Bataille identifies immanence with the real rather than socially defined self, but even more specifically with various modes of pleasurable destruction (thus “mutilation” in his terms can be read as a shamanic desire to unlearn society’s rules and systems of knowledge, in order that one may learn anew from experience, and with fresh eyes). This approach is identifiable, in Bataille’s terms, with “sovereignty”. To allow one’s socially defined self to undergo mutilation in order to learn afresh is a mode of shamanic voyage. Conversely, transcendence and work are defined as socially regulated or “profane” departure from one’s self and the experience of immanence and its associated ecstasies of destruction.
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The door flings open. In walks a peculiar gent. Taking a large step he trips over his foot. The sudden loss of balance causes him to slam his head against the wall. Unpreturbed, he sits down, takes off his shoe, and proceeds to put his foot in his mouth.
Those who stand around are bemused. "Surely he cannot have intended to do that?" they remark among themselves.
I used to think that way: It must be an error. Lack of judgement due to lack of education must have caused the troll his untold pain. His clumsy feet are due to lack of training as to how to walk.
I now think differently, that this clumsy effect is exactly what the sad fellow wants. It's not that lack of education has no role to play in producing the clumsiness. Rather, he accustomisation to a state of entitlement renders him passive in terms of of the world. He says, "the world owes me a positive evaluation, without my having to work for it." Compounding his idiocy, rather than understanding that many people's judgements about him in the past might have been in error, he passively accepts that their negative evaluations constitute REALITY.
The troll, in his passivity towards the world, has internalised others interpretations of him as negative self-esteem.
But the troll -- like Frankenstein's unfortunate monster -- still has hunger and desires. What is he to do? He cannot petition that a bride be made for him. But he can search for one with the same outlook as himself.
For this reason, the troll patrols the face of the Internet. Once on the site of some potential love interest, he seeks to employ the strategies that will enable him to recognise a fellow soul with equally poor self esteem. The longer the interlocutor tolerates him, the more the troll brightens. Since it is evidence of very poor self esteem to tolerate a troll, he feels he might just have discovered the bride of Frankenstein -- someone who will tolerate him for who society thinks he is.
The troll's strategy of filtering out those who have positive self esteem in order to latch onto someone with low self-esteem is a logical one. His mating cry is emitted in the unsavoury and clumsy antics he performs when he walks in the door.0Add a comment
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Why do idiots insist on using their image of me as a way to do sparring with their own shadow side?
I speak very directly and my speech is not rhetorically loaded to mean something other than what it appears to mean in plain language. However, there are those who strain to try to hear a tone of underlying nasty prejudice, a discriminatory or discriminating tactic, the nasty dismissal tone that they feel identifies who they really are in their underlying essence.
And when they do not hear it, they do not hear anything at all. A sense of condemnation is what they are most attracted to. The condemnation is also what they fear to hear. It is what Freud termed the "daemonic" that attracts them to hear the same forms of condemnation against them, again and again. They long to repeat their traumas anew, in the hope of conquering the hidden sector of their beings.
But I cannot help them, for I am not part of their minds.0Add a comment
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Most people have become accustomed to eating their food predigested and preprocessed. Knowledge, that is. That is why categories of identity seem to make us so happy: high in fat, high in sugar, low in fibre and nutrition -- we gobble them up to our hearts' content. They even give us a mystical feeling that we can look into somebody's soul and spirit without having to even engage with them first.
Me -- I like my food a posteriori -- slow cooked in the oven by my own hand, with carefully managed quantities of juices, to the point of being a little overdone.
Fast food knowledge has never appealed to me. It may give you a momentary buzz but its going to end up giving you cancer.0Add a comment
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It's a common cultural tone these days. It is supposed to make you sit up and pay attention.
"I didn't get it!"
With such a cry, the toddler slams down his spoon, sending bits of meal everywhere, as he asserts his rights to refuse to eat the porridge set in front of him.
Yet, there is a surprising twist to this story. You see, it isn't a toddler but a fully grown adult who is adopting this posture.
"I didn't get it!" he barks. "Therefore you must be wrong in trying to speak to me!"
"I didn't get it!" -- he emits again. Therefore you haven't managed to scale the mountain of my intelligence, to communicate to me!"
It may be true that the teacher lacks the fortitude to get the message across. However, the challenge of conveying information to an inborn genius who's never going to "get it" anyway, is hardly an activity of an enobling sort.
Motherhood may be conventionally considered a low status job -- but at least the mother has an inherent interest in conveying what she knows to her own flesh and blood. The school teacher is one step removed from this level of motivation. Pay her a certain amount of money, and she might seek to assure that your progeny "gets it". However, if some of the geniuses fall by the wayside due to a lack of application or ability, she may well turn a blind eye. After all she is only being paid an average wage to make sure your children "get it".
An internet acquaintance who you hardly know is even less in a position to care whether or not their interlocutor's "get it". Sure, they may want to impart their ideas and knowledge. But don't be under any illusion that they are absolutely driven to make sure you "get it". Surely they have other things on their mind. Also, they may already know that not everybody out there has the drive, ability or strength of imagination to "get it".
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I've finally thawed! It's been too long. I hardly expected that working so hard would make me so numb to the lures of pleasure offered in everyday existence. Tonight I feel almost normal again. It's been a while.
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Lately I wonder about those who play a stupid game in an enduring fashion -- the game is blind man's bluff, involving someone who knows nothing latching onto those they encounter, and managing to create a 'relationship', no matter how dysfunctional, on the basis of random firings in the other person's direction. Will he, in time, come to recognise his particular mode of lurching and latching on to be an achievement based on something other than knowledge?
To jump to a negative conclusion about someone and to proclaim this conclusion as having been born of insight is the bluff of those who have become blind.
Yet off they go -- these blind men -- talking now among themselves about their special skills and insights. They think they've discovered the essence of males and females, although they've never encountered an actual living version of either.
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Overcertainty about the world has its psychological correlate of paranoia. When Adam named all the animals, did he not feel uncertainty that he had perhaps named them incorrectly? The names he gave to them were surely arbitrary, having little to do with their actual genus and species. (One presumes that Adam didn't know this kind of science, which was able to apply labels according to some rational criteria.)
Lacan speaks of knowledge as having a paranoiac structure, but I believe what he was really getting at with that idea is that one must generally pay the price for one's indulgence in over-certainty by being visited by the niggling voice of conscience which suggests: "Hey, Buddy, perhaps, after all, you got it wrong?" Those locked into a rigid belief system pay a price.
My views are Yin and Yang, or rather more generally the notion that genuine knowledge is never fixed nor set in stone once and for all, but always requires openness to the possibility of error. To assert one's truths is desirable. But to deny the possibility of error in one's truths is one's undoing. Knowledge is not one-sided, and it is a brittle form of knowledge that is forced to play that role of supporting a one-sided system of rhetoric. (It is likely that Lacan's idea fhat knowledge is intrinsically paranoiac is because he saw knowledge in patriarchal terms -- as it it were only Yang -- and did not conceive that receptivity in regard to the possibility of error is the basis for overcoming cognitive paranoia.)
Contemporary interpreters of Nietzsche also fail to conceive that the Socratic method of interrogating an overblown and exaggerated self-certainty about what one is or is not known is the path to psychological health. Indeed, as per Nietzsche, there are some modes of questioning that are in fact intended to put noble natures into doubt. Yet genuine nobility should have nothing to fear from Socratic dialogue (so long as it does not become particularly political or forceful) -- for genuine nobility retains its noble nature whether or not it is proven to have got certain things wrong.
As for making moral integrity a characteristic of perfect knowledge -- this is precisely what undermines the development of actual knowledge, since it makes everyone too afraid to admit what they don't know. (It would be the equivalent of admitting that one is a moral degenerate for not already having learned a particular, important fact.)
As for making moral integrity a characteristic of perfect knowledge -- this is precisely what undermines the development of actual knowledge, since it makes everyone too afraid to admit what they don't know. (It would be the equivalent of admitting that one is a moral degenerate for not already having learned a particular, important fact.)
It is the mistake of contemporary ideologues to link moral integrity to the possession of perfect knowledge. This linkage belongs to Plato, not to Nietzsche. All the same, Nietzsche places too much emphasis on being and not enough on knowing. Being is a form of knowing in some cases, as when one knows what it means to be a lizard by acting and behaving like one -- for one is actually a lizard. Otherwise (and in the case of humans) knowledge and being are separate but they practically intertwine and thus transform each other. We have to be open to change and transformation, otherwise, we are all moral reprobates for not knowing from birth all that there is to know.
Interestingly, both Plato and Nietzsche, for totally different reasons, desire us to learn only what it is already intrinsic within us to know. Nietzsche seems to think one should not attempt revolutionising the mind, but pursue a gentle evolutionary process. Unlike Bataille, he was also keen to maintain social hierarchies.0Add a comment
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My life is and always has been very proletarian, whether I knew it or not. Even in Rhodesia, where I was supposedly riding high and dry on my white horse, I had no pretensions, since what was imbued in me was rather a sense of fear, (something next to godliness), in terms of my place in the world -- where Christianity was supposed to help make life for me only slightly less than tenuous.
I came to Australia, and found people had rights, and colours, and that these were the markers of a fixed identity, considered unalterable. My Christian servility did not help me work my way around these markers. My attitudes, in the eyes of others, remained opaque. I remember trying an art course, and finding much of the critique of culture being made to relate little to my experiences. "Shutters" were falling down around my eyes, I was told -- but truth be told, my eyes had yet to be enlightened as to the meaning of the culture, and thereby as to the meaning of the critique brought to bare on it. No shutters could fall when there were none to know about.
I found Australians abrasive in their demands that I should know all sorts of things, which hadn't yet been discussed with me. "Abrasive", however, was a word that only came belatedly to my lips. My real impression is that they were superficial, joyless.
I found that most of them would not respond to the human being inside -- instead most of them related to you as if they were judging whether you were living up or down to your identity. As I didn't yet have an identity, the nature of this game flew by me. Instead, I registered a kind of flightiness, and sort of superficial disregard for what I felt.
Race and identity are important to Australians, I later discovered. They're really so important, because according to the mentality I encountered, identity is fixed. It's not supposed to require learning, adaptation, or reflection to have an identity. You've simply got one and you're stuck with it. However, my deeply felt concern was the need to learn, to adapt and to reflect upon the meaning of reality within an entirely different cultural system.
My failure to immediately assimilate -- which no doubt many Aussies thought was natural to me, since I was white (the Chinese visitors were given more obvious care) -- meant that I stuck out like an injured thumb. I was thought "immature" -- a surmisal that I readily agreed with, for I sensed that the paralysing confusion I typically experienced was due to not knowing or having experienced very much.
Having alighted upon this thesis, I set about trying to find ways to experience the world that would plug up my missing gaps of knowledge. My approach was slow and hit and miss and often paralysed by fear.
It was the stress of not knowing how to adapt -- yet knowing that I needed to -- that caused my chronic fatigue syndrome, and sudden onset of all sorts of food allergies. (My parents took this as a sign that I was turning decadent, by losing track of what was necessary for Christian rectitude -- however, as Nietzsche points out, it was the Christianity itself that was the decadence. One does not live by "spirit" alone, but requires actual knowledge to get by.)
Australians still considered me quite immature many years later, when I got my first job. Only this time it struck me, you know, that the workplace bullying and the slights, and ongoing antagonisms that pivoted on my "identity" were actually majorly immature. I began to see the constant onslaught of snide remarks and belittlement as being a symptom of deep immaturity on a moral level. An insight struck me that such people who employed such tactics had a very suave and clever way of covering their bases and making themselves look good; but deep down they were deeply underdeveloped, had no ethical training, and saw reality in oversimplified terms, based on what they took to be their and my "identity".
Over the years, I have been able to piece together, bit by bit, some of the logic of this philosophy of identity, this morality of identity, which prevents people from looking beneath the surface to see the human who resides there. Much of what I have written on my blog goes towards that end.
It is not easy to understand a way of thinking that you were not brought up with. Just as many Australians find it hard enough to imagine that I was not brought up on a white horse with a birch to discipline the natives, I also find it hard to grasp the emotional importance that they attach to their identity politics. In particular, I don't see that the tendency to view others in terms of a fixed and immutable identity makes those who think in these terms particularly moral.
We have a long way to go.1View comments
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What influence does the continuing economic decline in Zimbabwe have on the
talks?
George Charamba: spokesperson for Robert Mugabe:
I don't know what you are terming as economic decline. In terms of the
stats, Barclays is declaring a dividend every year, so does Stanbic and
Zimplats. All the real players are sticking it out and doing brisk business.
The social condition of the native is on the decline. The condition of the
Zimbabwean black will remain the same for years from now, because it is
about who runs the economy. When [British Prime Minister] Gordon Brown wants
Tsvangirai to sign, he will sign.
"It's about power, stupid"
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-08-25-its-about-power-stupid
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But wasn't the point of the revolution in Zimbabwe to increase the economic and social status of the average native?
It seems odd to me that a spokeperson for Robert Mugabe would take what seems to be an outsider's economic gauge on Zimbabwe's economic interests. Perhaps this is intended as irony, which doesn't always translate so well on paper -- But, the proper response by Charamba would have been to account for the failure of the Chimurenga in bringing about an improvement in the status (economic and otherwise) of the average peasant.2View comments
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