This is not a "pipe"

Incidentally, the disorder with the highest treatment success rate for cognitive behavioral therapy is panic disorder with agoraphobia (~95%). Clinical agoraphobia is defined as a set of avoidance behaviors that develops in response to panic situations (I stop walking down the street because I had a panic attack once when I was walking down the street, for instance).

As the title to this post indicates, I'd like to reply to both Perry and Niko. I think there's a profound link between desire and surveillance that has perhaps been left undertheorized this semester. The current success of cognitive behavioral therapy is related to the decline of symbolic efficiency: the "other-supposed-to-know" that was once represented by a flesh-and-blood doctor has been externalized into a set of autonomous processes. This goes hand-in-hand with our wish to understand the mind increasingly in terms of computer processes. It is comforting to have a model, a sense of mastery. If an impersonal structure can carry this out, so much the better--less chance for error. But this is only part of why CBT works.

There is also what I am tempted to call "claustrophilia," the opposite of agoraphobia, the pleasure of encapsulation. The fantasy of cyberspace is not to be able to go anywhere, do anything, etc. We were already able to do all that stuff if we really wanted. Truth is, most of it is boring. The fantasy of cyberspace is to do everything just as we have always done it, but from the comfort of our own homes. I want to shop, converse with others, read, write, be entertained, etc.--the totality of quotidian life--without leaving my bedroom. Why?

Surveillance and Enclosure can be very enjoyable. As Joe Pantalioni said, "Put me back in the Matrix!" Niko is right, there really isn't anyone saying that material reality is disappearing. And the fact that one finds the same straw man argument repeated over and over again is proof positive of the argument he runs in the second half of the post: that reality is organized as a matrix of circulating images. Noticing this should in no way lead us to claim that this is not a fantasy--a symptom strategy--that keeps a trauma from emerging fully into consciousness. What is that trauma? Niko says it is "the desire for structure" but I would rephrase it slightly as "the terror of structurlessness" (the difference is minimal: in each case we recognize the social as lacking). We DO have structure, but it is threatened by a rapidly accelerating culture that exceeds all attempts to impose regulation. In order to stave off the disintegration of humanity we believe on behalf of the structure (the big Other), we act as if it's still there (God is dead, but no one told Him). And sometimes acting like something is there is good enough, like a psycho who thinks his dead mother is still alive. Why don't I run stoplights when no one is around? Why don't we use discarded abortions for stem cell research?

After reading all this stuff I still can't come up with a good reason why one wouldn't want to be put back into the Matrix. I don't care if it isn't a pipe, as long as I can smoke it. "Claustrophilia" is a powerful fantasy.