On Winning or Losing in Battle

We like to say that battles are lost or won. Even our best respected historians provide the final score whenever they can. Some battles are ties; some have ambiguous outcomes. Most are won or lost. We have ways of determining such things. We like neat dichotomies, binary oppositions. It’s in the language, but it’s in the language because it’s in the being, our being. Win and lose are easy to understand.

The borderlines we put on battles are not arbitrary. But they’re not real either. They are conceptual. They could be put in other places, both the starting point then the first shot is fired and the end point when the last effective shot is fired are placed there for convenience, so we will be able to give a name to when the thing started and ended. The name is everything. It’s the folder that allows us to catalog the battle, that allows us to have had a battle at all. There is no knowledge without the name on the folder. But we all know too that the battle started long before the fighting and continued long after and may never have ended. We all know that the most decisive victories are provisional and momentary. Many conquered people have eventually won the war—or anyway have had moment in which the victory had shifted their way, had conquered the conqueror from beneath.

The Unconscious Is More than That

Freud was interested in the ego/id/superego trinity of the unconscious to the exclusion of anything else that might have been happening in the mind that the mind was unaware of. With great verbal dexterity he made sure that all facts could be hung on this increasingly articulated model. Girard does the same thing with his model of mimesis. Both systems are brilliant, and certainly contain some important correspondence to reality. But they are also cautionary tales about trying too hard to make a single insight conquer the whole territory.

Being animals human beings are always attempting to organize themselves into the “proper” social structure for human beings. Mapped in the genes (as it were) of all animals is the way that those animals are supposed to be organized. This is why middle school students are so notoriously hard to teach. Their bodies are telling them to form themselves into a nation. The kings are trying to emerge. Everyone is trying to align themselves with power, not the foreign invasive power of the teacher-class, but the real structure of the student-class. Rivalries emerge. School is contrary to nature.