Much to see!

After Wednesday, I'm going to go away for a few days. I need to drain the academentia out of my veins.

Mike has suggested that we leap forth onto this railway line

Presumably there is much to see in Mandurah.

Very unpleasant indeed!

Here are a few of my unpleasanter things!

Raindrops on dragons and snot-holes on kittens......

@@@

I should be happy as I've adequately achieved a wad of work. However, there is never an excuse not to embrace misery (and actually I find my brain often compensates for the negative in life by generating positive images and vice versa!)

So here are some things I don't like:

1. The dream I had last night. I was going to start a shop on one of the fields of land available. But everybody had bought their portion of land to start their shops, and I was late to do so and didn't have the money. The University had built models of my products, but they had started to send me invoices, too. I hadn't agree to that, and yet here they were. The final invoice was for over 8 grand, for models of my products. But now I knew I had no shop to sell them from.

2. Danny Green dancing (with the stars). It's good for people to try various things, but this boggles the mind. Please. Don't.

3. Whereas September was previously constantly disappearing from the calculations as to how much time I had to do things this year, on Saturday, it seemed to my befuddled mind that July probably came after August. I find that heavy abstract thinking drains everything away from what's required for logical, conventional thought.

shamanism today

the raw and the cooked


Identity is a cultural epistemological system that stops you (as a unique being) from experiencing the world. To accept a schematic identity form as one's own is to no longer experience life in the raw. One's life is then mediated, precooked, even prechewed, often predetermined by social mores. You then experience life as a generic type, but not as a unique person.

Shamanism is associated with "wildness". Why? Because it is an approach to life that aims for what is raw, uncooked, undigested (and perhaps, to some degree, it even aims for what is undigestable).

The 50s housewife

It can be hard to understand others' complex motivations due to the invisible style of management  in vogue in schools today. This also leads to the undergraduate postmodernist's feeling that he or she is simply a brain in a vat.

Advanced behavioural management techniques render invisible the autocratic arm of the system and uses the techniques of a simpering 1950s housewife to impress upon those whom it wishes to bend to its will that what it has in mind is really "your idea!"

 "Would you like this pain to continue? Or wouldn't you prefer to be rewarded?"

Let lunatics resist as much as they will -- it only goes to prove that they are lunatics or masochists! They must enjoy pain very much in order not to give in to the seductions of the smooth operator.

So that is how we all end up suckling on the nipples of the system.

Then along comes someone with a more autonomous mode of thought -- and we lack the skills and sophistication for dealing with them.

They don't make any sense so long as they are not suckling on the nipples of the system.

feeling threatened?

There are those who think that nothing is real; that every claim to truth is simply an empty postulation or what they term "an interpretation". Perhaps this is a misreading of certain strands of Continental philosophy or theory, which seek to move the individual away from assuming that there is only one universal truth for all time, that applies to everybody. To understand that truth is relative, that is it perspectival, that it is based on variable aspects concerning the viewer and their situation, however, does not amount to truth being merely an interpretation. It is by no means just this. That is like assuming that because you cannot have your fixed and eternal truth, you must succumb to sophistry and yourself be a sophist. You must be the victim of having no truth at all.

I have mentioned earlier in various posts that those who are prone to binary thinking are not the most well advised cookies in the container. If you move from an idea of the absolute unassailable nature of truth to a position that truth is absolutely relative, your cookie starts to crumble. (Actually in a way you are just switching the on-off switch within the same paradigm you started with. You haven't actually gone anywhere, in terms of your intellectual development.)

I see that those how have of late felt the encroachment on their social space of various progressive movements -- feminism, for instance -- tend to try to defend their threatened feelings by flicking the light switch. Having no idea how feminism is addressing real issues, these defenders of the status quo are inclined to feel, for the first time, a threat to their sense of the "absolute truth" concerning the righteousness of the status quo. Instead of understanding WHY it is necessary for feminist to attack the status quo, these individuals, feeling threatened, revert to the adopting an absolute relativism concerning their "truths". (It becomes "your opinion" versus "my opinion" in their own minds.)

To have such an undeveloped approach to truth and reality is to remain in a very shaky position. Without an understanding of truth that goes way beyond opinion, you face the world like a boxer who has not learned how to develop his or her stance.

This is why so many of those whose first inclination it is to defend the status quo feel threatened. They haven't put the intellectual work in to afford not to.

Bataille as shaman

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.

more on the psychology of trolls

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.

The Daemonic

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, adiscriminatory 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. For the 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 a spontaneous healing.

But I cannot help them there. Perhaps I am the ultimate sadist in that I cannot bestow upon them the prejudicial feelings they expect, so that they may kick and strain against them, and believe themselves to have confronted the evil that assails them in the world. (The ultimate sadist, it's said, ignores the pleas of his masochistic interlocutor to acknowledge him through bestowing pain).

on eating

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.

On "not getting it".

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".

skills and insights -- patriarchal style!

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.

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))


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.

Overcoming self-overcertainty and how ideologues are often wrong

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?"

My views pertain to Yin and Yang, or rather more generally to 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 have also failed 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.)

Tomorrow

I really need to take time out to train. I spent today doing little. I think a bottle brush tree is attacking me -- either that, or I still have the trail end of my cold. It probably is allergic, though. Ah, me. It's good to take time to relax.

throwing around a bit of identity

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.

ZANU-PF's extraordinary statements

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


*****************

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.

Blind man's bluff

As Gregory's writing on Derrida (see the post below) says, those who subscribe to logocentric thinking also subscribe to binary logic:

In binary logic, any being or entity is defined by what it is not, "which would identify it as this rather than that" (Derrida, 2004, p.143). For example, an apple is defined by how its shape, color, and texture differ from other fruit, such as a banana. A fruit is either an apple or a banana. There is no in-between. Binary oppositions maintain an either/or if -then proposition and are thereby able to eliminate doubt and ambiguity and to establish a certainty of meaning.

Do you understand how this works, politically?

Try to imagine the king of the castle perched upon his heights. His is a binary world in which he occupies the position determined as superior. He is for instance, white to your black, man to your woman, right thinking to your erroneous tendencies.

Such a king of the castle has no need to expand his knowledge base. So far as he's concerned, he's already got it all figured out. He simply asks for things in a reasonable way. And however he asks for things, that is automatically a reasonable way -- insofar as he is white to your black, man to your woman, and reason to your madness or unintelligiblity. If he were to leap in crazy and gesticulating fashion screaming nastily into your ear, he is still the white to your black, still the man to your woman, still the reason that chastises your refusal to hear.

The dirty rascal sits below -- far below the place where the king and his castle reside. Metaphysically they are black to his white, woman to his man, silliness and immaturity to his well reasoned nature. Your attempt to argue with the unfairness of this situation only makes you out to be: blacker, more womanly, self-evidently lacking in good reason and sufficient common sense.

What to do about this arrangement?

My advice is not to attempt to reason with the man. Don't play the argumentative game of dirty rascal, either (that's expected of you!) Just walk away.

Binary metaphysics is actually quite weak when it cannot throw its net of mastery over the world. It succeeds in its bluff only when you look up to pay attention to the man.

But I have other things to do in life. Complex, magnificent things. So do you.

transitional objects

See pp 528-529 in Marc Howard Ross ,Political Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1995,Psychocultural Interpretation Theory and Peacemaking in Ethnic Conflicts .

It concerns “transitional objects” and it is what I have always known, as an adult, concerning my different way of processing “the concrete” (or, I should rather say, the simple, sensory) aspects of my environment. I don’t process these in the same way as most Australians do at all.

My transitional objects -- those that remind me that I belong to the world, that I have a reassuring place in it, and that I can feel secure -- are things like the early morning breeze (reminds me of travelling to school on my bike), wood smoke in the early evening as night closes in, long fields of clipped grass and the virility of sports fields, hedged with trees, polite greeting rituals, the sound of roosters crowing, the feeling that we are all striving for a certain rhythmic harmony in life.

the "mystical" nature of intersubjectivities

Marechera's shamanism is actually a metacritical approach to the experience of intersubjectivity and the strong political ramifications entailed in having intersubjective experiences.

A naturalistic feeling of intersubjectivity in adult spheres (which is not earned by verbal communication) rides upon the so-called pre-Oedipal (very early childhood) processing and pre-Oedipal functions, psychologically akin to the ocean's hidden undercurrents, that influence our social behaviour. These include: dissociation, ego splitting, projective identification,and magical thinking. These pre-Oedipal functions come into existence on the basis of primordial mutuality and nurturance as well as on the basis of a primordial struggle between the infant's feelings concerning its needs of gratification and the infant's idea of the mother, represented in its psyche as both sameness and as primordial "other". They are a way of mediating and resolving these tensions at the level of the bodily push and pull the infant experiences in relation to its mother, as it seeks to assure its own survival. They enable an immature consciouness to reassure itself that all is well, under variable circumstances. They function to create the feeling of wellbeing that will regulate the infant's nervous system in a way that best assures survival. Thus pre-Oedipal intersubjectivity is a mystical basis for fictions -- with very direct materal consequences -- which serves a survival function.

We experience the non-rational currents of vestigal pre-Oedipal dynamics driving and determining our directions within the social sphere (as animals experience the pull of forces that drives their migratory patterns), as we react to them at a pre-rational or intuitive level according to what feels natural. Thus, in certain kinds of societies, being cruel to women and blacks just FEELS natural. This is facilitated by ideology, obviously. However ideology cannot cause anything to FEEL natural -- although it may give well-sounding reasons as to why some mode of prejudice or discrimination is indeed natural. What makes it FEEL natural is the facility of intersubjectivity, driven by pre-Oedipal dynamics.

Intersubjectivity has an effect on the pre-conscious level which is read subliminally. Just as the communication between the young baby and its mother is preverbal, so pre-Oedipal dynamics (vestiges of our past manner of relating as a child) are also registered non-verbally. (Although language may be used to convey their meanings, pre-Oedipal messages normatively and logically entailed in pure linguistics.)

Needless to say, the pre-Oedipal realm is not experienced by most people metacritically. Marechera's writing, however is different, and I will argue that it is shamanistic in that he ascertains the hidden currents driving people in particular political directions (shamanistic knowledge). His writing also tries to use knowledge concerning how pre-Oedipal dynamics work, to redirect the currents underlying society into different forms that serve to exert intersubjective pressure that will bring about the writer's preferred anarchistic model of society. This metacritical approach -- which ascertains and redirects the hidden social currents --is what is entailed in Marechera's attempt at a shamanistic healing of societies.

limits of freedom in bourgeois states

The problem with liberal democratic systems is their top down methodology for handling social data. This leads to an undermining of the social dialectic that in instrinsic to a participatory grass roots democracy. The assumption that whatever phenomena takes place within such a system is indicative of the will of the people is where the dialectic is lost, and idealistic postulations have been put in their place. This produces the idea that the status quo is acceptable -- but that, in consideration of the acceptability of this status quo, behaviour can still be tweaked from above to produce maximum effectiveness in relation to serving the state apparatus and its functions.


Top down control, even that based on ostensibly "objective" statistics and their ostensibly "objective" interpretation, lead to manipulation from above, as groups of people have their environments tweaked for improvement. The objectification of the citizens and their needs in this way is the way in which full citizen rights are undermined. To be manipulated from above as an object is not to have one's full subjectivity acknowledged. One's subjectivity is instead viewed as a function of one's a priori place within the system -- particularly in terms of being a member of this or that demographic. Thus, a very watered down subjectivity is acknowledged, but not one that embodies that side of the dialectic that pushes against current social norms with a conscientious idea to change them. Rather, the bourgeois notion of the individual is that he or she is quintessentially passive and objectively analysable without the capability of offering resistance to such top-down analysis.

Leslie Fiedler

Hattie sent me this.

It has some resonances with Marechera's Black Sunlight, which was, however published much later. The musical rather than verbal/linguistic turn (blind Marie on her ukulele as the metaphor for the text itself), plus the embrace of madness as refusal of social norms. Yet Marechera's writing, whilst having this "postmodernist" flavour outlined by Fiedler, also has its quintessentially Zimbabwean references, mood and message -- so is actually much more full-bodied emotionally and intellectually than Fiedler's depiction of the Western cultural trend would imply.

I do see the beginnings of the postmodernistic attitude detailed in her writing -- which frankly, I have never understood. This postmodernistic attitude of passive defiance as a form of rebellion does seem to correspond with a notion of what femininity is or might assumed to be. Yet actually, this notion of postmodernism's does seem all too rigid to me in its masculinist assumption that there are only two gender roles to begin with and also with its idea that it is more fragrant to embrace "femininity" than its ostensible masculine opposite. To me that is naive, since it ought to be recognised -- far more radically -- that there are as many possible genders as there are humans.

either-or versus both-and

There has been much said in contemporary texts concerning the way that an ostensibly "postmodernist" position enables one to avoid an "either-or" position (supposedly the narrowly rational approach) to decision making, in favour of a "both-and" approach.

I have reservations that "postmodernist" is the best term to apply to the latter mode of processing ideas. "Postmodernist" here implies that one has found the limits in Modernistic processing, and is thus taking an alternative line. Yet one may come upon a "both-and" approach through pre-Modernist thinking -- which is to say, if one had never experienced the discipline of Modernistic linear thinking, to begin with.

Either-or thinking is a way of telling untruths to oneself and others. Organic beings(as humans are) are variously all things to one another, depending on the roles that one is called to play. But either-or thinking demands something impossible of an organic creature -- that one be something not organic but mechanical: that is, "this quality" but "not that".

Either-or thinking is the province and speciality of trolls everywhere, who take delight in pronouncing, "I have found evidence that you at this, and therefore you can never, ever, ever, be that!"

But the troll's way of seeing things is necessarily methodologically inaccurate. The troll always thinks he sees something, upon catching a glimmer of this or that. But the troll effectively avoids seeing the whole -- seeing the organic quality of his changing object.

How much stupidity would we get over all at once, if we could recognise that most people have both {this quality} and {the opposite quality} in various measures. Nobody is wholly good or evil, right or wrong, masculine or feminine.

It should be possible to see this.

The primitive mentality of viewing wholes and parts

The idea of the pre-Oedipal involves the idea of ‘the whole’ -- such that one sees oneself as part of the whole – the mother and child together being experienced as an ecological and political whole. A pre-Oedipal perspective (in this same vein) also leads to seeing others as part of the same ontology as oneself. Thus others appear as “other selves”, rather than as those whose trajectories of life are necessarily independent and detached. Quite simply, if other lives intersect with one’s own, then the subjective nature of one’s perception of them makes them “other selves”. Magical thinking, projective identification, dissociation and splitting are all functions within a pre-Oedipal way of ascertaining the world, and in terms of the greater logic of the whole, parts of me may become parts of you and vice versa . In other words, the pre-Oedipal mode of perception employs psychodynamics which shift around parts of identities, within a basically unstable, but unified 'whole'. Deleuze and Guattari make a great deal of this, in that they see the creation of "part objects" or "useful functions of a person" as being inherent to the way capitalism operates.

Nietzsche was right!

It is psychological passivity that makes people unwell, that causes them to fume and fester and catch social diseases (like racism, sexism and antisemitism).

You look at any passive movement, any reactionary movement, any movement that fails to understand the possibility for social transformation, and there lurks ressentiment, beneath the floorboards. The self justification of passivity is the failure to embrace social transformation.

Fire and brimstone shoot forth wherever social transformation is taking place. However, here it is too hot for germs, diseases and creatures that lurk in stagnant waters, like liver flukes.

It's such a shame that Nietzsche rhetoric concerning "strength" did not amount to most people perceiving this.

Instead "strength" became a code for a reactionary masculinism, justifying the petulant rage of mental two-year olds against the necessary social restrictions imposed by their mummies.

Be who you are!

There is something I have learned -- and let us for the sake of a name, refer to it as a mental Buddhism. This isn't an ideology. This isn't a dogma. It's a state of mind. The thing I have learned is the value of being who you are.

In an age of identity politics, this is counterintuitive thinking and feeling for most. We are supposed to stop at the level of the demographic we are defined to be in. Or, we are to be passionately imbued with a notion that by struggling and bartering within the system that regulates a social hierarchy, we can improve our relative status vis-a-vis others, and come out all shiny, pure and pink.

Both of these approaches are dead ends to enriching subjective development.

In sparring I have found, you can't inflate your presence. You simply have to work with the one you have. Trying to impress yourself and others that you're more than that uses up vital energy that could be used for effective attack and defence. An egoistic approach also blinds you to your own weaknesses, and allows you to replace bluster and positive thinking for hard training and preparation.

It doesn't matter who you are. You need to be who you are in order to act effectively and to grow. Others will try to take you down on the basis of their image of you -- but they are putting themselves in jeopardy when they react to a mirage.

Please let me think

It strikes me that within the general populace and the modes of feeling that arise from within it, there is generally a misunderstanding about what an intellectual is. Too often the role of intellectual is confused with that of priest: Viz. The intellectual has to be in the prophetic position of being right all the time, and must represent in his or her behaviour a good model of morality. Failing this, it might be presumed, the "intellectual" has no intellect at all, and is just a pseudo-intellectual.

But all of this is crude and simplistic assumption, no more. An intellectual is not a priest, and is not bound by the need to make estimates that will suit the general public's needs -- although that might happen. An intellectual is rather someone who has the capacity to think in a nuanced and complex manner.

What she thinks or why she thinks are matters that do not directly concern the general public. No matter what the public feels. The public is only the indirect beneficiary of intellectual thought.

I'm archery old chap!

You Are Archery

You are a bit of a traditionalist. You like old fashioned things with deep traditions. You also like to see the result of your accomplishments right in front of you. If practice makes perfect, that's fine by you. You like to practice a skill.

What Olympic Sport Are You?

Life in the bubble

One of the problems that makes it so hard to tell the truth about anything is that the doctrine of metaphysical individualism gets in the way. You don't know that doctrine? Well, it's the one that says that we are all actually walking around in protected shields or bubbles, and that what one person says or does doesn't influence another, because reality doesn't work that way.

Sure you may be sad, you may be angry, you may be gruff and bemused by other people, but don't let it get you down, because acknowledging an influence is actually a sign of weakness. You are giving in to something.

Well, what these bubble shields are supposed to protect us from, according to this mode of reasoning, is abject madness and decrepitude. Give in just a little, and all at once it is upon you -- this madness, this craziness, this deplorable, catastrophic state of being.

The influence of others also lurks within the wings. It can't be kept at bay for too long. Take a deep breath -- and repent! You have already drawn some of the flavour of the madness in. In the early mornings, in the evenings when you're able to relax, the fragility of the bubble beckons, its edges crisp and melting, the warm air pressing in, pressing in.

Watch out! An influence! A warm hand presses in, presses in, just as you gasp for air again, and cry out at the claustriphobic nature of your being.

Purity awaits you at the door; knocking madly, begging to transport you on to cleaner and more solitary environs. You give in -- your bubble newly secured with masking tape.

This is reality. And you are unrepentant. The bubble floats on beyond the door, you inside, avoiding madness. The bubble of your mind is bouyant, moving on into the workplace, where it seats itself behind the desk and asks the maid to bring one coffee. (The bubble brain is no colonial slouch and has his quite contemporary creature comforts.)

Madness presses all around, but bubble brain eschews madness. This is the new doctrine of individualism for you.

Bubble brain names it "self responsibility".

birthday gratings

Please eat a lot of sadza on your birthday!

those who lack as individuals

It really is as if people presume that they are they are the manifest agents of the invisible hand of the market. That’s what gets me about the weirdness of the current cultural fashion. Whilst they are acting as if they are the invisible hand — generally in the sense of acting sadistically, although sometimes masochistically — those that do so clearly do not perceive themselves as individuals at all, but as abstract forces acting and being acted upon. That is why they do not expect you to take it “personally”.

But of course, if you are not bound to see the world in these same terms, what you see are individuals who have temporarily decided that they are “forces” and not exactly individuals (who will have to answer for their actions later in a personal sense). You see the evasion of responsibiilty for having a self, and then the return to a certain posturing as an individual with unique qualities, and it all seems very funny.

A true individual, of course, would remain one from this moment to the next, and not posture as an abstract force, beyond his or her own control, whenever that was convenient.

--


So I think I’m starting to nail it though — how someone can SEEM okay on the outside, but when it comes down to it, their personality turns out to have been eaten through with holes. It’s like they see themselves as an individual, too, but actually they’re the Borg, and should not be trusted.

These days, my feelings are very finely tuned to detect this all too familiar aberration from human centred being. I ask myself, “did I come away from the interaction feeling like I’d just spoken to a human, in the deep sense of it?” Very often there is something human there, but also something resigned and empty. You feel like you are touching an “almost human”, someone who will sway in the wind. That isn’t so much the problem, but that they may betray you by yeilding to the path of least resistance. (And they will feel “strong” if they get to express their sadism in the process.)

But people who do martial arts, people who do adventure sports, most of the black people I speak to from Africa (and somewhat fewer of the whites) seem to return a feeling of reliability and substance. Those are the ones whose company I choose.

That strange woman who I do not know

I can tell the sort of person I was supposed to have grown up to be, had my personality been quite different, and had I grown up in Zimbabwe. It's how my parents act towards me.

From their reactions to this image of a daughter that they superimpose upon me, I see that this kind of person might have been quite weak-willed, easily frayed at the edges and inclined to bend to a strong patriarchal will. I would have been excitable concerning simple things -- certainly nothing of an intellectual sort, but rather the prospect of travel, get-togethers of a conventional sort, and perhaps now and then (but hardly often) buying things of a conventional sort, which suit what is expected of me, and don't cause me to stand out more than a little.

The person my parents address as if it were me has to find her niche within a group that will work to make her feel comfortable. Since she has no intellect to speak of, just a few eccentric notions or pretensions, she should aim low in life, and accept whatever dominance comes to bare.

This strange, strange person is easily persuaded by a firm patriarchal line. The strength of the voice in its adamance persuades her, rather than the actual content of the speech. (When she pretends otherwise, it is because her negative emotions have simply run away with her, depriving her of rationality.)

This person is obviously very strange. She says things, but she really means something else. It's her way of wriggling out of what she really means: to say something that makes no sense whatsoever, until it is re-analysed in the cold, clear patriarchal light of day. Once under this light it then becomes apparent that whatever she meant, the deeper meaning was a fear of the degree of righteousness entailed in patriarchal formality, and a withdrawal from the firm hand of goodness and clear thinking.

Apart from these outright complexities, this person is quite simple -- liking the things she's always liked, (and on occasion disliking one or two things, too). She dislikes the things she's always disliked. Supposing she didn't like something when she was eight years old -- well, that is the thing she still doesn't like now. The simple things she used to like when she was seven are the things she likes today. Today, however, she confuses the matter by overlaying her simple likes and dislikes with a layer of complexity which means nothing but nonsense, and requires a patriarchal decoding device for it to make some sense. This is evidence of perversity, which destroys the innocence of who she really is.

In all things, this person is very strange and irritable -- but somehow exceedingly easy to read.

She is destined to fail, again and again, because she doesn't understand the parental benevolence that is directed towards the simple matter of helping her to succeed, despite herself.

bad will

I find that what bothers me about postmoderns and all those whom I consider to be present day decadents is that meaning seems to float around the vicinity of the speakers without those involved effectively pinning it down in terms of context and authorial intent.

Surely this approach results from undisciplined thinking?

Or worse? From bad will towards oneself, or others, or one's circumstances?

magic in dissent

There is magic in unwitting, accidental or forced social dissent. That is Marechera's message to us in Scrapiron Blues. There are metaphysical principles at work: Chaos returns us to the primeval soup, which contains more possibilities than we can actually think, for regeneration. Thus, the competing social pressures that push us into a kind of madness actually open up a hole or gap within conventional reality for that which was previously unimaginable to appear.

Societies victims, therefore, occupy the privileged position of sitting upon the epicenter of socially destabilised meaning. They are bound to be mad; but they are also bound to be magical. They live beyond and between the regulating forces of rationality, beyond that which can be rationally imparted using regular language. Rather than screening their reality through a system of conventional norms and abstract concepts, they have touched unmediated reality itself -- (the noumena, in Kant's terms, or the traumatic Real as per Zizek and Lacan.) Such an experience can be felt as a visceral shaking, separating one from one's habitual modes of processing reality -- thus instigating different emerging perspectives.

This view underlies the approach of Marechera in Scrapiron Blues, whereby those who are economically, socially and physically under duress -- eg Jane in "Dreams wash walls" ( p 6, 7) and Tonderai's father (p 195 - 198) in "The Concentration Camp" -- have direct access to the spirit world. In actual fact, their imaginations take off, which enables them to perform superhuman feats of endurance (Tonderai's father under duress of torture) and defiance (Jane sees accidents that are not there, and in turn is seen as a ghost).

The other day [Jane] had a fight with a dream that refused to come. The dream was critically injured and when Jane took it to hospital she could not understand why the doctor and all the nurses could not see the severe injuries and gave her a sedative and phone Tony to come and take her home. But Tony said he was too busy washing the blood from the walls to be able to come and the doctor drove her home instead. Was there a one-plus-one somewhere?

And there was the other dream that had an accident and she had to phone the garage for the breakdown truch. The breakdown truck driver arrived within five minutes. Jane was delighted.

"You are very prompt," she said brightly.

The truck driver wildly looked around. He croaked: "But ma'am, where ... ?"

Jane pointed. The driver turned. There was nothing but the brittle, bitterly cold winter night. Hairs standing on end, the driver leapt back into his truck and with a scream of gears and shriek of tires backed away and was soon a glo-worm speck screeching down the road. Jane shook her head in disgust, puzzled. ( p 6-7)

It is clear that those who perceive a different than conventional reality, due to their traumas which cause them to have belief in their dreams, represent a destabilisation of reality for those who see only conventional things.

Tonderai's father stores up language as his "burial ship" by refusing to speak about what he knows, under torture. He is like dracular in his coffin in the basement of the ship, being carried away by the waters of life, to a future portended as death and rebirth as a liberation hero.

Sailing,
The sooty palm leaves its print
In the police stations of the galaxy;
The voice yet to sound already had echoed
In the streets of Soweto;
The sky's bullet-blue noon
Has tightened upon the trigger,
My burial ship, The Wordhorde,
Wrought from tough hardwood word ...
Sails... ( p 196)

The negative and frightening associations Marechera attaches to the qualities of his folk heros tilts the balance of power in their favour, and away from political and social conventionalism.

Surviving whole

It's easy enough these days to hold a belief that reality is something we have control over. It flatters us to think that way. Like the notion of "survival of the fittest" it is a convenient myth, which simplifies our understanding of what's out there and makes it seem less threatening, more susceptible to our personal control.

Yet, I wonder how far faith in this convenient principle (of mind over matter) can be taken, by most people. There has to come a point when the urge to flatter oneself by believing in the greatest possible range and depth of one's own mental power over matter gives way to realisation that there are things out there that menace with one, despite the immensity of one's personality and will.

"Survival of the fittest" along with the feeling that reality is a mental (rather than a material) construct, is a view that emerges out of modes of life that are incredibly easy, which make no contact with anything threatening that does not appear to come from one's own mind. Such a view of the world evolves from spending time in plush, air-conditioned supermarkets, from travelling around buffered from the world in shady limousines, from travelling in only the well-worn passages of the anthill of life. To hold fast onto such an ideology, one must never experience anything disruptively real -- not the bulldozer smashing down one's home, not the sunlight cutting through the synthetic breeze.

It is imperative to live as if the reality not created by one's mind does not exist. One must be the creator and originator of all things -- a veritable brain in a vat -- in order to believe in the most flattering ideas concerning oneself, and one's place within the universe.

But this view denourishes one, and deprives one of a more complex existence. The hardships of life thus beckon -- desiring to give one complexity and to replenish marrow. In order to encourage such hardships, one should simply relinquish, just a little, the fervid intensity of belief in oneself.

Zimbabwe's prospects / Marechera's shamanism

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/contemporarySHMN.htm

dreamatic

Weird shapes in my sleep last night - which began with praticing some subtle magic with some gypsies or hippies, and then went onto the conference I am fated to attend, wherein I met the administrator of it all, who was somehow like the Olympic boxer I saw, who had won his match with his big punch. Only the punch was some form of superior magic.

Much to be hoped for.

needing the negative

The major difference between the culture I grew up within and the sense of the culture around me today, is that we had a higher tolerance for, and endurance of the negative aspects of living.
Today I seek out the negative from its lure where it hides away from the majority. I pursue its velvet hand in martial arts training. I seek it out from where it snores in pursuing the kind of knowledge that is hard to gain -- that is defined by experiences on the peripheries of social life.
I cannot stand the numbing creeping feeling I get when everything becomes too easy, when going with the flow seems more logical than fighting against it.
Some suggest that life for me should be easy -- that I could more easily dissolve myself into a numbing femininity with much permission, than could a male. However, such a numbing route leads to an automatic and immediate sickness for me.   I lose touch with my original sense of being that way -- born into the violence of an African war.  My character structure was formed by this war and by the psychological states produced by it.   To lose touch too much with my origins means losing touch with myself.

I'm really not hard to understand but may seem to be so!

I'm not that hard to understand. It is the often and regular backwardness of present day social reality that doth make it seem so.

I don't do tit-for-tat -- the little street jossle, and mode of feigned alarm when the crowd pushes against me as it makes its way to nowhere. I don't hit back in those circumstances. But I do wait. I pay back, in general.

It has always been this way for me: repaying good for good and evil for evil. (If I am behaving toward you in some strange and yet very particular way, check your own record for behaviour toward me in the past.)

What happens to you is a feature of what you, yourself, have somehow decided.

misogyny as a retreat from reality

Unlike the shaman, whom I have argued elsewhere, retreats only temporarily into the magical realm in order to retrieve better tools for practical living, the modern day misogynist retreats into this realm for good.

The spectre of the adult female frightens him so much that he retreats to a stage of development where he feels that he will be unharmed. This early mode of development is, as Sherry Salman points out, a dissociative mode of the pre-Oedipal self.

The misogynist has certainly made his retreat. In the regressive mode he hopes to find safety and security at once. Yet, he finds he cannot do without women. So, women re-enter his picture, this time as mothers. The pre-Oedipal self wants to be cared for and assured that all is well. Above all, it DEMANDS it. "You OWE me this!" it screams to every passing female. "I need to be loved, and cared for, and attended to!"

In this dissociated condition, its seems to the one who screams thus that he is calling from a state of pure benevolence, goodness and light. It is his inherent righteousness that enables him to make such a call for the attentions of others. Truth be told, however, he is also a little self-disgusted. "I just shat myself -- and YOU made me do it!!" he proclaims to those he wants to enrol to do the task of mother.

At other times, he is more sure of himself: "I am the superman," he proclaims. Magical thinking of this sort enables him to comfort himself whilst remaining entirely passive -- it is not his task to influence the world, after all.

The misogynist yelps: "You have made me frightened, and now I DEMAND to be comforted and unconditionally accepted!"

The pressure to be understood (and make a moral issue out of it)

The overestimation of enlightenment has its effect in the presumption of the ubiquity of knowledge.

There are things we all do not know. But lack of knowledge is somehow linked to a sense of moral failure. Why? Because knowledge is presumed to be freely available. (It isn't). Those who do not know everything and anything are deemed to have somehow morally failed. Yet they are merely being human.

The moral failure is actually elsewhere; presumption that it is entailed in not knowing something is merely a decoy forcing the attention away from the locus of the real moral failure.

The real moral failure: failing to ask others to fill us in on what we really do not know.

The real moral failure: failure to disintinguish between what one does and doesn't know, and acting arrogantly and prematurely.

The real moral failure: blaming others for their misfortune in life, because they simply haven't learned something.

The real moral failure: Attributing nefarious motives to others because they simply do not share your point of view (or do not come from the same culture as you do).

The real moral failure: Asserting that one knows everything and that one does not have to learn.

The real moral failure: Being misunderstood and putting that down to the evil nature of those who misunderstand (who might be indeed evil -- but check first!)



*********

shamanism and the mind

Shamanism deals with the unknown as a way of coming to terms with the known. (and, of course, this mode of dialectics changes things.)

Perhaps that is it -- in a nutshell. The importance of non-knowledge (what the mind, in its passive and complacent state refuses to know) is emphasised by this technique.

Of course there are various degrees of the unknown. There is the unconscious, but there is also the subconscious and the semi-conscious level of awareness. The unconscious, by definition, evades conscious processing. However, subconscious material may be processed and reflected upon as such.

Inspecting ethics

One of the reasons I ended up with Mike -- and not with some other guy -- is that we both have an old-fashioned feeling for ethics. We are both morally old-fashioned!

(By that I may NOT mean what you think I mean...!)

The sense of community ethics these days has taken an unusual turn for the worse. I can look at my peers and judge them according to a certain uniform standard I have in mind for an ideal person. I can question the degree to which they avoid accommodation to this unform standard -- in other words, what are they trying to get away with, when I'm not?
These are more modern sentiments, which make uniformity the basis for communitarian goodness, and which makes public goodness out to be an issue of what one can get away with -- with the lower status members of society being allowed to get away with less. This is the kind of morality that takes as an economic imperative the necessity of policing one's peers, to make sure that they're not competing in a cheating way, by failing to put in all the effort required to make one's feelings and behaviour uniform. Under such a system of ethics, every genuine expression of spontaneity is considered to be a mode of deviance in relation to the requirements of the system. In particular, it is considered to imply cheating against the uniformity of the status quo, and hence to undermine the possibility of success for one's peers.

This modernist's -- or rather, industrialist's -- basis for ethics shivers constantly and delightedly under the impression of the Big Man. Here, someone who trumpets his voice in an abusive manner is not deserving of the flowback of an equal and opposite reaction, that suggests that he should watch his back. Rather, such a Big Man lays down the basis for ethics for all to follow. After all, how could one compete against one's fellows on the basis of a system of rules layed down, if the Big Man was not there to trumpet the rules, and cause fear to arise in the first instance?

Such a system of ethics based on fear, policing of others, and actual psychological or economical violence when somebody fails to live up to an impression of uniformity, is hardly ethical at all. But there it is.

I'm sure the reason I ended up with someone of Mike's age and attitudes is that his ethics for retaliation against any and all  UNethical treatment is similar to mine!

cyclical versus linear views of life

I am taking a somewhat Freudian approach. And I am considering Bataille and shamanism.

How it seems to me is that we humans have a certain propensity for destruction. Let us call it Thanatos, as Freud does.

What that means is that we have an instinct that will out. Now the old cyclical view of life — the pagan naturist religions and Dionysian sects — used to allow for a certain period of acknowledging and engaging in destructive processes. The change of the seasons, or the descent into winter deadness was seen to imply the naturalness of this cycle of destruction and regeneration. Shamanism, too, acknowledges that destruction of one’s self, of one’s psyche, leads to insight as well as to regeneration. So very many traditions in the past gave a place to Thanatos, to ensure their citizens didn’t become psychologically repressed and thereby destroy their own civilization.

However, the Enlightenment is marked by a concept of scientific optimism, above all. It holds that humans can rise above their instincts to control their environments and bring themselves happiness. Relentless progress in this vein, however, has not automatically brought us happiness. The 20th Century saw some of the most violent outbreaks of death seeking through war that the world has ever seen.

It seems that if we do not acknowledge our instinct for Thanatos, with various destructive rituals, we become its victims. It’s not the linear view of history as such, but the lack of acknowledgment of instinct that it at fault.

against identity politics

I think the mistake I've made before, in the field of knowledge, was overestimating just how much other people's ideologies were grounded in some form of reality. I think this overestimation stemmed from my own needs and desires: I wanted it to be true that others -- all others -- knew something that they could impart to me by way of knowledge. I was knowledge hungry, hence craven, for I believed that others must have something to give.

It was this attitude of mine that was always frustrated by the attitudinal stance others adopted in relation to my quest -- the presentation of knowledge as oppositional and combative rather than as revelatory and of universal interest. To frustrate my quest for knowledge by making it into a battle of wills, to turn it into an abject field for the struggle for rudimentary or bare existence, seemed to me to be very wrong indeed. But that is how identity politics interfered with my quest for knowledge.

It would have been okay if identity politics was much more grounded in historical fact than it often appears to be. One can learn from others insofar as they carry in their minds and hearts the memories of past struggles, and their present day significance. Yet most forms of identity politics seem to be based less upon a positive and heroic striving, but upon the fear of allowing others to get ahead. It is only one's own tribe, one's own group, which should be permitted to get ahead, and so others' quests for knowledge should be stymied as a project that would feed the succes of an oppositional power.

As I have noted, I see this as very wrong indeed. If you keep people at a level of being craven by not giving them the knowledge they desire, they are more likely to take a bite out of you than not. This artificially induced scarcity of knowledge and truth is harming those who promote it.

Perhaps partly because of the nature of this very cultural milieu (and my recently more developed understanding of it), I'm finding that few people know as much about anything as their belligerance and emphatic manner would imply. Whereas I used to overestimate most people, I now see that in their relationship to knowledge, most in fact strive for a comfortable internal equilibrium -- a feeling of harmony and relaxation that is (paradoxically) defended at their boundaries by a feeling of extreme agitation. Thus the individual defends the boundaries of his selfhood from the encroaching sensation of the 'depressive position' (see Lacan). The path of least resistance for bolstering this flailing sense of selfhood is identification with the agenda of one's group of identity (the colour of one's skin, one's gender, etc.)

Setting up such barricades against those who happen to be different is inimical for developing a more complex and probably beneficial kind of knowledge. You can't develop your sense of reality if you are forced to look inwards all the time. You are stuck at the level of registered the phenomenology of experience of people just like you! That's okay as a starting point, but when you turn it into a political dogma, you are going exactly nowhere.

Most people, I find these days (and much to my regret) cannot read some new material with an openminded heart and manner. They feel disturbed if they don't know from the offset what political perspective you are taking. Some feel that their greatest achievement, upon reading something that takes one way outside the conventional categories of identity, is to label the point of view of the writer, as being "pro this" or "for that". Such readers betray the desperation entailed in their anxiety to put everything away in a safe box. (To them, there is either identity politics or there is nothing.)

But whilst the adamance entailed in their position appears to imply knowledge, this is merely a heightened sense of anxiety dressed up as something that it isn't.

Life in Rhodesia -- a question of identity

For the first 16 to 18 years of my life, I did not have a clear and self-conscious identity, not in the Western sense of fitting myself into a particular category.  In this, I was no different from all my Rhodesian friends.

I see a certain resonance regarding all of this in relation to Marechera's life, since in The Black Insider he admits that he never knew that he was black until he encountered racism (presumably "on the threshold of manhood" in Rhodesia, and then as a later reminder, in Britain.)

Similarly, I didn't know I was white. I knew what my skin colour was, but there my understanding of whiteness stopped. It will be hard for those with a very different education in racial politics to understand (just as they don't understand how Marechera could sincerely make the statement that he did), but we both didn't realise the social and political repercussions entailed in our having a certain skin colour, until we were (in my case) an adult or (in his case) on the verge of being an adult.
Yet we both lived in Rhodesia, where popular theory has it, we both should have known better. "How could you not have known?" is the eternal refrain of those whose social and economic systems were entirely different from ours. We didn't know because the machine of culture was very crude and often entirely inept in categorising us down racial lines, unless it had a certain and explicit purpose in mind. If, at any moment, the system did not require to make one the master and the other the master's slave, then both potential master and slave were free to run around quite wild -- until such time as the system had use for one.

As children, we did not feel that we were destined for any particular purpose specifically. Childhood was innocence -- as Marechera points out about his own boyhood. Such innocence was experienced long and late. We both no doubt had Queen Victoria to thank -- who gave her name to a certain philosophy concerning the absolute difference between childhood and adulthood. Therefore we had long childhoods, although at a certain point, perhaps at the point of puberty, things were supposed to snap into place suddenly, so that all necessary adult knowledge would suddenly be in place, equipping one to fulfil one's appropriate social role. Thus it was a puberty that Marechera lingered "on the threshold" unable to cross into his adult role, which would in Rhodesian society have been that of a humiliated servant.

I came to knowledge of the political meaning of my whiteness and femaleness very late. I could not have known, despite the many indications around me, that one was considered by society to be a boon, the other a generally negative quality. I realised that I was happy because the British Empire had given me the possibility to live in Africa. I thought that females were just as free and happy as males -- only God had given males over to playing different sports. I did not consider deeply what fate had ordained, as if it all had something to do with me. The divisions of labour, insofar as they were evident to me, were something fate had ordained.

Beyond my expectation that certain types of people would fulfil certain particular roles, I had not racial nor racialist consciousness. Rather, I was brought up to be timid, and a little unsure of myself -- more so as I approached adulthood. My view was that my peers were the source of all sorts of vicarious adventure, and that I could live other lives, imaginatively, through theirs. My peers and I approached life with a sort of collective consciousness, sensing the environment for what kind of mood it offered for us collectively to share.

It is hard for those who haven't experienced it to imagine, but our deep-seated trust in the authorities, (despite our irreverent and often disruptive gestures), meant that whatever the authorities said was good for us was good. Therefore racial desegregation in the early eighties was for me and every one of my friends (as far as I knew) no more than a little social hiccup. By virtue of being included in my class, the blacks became my friends. They were my peers, since the authorities had deemed it should be so. One does not cut off the possibility of sharing a whole new dimension of exotic life (life itself being a form of the exotic) from another 'self'. That would be like cutting off a part of one's body, or deliberately limiting the range of one's imagination. The blacks in my school were equally, as much as various whites, my friends.

I didn't realise I was white until I came to Australia and wasn't supposed to talk about it. It was expected that it should be an embarrassment for me -- but what was really the embarrassment is that I had lost all my other selves, and therefore had been reduced to a very poor version of my true sense of me.

I didn't realise yet, that I had to grow an ego, and a certain amount of healthy narcissism in order to compensate for my deep personal loss.

the end of green baboon (a zimbabwean analogy?)

The end of green baboon


Once upon a time,
in a town at the end of the rainbow,
there lived a black baboon
and a white baboon
and a green baboon

It was very hot
The sun was bloodshot.
There was not a drop of rain
“Drought!” shouted the Daily Baboon newspaper.

Black Baboon ws hungry. Very hungry.
White Baboon was very, very hungry.
Green Baboon was also hungry.

“There is nothing but hunger at the end
of the rainbow,” said Daily Baboon newspaper.

Black Baboon heard a voice.
The voice was the voice of his hunger.
The voice was coming from his stomach:
“A is Awful, B is Baboonery, C is Cad!” said the
voice.
“Shut up!” cried Black Baboon, “Shut up!”

White Baboon was walking down the street.
He stopped and listened. He leaned over the gate.
Black Baboon was shouting, “Shut up! Shut up!”
White Baboon was very angry. He jumped over the gate.
He hit Black Baboon on the head.

Black Baboon forgot the voice of his hunger
Black Baboon hit White Baboon. They fought. They bit.
They hit. They smashed. They scratched. They snarled.
Green Baboon was passing by. “Stop!” he screamed, “Please stop!”

“What did you say?” said Black Baboon and White
Baboon together, “What did you say?”
“Please don’t fight,” said Green Baboon, “I can’t stand it!”
Black Baboon looked at White Baboon.
White Baboon looked at Black Babon.
They both looked at Green Baboon.
Their eyes were small and sharp.

“No!” screamed Green Baboon, “No, don’t!”
Green Baboon was very afraid. “NO! No—ooh!”
Black Baboon looked at White Baboon.
White Baboon looked at Black Baboon.
They looked at Green Baboon.
Their eyes were small and sharp.

They jumped on Green Baboon.
They hit. They bit. They scratched. They beat him up.
They hit hom the whole day. It was like thunder.
The rainbow drained of all colour.
Black Baboon and White Baboon were eating Green Baboon.
White Baboon liked his Green Baboon with garlic.
Black Baboon liked his Green Baboon with chillies.

“Let us eat him in a civilised way,” said White Baboon.
Black Baboon agreed, “Yes, let us eat him in a civilised way.”
They carried Green Baboon into the kitchen.
They cut Green Baboon into chops and steaks.
They cooked Green Baboon with spices and dry white wine.
White Baboon made the salad.
Black Baboon made the custard.

They spread the tablecloth on the table out on the verandah.
They set the knivers and forks. They placed two plates
and two serviettes and two comfortable chairs.
They sat down to eat. The moon was up, big and round.
Black Baboon had put a record on the gramophone.
“Ah, Beethoven!” sighed White Baboon, listening to the music.

It was beautiful.
It was romantic.
It was the end of Green Baboon.


--d marechera

Two selves: on thinking

The fact that I'm a thinker and not a feeler as such has no doubt caused me untold troubles. Even now, that I have made another breakthrough in my thinking, leaving me higher on the mountain of thought, on a safe ledge, I feel rather tired. It's as if gravity wants me going the other way and fast. Thinking is the air I breathe, the food I eat. Yet I come from the kind of culture that feels it is a betrayal for a female like me to think. Thus the development of thinking has for me been a long, arduous, and very solitary process. The breakthrough recently was the realisation that I now had the tools to say what I think without emitting a deep sigh at the gap between the reader's experiences and mine, a gap which previously I'd thought could not be bridged with words. I now see that one can write clearly in such a way that at least provides a conceptual map for the reader, even if they haven't experienced everything I have to say.

The opposition to my being a thinker goes way back, it seems. I remember lounging forwards over the back of the driver's bench seat in the old car, asking questions. "Why is it that...?" and "Why do you think...?"

"Be quiet!" snapped my mother. "You ask too many questions."

I felt like I'd been deprived of air.

I grew up relatively ignorant about all sorts of things. I had the mental machine power, but not the grist to work with.

There were things that I was expected to know naturally, as if by virtue of something essential at work, like biology. I was supposed to know what it was politic to say, and when to say it or when to keep quiet. If rage descended upon me, I had made a mistake.

My father didn't believe that women could think. They had to be slapped down enough so that they weren't precocious. It turns out that I reminded him of his overbearing mother.

He decided that I couldn't navigate my way through regular workaday world because I was exhibiting the typical female traits of non-thinking. The only thing for it was to beat me down to make me see sense.

Thew problem, as it appeared to him, was despite having completed a Bachelor's degree, and having been independent in the world for quite some time, I "couldn't even speak properly" (much less, think). To him, I represented everything that was wrong with the world and with his own ability to come to terms with it. I was the externalisation -- the manifestation of the inner symptom -- of his own distress. (It would have been unseemly, obviously, for such distress to have taken a male form.)

And then, the old school friends -- and once again, I have transformed myself into a thinker, against what would forge bonds and unity. I cannot send any more fuzzy tokens on facebook. I'm all out of trying to form connections in that way. And the other childish self -- the one I used to be -- is mocking at me now and proclaiming that I have betrayed my roots. How dare I have turned into another person, thinking too much? I'll surely have to pay a price for falsifying the books. No person has more than one personality throughout their life, says common sense.

And why persist with something difficult, when sending fuzzy gifts is easy, and causes no stress or pain? I have been branded with a red flag of perversity. I'm evil in relation to my past.

Were you born in a cult?

Actually, as an aside note, these days I am considering the patriarchal attacks on me (for that is what they were and are) as being of a rather special nature.

My place in the world has been, in many ways, like that of someone who has grown up in a religious cult, without realizing it, and has now left that cult. There are those around who do not want one to talk, lest one report certain things that they now feel ashamed of. So many, many people -- too many to count -- have taken it upon themselves to silence me, usually by using tactics that are broadly or explicitly misogynistic.

Misogyny is a good way to silence someone because it makes everybody doubt the person's ability to tell the truth -- including the person themselves. So I was told that I was effectively unschooled (despite at that time having a bachelor's degree), that I "couldn't even speak properly", and that I was in various ways and measures delusional. When I reported the abuse, this was represented as further evidence of how I didn't see reality as it in fact was.

Of course I wasn't brought up in an actual cult, but rather within a culture that had effectively seceded from the rest of the world and its views about what was right and proper, to pursue a particular view of Christian righteousness and civilization. That was the ideology underpinning the state of Rhodesia, which began just before I was born. And people shed blood for that ideal. And now they can stand no criticism (however implicit) of it.

Somehow my natural intelligence has made me seem a threat to all sorts of people -- but especially the patriarchal, Christian ideologues, who still uphold the banner of the past. They have made themselves particularly noxious enemies. I guess behind it is a fear that I'll spill the beans in some way. But the extremity of the hostile behavior I have faced these days strikes me as odd.

the metaphysics of modernism

Modes of modernistic thinking are now easier for me to detect. These presume a uniformity of the ground of experience, such that we are all presumed to be experiencing the same sorts of things. Thus someone else can easily put themselves in your shoes and tell you what you could have done better. They can understand immediately -- for they are also, (presumably), in the position of experiencing exactly the same sorts of things, and making better decisions.

These days if someone addresses me, "I know who you are and what you think, only in your shoes I would have done much better!", I bid them sayonara. Obviously, there is something that they don't know about me, if they think that doing what they would do would have been the better choice for me. They may fail to understand my circumstances sufficiently, or have other excuses, but clearly they are giving themselves a pat on the back at my expense.

It devolves into a stupid mechanism of Papa knows best, but real knowledge isn't bought and sold that easily.

oil and water

When most people think of the Rhodesian culture, they seem to conjure up an image of south african apartheid mingled with southern (US) slavery systems. Thus their views of whites who lived there during the Rhodesian era is really a projection of themselves and their own pasts, plus something scandalous (and objectively wrong) that they saw on a media broadcast. What happened on the Rhodesian periphery, with the war that was being fought, was the real barbarism, which was not observable within the suburbs most of the time. (In my whole formative years, I never saw anything like the barbarity I saw in the Western workplace during just one day.)

The realities of this culture were quite different. If you want a rather humorous depiction of what my parents' generation was like, watch War of the Worlds. There you can see the 1950s gender roles and humble scientism in action. That wasn't really what it was like, but it is a better (for more accurate) picture of how things really were than the Jack-booted nazism that automatically comes to most people's minds (another Western projection).

My own generation were different again, for those of my parents' generation. We generally had a healthy anti-authoritarianism about us that was most often expressed by playing practical jokes behind various adults' and teachers' backs. We also accepted a certain amount of authority and discipline, because we had to. Most of us embraced the great outdoors and played some sports.

Zimbabwean culture today has much of the legacy of the Rhodesia of yesteryear about it. There may not be much of a liberal individualism about it -- at least not yet -- but there is a certain strain of libertarianism that pertains both to the frontier mentality of the white settlers as well as to the irreverent humour and culture of toleration of the black populace. (And those -- black or white -- who have lived in Zimbabwe for a while will show both strains of culture, no matter what their skin colour.)

Zimbabwean authoritarianism and Zimbabwean libertarianism live along together, oil and water, mixing freely. The members of society and society as a whole are neither one thing nor the other, and to see only one aspect is to oversimplify to the point of totally misunderstanding.

I am a mixture of both the Zimbabwean cultural strains -- for I believe in the discipline that comes from recognition of authority (especially female authority)and its libertarian aspects (the right to dissent whenever the group's feelings do not coincide with my morality. Those who see me in only one aspect make a grave error, because I can very easily turn to show the other aspect -- and, usually have done so.

weakness of western individualism versus collectivism

It now becomes clearer to me that whenever I have used the term, "Westerner", in a somewhat pejorative fashion, I have been referring, in my own mind, to the embodied characteristics of someone who lives in seeming oblivious proximity to evil, whilst having an almost entirely abstract opposition to it.

To put it in plainer terms, the project of individualism -- a quintessentially Western project for sure -- seems to have failed in many ways. The failure comes about through the economic system ALONG WITH ITS DOGMATIC REINFORCEMENT of "individualism" as an ideology or ethical system (the latter construct being a contradiction in relation to itself). If my individualism is based upon my ability to compete against my peers, this does not bring about a joyful sense of inner freedom, but draws into much closer proximity than it would otherwise be, the psychological feeling of the depressive position. (The bourgeois ideological way of framing this is: "My freedom is your unfreedom." What is rarely taken into account in this formulation is that it also works in reverse: "Your freedom is my unfreedom."

Thus the contradiction inherent in the project of Western individualism is that it awakens, as an ubiquitous lived experience, the state of mind that is the "depressive position". Others are always capable of outdoing one in all sorts of ways -- and such outdoing is experienced as a smite upon one's individualism. (The consequent feeling is exactly what is meant by the "depressive position").

To have to live with such a logical and emotional contradiction in his everyday social life is what undoes the Westerner. Specifically -- and here's the rub -- he cannot deal appropriately and openly with evil in his midst because to do so raises his awareness of his own limitations in confronting a power that seems to be greater than he: His very individualism is threatened in the process of having to acknowledge any sort of power that is greater than his own. The Western individual, in confronting evil in his midst, finds himself in the depressive position in relation to a greater power (due to the very force it has that compels him to acknowledge it) -- at least, this is how he feels within himself. So, he necessarily avoids acknowledging what is wrong within his community, in order not to feel his strength weakened. Thus he maintains the illusion of his individualism as a potent and immeasurable force (whilst knowing deep down that it actually isn't).

Evil in the community is the limit of the contemporary Westerner's individualism. He dare not venture out beyond himself to tackle it (at least, not as "an individual") -- and furthermore, he sees others who do as necessarily being subjected to an overwhelming depression (thus certain views recently -- that the people who looked most miserable in the school photo I presented on this blog were no doubt me, because I dared to tackle evil.)

The Westerner, believing himself to be strong, is weak. The collectivist (such as myself) believing herself to be capable but not necessarily strong in an objective way, is morally and ethically more powerful.

Western individualism and ubuntu

In many of my readings concerning psychoanalysis, I keep coming across this expression: "The depressive position."

Upon reflection, I wonder whether this term is key to enscapsulating the difference between how most Westerners experience their own consciousness, and the way I experienced life growing up.

I've spent 12 years delving for useful ethnographic information in my autobiography, and I can honestly say that at least for the first 16 years of my life I experienced nothing of envious competitiveness with any of my friends.

It wasn't that I was of such superlative character than I simply rose above that. Rather, my life was just immensely full -- and somehow the antics of my friends only added to that sense of fullness rather than detracting from it.

On a related matter, I have very often wondered how it could be that people brought up in Western culture -- people who often have a much more subtle and refined version of right and wrong that the ones that I was brought up with -- tend to put up with so much seemingly open malice directed against them.

Could it be that the answer is linked to the proximity in experience of the depressive position (being resigned to the world of objects and objectification)? Maybe a lot of people cannot bear to admit the truth of how little they are worth to others, or how flimsy the underpinnings of their social positions are. Such recognition would cause them to plunge into despair -- an acceptance of their lack of subjective value in an objective world.

Perhaps I never felt this way, because my conception of the social world was collectivist, rather than individualist. With me, it was more a feeling of, "I rise and fall with my tribe. And if something bad happens to me, it can be balanced to some degree by something good happening to someone else."

This kind of approach to life gives one a certain robustness. I find that these days I have transitioned back almost entirely to viewing the world according to this earlier engendered perspective. One lives many lives vicariously in this way, and if something personally bad happens, it seems relatively minor (compared to if I have the mindset that I am competing strongly as an individual -- of course I am still competing, only differently).

One can also experience more of the highs and lows of life, this way, without feeling like the world has to come to an end.

------------------

From Wiki:

Ubuntu: "I am what I am because of who we all are." (From a translation offered by Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee.)

Archbishop Desmond Tutu offered a definition in a 1999 book:[3]

A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
Tutu further explained Ubuntu in 2008:[4]

One of the sayings in our country is Ubuntu – the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can't be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.
Nelson Mandela explained Ubuntu as follows:[5]

A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?

FIGHT

green and mean

Click on image to enlarge.




all you who got the wrong answers.....suffer!

Guess?

click on the image to enlarge it, and then guess which one I am?

the glue of belonging

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/contemporarySHMN.htm

politics and identities

How central a part identity places in Western thinking! I am now in a position to clarify something I had intuitively registered before.    At least in terms of my generation and its perspectives, identity was a political category but not a real category, in post-colonial Zimbabwe. This was obviously different for my parent's generation, where society was more static.

My generation could not learn the truth about anybody on the basis of an external identity. There were now wealthier black people and there had always been whites who weren't as well off as others.  All that the category of identity could indicate was somebody's capacity to move around, and where those parameters lay. It could tell you the permissions that somebody most likely had to do x or y. It couldn't tell you how they thought, or what they had been through, or what their attitudes were certain to be. You had to find those things out for yourself.

Much is made of identity in the West, for over the centuries of industrialisation, identity has become an epistemological category here -- and not merely a political one.

So much nervous energy is wrapped up in the frenzied issue of identity in contemporary Western culture. Political heads continue to roll around after the ecstasy of their execution. Sado-masochistic excitement about "identities" keeps us in its thrall.

My situation is different in that I so easily revert to benign indifference concerning matters of group identity.