My thinking is that we must move away from competing against other identity groups on the basis of our self-represented moral purity. This approach lends itself too easily to the ways of thinking of those who are comfortable within their positions in the power structures. After all, having power suffices, most of the time, to make anybody appear to be serene and pure, whereas those without power rant and rave and generally lack the ability to convince others --particularly those in power -- that their ranting and raving has any particular meaning. Thus they appear impure indeed, and are so to most practical purposes. As Bataille points out, they become the discarded refuse of society, which retains its moral feelings of serenity and purity by excluding certain people from involvement within the whole. (In "The Psychology of Fascism" Bataille shows that the inclusion within society of those who had been excluded by the bourgeois regime was used to vitalise the fascist movement.)
The emotional blackmail that bourgeois regimes hold over their citizens -- "Behave, and we just might let you in, one of these days" -- has no actual surety or concrete contract to back it up. It is as illusory as pie in the sky when we die. However, the promise of power can almost seem like power itself, a lot of the time, and this is what keeps people cooperating.
Fascism as a solution gives one more the impression of being chained at the ankles to your "gang". Still, walking in lockstep can seem like power, too, and it can be the form that power takes in many ways.
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Let me produce a Nietzschean aphorism.
The right-wingers premise in berating you is that you shouldn't say what you think because the people who may have to hear are very sensitive and delicately poised within a system of morality that has your best interests at heart. Should the indelicacy of some of your judgements reach their finely attuned ears, they might feel so pained and so anxious that they could lose their very zest for living. Therefore the majority of the populace have a right to be protected, by the right-winger, from ideas that could be harmful to them.
However all of these suppositions about the nature of the world are contradicted by the right-winger, and his own behaviour. In directing his aggression towards you in various ways, the right-winger is actually saying:
"The world is a very harsh and empty place, with no room for human concerns or delicate interaction whatsoever. I am determined to keep it that way by shutting you down. I insist that there should be no room for sensitive human interaction."0Add a comment
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I have had two selves -- which various events are now uniting into one self.
There is the self I grew up with, and the self of the new culture that I continued on with. These are hardly the same, and have not been united up until now.
The old self is Polyphemus. It was the self that become frozen solid, petrified, as in Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt, upon entering the modernising Greek culture. There was nothing in the new culture for it to identity with -- and so it turned into fossil, and could not grow or develop too much. There was no good soil for its roots, so it remained as it was, and then turned to stone.
Then there is the new self -- the green shoot that I sat in quiet rooms all day, growing. This was the new mind, and somehow the new body that would save me from the child victim of a traffic accident (which was how I pictured the psychical condition of my old self.) "Rest and be calm, there, beside the road, with your mangled bicycle," I said to the old self. "I'll be back. The minute I've grown a new self, or parts to prepare your mangled organs."
I've lived for too long with two facets. I can turn the one self over and find the other self. Only, I'm not able to understand in every sense what she is saying. A great deal of it makes sense: "I'm your feelings, the way you actually experience things. I am also, in large part, your body."
Yet there is a great deal that I cannot put into words, peculiar sensations that twist and turn within my gut, hard to undertand in terms of present realities, the adult context of my now existence, and the nature of the present established orders of things. It seems this child has no place in my adult life. A line has been drawn now in the sand, which separates childhood from adulthood completely. The child is quintessentially that which is verboten. And I see children and they are also verboten, much as my own childhood has been verboten. ( I speak to them, when it is necessary for me to do so, but cannot seem to understand them in a way that finds not threat in the association. I walk away.
"Zimbabwe".
Even the mention of it says "childhood" to me. I cannot think about the word, I cannot relate to it, except within the emotional frame of childhood memories -- those which I have come to accept as forbidden. I cannot mention Zimbabwe without cringing, thinking it an invitation for the superior cultural whip to descend -- as, so often, it does.
"Zimbabwe". It is a childish word like "sadza", like "hoohoo" (for insect), like "tummy" for stomach.
To me it is a word that resists adulthood and formulaic condescension about proper ways to do things "or else".
It brings back the former self -- the self who is shy and inarticulate, who knows best how to get along with others by respecting their awesome powers to be human, and hiding in a corner of their shadows.
My old school friends bring this mood back to me, more than anything else. They are still their own children and relate best in this way, whereas I, I've broken the promise, abandoned the former self to find help -- and never returned in the same way again.0Add a comment
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I see more and more these days, and more and more pieces of the shattered jigsaw of my earlier life start to creep into their positions.
I list my sins as they appear before me, creeping around, as day dawns and the light begins to sharpen:
1. I don't read closely enough. And perhaps all of my sins can be reduced and narrowed into this equation. I never have it seems, and close reading has been what was required of me -- to fit in. But I don't read closely from social situations, and I forget half of what is said to me, and thus I've blown my chances to get along in a nice mood of tranquility.
All of my sins can be reduced into that one formula -- the one recommended most fervently to women -- read yourself and those deemed your superiors closely. Track them carefully as if your life depended on it. And take them literally at their word, so that, should they depart from their word, you will have their very words to prove it, thus redeeming yourselves.0Add a comment
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So they captured me and put me on their boat -- me with my sunflower head and they with their advanced industrial culture. "You must learn new ways," said the Odysseuses. "We insist!"
I was alone and away from my home. What other option did I have, but to oblige them?
Odysseus Number 1 was more insistent than the others: "You are to refer to me as Nobody, as I have previously mentioned," he said. "You are to learn new cultural ways. Advanced format."
It was not sociable to yearn for my cave, and yet I did at this point. How could I learn new cultural ways at this advanced stage in my life? Yet all of them insisted. "Row for us and we will explain. Unique individualism. Fine format," they uttered in unison.
I wanted to know more. These people were truly mysterious. Perhaps they could help me after all, just as I was willing to lend my services to them?
The suggestion that I was willing to go along with their mysterious plan seemed to make them smile -- in unison.
"First we teach you advanced cultural way," they said. Then: "THWACK!" One of them had hit me upside the head. "This will help you to learn quickly," he added for my reassurance.
Since I really wanted to learn from them, pain was no object for me. I would learn as quickly or as slowly as they required.
"Advanced cultural way. Number one lesson. Your culture is very evil. You too!" screeched the one whom I had dubbed Odysseus 7.
I agreed with him implicitly. What else was I to do?
Contemporary ways and up-to-date morality were the first few things I knew I had to learn.
"THWACK!!!" came the warning stick, lest my attentions were being driven from the task at hand.
"Number one lesson. You are colonial practitioner. We disagree this practice in contemporary era!!" yelled the Odysseuses in my cauliflower ear.
"THWACK, THWACK!" came the stick, teaching me another resounding lesson.
"We have high minds," whispered one of the Nobodies in my ear, consoling me that all the torture would pay off finally.
"We can't stand evil in our midst," admitted another, sounding vaguely Dickension. I wondered, though, whether or not he might be crying crocodile tears for me.
"We believe in higher moral practices," consoled a third. "It's only right. We are willing to take you in and admit that you are the same as us, but there are just a few rules you have to abide by, first."
'THWACK" came the stick again -- reminding me that we were not back on the island any more. Here were people with true values to profess. I was encountering the internal shock of my first real encounter with serious people of real moral fervour.
These people meant well, but there was surely something strange about their manner. I wanted to know more about them and their ways.
"We have gentler, better ways of organising ourselves," said one of the creatures, matter of factly. Your ways are comparatively crude and barbaric. Ours are advanced, intelligent, and highly intellectual, too."
I thought that what this Odysseus said to me must be true, if only because he sounded so sincere about it.
"Tell me more!" I insisted.
(A smile came over their collective face.)
"We'll teach you how to leap when we say leap," they said. "However, this will take some time!"5View comments
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...because we all dream.
Freud said that a dream is a small psychosis.
However, without that small psychosis, we would truly go mad, as empirical science has shown.
Thus we all have recourse to the spirit world and to madness for the sake of self renewal.2View comments
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One of the problems with the most cutting edge contemporary consciousnesses that this late, great stage of moth-eaten capitalism has produced: there is no point in engaging with its denizens.
The conventional subject who is struggling with a pre-Oedipal disorder is in no position to relinquish the possibility -- indeed, the imaginary supposition -- that he is everything. The narcissistic posture is as follows: "There is no subject position that I cannot theoretically occupy. Don't hedge me in."
One has to concede then, that this is true, to the degree that the subject believes it to be true. "Neither reason, nor my behaviour, nor anything contingent can hedge in the undefinable essence that is my pure being!" asserts the subject. "You shall refer to me by no name, for I am theoretically everything!"
Nothing I can do or say can either address him or his postures, since language is a mere epiphenomon of this pure being of his. I can respond to him only in the same vein that he addresses me.
"I am everything, and don't define me or essentialise me!" he asserts.
"I hear you clearly," I respond. "My understanding is that I'm to address you henceforth as 'Nobody'. "2View comments
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Reading more psychoanalytic texts, yesterday, I didn't really understand before the relationship that some people have to their superegos. I have found, in my own life, that it is possible to tame the superego, just as it is possible to tame a circus tiger and get it to do your bidding. It was Nietzsche who first gave me this idea, in Genealogy of Morals, wherein he suggests that conscience can be trained to enforce the opposite values to those of conventional Christianity.
So, from experience I have learned to know the proclivities of my own superego -- and thus to tame it. I understand that when I am tired from applying genuine and intense amounts of energy towards completing a particularly well defined goal, it is in the aftermath of this effort that superego tends to pounce: "Maybe you could have done this or that better? You know, you are not perfect! What's up with that? You've achieved something, but is it really as much as you would have wanted to achieve?"
As Nietzsche and Freud (if I recollect rightly) both manage to point out, the more you give in to superego ( or the "ascetic ideal", in Nietzsche's terms) the more hairsplitting becomes its demands. The moment of fatigue also has a cultural origin, in terms of its meaning, for me, since I was never permitted, by my father, to express fatigue. It was considered by him to be a sign of complete mental and physical deterioration, something unconscionable, to express oneself in relation to this normal physiological sensation.
To keep superego at bay, I generally try to avoid becoming fatigued -- or if I do become so, I grit my teeth and close my eyes and ride the wave of feeling slightly off-kilter, until normal energy levels are restored. What I don't do is to make the mistake of believing everything my superego tells me when I am in a delapidated condition. In this way, and in others, I assert my power over my own life and tame the superego.
Yet, recently, I have found that there are those who see their superego not as an abritrary and officious sparring partner, but as an ally. It seems that they use the certainty of the ideas generated from the superego in order to calm down their profound levels of anxiety. For them, superego performs a role of filling in the emptiness they feel inside, by giving them some prescriptions to follow that make them feel less alone. Many people, it would seem, feel that they cannot do without the feeling of being dominated by their superegos. To even try to do things differently would make them feel extremely terrified and even more alone. So they submit to all sorts of rules that may be extemely arbitrary, in order to avoid this feeling.
Perhaps this attitude of fear is indeed the anchor of much dogmatic religiosity. The ability to abide by rules is a palliative, in the case of some people, to make tolerable an overwhelming sinking feeling. No wonder those whose character structures are like this start to panic when another value system (than that of right wing fundamentalism) seems to be in the making. They are afraid of losing their 'souls'.1View comments
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And I gazed out at the world from my cave at my newcomers -- but they were comers whom I'd seen before. They all had matted hair like that of a lion, and they'd come to see my in my cave in order to write notes about me -- the exotic creature that I am!
And I engaged them with the discourse of my civilisation:
"Who are you, and where do you come from? And once you leave what sorts of notes will you write about me? Will you, for instance, reference my one eye, and note about my eating habits and my proximity to the band of brothers?" I enquired.
"What kinds of ideas would you like to take from me?"
But this visitor was like the one before, and even more sullen.
"My name is Odysseus," he said. "But you can't mention that. It is essentialising. The point I'm trying to stab home is that I insist that you refer to me and mine as "Nobody" -- and there could be penalties for disobeying my instructions!"
He was like the one before, and the one before him, all visiting my cave with the same sullen assertion on their lips, intent on having their colonial adventure. What good was it sharing with them my sheep and wine when their propensity to stab me in the eye was overwhelming?
This one would soon be leaving, too, for having supped, he would be finding new hyperactivity, and I, on the other hand, would be getting quite sleepy.
I covered my eye, as my grandmother and greatgrandmother had learned to do before me. The stabbing would soon be coming, but they couldn't help it -- that is what those "Nobodies" tended to do!
"Come quickly, come quickly, my brothers! Nobody is stabbing me again!" I called out in my fitful sleep. But no-one came.
It was a good thing, I consoled myself, despite my sorrow, that at least I had avoided naming names, and had thus committing the academic sin of positing Western society as a "monolith". Nonetheless, in regard to its guilty self-awareness of its colonial past and what I represented to it as a young "colonial", those of the West had expressed that they knew Western society to be "one".1View comments
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