Monday 31 August 2009

The interpretation of the flesh: Freud and femininity

Yesterday, I spent the largest part of my day loafing in the bed, in retreat from the cold, and reading Teresa Brennan's book, The interpretation of the flesh: Freud and femininity.I must say that in her conclusions, she agrees with something I had been contending all along, that the manner of treatment of adult women in the public sphere can have a profound ontological effect on them.
Here is what she says:
“Of course the notion that this projection can castrate the other presupposes that psychical energetic connections work not only within but between beings. [...] For the subject, the advantage of this projection is that it disposes of the affects and anxiety that otherwise inhibit his ability to follow a train of thought, and/or linguistic chain of association; the disadvantage is that this ability depends on maintaining critical blind spots.” ( p 233)
Here we have an example of the way that psychology can assert itself into the realm of the political. Brennan certainly sees that there are cultural-historical influences that determine how masculinity and femininity are constructed in the society, but she does not go so far as to label these constructions as being also political.
That does not mean that these projections onto the other of a state of “castration” — which we can understand as mental and political helplessness — are not facilitated by political mechanisms, making them profoundly political. Rather, Brennan is writing in 1992, and advancing a novel thesis about psychological intersubjectivity, that was hardly recognised at that time. Seventeen years later, we are more familiar with post-Kleinian theory, and we are able to draw more conclusions concerning the interlinking of the political sphere with our inherent psychological mechanisms.
It becomes clearer after reading Brennan’s book that the projection of “castration” onto an other — which, as Brennan points out, can be one who is biologically male or female, but for psychoanalytical reasons, is generally a woman — is a political feature of the psychological division of necessary labour.
This is because, as humans, we are all physiologically complex — which is to say, made up of both rational and irrational drives. So it is that if one is to politically represent and uphold exclusively the rational side of one’s identity, it is necessary for one to somehow do away with the irrational side of one’s self (both as representation and as, far as possible, as conscious experience).
To maintain a rational self-image, the inherent irrational aspects of human psychology — (those which intrude at times to seem to prevent the work of narrow rational thinking) — will be denied, or sublimated of projected, depending on the level of the level of the psychological resources and skill of the subject.
Brennan deals with the issue of projection in the last few pages of her book, and it is fortunate that she does so, since these days it is tacitly acceptable, within the Western socio-political complex, for projections to flow from male to female, but not for them to flow the other way around: That is, the political rhetoric that maintains ideologies imputes that “it is irrational to impute irrational characteristics to men.” It does not seem to be irrational to impute them to women, however. So it is that individual men are lifted above the possibility of criticism, by virtue of the tacit acceptability of the logic of projection.
But projection isn’t merely rhetorical: that is, there is more to it than expressing the idea that “it isn’t me, its you!” as a way of putting women back into their (traditional) places. Rather, at a deep psychological level, the subject who projects also actually believes that it is not he, but her, who is responsible for a hole in his otherwise far too fluid and facile chain of thought.
Consider the nature of the political divide in terms of this tacit division of psychological labour: Phenomenologically, those positioned as “masculine” (which can be upper division women as well as men, in the managerial classes) experience only annoying interruptions to their rational train of thought, which seem to come from the outside of their own psyches, and need to be crushed or put down. Meanwhile, those positioned on the alternative side of the political divide, those allocated to do “feminine” work, will have a variety of experiences depending on their degree of psychological and political awareness.
Those who find themselves positionally on the “feminine” side of power systems will not have the same view of the world and of established systems of morality as those who find themselves on the “masculine” side (due to factors dominated by psychological symbolisations of gender and social status). At the lowest level of consciousness, women who are projected upon will find a certain need fulfilled, in that an identity — albeit a weak and shaky one — is projected upon them. Their narcissistic sensibilities (whether weak or strong) are enhanced.
At a higher level of consciousness, one encounters the male projection of “castration” as a constant assault on one’s processes of thinking, as well as on one’s capacity to maintain a sense of identity. The males who project are inclined to expect women to identify with all of their failed processes of thinking, as if they had originated from the women themselves. In the case of ongoing assaults of this projective sort (which I have experienced), which sometimes appear to be specifically designed to weaken one’s resolve, I find the only solution is to get away from the situations that allow for these power dynamics, and to take refuge as a hermit. Otherwise, one will not be able to think very much, if at all.
When one has no choice but to associate with those (including organisations and systems) which engage in this process of projection, it does feel masochistic, despite the fact that one is on red alert for combat, and is not masochistic at all. This is because these projective attacks work against one’s inner ontological awareness — the part of the self that governs a sense of identity.

Sunday 30 August 2009

Last night's dream

Ever since I have returned to Perth from the UK, I have had occasional dreams that I am back there. Usually the obsession of my mind is transportation in some way, and the fear of losing my luggage, coupled with a secondary reconsideration and indifference about losing my luggage. A couple of nights ago, for instance, I left some of my suitcases, which were full of raw vegetables, on a city bus, because I could only carry two large suitcases full of shopping. I wondered if the bus company would send the other ones on to me, but I concluded that they wouldn't as I hadn't left a forwarding address.

In last night's dream, I turned a corner on the street, towards UWA, which turned out to be Oxford University, New College. The streets were very labyrinthine, so I immediately lost my way upon turning the corner. I got out of the car to ask directions, and I was immediately immersed in the labyrinth, and the mardi gras that was taking place.

I had to join the party -- which had only women in it -- because my car had been taken, by now, and put on a big truck by a big crane. I thought I'd have to pay to get it back, but it was just being removed for the mardi gras.

I was in a room where there were benches to sit, and the women were getting changed. I found some vaseline and started to apply it to my face, and then I thought, "I wonder whose it is, and why I'm doing this?" I found that gravity was pushing me towards the door, as I sat on the bench, and I tried to explain this to the others, but it didn't bother them.

5. List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself.


1. I'm very patient with people, and forgive almost any sort of error except the error of bad faith.


2. I'm exceedingly ruthless with people who commit the error of bad faith with me.


3. I don't have an ideology. I rely upon observation to determine what is what.


4. Every time a wingnut attacks me without good cause (ie. every time a wingnut attacks) I make sure to do five times the amount of positive things on behalf of the left -- such as donate to the third world, whatever. I can also gain much just by watching and learning.

5. I do believe, to a certain degree, in natural justice. I think people who treat others badly become sick inside.
6. I think not all authoritarianism is bad -- especially in schools.
7. I think most people fall for ideologies because they have not tested their own limits and consequently know very little about themselves -- or others.
8. I think that if we are psychologically in order, we can tell whether others are speaking tongue in cheek or not. If someone fails this test, it is probably because they have become used to lying to themselves at a fundamental level.
9. I'm getting fitter. My shoulders have hardened.
10. Pork ribs.

Friday 28 August 2009

Nietzsche, Bataille, Marechera -- comparing shamanisms



Comparing shamanisms: Nietzsche, Bataille, Marechera


The immense task of a contemporary shaman is to use all means available to discover how to survive a huge historical crisis that has ended up wounding his or her psyche.  A modern shaman is generally one who has lived through sudden historical changes.    The  wounding of these changes compels deep and thorough investigation into the world as well as into the structure of one's psyche. The urgency and personal nature of this quest ultimately produces its fruit: profound insight into the nature of reality as well as access to means creative means of self-expression that are not available to those who haven't had to look so deeply.

A shaman is a wild person and so a socially marginal one – although not by virtue of his or her original nature, but based on a return to Nature, through shamanistic initiation. He is not civilised, in the narrow sense by which Nature and Civilisation are seen to be at odds. Rather, he uses knowledge of Nature in order to enhance and prolong his own life, and to endure Civilisation. Thus one can compare Nietzsche's and Bataille's shamanism, as imparting very different strategies for shamanistic survival, on the basis of knowledge that has been obtained more or less in shamanistic ways (that is, via an ecstatic experience).

Looking at it in this way, Nietzsche took his shamanism towards patriarchy and towards master race domination, which Bataille's approach managed to correct -- but not in time to save Nietzsche's reputation. Survival of a shaman is based upon the ability to innovate a solution to existential dilemmas as they present themselves. The paradigm that Nietzsche chose -- that of transcendence -- gave him fewer options for creative innovation in solving life's problems as compared to the one opted for by Bataille.

To transcend the body is to risk social and psychological rigidity, as one departs further and further from the source of psychological nurturing. Aiming to enhance one's feeling of power (equated with a sense of intoxication) was an alternative means by which Nietzsche expected to gain a sense of revivification for his mind and body. Yet to descend into the body -- as Bataille did -- was to descend into this base, and to be nurtured by the very source of Being, itself.

Marechera's shamanic solution was to perpetuate his inwards survival in a way very similar to that of Bataille, in opting for immanence rather than for transcendence as a method to draw in vitality. It was a risk, but a calculated one -- since the dregs of society provide more exposure to the raw substance of immediate reality than do those who live aloof, respectable, and above the thronging crowds. His capacity to live homeless, on the streets, was certainly reflective of his capacity for shamanic innovation.

He had the capacity to dissociate, if need be, and the well developed inner self knowledge that would enable him to know best how to distract himself with entertaining stories. Yet to live in such objectively desperate circumstances for too long would deplete even an experienced shaman's inner resources. Thus the practical limits of everyday life represent a realistic limit to the fundamental shamanic principle of trying to influence reality to the point that it bends to one's requirements.

Nietzsche had already gone too far in trying to perpetuate his own survival when he tried to develop a system of gender relations that would have robbed women of their agency. He was not able to perceive that this approach no longer was in line with his original principle of transcendence, but represented a descent towards a pre-Oedipal (very early childhood) type of arrangement of male symbiotic union with women, as in the psychological situation of the mother and child.

To make women into symbiotic "part objects" for the sake of masculine supremacy -- which would have been the consequence of his approach, when generalised socially and politically -- would have compromised the shamanic masculinity, by making of it a kind of childishness and dependency. For the pre-Oedipal structure of relationship, whereby one is nurtured and the other gives the breast, is a quintessential example of extreme immanence.

Far better to aim for immanence and nurturing to begin with,  as Marechera and Bataille actually did. At least each of them were shaman enough not to remain at this level, but to utilise their experiences of immanence in order to develop their creativity and schemes of thought.

Note on methodology

Note on methodology:

My thesis approach is psychological, which may seem at odds with the literalistic nature by which shamans themselves interpret their experiences. However, the differences between the two approaches can be bridged via phenomenology: that is, one experiences the realm defined by pre-Oedipal consciousness as being very literal and direct. Metaphor ( a feature of language) is phenomenologically quite remote when one is experiencing life in this way.

New Age shamanism and Nietzsche through de Sade

Let me say that an aspect of shamanism that is also in Nietzsche comes through his correct understanding of Nature, through de Sade.

So he had access to the shamanism proper (in the sense of a correct orientation towards Nature) as compared to many of the new age papers on shamanism that I moved swiftly through today.

Once again, let me offer a caution to "Nietzscheans" -- just because the true nature of Nature doesn't mean you have to submit to it. Even worse, if you try to force others to do so!

The new age view on Nature, however, is that it is really nurturing and benign.



It is considered "healing" to submit to Nature on the basis of a supposition that this is so.

Yet shamanic healing does not come about through submitting to something which has intrinsic properties of being healing -- rather as one might submit to a hot bath at the end of a long day.

That is why the destructive elements of shamanic initiation need to be emphasized more within the Western context -- not to give people the basis for macho posturing, but to warn them of the reality.

Shamanic healing comes through an encounter with oneself as intricately related to raw Nature. It is not -- (another common misunderstanding) -- a way to grasp an epistemology that is unaffected by social content or cultural ideas. It is not neo-platonism. Rather it is a way to encounter a part of one's nature of which one had previously been unaware.

Thursday 27 August 2009

Dream

I am inclined to have futuristic dreams, more often than not. Sometimes I am back in the past, doing something or other, at my old school, for instance. But always there is a futuristic element to the dream as well. I am anticipating how things might have changed.

It is only when my creative juices have been almost emptied, by working too hard on my [expletive] thesis, that I have dreams that are sketchy at best, where the content seems to scrape the bottom of the barrel in reworking themes that I had virtually lost interest in.

Last night, there were passenger planes landing at an airport in the middle of a war zone. The planes landed with all of their windows open, which I thought to be an interesting innovation. And they were routinely fired upon by anti-aircraft weapons upon landing.

"Aren't you afraid of being shot down?" I asked the pilot.

"Not really," he said. "It's the anti-gravity devices that all ground-bound vehicles are more afraid of."

"What?" I said. "Does such technology exist?"

"Yes," he said. "They use a beam. It's quite scientific."

Nietzsche and transcendence


In Visions of Excess, Bataille takes his otherwise mentor, Nietzsche, to task for promoting a metaphysics of transcendence -- which Bataille perceived as a will to fall. He says that when Nietzsche clung tearfully to the neck of the old carthorse in Turin, he was exemplifying the state of having fallen from the psychological heights, which was an inevitable outcome of his philosophy of transcendence.

Initially I thought that Bataille's criticism of Nietzsche was a way for him to develop an inroad for his own psychological approach, but it seems there is more to it than that. Bataille writes from a point of view of genuine insight.

For what is transcendence, after all, if it is not transcendence of the body? Even in its guise of being a moral transcendence of the ideologies and proclivities of the masses, it is ultimately this.

In order to understand the Icarian complex (the desire to attain transcendence and why it is bound for failure), one must consider the nature of the body, and how it is the psychological source and origin for all the pleasure we may have. (Nietzsche understood this implicitly, but did not take the logic of his knowledge far enough, so that be built certain contradictions - or "tensions" -- into his philosophy, and ultimately remained somewhat a man of his time.)

To transcend those aspects of life to which one feels morally superior seems more than logical. However, to turn transcendence into a metaphysical principle, by which those who are destined to be superior distinguish themselves from their inferiors is more psychologically problematic. It may lead to an increasing psychological fastidiousness and separation from the thrall of life to the degree that one finds it difficult to feel the pleasure of the body any more. Ultimately, what one achieves this way is a self-transcendence, which makes it difficult to experience pleasure in life.

When we compare the harshness of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil to some of his earlier works, we may already be able to see some of the internal logic of this philosophy of transcendence, and how it has done damage to the author.

Already he is railing against women and promoting rigid traditional marriage as a way to right all wrongs. (In earlier writings he has a more realistic view of love as not requiring a permanent contractual binding.)
Could it be that the author, having detached too much from everyday life through his practice of transcendence, was unable to generate his own feelings of intrinsic connectedness to sensual reality? Being unable to derive sufficient pleasure from it in a natural way (by way of internal reference to the body), he was driven to trying to generate the philosophical basis for a social system that would remove the option for marriageable women not to marry marriageable men. In other words, at the point of the failure of his philosophical system on a psychological level, he became an antifeminist, who tried to make the future social and political systems take up the slack for what had become internally missing and inadequate?

To spell it out even more clearly: If Nietzsche, in his pursuit of transcendence, had lost touch with his body, he needed a woman to combine with him, to symbiotically become the body he'd lost touch with. This is what he was aiming for, and his psychological neediness was at the source of his antifeminism. For, one does not easily compel a woman to become a mere function of one's desperate psychological needs if she is feminist and free. One needs the force of a social system to make this happen.

And in his last depraved attempt to use social forces to get what he ought never to have lost Icarus fell back to Earth --  but didn't know it.

Wednesday 26 August 2009

It appears that I have penis envy!

In the same manner that all Jews desire the Swastika, and Tutsis long for the Machete, I an envious of those whose prize possession is the penis.

Now, please, carry on with your meals.

Is shamanism masochistic?

Perhaps contemporary shamanism might be misunderstood as being simply masochistic -- in the way that I had originally been inclined to misunderstand Bataille.

It seems so if one thinks non-dialectically, but not if one thinks otherwise.

Think of any dangerous, extreme sport. From the point of view of the non-participant, these sports appear to be masochistic. I remember when I did about my seventh skydive, I still felt as if I was holding death close to me, like an icicle close to my breast, for the full duration of the 20 minute ascent. Having completed the jump, however, one feels as if one had developed the capacity to see through -- and beyond -- mountains. One has become superhuman.

Shamanism is precisely like this. Like skydiving, it harnesses the death instinct in such a way that all sorts of limits are drawn upon it -- to the point that it is made to enhance the feeling of being alive, rather than to lead towards actual death (except in the case of rare accidents).

Like skydivers some of us may have obtained a blueprint for repeating death-defying experiments with their own psyches -- without dying.

Is it masochistic?

Not at all, in the sense that such activities are thoroughly opposed to submissiveness of any sort.  The opposite is the case.

I would trade blow for blow against any mechanism that was set up to put me in my place, since I have become naturalised to the enjoyment of all sorts of psychological extremes. 

Tuesday 25 August 2009

Hegel as shaman

Hegel’s Phenomenology states:

to uphold the work of death is the task which demands the greatest
strength. […] Now, the life of Spirit is not that life which is frightened
of death, and spares itself destruction, but that life which assumes
death and lives with it. Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in
absolute dismemberment.
It is not that (prodigious) power by being
the Positive that turns away from the Negative, as when we say of
something: this is nothing or (this is) false and, having (thus) disposed
of it, pass from there to something else; no, Spirit is that power only
to the degree in which it contemplates the Negative face to face
(and) dwells with it. This prolonged sojourn is the magical force
which transposes the negative into given-Being. (Hegel 19,
translation modified. Cited by Bataille, “Hegel” 331; 282-83)4---

SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009

A man is only ever rational in his indignation

Let us return to the common way in which consumerist oriented men establish their dominance. It's on the basis of a psychological double-bind, which a woman is not to escape from. Let us imagine if the typical gender psychodynamics were represented by a member of each party, who, for some unknown reason, were actually able to speak honestly (in Kleinian terms) about their actual relation to each other:

MAN: Emotional? It's how you are when I'm distressed.

WOMAN: I know that emotional is precisely how I am not allowed to be, if I am to represent a good part object* to men at large, rather than representing a scary, evil part object.


Note how diminished everybody and everything comes when these infantile psychological one side of the human psyche. And to be honest, I have never known one who was born and bred under the force of typical cultural consumerist consciousness to express his indignation without blaming the nearest female in his vicinity for it, saying that it was she, not he, who had caused the bump on life's otherwise necessarily harmonious highways, by being "too emotional".

As we can see, the conventional consumerist male is one who is very passive, in that he expects to automatically receive every positive thing in life, so long as "reason prevails".

His intellectual conception of reason is borrowed from certain 19th Century ideals of transcendence of the passions, an orientation towards science, and an idea of representing 'civilisation' rather than 'nature'. Yet great is his passivity towards the project of any actual self-improvement or in terms of orientating himself towards actual mastery of the material world. He wants to represent RATIONALITY itself (ie. in relation to womankind), and sees no reason why he shouldn't do so, but he has done absolutely nothing to achieve it. In fact, he wouldn't know where to begin to try to do so.

So, instead he sits around like a spider in his web, expecting to be gratified (a passive expectation which he associates with the reign of "reason".) And when something goes wrong with his plans, he alights upon culprit in the form and shape of any ordinary woman -- for he considers that women (in their nature) are responsible for upsetting the default reign of reason, which had been so rewarding to him, until reality had intervened and upset his plans for remaining perfectly passive.

Our 21st Century gent sees his self-identity in representing 19th Century rationality itself.

Yet, so secure is he in his surety as to what should prevail (by virtue of his capacity to consume), that he has not leaped into action all day.

And amazing, too, that despite no action on his part, women are falling like flies around him!


--

Note: * A "part object" is the projection of either a nurturing (positive) or a non-nurturing (hostile) facility. It is called "part object" because the nature of the full human being (who is requisitioned to provide psychological nurturing) remains irrelevant to the psychological dynamics that are taking place.

ALSO NOTE: And of course, passive consumerism emulates the regressive qualities of suckling at the mother's breasts, so of course it invites the same psychological behaviours that predominantly occur during this stage. So passive consumerism leads to viewing women primarily in terms of either nurturing or non-nurturing part objects.

And that is why it doesn't seem to occur this way with Zimbabweans, despite their patriarchal society. Theirs is not yet as passive (in the sense of being consumer oriented) as industrially advanced, Western societies are.

Sunday 23 August 2009

The Freudian Mystique

I've just been reading The Freudian Mystique by Samuel Slipp. I enjoyed it up to a point, although I found some of the assumptions in an an otherwise well written and well considered book to be a trifle too slick.

Slipp perceives, as I do, that is is the fear of the mother during the pre-Oedipal stage of childhood development that is behind social misogyny in the broader sphere of life. A terrible recollection of the mother as monstrously abandoning or monstrously engulfing is the source of patriarchal views about women. Such normatively accepted social evaluations are actually based upon primitive defence mechanisms: the splitting of ego along with projective identification onto women of the images engendered during infantile psychosis -- that is, when the child feels overwhelmed by the mother and distrustful of her, on the basis of her much larger size and power in relation to the child.

I had noticed this phenomenon writ large a few times myself, when it appeared to me that those who demonstrably had very little power in society (such as myself in some instances) were considered by key males (and indeed, up to a point, by males in general) to have no limitations in power whatsoever, but in fact to be terrifyingly powerful in our situation of complete lack of resources. So I understand then that the power that is projected onto me and other women is simply not real, but derives, somehow from the mind of the observer.

The strongest points in Slipp's book are his production of this analysis in scholarly terms, and his explanations as to why Freud himself avoided delving into the pre-Oedipal dimensions of psychological relations. Apparently it had to do with Freud's early emotional abandonment by his mother, as she dealt with bereavement, which led to his splitting his ego into two in relation to her -- he had to believe that she could do no wrong, otherwise the terrible feelings of abandonment he had experienced at this early stage would re-enter his consciousness and overwhelm it. So the pre-Oedipal aspects of development were best avoided by Freud, who needed to repress his own experiences of this stage.

The weakest points are a partial reversion to biologism. If women are by nature more in tune with the pre-Oedipal field (which is dubious), then how to explain Nietzsche and Bataille? Slipp's arguments could have been extended to show that when Nietzsche chose to reclaim what had previously, in Western culture, been considered part of the feminine preserve -- ie. irrationality and sexuality -- that he gained his mystical sense of the value of this irrationality through an ecstatic encounter with the pre-Oedipal dimension, experienced as the ontological core of the human psyche. Thus that which was culturally attributed to the feminine was re-appropriated in the philosophical reworkings of Western cultural ideas, and became attributed as masculine. Slipp does note this last point concerning cultural reappropriation, but doesn't recognise that what was reappropriated was, in fact, access to the pre-Oedipal dimensions of consciousness, itself.

Furthermore, it is a mistake to presume that this pre-Oedipal realm of awareness is a realm of "feeling" per se. I presume this notion comes from Darwinism and its idea that "ontogeny recapitulates phlogeny" (Ernst Haeckel, quoted by Slipp, 1995, p 29) - ie. that infantile developmental processes mirror the processes of the broader evolutionary development of the species). Slipp reimposes the very error that he is seeking to critique, in his splitting of the human psyche into male and female components, that are more oriented towards abstract thinking and relational (emotional) thinking respectively. Yet one ought to question in what sense the primary processes of the pre-Oedipal stage are in any way specifically "emotional" in a phenomonological sense. Rather than that, it seems to me that these processes are urgent and condensed expressions of general human awareness. They are emotional in this sense of communicating aspects of the psyche in a very condensed and immediate way -- and yet, I am not sure that they are actually emotional in the way that women have been pejoratively considered emotional, for centuries. Rather, the use of this pejorative term seems to be related to reflexive psychological anxieties about the pre-Oedipal dynamics -- a fear of being overwhelmed by them, as by the pre-Oedipal mother. It also seems that the nurturing aspect of the mother (a certain kind of reflexive attunedness to others in the process of nurturing) is being confused here with the unstable psychology of the nursing child. In any case, the two things are not "emotional" in the same ways, and so it is a mistake to think that the nurturing environment of the nursing mother would somehow keep the attention of the female child more easily, whilst being more uncomfortable for the male. This is not a simple case of "like attracts like" here, since the two -- mother and child -- are not psychologically alike.

And if like doesn't attract like on the basis of emotionality attracting emotionality, then Slipp still needs to find some other ways to consider gender differences, that do not rely upon essentialistic thinking. To give him credit, he does largely see that cultural ideas and the prevailing forms of nurturing (by mothers, and less by fathers -- although he acknowledges that this is changing) do largely serve to reinforce the dominant patriarchal values of our time.

Slipp, it seems, is also of the school that one attains, through one's early conditioning, a firm gender identity, or something may be wrong with you. (He thinks that something was wrong with Freud, in this regard.) The shamanistic capacity to slip back into the pre-Oedipal dimension, for sustenance, and then to return to a normal developmental state, is unknown to him. That one can overcome one's mother complexes by doing so is also not even anticipated in this work. it is also not yet established whether women or men have more shamanistic aptitude.

To the degree that shamanism involves a certain audaciousness and willingness to shatter the already existing self, men may be better culturally conditioned for it. But women, when pushed to their limits, can show incredible resourcefulness. Perhaps what they sometimes lack is a tradition in which to couch their experiences.

Lacan, Bataille

UPDATE:   This I had formulated a long time ago, but is slightly off the mark, mostly because I underestimated Lacan's misanthropy.  I was responding to what I saw as shamanistic about the Marechera novel, BLACK SUNLIGHT.


According to Lacan, an individual moves from the paranoid-schizoid psychological state of early childhood, and then on to an adult level of consciousness via an encounter of oneself as ontologically whole (through gazing, literally or figuratively, into a mirror) roughly approximates Lacan's set of ideas (although it is not necessarily the same). However, Kleinian and Jungian psychology are also relevant for understanding the scheme and meaning of the protagonist’s shamanic journey.

Bataille is also particularly instructive with regard to his self investigations, as in, for instance, Inner Experience. The capacity to perceive inwardly the psychological repercussions of Lacanian theory is a rare ability that pertains to shamanism, but not to Lacan’s or Freud’s systems themselves (it is a feature of the shamanistic imagination, that it is possible to travel backwards and forwards developmentally, and with clear vision). The shamanistic imagination maintains a bridge of psychological discourse between two versions of the self – that of the normative consciousness and the other of the psychological unconscious. (The latter, in Lacan’s terms, is the same as the  self who pre-exists the transformation that takes place when the child starts to learn language. At this stage, the child’s self-awareness is no longer personal and immediate, but is abstracted from his or her direct needs. Also, after this point, the child no longer has an awareness of being ontologically linked to everything in a state of oneness with it, but must stand alone as a discrete and separate entity from other things. This represents a loss of primal unity, which the shamanistic imagination seeks to restore, if only temporarily.)

The shaman sees both sides of the psychological coin (the advantages of the early world of paranoid-schizoid consciousness, and those that pertain to the adult state of rationality).  Bataille’s approach, which like all shamanistic approaches, seeks to draw dialectic of communication between the two. In the paranoid-schizoid state, there are only singularities, with nothing else sufficiently resembling each event enough to acquire the label of being “the same”. It is with this awareness in mind that Bataille rails against the limitations of the “I” that is adopted when we take up language.

Bataille, however, is also keen to use language (the other way of formulating reality) effectively, to convey, if possible, this sense of lack he feels in having to imply that his identity is general and universalisable.

(He expects to fail in his attempt to bridge the two worlds that divide our self-identity, to the degree that we, as readers, lack the capacity to take in a point of view that does not depend on language.)

Marechera's Black Sunlight maintains knowledge of the two different modes of being, building a bridge between the paranoid-schizoid position and language.

Thus it expresses a shamanistic view of reality having two very different sides to it.




Saturday 22 August 2009

Singularities and the inductive method

Inductive logic seems to me to be the bridge built by Eros (the principle behind coherent abstract thought) between infantile intellectual dependency on the parents and the state of achieved adult independence from the parental figures (between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, in a sense).

To fail to develop inductive logic is to fall back into a world of singularities. In such a world, there can be only one of any particular thing, with nothing else sufficiently ressembling it enough to acquire the label of being "the same". It is with this awareness in mind that Bataille rails against the limitations of the "I" that is adopted when we take up language (and thus take up the linguistic logic that has inductive reasoning as its underlying principle. He finds this "I" to be servile and lacking in the sovereignty that comes from being a singularity -- a thoroughly individual self. Bataille, however, is also keen to use language effectively, to convey, if possible, this sense of lack he feels in having to imply that his identity is general and universalisable. The implicit logic of language, which is the inductive method of knowing, makes him seem to himself to be one out of all too many generalisable human entities, rather than the singularity that he knows he is.

To keep in mind the two different modes of being that are implied by crossing the bridge from the pre-Oedipal position into language is to maintain a shamanistic position in relation to the world.

However, there are those who descend into primitive irrationalism. They determine to see the world only in terms of singularities, and refuse the intellectual processes of inductive reasoning as being too alienating for them to accept.

Thus, they assure that they only ever encounter: one fuhrer, one nation, one folk.

Friday 21 August 2009

Marechera, an object relations approach to shamanism and Nietzsche


It is the focus of this thesis to take an interest in Marechera’s “unconscious” determinations and their inner logic, since it is in these that one finds his total shamanistic sensibilities -- the aim to cure various social diseases, via certain practices and techniques of recovery from “brain death” that are based upon Marechera’s own experience with, to use a different term for the same thing, “soul loss” and later “soul recovery”.

While Marechera doesn’t use the term, “shamanism”, to describe his agenda in this regard, the inner logic of his ideas above testifies that  the key to his thinking is shamanism. One may consider that at the heart of shamanism there is a temporary ego loss (or ego “dedifferentiation”) [ie. in the paranoid-schizoid position (the early pre-Oedipal state, which is followed by the child’s late pre-Oedipal state of burgeoning awareness of oneself as a discrete entity – called the “Depressive position”]. It is worth noting here that shamanism has a flourishing intellectual tradition, even in the West, which goes through Nietzsche, to Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault.

One can, for instance, consider how Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence", is quintessentially shamanic, for it awakes awareness that the core self can offer the basis for affirmation of life, if it is itself awakened. Yet, shamanic awakening always involves facing death. The key point in shamanistic experience is in the understanding that by facing death (losing oneself temporarily to Thanatos and a sense of disintegration of the established self), one is entering a psychological realm dominated by primeval forces, so that if one is already healthy in the core self, one is destined to meet the countervailing force, Eros – which is the cohesive force of life, driving towards unity of mind and body. The overall health of the core self to begin with will decide whether the shamanic journey is successful. For it to be so, eros must win over thanatos, and thus the self is reconstituted – not on the basis of any prior existing “true self” having been discovered, but on the basis of an encounter with Eros as a primeval force. Other forces that we meet in Black Sunlight relate to Marechera’s knowledge from childhood – his “object relations”.

Thursday 20 August 2009

a Jungian view of creative regression

We must take a moment here to consider the relationship
between ego and Self. Just as the ego is the center of the
conscious personality, the Self is the central archetype of wholeness,
as well as the ordering and unifying center of the total
psyche. As ego-consciousness emerges, there is a constant tension
between the ego and the Self, between conscious and
unconscious (Edinger, 1972). When this tension is well held, a
dialogic, fluent relationship between ego and Self emerges and
the ego-Self axis develops. Defenses, including narcissistic
defenses, interfere with this relationship. They rigidify the differentiations
within the psyche; they split psychic reality and
render the ego inflexible and to some degree isolated, thereby
inhibiting the ability of the ego to gain access to the unconscious,
and vice versa. Thus while defenses are employed to
protect the psyche from unmanageable conflicts, they also disrupt
the connection between the ego and the Self. We sometimes
imagine this as the defenses pulling the ego away from
the ego-Self axis, disrupting the dialogue. This effectively isolates
the ego not only from the potentially overwhelming
power of the Self but also from its richness and wealth.
The psyche in its pursuit for wholeness will seek to
realign the ego and the Self (Jung, 1911-12/1956). This may
require a descent into earlier states. In our discussion about the
paranoid-schizoid phase, we noted that the individual who is
working on the consolidation of primary differentiations is
challenged by reabsorption into a lack of differentiation.
Similarly, the person who is working on the development of
narcissistic resources is challenged by regression first to the
paranoid-schizoid phase, ultimately to a primitive lack of differentiation.
Such a regression is typically experienced as a collapse,
a treacherous descent, a defeat. Yet such a defeat may be
just what is required in order to realign the ego and the Self.
Indeed, it is Jung’s (1979) conception that “the experience of the
Self is always a defeat for the ego” (p. 778).

Monday 17 August 2009

bataille and shamanism

This is one of the most directly shamanistic passages in Bataille:

Despair, impatience, horror at myself, in time delivered me -- even while I was trying sometimes to find once again the bewildering path of ecstasy, sometimes to be done with it, to go resolutely to bed, to sleep. Suddenly, I stood up and I was completely taken. As I had earlier become a tree, but the tree was still myself -- and what I became differed no less than on of the "objects" which I had just possessed-- so I became a flame. But I say "flame' only by comparison. When I had become the tree, I had in mind, clearly and distinctly, an idea of a woody plant. Whereas the new chance experience answered to nothing which one could have evoked in advance. The upper part of my body -- above the solar plexus--had disappeared, or at least no longer gave rise to sensations that could be isolated. Only my legs -- which kept me standing upright, connected what I had become to the floor--kept a link to what I had been: the rest was an inflamed gushing forth, overpowering, even free of its own convulsion. ( p 127, Inner Experience)

This temporary ego loss in the paranoid-shizoid position is what is at the heart of shamanism. Bataille sees a shamanistic motif and manner of seeing in Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" idea. But there is always a return to the depressive position. So, Bataille sees a Hegelian dialectic in this shamanistic movement back and forth, and Anton Ehrenzweig sees the movement between Ps--->D and back and forth as the manner in which art is created.

Sunday 16 August 2009

Marechera and the paradoxical healing powers of shamanism

According to some psychoanalytical theorists (such as Lacan and certain object relations theorists), the early stage of childhood development can be considered as “psychotic” when compared to adult rationality and the equilibrium of the normal adult’s ego state. I believe this view of childhood degeneracy is founded in the Judeo-Christian ideology of "original sin", which psychoanalysis roughly parallels in a secular mode, at least in the sense that it posits the existence of essential qualities that need to be expunged from one's nature in order to become good, honest and above all, "sane".

I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the early childhood state of consciousness. Rather, it is the lack of awareness of just how much of this early consciousness remains with us into adulthood that is at fault, in terms of much that passes for goodness and rectitude in the world, but is actually distortion of reality and/or repression. I disagree with the Judeo-Christian stream of thought that anything in human nature ought to be expunged or put into a controlling strait-jacket by a 'psychotherapist'. Rather, what is required is that we become aware of the deeper elements of the psyche and how they operate socially and individually.

The early stage of consciousness and its psychological dynamics of thanatos and eros remain with us as adults, as part of the unconscious mind, influencing political processes and governing the processes of creative and innovative thought. This is my view. Whereas the artist, in expressing his or her creativity, experiences “unconscious” ego dedifferentiation, the shaman’s approach to knowledge and creativity is more extreme. The author of Black Sunlight (Marechera), as represented by his protagonist, Chris, experiences the paranoid-schizoid dimensions of existence via conscious acts of transgression that set into motion the psychological processes linking self-destruction to self-regeneration.

As Anton Ehrenzweig says, in his book, The Hidden Order of Art, an artist [footnote: in a deeper sense, one would consider the role of shaman] who is capable of experiencing ego dedifferentiation ( (his word for temporary undifferentiated unity with the world) goes deeply enough into the psyche that he or she gains access to eros” (“the life instinct supporting the child’s object relationships and control of reality” ( p 284)):

The fragile link or short-circuit which transforms unconscious undifferentiation into conscious abstraction holds together widely divergent poles of mental life. (p 284)

It is this paradoxical effect of “soul loss” that ultimately renders Black Sunlight a psychologically redemptive – and, overall, healing – book. Those who creatively undergo ego decomposition will not stay on the surface of reality (kept there by the pathological disturbances that prevent a clear appraisal of what it means to be alive.) Clear thinking, about who one is, is made possible by sinking to the depths of the psyche in order to lose one’s developmentally engendered neuroses.



See also:

Thursday 13 August 2009

goals and ambitions

1. Complete thesis.

2. Get a contract for a book on thesis (possibly in Zim). Turn thesis into a book whilst working part time.

3. Visit Zim, and set up a system that will operate effectively for Break Free Self Defence.

4. Obtain funding for the organisation from an International funding group.

5. Pass another grading, and take a video of my sparring

6. Visit Zim again and spread the range of Break Free Self Defence. Attend conferences and seminars to talk about the programme.

7. Write my next book on the nature and meaning of the spirit of adventure.

The male mystique

Male pick up artist: "Women like to be treated with hostility. It really turns them on."

Woman: "Sure they do! And here's some hostility right back at ya."

MPUA (whining and whimpering): "Ouchy! It's not fair! Men are noble, and and and, superior, and and and... well, we have cocks!"

Woman: Only if you say so.
12 See: Dambudzo Marechera. Black Sunlight. London: Heinemann (1980), p 117. On the issue of sacrifice and the how: See: Gertrud B Ujhely, ‘Thoughts concerning the Causa Finalis of the Cognitive Mode Inherent in pre-Oedipal psychopathology'1980 accessed 8/8 2008. n.p.

The author’s sacrifice in writing without holding himself back in a mode of self-preservation or self-adulation can be conceptually linked to his eternal return, as per the following passage in the work listed above:

“[The magical layer of consciousness] is part of the realm of feminine power, of nature itself, of circularity, complementarily, of eternal return and of human and divine sacrifice.”

Also see: Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R Trask (Bollingen Series; USA: Princeton University Press, 1964), p 38, regarding the Yakut: “[T]he central theme of an initiation ceremony [is] dismembership of the neophyte’s body and renewal of his organs; ritual death followed by resurrection.”

See also, concerning Siberian shamans, p 43: “demonic beings cut his body to pieces, boil it, and exchange it for better organs.”

This type of shamanic consciousness accords with a state of regression to the paranoid-schizoid position of the early pre-Oedipal stage, when one’s body image and mental state are subjectively fragmented rather than being experienced as a coherent whole.

Wednesday 12 August 2009

Dambudzo Marechera’s Black Sunlight: A revolt against the State’s strictures of public identity.

PRELUDE

In his 1986 interview with Alle Lansu, Marechera, speaking on Black Sunlight and Mindblast, relates concerning his “unconscious” desire to write in a way that is destructive or disruptive in order to save people from the “slow brain death” of thinking in an institutionalised way. (40-41). “I try to write in such a way that I short-circuit, like electricity, people’s traditions and morals. Because only then can they start having original thoughts of their own.” ( p 40). He considers that once they have stopped thinking in an institutionalised way, they might “look in a mirror [and] they will see how beautiful they are and see those possibilities within themselves, emotionally and intellectually.” ( p 41) The illness he wants to save them from is “slow brain death” ( p 42) due to “being fed with irrelevant facts, fed with things that have nothing to do with the individual who carries that brain”. (p 40) He questions, in the same refrain, whether an anarchistic uprising might be the answer to being fed the kinds of data that produce brain death.
As I have asserted already, it is the focus of this thesis to take an interest in Marechera’s “unconscious” determinations and their inner logic, since it is in these that one finds his total shamanistic sensibilities -- the aim to cure various social diseases, via certain practices and techniques of recovery from “brain death” that are based upon Marechera’s own experience with, to use a different term for the same thing, “soul loss” and subsequent “soul recovery”. While Marechera doesn’t use the term, “shamanism” to describe his agenda in this regard, the inner logic of his ideas above testifies to the fact that the key component to his thinking was shamanistic. One doesn’t need to have the available term at hand, in order to understand the principles involved, since a shamanic practitioner works from inner experience.

This key point concerning the exact nature of Marechera’s unconscious drives – that is, to heal and revitalise others on the basis of his shamanic self knowledge – explains the otherwise odd and in some ways chaotic formal structure of the book. The author’s investigation of anarchism as a means to solve the problem of a societal origin for inner soul death is undertaken on the basis of the author’s already accumulated shamanic knowledge, which he had acquired earlier in life (as described in terms of the madness and recovery he experienced in The House of Hunger’s novella section.)

Despite the author’s view that Black Sunlight was about exploring anarchism as a formal position, the broader emotional and intellectual context of the protagonist’s entry into the world of anarchism is shamanic – as are the methods (of being seduced into a transgressive mode of thinking and swallowing drugs); as is the middle section that follows the pattern of an initiation, as when the author looks at the sky that is cracked [footnote: joy before death, Bataille]; as is the renunciation of the solution of anarchism for shamanic healing; as is the final looking into the mirror (in a state of exhausted, and apparently suicidal bliss/renunciation— two of the extreme sides of human organic experience are united in confrontation with death. A sense of “ecstasy in loss”, in confronting death, is a keystone for a shamanic experience. [ref e.g. Bataille]).

This sense of ecstasy is based on no uncertain sense of tangible achievement: that one has plumbed the bottom of one’s psyche, the place where, according to Freud, all sorts of hidden psychological complexes have their origins, and that one has survived the intrapsychological encounter – the coming face to face with one’s worst inner fears. Shamanic journeying is guided and facilitated by an inner drive to uncover and resolve conflicts so as to recover psychical equilibrium, reunites one with the creative and energising facility of the Unconscious. Yet, an initial encounter with all the aspects of the self (including the culturally and politically generated self) that have been buried in the psyche due to their capacity to their earlier capacity to overwhelm the ego, is the most difficult form of shamanic journeying, and because of its painful nature, can be understood more as a primary shamanic journey or “initiation”.

Black Sunlight’s narrative invokes the latter sense of things as it is a confrontation not only with the author’s own psychological complexes, formed during the pre-oedipal stage, but with Zimbabwe’s political complexes. The writer, in shamanic guise as a photographer, (recording grimy reality) journeys to the lower levels of the psyche (the pre-oedipal level of consciousness). By undergoing the ritual of ego death and then ego restoration, he allows the hidden nature of the Zimbabwean psychological complexes to speak through him, and thus he “irrigates” the pathologies that are hidden beneath the surface of the body politic. This assures that healthier life can grow, through self-knowledge.

The broad scope of Black Sunlight (as guided by the author’s shamanic healing agenda) is that it is a shamanistic novel, designed to initiate others into a shamanistic mindset, whereby they may lose their institutionalised ways of thinking and recover from their ongoing affliction of “slow brain death”. Transgression of the superego and its commands is the means by which Marechera’s protagonist gets in touch with the contents of his psyche that would otherwise be buried. We, as readers, are encouraged to journey along with him via the shamanic liminal state between ordinary human society and its conventions, and the submerged unconscious and its hidden laws. The metaphysical paradigm of shamanism suggests that a shaman intervenes in this unconscious, hidden world, on others’ behalves. However, in the case of Black Sunlight, given that it is a novel, it seems that Marechera truly wants to take us on his journey – as an actual experience of shamanic initiation.

The difficulty, however, in writing having any success with his audience in bringing about a similar initiation is recognised by Georges Bataille, who states regarding “the practice of joy before death” that “oral initiation is […] difficult”. ( p 236 Visions of Excess). Clearly Marechera wants to initiate us into shamanic alertness and aliveness by the shock value and intensity of his writing. Yet, there are also deeper psychological nuances to his work – for instance, the imagery that unifies (post-Oedipal) sexuality with pre-Oedipal psychological structures or “primary processes” (such as trance induced fantasy and the array of Kleinian dynamics that are produced when an immature (pre-Oedipal) consciousness seeks to come to terms with reality in way that suits its psychological needs, but produces only a jumbled or distorted sense of reality.

Given the predominance of these pre-Oedipal structures (magical thinking, dissociation, splitting of identity, projective identification) in Marechera’s writing it seems, that he wanted us to be reminded of our passing through this pre-Oedipal stage on the way towards gaining a solidified and certain adult identity within society’s system of social hierarchies (the main ones in the novel being man versus woman and white versus black). In fact, through partaking of the adventure of the protagonist into the most primal caverns of his own Unconscious (the statedly primeval caves at “Devil’s End”), Marechera is inviting us to revisit our own psychologically fluid states prior to the acquisition of an “I” (Lacan’s mirror stage) and prior to our sense of having wholeness. (The psychological sense of wholeness is achieved by psychologically drawing all the otherwise disorganised sensations of the mind together as being part and parcel of a coherent subject. Lacan sees this developmental “mirror stage” as taking place in a way that parallels or replicates the sense of a child starting to recognise himself in a mirror).

According to Lacan, this liquid state of pre-Oedipal consciousness is lost forever to self-awareness when a child finally gains a formal identity in society proper (patriarchal, male dominated society) and learns language as ‘the law of the father”. Marechera’s writing is thus shamanic, as he seeks to restore to us this long lost, and forgotten, state of awareness, when one was (so far as one’s awareness went) ontologically at one with one’s mother and with the sensations emanating from the immediate environment.

This unity of self with otherness is mystical in the sense that any recollection of this primeval state is barred by later milestone developmental processes that produce repression (in Lacan’s system, at the point of learning language, and in Freud’s system at the oedipal stage.) To be able to re-experience this earlier mode of psychological liquidity (the primal state of pre-identity) whilst as a fully developed adult (as indicated by Marechera’s powerful motifs of adult sexuality throughout the novel) is to undergo shamanistic initiation. One crosses the barrier of adult identity, back to the early pre-Oedipal self via transgression of the commands of the oedipal superego. The regression that is achieved consequently can be understood a form of temporary psychosis (the shaman enters this state much in the same way as a patient suffering from severe trauma is put into an induced coma), but it is one that is guided and facilitated by the fully developed adult ego. [footnote: ie. in the Freudian sense that the shamanic journey is for a rational and considered purpose, and thus serves the reality principle, but more so in the Jungian sense, since the contents of the Freudian Unconscious are also theoretically barred from one’s direct and personal investigation, and must be theoretically conjectured.

Shamanism, however, is a system that holds in principle that one can obtain direct access to Unconscious states.] In accordance with my metaphor above, the shaman (Marechera in this instance, but represented by his main protagonist, Chris) enters a state of mind in which his rationality is suppressed – a realm of drives, necessities, and a sense of oneness with everything else that exists. He is guided in this by a vestige of his adult ego that has not been obviated by the suppression of rationality. Thus his “psychosis” is really an adventure of self-exploration into one’s Unconscious – a “shamanic journey”. The novel, Black Sunlight, is also the author’s exploration into the ways in which identity is manufactured, at its pre-ontological stage, in Zimbabwean (or, as it was, Rhodesian) society.

Yet, it is difficult to get a reader experience the book fully, and this may be because of our normative faculties of repression, which do not allow us to cross easily from "language" to immediate experience without putting up a fight. The text is loaded with precisely the kinds of elements that are psychologically and socially disruptive and intended to speak to us on the level of communication which recalls for us the states of being that pre-existed our entrance into language as the dominant and logocentric mode of interacting. According to the philosophy of Georges Bataille, these elements can be referred to as pertaining to a system of “heterology” (in other words, with laughter, tears, sexual excitement, poetic emotion, the sentiment of the sacred and ecstasy [footnote: Shannon Winnubst, Reading Bataille Now—ref 2001a, 159-60.] ) in fact leads away from experiencing the impact of “electric shock treatment”. Rather, the normalizing part of the mind, that is, the part of the mind that is prone to accepting and reinforcing institutionalised thinking, blows its fuse whenever it senses an encroaching danger of electricity overload. This is as much as needs to be said about the difficulty of initiating anybody orally. So, it is extremely difficult – although not impossible – to get the kind of reaction that Marechera hoped his work would solicit.

on being shamanised

What is not accounted for in Freudian psychology (and Lacanian for that matter) but is recognised by such theorists as Isobel Menzies Lyth (The Dynamics of the Social) are the raging pre-Oedipal processes (primeval, but related to early childhood experience) that still affect adult society right until the end of most people's lives. And most people do not consciously recognise this. The shaman is a kind of person who can recognise this, in a deep way -- deep enough to take into consideration the nature of ethics (and the possible infringement against ethics) that these kinds of elements being allowed to rage imply. In the most direct sense, it implies that human societies are necessary irrationalist, and that identities are formed on the basis of need, rather than on the basis of ethics and morality. The "character of the father" that is established at the Oedipal stage is really nothing compared to the way that identities can be forged and determined on the basis of society's pre-Oedipal dynamics (which run rampant and create havoc at a post-Oedipal stage).

These rampant pre-Oedipal dynamics are no doubt the product of a society under stress. There is a FELT NEED for people to perform certain psychological roles, in such a stressed out society, including roles that are defined and demanded in terms of very primal needs --- such as nurturing mother, authoritative father, and scapegoat (to name a few types. Are they archetypes? ). To have people locked into these roles means that the aggregate of social stress is depleted, as others start to take on the psychological part-functions (ie.by becoming pre-Oedipal "part objects") that others feel they don't have the capacity, for whatever reason, to be able to cope with. Thus there are people whose whole life mission seems to be directed towards forcing you into one of these roles, in order to handle, for them, the processing of psychological material that they don't feel equipped to cope with. (eg. Someone who feels that they are becoming a scapegoat might seek to create an actual, real scapegoat to handle the processing of material related to rejection and feeling like they don't belong.)

So it's seems to me that these hidden pre-Oedipal dynamics, at large in adult societies, are much more powerful in terms of allocating people identities (by force of psychologically determined social pressure in the fundamental instance, and only secondarily by means of a projective identification which is at last felt and perhaps internalised by the subject who does not become aware -- ie. does not become "shamanised".).

But this hidden means of compromising ethics by forcing people into roles that suit the psychological needs of the community is why Nietzsche warned against "herd morality." (In my experience, the herd primarily attributes moral virtues to anyone on the basis of its psychological needs, and not in accordance with independently existing characteristics of any person.) This is why the one who DOES become shamanised (ie. who becomes very aware of how these group dynamics work, and how they compromise genuine ethics) becomes, in Nietzsche's terms, a "hermit".

Tuesday 11 August 2009

shamanic initiation

A sense of “ecstasy in loss”, in confronting death, is a keystone for a shamanic experience. [ref e.g. Bataille]). This sense of ecstasy is based on no uncertain sense of tangible achievement: that one has plumbed the bottom of one’s psyche, the place where, according to Freud, all sorts of hidden psychological complexes have their origins, and that one has survived the intrapsychological encounter – the coming face to face with one’s worst inner fears. Shamanic journeying is guided and facilitated by an inner drive to uncover and resolve conflicts so as to recover psychical equilibrium, reunites one with the creative and energising facility of the Unconscious. Yet, an initial encounter with all the aspects of the self (including the culturally and politically generated self) that have been buried in the psyche due to their capacity to their earlier capacity to overwhelm the ego, is the most difficult form of shamanic journeying, and because of its painful nature, can be understood more as a primary shamanic journey or “initiation”. Black Sunlight’s narrative invokes the latter sense of things as it is a confrontation not only with the author’s own psychological complexes, formed during the pre-oedipal stage, but with Zimbabwe’s political complexes. The writer, in shamanic guise as a photographer, (recording grimy reality) journeys to the lower levels of the psyche (the pre-oedipal level of consciousness). By undergoing the ritual of ego death and then ego restoration, he allows the hidden nature of the Zimbabwean psychological complexes to speak through him, and thus he “irrigates” the pathologies that are hidden beneath the surface of the body politic. This assures that healthier life can grow, through self-knowledge.

The broad scope of Black Sunlight (as guided by the author’s shamanic healing agenda) is that it is a shamanistic novel, designed to initiate others into a shamanistic mindset, whereby they may lose their institutionalised ways of thinking and recover from their ongoing affliction of “slow brain death”. Transgression of the superego and its commands is the means by which Marechera’s protagonist gets in touch with the contents of his psyche that would otherwise be buried. We, as readers, are encouraged to journey along with him via the shamanic liminal state between ordinary human society and its conventions, and the submerged unconscious and its hidden laws. The metaphysical paradigm of shamanism suggests that a shaman intervenes in this unconscious, hidden world, on others’ behalves. However, in the case of Black Sunlight, given that it is a novel, it seems that Marechera truly wants to take us on his journey – as an actual experience of shamanic initiation.

currently reading

Klaus-Peter Koepping ABSURDITY AND
HIDDEN TRUTH:
CUNNING
INTELLIGENCE AND
GROTESQUE BODY
IMAGES AS
MANIFESTATIONS OF
THE TRICKSTER

Monday 10 August 2009

The danger of primary processes and their capacity for destruction

Why is it so difficult for most people to accept a woman's authority? They do in the gym, where formal standards of rank are recognised, but not in schools, and hardly in the workplace, unless there are also formal standards introduced and maintained in the workplaces.

What we have is a descent into Nature in a very unconscious (hence non-shamanistic) way. We are all "natural" and so formal standards are not allowed to intervene sufficiently to moderate attitudes and behaviour. Women per se are thus treated on the basis of primary processes of thought, as Mothers. And when they refuse to be Mothers, they are perceived as impossible to understand and unconscionably evil.

And fathers, I guess, on the basis of these primary processes, are the unquestionable authorities. It's not the content of their ideas, but their state of being that gives them this authority. Again, its a product of primary process operations.

Zimbabwean culture hasn't fallen to quite this level yet.

It is also, of course, very UN-SHAMANIC, this kind of "naturalness" -- a human devolution. Shamanism goes BEYOND the subject as he or she is conventionally and culturally constructed, in order to play with future possibilities, on the basis of its knowledge of primary processes. It's use of this knowledge always sublates (in the Hegelian sense) the existing subject, in a forward movement toward the future. Nietzsche's trope of the child captures the essence of this shamanistic engagement:
But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child?

Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self- rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.

Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, there is needed a holy Yea unto life: ITS OWN will, willeth now the spirit; HIS OWN world winneth the world's outcast.

But this is the kind of "naturalness" that has been finally obtained through first undergoing a huge amount of painful transformations (first the camel, then the lion, and only finally, "the child".) So the shaman can enjoy flights of fancy and other primary processes, but that is because they are so well integrated with secondary processes, that they represent an opportunity to play enjoyable games (as Marechera does with us in his story telling).

But there is another kind of naturalness that is so undeveloped, that it would prevent any potential shaman from coming into being. It is the naturalness of a culture that is descending towards accepting the predominance of primary processes in the general spheres of work and education.

Sunday 9 August 2009

Women are gladiators

We fight for our lives against:


men
tropical beasts
other women, also thrown into the arena for contest

whilst the little men shout and hoot on the sidelines, enjoying the festival with sadistic glee.

Saturday 8 August 2009

Authenticity is Flow, Nice guys

"Nice Guys" are those who never "get the girl", ostensibly because they are too nice.

At least, this is how it is according to their own interpretation of themselves

The facts suggest otherwise, namely that they are merely the ideological victims of patriarchal thinking and the inevitable bifurcations that spring directly out of this form of thought.

Self-imputed "Nice Guys" make a number of errors, and not all of them are intellectual.

The primary error is the one of having a patriarchal character structure, as really all the other mistakes and confusions are based in this primary condition -- which is already a condition of error in and of itself. We will take a look at the way the "Nice Guys' " errors escalate as they get swallowed up in the maze of patriarchal logic and end up with (even more) confusion.

Ideological Errors in sequential order:

1. "I respect traditional gender roles, therefore I am respectful of women."

2. "I notice that women do not seem excited by those who are willing to extend to them the respect of treating them in a traditional fashion as the embodiment of the quintessential feminine. Therefore, they do not want respect."

3. "Women want those who have no respect for the sanctity of traditional gender roles, therefore women only like mean guys, for there are only two types of men in the world, those who conform to gender expectations and are nice, and those who don't respect women."

4. "If I switch over from being nice, and am mean, I can make women see my true value."

5. "I will be mean to women, so that they can like me, or if not, they will at least be forced to see my ultimate value as a man."

--

Patriarchal dichotomies -- eg. nice guys versus mean guys -- are entirely senseless and are thoroughly illogical.

Here is the solution from Nietzsche -- you character ought to be allowed to FLOW; you ought to "create beyond yourself", by exceeding the categories of gender and expressing something other than a cardboard cut-out notion of identity.

If you're thinking everything too consciously through, you're probably not able to flow forth with any identity that is your own.

Your remain trapped in the little patriarchal box of ideology, forever screaming out your anguish ... voicelessly.

Pick Up Artists

Reading a little, these days, about pick up artist culture, and relating on the basis of what I have personally experienced of them, I wonder if these types ever take into consideration that the reason why their techniques sometimes seem to work is that their attempts to manipulate women in conversation impacts on the psyche of women at the level of pre-Oedipal dynamics. It is, in other words, the mothering instincts in women that these pick up artists end up successfully appealing to, rather than their sexual instincts.

This, at least, is how I have often registered the approach. It's "Please! Help me! I'm a squaling child -- locked into only one side of a duality."

And I have often sort to help, in response to this subliminal appeal. And I have often sought to educate. Because its a terrible thing to leave a squaling child on its own.

It seems to me, then, that a neediness that is projected by those who are locked into one side of the masculine-feminine duality.  This is animus without anima,and this seems to scream out about poverty and loss.

Thus one has pity for such people, and lingers in their company; and they, in turn mistake this behaviour for sexual desire.

Sublate what is in you. Pour what you have into the ground.

The most surprisingly erotic experience I have ever had was at a party where all the heterosexual men were dressed as drag queens.

What was surprising is how the fancy dress compelled the men to go "beyond themselves". Simultaneously they reflected me in their appearance and their exaggerated mannerisms AND they fawned on me in an entirely heterosexual fashion. This activated so many different levels of of my mind at once: "It's me in front of me (a woman), but it's nonetheless not me; they're freely distributing themselves, yet they are so obviously using their access to their feminine side for very masculine (and heterosexual) purposes.

"I'm confused! I'm delighted!"

Isn't is the basis of eroticism to be confused and intrigued all at once?

But most men do not have enough security in their masculinity to flow out beyond themselves.

That, my friends, like the peacock's renowned tail, requires that one has one's essential qualities into excess.

So much for anxious masculinity

If you want  a remedy that will save the situation and redeem you from yourselves, you need to go beyond yourself. That was Nietzsche's way  and it was Bataille's.
Sublate what is in you. Pour what you have into the ground.
The most surprisingly erotic experience I have ever had was at a party where all the heterosexual men were dressed as drag queens.
What was surprising is how the fancy dress compelled the men to go "beyond themselves". Simultaneously they reflected me in their appearance and their exaggerated mannerisms AND they fawned on me in an entirely heterosexual fashion. This activated so many different levels of of my mind at once: "It's me in front of me (a woman), but it's nonetheless not me; they're freely distributing themselves, yet they are so obviously using their access to their feminine side for very masculine (and heterosexual) purposes.
"I'm confused! I'm delighted!"
Isn't is the basis of eroticsm to be confused and delighted at once?
Most men do not have enough security in their masculinity to express it beyond themselves.
Like the peacock's renowned feathers, one has to have one's essential qualities into excess.

Friday 7 August 2009

Nietzsche and Bataille and the visual and the Dionysian

From Nietzsche's THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we link our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in origins and purposes, between visual (plastic) arts, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian. Both very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate for themselves the contest of opposites which the common word “Art” only seems to bridge, until they finally, through a marvelous metaphysical act, seem to pair up with each other and, as this pair, produce Attic tragedy, just as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art.

In order to get closer to these two instinctual drives, let us think of them next as the separate artistic worlds of dreams and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

According to the ideas of Lucretius, the marvelous divine shapes first appeared to the mind of man in a dream. It was in a dream that the great artist saw the delightful anatomy of superhuman existence, and the Hellenic poet, questioned about the secrets of poetic creativity, would have recalled his dreams and given an explanation exactly similar to the one Hans Sachs provides in Die Meistersinger.

My friend, that is precisely the poet’s work —
To figure out his dreams, mark them down.
Believe me, the truest illusion of mankind
Is revealed to him in dreams:
All poetic art and poeticizing
Is nothing but interpreting true dreams.

The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, in whose creation each man is a complete artist, is the condition of all plastic art, indeed, as we shall see, an important half of poetry. We enjoy the form with an immediate understanding, all shapes speak to us, nothing is indifferent and unnecessary.

For all the very intense life of these dream realities [ie. the visual], we nevertheless have the thoroughly disagreeable sense of their illusory quality. At least that is my experience. For their frequency, even normality, I can point to many witnesses and the utterances of poets. Even the philosophical man has the presentiment that this reality in which we live and have our being is an illusion, that under it lies hidden a second quite different reality. And Schopenhauer specifically designates as the trademark of philosophical talent the ability to recognize at certain times that human beings and all things are mere phantoms or dream pictures.

[my brackets and bold text]
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FROM BATAILLE'S Story of the Eye (from Wikipedia):

After Marcelle's suicide, the two flee to Spain, where they meet Sir Edmund. They witness a Madrid bullfight, which involves the prowess of handsome twenty year old matador, El Granero. Initially, El Granero kills the first bull that he encounters and the animal is consequently castrated. Simone then pleasures herself by vaginally inserting these taurine testicles. Unfortunately, El Granero is killed by the next bull that he fights, and his face is mutilated. As the corpse of El Granero is removed from the stadium, his right eye has worked loose from its socket, and is hanging, bloody and distended.

Simone, Sir Edmund, and the narrator visit the Catholic church of San Seville after the day's events. Simone aggressively seduces Don Aminado, a handsome, young, Catholic priest, fellating him while Simone and the narrator have sex. Sir Edmund undertakes a blasphemous parody of the Catholic Eucharist involving desecration of the bread and wine using Don Aminado's urine and semen before Simone strangles Don Aminado to death during his final orgasm. Sir Edmund eviscerates one of the dead priests' eyes, and Simone inserts it within her vagina, while she and the narrator have sex. The trio successfully elude apprehension for the murder of Don Aminado, and make their way down Andalusia. Sir Edmund purchases an African-staffed yacht so that they can continue their debaucheries, whereupon the story ends.



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The orgiastic assault on the eye, in Bataille -- isn't it an assault on the Appolonian mode by the Dionysian? Does the Dionysian seek integration/unity with the former? (Or precedence?)

The Dionysian is associated with the orgiastic, in Nietzsche. In Bataille, it is represented by the genitals or lower part of the body. The eye is logically associable with the Appolinarian expression of art -- the visual arts. But the Appolinarian is also associable with the idea of illusion, and therefore with values that are false, forged, or deceptive, although ultimately appealing to the higher mind. The "Orgiastic" form or art, however, communicates to us non-visually and non-verbally (music could be understood as a kind of pre-verbal appeal to our emotions).

 Music uses the Dionysian manner of expression -- arguably any mode of communication that is preverbal, non-visual and yet direct -- in order to express a deeper level of reality than that the Appolinarian. Are they not speaking about the level of communication that is pre-Oedipal (and are they not suggesting the idea of integrating this dimension of things with the more respectable level of communication that is defined as Appolinarian?)

Cultural barriers to objectivity