the family configuration.

Their sleepiness, alas, was contagious and I found myself napping at 3pm. Now I feel less tired and more relaxed, but a bit headachy unfortunately.

I looked over my post from last night and wondered what on earth possessed me to write so much about the topic. Finally decided it had to do with having come from an emotionally abusive vanilla background, and having seen the difference in a number of friends' relationships, where spousal abuse was common, unpredictable and extremely hurtful. One point I should have made but didn't, I think, is the number of abusers I have seen who were self-thwarted Dominants, prevented from exercising their personality traits in other ways due to morality, or a too hasty acceptance of societal norms. Put these people into a vanilla relationship, add a lot of frustration, and in the worst cases a good deal of alcohol, and what could have been a healthy domination streak turns into a nasty abusive one. My mother is that all over, though she controls the alcohol, as was the first girl I had a long relationship with, although not with me. We kept in touch, still do, and in later relationships she followed a ruinous course, eventually being charged with spousal abuse. Ironically her bail was set dependent upon her being my "court charge" for a period. If only the Judge had known MY predilections : ).

Well, for tomorrow, on to brighter and happier subjects. We have a play party to go to tomorrow night where mitda and I may play publicly for the first time ever. In any case some people we know and get along with well will be there, so it should be quite fun.

What a strange world of work

I work in an odd situation, for most people, in that I don't stay very long with companies. I don't work permanently, I work contracts. This is partly due to my nature - but mostly due to the nature of my job. Since I work as a software architect/developer, I'm in need of new projects on a consistent basis, but most companies don't start new projects all the time in IT, so they don't keep architects and developers on-staff, they hire contractors. Of course most of you probably know someone in IT, so you know this. But this is not the oddest thing by any means at the moment.

I am working a contract right now with a large, rather well known computer hardware OEM and services company, in their services division. They do, unlike many of my former clients, write software on an ongoing basis, but they hired me contract to write a market trial, which is close to starting.

Now emmie and mitda are not the most subtle slaves in the bdsm world, they both wear collars in virtually all situations, mitda wears cuffs most of the time, and they make no bones about the fact that they are my wife and girlfriend, which is noticeable even to those who don't know what collars and cuffs indicate. They have been around my work enough times that the people on my project, other than the ones who are absolutely clueless, know what the situation is at my household.

Well, surprise, noone seems to take much offense. In fact one of the members of my very small team turned out to be a TPE/IE Master with a live in slave. We went together to the recent GWNN conference (group with no name - a local bdsm group).

And this is what this meandering post is finally getting to. My colleague is very much a dom. He is ex military, very much into controlling himself and his surroundings, and confident in his ability to do so. He and I get along extremely well. However there is another member of the team who doesn't share that attribute of easy going self confidence. He tends to be at turns blustery or sulky, or tries to be easygoing with a rather undeveloped sense of humour that can be either quaint or irritating, depending upon one's mood. Because this fellow, although also a contractor, has been with the client for a good long period of time, while my other colleague and I joined for this project only, he is generally the lead on one of the main aspects of the product development.

Suffice it to say I openly have issues with him. And vice versa. But that isn't the story here either. He, let's refer to him as "J", has major issues with my other colleague "B". And vice versa there too. So here we go to a little vignette.

The project has been an extremely rushed affair. This is not that unusual in software development, and is part of the reason we were hired. There simply wasn't the turnaround time to reallocate permanent employees to the project, so contractors were brought in. However as a result normal process methods have been somewhat lax as we rushed past checkpoints and approval items to simply get something done and working. Now B is the requirements engineer for the project, and as we move precariously closer to QA he has become more and more aware that there are major differences between the product we have in hand and any requirements documentation that may have existed for the project. As a result, and mainly with other business-side members in view, he sent out an email, strongly worded as is his style, asking that from this point on any changes be vetted through him. After all this is his job. And he wants to get these changes, however minor, documented so that QA can perform their jobs. If they don't know what the current program is meant to do, it becomes a worthless task to test it. But the wording of the email put our friend J's back out of joint. And in response he went into bluster mode, came over to where B and I sit, and began yelling. It's not a big office and almost right away the entire project team was at B's desk getting involved in the "discussion".

B responded pretty calmly, repeated a couple of times "J., you need to calm down". Eventually this advice did reasonably sink in and the crowd dispersed. However B. wasn't happy with the situation. Once most people had disappeared for the day he took J. aside and to a meeting room. And proceeded to "rip him a new one" as it were for his unprofessionalism and poor behaviour. J. became extremely upset, to the point of tears, and told B. that he had an anger management problem. B. was nonplussed, telling J. that if he couldn't control his a. m. problem at work, he simply shouldn't be working.

Why have I wasted your time with this rather long vignette as part of an even longer post? Because it illustrates well, along with another comment J. had made as one of his rather quaint jokes, shortly after I had met him, something I started to talk about in a post earlier on this blog regarding bdsm and abuse. J. had said to me and others in the group when asked about his weekend "after you marry, one night when you're fast asleep, your wife rips your spine out and you don't make a decision after that".

I'm not implying J. is into spousal abuse. I wouldn't know and wouldn't want to know. But with an anger management problem such as he has it wouldn't be unthinkable. At least many actual wife abusers have anger management problems, that much would be accepted, I think, by most authorities on the subject. Yet it is B., who doesn't comprehend or accept lack of self control even when caused by such a problem, that is into bdsm Mastery, and keeps a live in slave to that end. I have no doubt either that B. can be quite sadistic with his consensual partner. But he is not an anger management class candidate nor is he a danger to his partner, while J., whose comment on his wife spoke (non-bdsm style) submission, that is a real danger when it comes to spousal abuse.

Does this mean that Dominants are never spouse abusers and submissives are? No. Does it mean that most spousal abusers are not vanilla? No. But it does show the difference I had been trying to express between a Dominant and an abuser. Abuse comes from lack of control, over the self, over others. And this lack is what makes abusers pick helpless targets. A Dominant first chooses someone who wants to be dominated, and someone who is worth dominating. If for any reason you find out that your next door neighbour whose kids are on your kids' basketball team and whose wife runs the PTA is secretly into bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sado-masochism, remember that it doesn't mean anyone there is in danger, physically or psychologically. It may be the nervous churchgoer across the street that is hurting his wife and marring his kids, in a way that is permanent and difficult to reverse.

A Firmer Hand

It is easy for a Master to become too at ease and complacent. Today both girls are in chastisement for different reasons. Suffice it to say that if the hand is not firm enough with a slave she will quickly lose her way, get confused, and fail at complying with the most basic tenets of the TPE/IE life she has accepted and submitted to. I become complacent with homelife when I am too strained at work, tired from insomnia and other issues, and generally happy with myself and our family. Even though I remain very happy with the family, I have been forced to realize that things are nowhere near 100% and action was needed.
A slave, unlike anyone else, no longer moves simply within the space they open up as human beings. Rather they share the space their Master opens up, and can only find their way when they are properly directed by the Master, who is familiar with the terrain and can guide their vision. In sharing this space, this "there" that the Master provides for them, they must find their only solace and satisfaction, and must find their will being guided and directed in union with their Master's, so that when they do go astray, upon being reigned in will wish for and delight in the chastisement the Master chooses for them.