Thursday 25 August 2011

BREAK FREE SELF DEFENCE, ZIMBABWE: teaching anti-rape self defence skil...



What is feminist liberation?

Let us start by addressing what is at best a limited solution to female oppression. The problem with women becoming “tough” or opting for masculine values as “better” is that you are still caught up in the system of Western dualities. Up to a point, it is natural to struggle to restore those qualities that have been denied one. If one has not been permitted to express anger, because that mode of expression is considered “masculine”, then one may have to work hard to get to the point where the expression of anger is as natural and unimpeded by gender considerations as the expression of any other emotion. So, there is a first level of feminist action, which is to restore those putative “masculine” qualities that have been lost.

Beyond this point of practical restoration, though, there is no value in adopting masculine values or styles of behaviour just because these have been valued as “better” than feminine ones. That is to treat metaphysical values, which have been learned socially, as if they had a meaning that was more than arbitrarily defined and historically created.

Real liberation is to be able to escape the limitations of these binaries altogether so that they no longer have any hold over your life or your mind.

Wednesday 24 August 2011

Cobra class: self defence techniques from the ground #1

Cobra class: self defence techniques from the ground #2

Cobra class: self defence, round knee and throat gouge

The structure of the bourgeois identity



I can't help reflecting on the following statement by Stephen Toulmin regarding the formation of the bourgeois character structure:
The early 17th century [...] saw a narrowing of scope for freedom of discussion and imagination that operated on a social plane, with the onset of a new insistence on "respectability" in thought or behaviour, and also on a personal plane. There, it took the form of an alienation quite familiar to the late 20th century, which expressed itself as SOLIPSISM in intellectual matters, and as NARCISSISM in emotional life. (emphasis mine) [p42, Stephen Toulmin, COSMOPOLIS.]

Intellectual solipsism and emotional narcissism. Looks familiar?

Employment systems: bad/good for the "soul"

I find it interesting that the religious notion of moral probation is the idea on which even the structure of the contemporary workplace system is based.



Women are put on moral probation much more decisively than their male counterparts would be. Similarly, employees are considered to be much less trustworthy than those who have gained power and are managers or owners of a business. The idea behind all of this is a fundamentally religious one. Those who are made to be subservient are in that position of servitude for their own good. They can thus learn how to develop proper moral characteristics and thereby perfect their souls. Even if they were to stay in a subservient position their whole lives, their souls would have undergone some improvement by the time they reached heaven.



Women's souls are particularly wild and woolly according to the original story of Genesis -- thus demanding extra policing by everybody. By contrast male souls are more likely to be in a state of innate rectitude to begin with, so the policing doesn't have to be so extreme.

Sunday 21 August 2011

Modes of reification


Money: It's the second product of reification, coming after the primary act of reification, which is  "God".

Reification is a principle of Philosophical Idealism and lays the emotional foundations for psychological projection. It posits a reversal of original cause and effect, turning subjects into objects and vice-versa.

The tool by which we measure economic value ought not to give us our particular value. For when this happens, this produces a reversal of cause and effect: Inanimate forces take on a life of their own, to dominate humans.

"The market" functions in just such a way, to fix the overall value of something on the basis of commercial demand. Due to the overwhelming importance of the market for survival, these commercial values come to dominate the thinking of the subject, bestowing a commercial meaning, and not a deeply human one, on both the seller and the value of her products. When this occurs, the subject becomes the plaything of her original aim: survival.

Jennifer Armstrong



STAY SANE AND SAVAGE: Nietzsche and Freud's views on feminism: the patriarchal angle

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE: Nietzsche and Freud's views on feminism: the patriarchal angle

Thursday 18 August 2011

Shamanistic subjectivity does not imply emotionalism

If one considers the three tier system posited by the shamanistic world view, which can be seen to have rough correlation with Paul MacLean's TRIUNE BRAIN (as a loose theoretical construct, rather than as necessarily a scientific one), one can theorize both the possibility of ascent and descent from the here and now of everyday bodily awareness.

Either one ascends by detaching from the body (and from the immediacy of its emotional needs) or one descends still more deeply into the inner structures of bodily drives and dispositions (most conventionally called 'the unconscious').

The term, "dissociation", which in this case involves, in one instance, transcendence (moving away from the body without losing the existence of the body) or, alternatively descending more deeply into it (without losing the possibility of returning to normal consciousness of bodily states within the here and now) does not, therefore, imply emotionalism.  (NB.  The meaning of "dissociation" is definitively pathological according to contemporary psychology, nonetheless the ingestion of psychoactive drugs was to enable the spirit to fly away from the body, in traditional shamanic lore.)

Rather, it implies obtaining a distance from oneself, through experiencing doubling (involving the body as it understands historical time and place, along with one's state of experiential ascent or descent in relation to the body).

Saturday 13 August 2011

A note: French feminism

The French feminists of the 70s or so experimented with "difference feminism". I'm not so sure it was a resounding success. They raised some important points of awareness, but they could never win the rhetorical battle against women, in that way. Difference feminism came largely out of the Lacanian school (the school of the "French Freud") and was invested in making use of the fundamentally misogynistic platform of Lacanianism, by turning it against itself. Therefore, what was presented as a negative value by this school -- women's putative 'affinity with nature' -- was turned around to represent a positive value for women.

In fact, I think what these earlier French feminists were attempting was something akin to a rhetorical gesture of their own, rather than actually promoting any true biological affinity with nature on the part of women. The tone of Irigaray's "Speculum of the Other Woman" is highly ironic and critical of patriarchal formulations.

All the same, witty rhetoric is often not understood as counter-discourse on an intellectual level. It can be misunderstood as somehow positing 'facts' or a 'deeper reality', when it isn't.

Most people misread ironic intellectual discourse.

Friday 12 August 2011

Anecdata and the lost art of thought.

Karen Winnett: [.... I]n general I find the anecdotal is actually statistically irrelevant which is why I don't try to personalise things...
so you mean that the commonality should still be explored and therefore the personal has value to the wider dynamic?Ok...I'll reflect on that one.I can see that.

Projections of control from men are always there...the duck and dive to give clear signals of NOT being interested in a relationship or a sexual encounter doesn't seem to abate,and always there is an awareness on my behalf that the desire encompasses a control factor.Its is surreal how quickly some help translates into some sex and then some control...so I am always clear about some help not going past some help...which is why some help is rare..
I know men are not aware..they are sociailsed as well, and they have needs to have a situtation they understand and control.Where does that comfort come from?Their social expectations...SO they are challenged when met with a different response.Many are then put on their mettle to relate to a woman as a person not a parody.Then the projection may start...aggression being common,and dominance.
I don't engage much..but many woman are attracted to the predicatable and the familiar dynamic,and they call it a relationship although it has precious little to do with relating and a great deal to do with two socialised modes of behaviour interacting.



JENNIFER:
1. I think there is a danger is being too afraid of the "personal".
My use of it tends to be illustrative, after having thought through quite a bit .For instance, take my example of Mike earlier in our talk, which was based on having made intellectual advances in relation to Freudianism.

2. 
The Nietzschean method of reasoning, (which is based on an assumption that subjectivity cannot and should not be denied), is related to a sense that we are all part of a historical unfolding of cultural meanings and attitudes. We are not isolated from the whole, because we cannot be. Therefore, "the personal" aspects of experience tend to have meanings in relation to a broader social context.  
Nietzsche, in some ways, inherited -- as well as personalised -- the Hegelian method of dialectics, which has the unfolding nature of Geist (objective spirit), via historical change, as its reference.

Why feminism is often rejected out of hand

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/2011/09/compelling-force-of-tradition-as-anti.html

Objectivity, where art though? (Probably in Asia).





  • Karen Winnett
    Oh oh..and the other thing on the topic I have to observe too..Cedric and mike,when they analyse with a perspective unpalatable because its "marxist"..people see that,assume they know what is meant,assume its too hard,assume the ideas are going to be dogma (making that trasnmutation we were discussing) and then they just stop listening and start an ad hominem attack or just don't reply...and with you,with any comment about patriarchy it seems to make the same response in some people!Very few people can see where an idea might in fact not BE perosnal,it might address a macro social issue or an entrenched power structure..and so they "fog" it...its actually quite interesting.


    5 minutes ago · · 1 person

  • Jennifer Frances Armstrong Western culture tends to lead to these kinds of misunderstandings more than any other I have encountered. I think it is because Western culture emphasizes the individual to an oftentimes pathological degree. That said, the division you imply between what is objectively "out there" and what could be said to be, as it were "merely" "inside my mind" or, based on "subjective experience" -- that, too is a Western dichotomy. Where it goes wrong is in making it seem as if the macro scale of things was somehow self-justifying -- i.e '"Objective". Oftentimes, the majority of people doing something -- or, indeed, an analysis of how they do things -- does not lead to anything like an understanding of actual objectivity, but rather to a conceptualisation of MASS SUBJECTIVITY. The conceptualisation itself, needless to say, could also be right or wrong.
    3 minutes ago ·

  • Jennifer Frances Armstrong So, just because one imagines oneself to have achieved a divorce from emotion is by no means a guarantee that one has alighted upon objective truth of any sort. In fact, there is no correlation there at all, I think.
    2 minutes ago ·

  • Jennifer Frances Armstrong The fogging of the issue of patriarchy is very common, not least because it is in fact taught BY PATRIARCHY that "women" per se are only able to communicate personal issues. So, what we are encountering here is, in a very material sense, patriarchy's immune defence against a hostile critique.

Wednesday 10 August 2011

Left fascism? My left foot!


The self-hatred of the lower classes is expressed in their desire for political self-transcendence. They do not want to be what they "are", but what the ruling classes represent, to them. As Fanon saw, this higher level of being can be codified as whiteness. It can be codified in terms of certain kinds of upper class mannerisms, or what have you.

Since power is predominantly masculine in Western culture, Freud could codify women's desire for power as "penis envy". In any case, the desire for transcendence is the desire to be more (and, ultimately, different) from what one is.

That is why making libido connect not with transcendence but, instead, with immanence (as Bataille --whom Wolin mistakenly casts as a "left fascist" does) is potentially destructive of any hierarchical social order.

But perhaps I am reading too much into the mainly psychological musings of Bataille?

Identity politics, fascism and the lizard brain



It all began when Heidegger's nonsense superseded Lukac's considered critique of how reification works to turn reality upside down.






      • Jennifer Frances Armstrong So now we are all way "natural" and unreflective peasants, who nonetheless do not understand the meanings of words or how they control us.
        8 minutes ago ·
      • Jennifer Frances Armstrong Identity politics is in a lot of ways just another form of mysticism.



        I think it reaches down to a very basic level of our neurology, which has traditionally been exploited by fascism. We have a "lizard mentality" that needs to feel belongingness.



        But it is a VERY BAD idea to try to build a system of ethics on the functions of the lizard brain -- or, worse still, to assume that one has already been built.
        2 seconds ago ·

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE: Identity is no basis for ethics -- as Beivik's 'thinking' shows

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE: Identity is no basis for ethics -- as Beivik's 'thinking' shows

Tuesday 9 August 2011

Identity is no basis for ethics -- as Beivik's 'thinking' shows

www.guardian.co.uk
Slavoj Žižek: Like Pim Fortuyn before him, Breivik embodies the intersection between rightist populism and liberal political correctness
56 minutes ago · · ·
    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong
      QUOTE:His predecessor in this respect was Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch rightist populist politician who was killed in early May 2002, two weeks before elections in which he was expected to gain one fifth of the votes. Fortuyn was a paradoxical fi...See more
      53 minutes ago ·
    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong MORE:What Fortuyn embodied was thus the intersection between rightist populism and liberal political correctness. Indeed, he was the living proof that the opposition between rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one, that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin: ie we can have a racism which rejects the other with the argument that it is racist.
      52 minutes ago ·
      • Jennifer Frances Armstrong It's a little unclear what is the paradox Žižek is trying to highlight, as it may well be a structural one intrinsic to the contemporary age. Nonetheless, we might go so far as to say that identity politics, whether of the left or right, produces its own form of logic, which often replaces or precludes a more comprehensive system of ethics.
      2 seconds ago ·

Leftwing emotional blackmail and the neoliberal agenda to make us all one under Capitalism

1. What I despise above all is being subjected to racially loaded emotional blackmail, which tells me that because somebody has more melanin in their skin than I, their attitudes, especially cultural attitudes, are beyond criticism. I cry foul on that (and I consider such people to be very low and ill-mannered).



I have even had people trying to justify rape inside of marriage, using the excuse, "but you have to accept it, because it is our culture."



Actually, no. I'm not one of those who bends to unethical emotional blackmail -- even when it is disguised as overarching Ethics.



2. Christianity is a dogma (or, if you like, a multiple system of dogmas) that oppresses women. It may be less oppressive than some dogmas, depending on the version of Christianity you adopt. I am not concerned about that, because I don't think that arguing that one's dogma is a milder form of oppression really constitutes a convincing argument for one's dogma. Anyway, Zimbabwean Christianity also oppresses women, not because it cuts off our clitorii or anything like that, but because it trivialises us. When in the company of Zimbabwean Christians, I get treated like I'm a bit of an airhead. Lovely!!! I get talked down to and told I am not equipped for leadership, or that I don't want to be a leader because of my gender essence. (Actually) horrible!!! For these reasons and more, I oppose Zimbabwean Christianity.

SMASH, GRAB, RUN BY DAMBUDZO MARECHERA

Let the minutes unleash

The bullets Brixton wishes

Barbed wire is the ivy on my walls

Acrid cordite like mist in autumn

Dissolves the harsh street into pellucid cameos

Think how the striking truncheon outpaces thought

How the burgeoning Molotov cancels discussion

And for just this once in my black British life

Exploded the atoms in me into atoms of power

Let each viewfinder’s instant exorcise

The pictorial myths complacency devises

Each hurtling brick aimed to smash this enchanter’s glass

Aimed to loot the truths for so long packaged in lies

I am the hundreds of putrid meat in English prisons

In derelict houses, in borstals, the millions of condemned meat

Who let the grim minutes unleash their canned grime.

Monday 8 August 2011

Rite of passage and identity

Lizard brain does need something to hang its hat on, and "innate" gender differences seems to be IT, at least for now. This is not to suppose that alternative sets of binaries could not be set up to make people have a primal sense of identity and belonging. In theory, anyway, other binaries could fulfil exactly the same role as gender does, currently.
2 minutes ago · ·
    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong The cure for anxious masculinity or uncertainty about one's identity in general, is primal rite of passage.
      2 seconds ago ·

Sunday 7 August 2011

Forced Childbirth To Blame For Illegal Abortion Clinics and Our “Sex-Negative” Culture « Feminism — The Other "F" Word

Forced Childbirth To Blame For Illegal Abortion Clinics and Our “Sex-Negative” Culture « Feminism — The Other "F" Word

Feminism — The Other "F" Word

Feminism — The Other "F" Word

Gender, doubling and shamanism

I developed the idea of "shamanistic doubling" as a way to put across a certain methodology of dialectics to those who had no capacity to conceptualise anything more than relatively stable metaphysical essences.

    • John Haigh but can you say that again in plain english?
      13 minutes ago ·

    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong no
      13 minutes ago · · 2 people

    • John Haigh heh ok
      12 minutes ago ·

    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong Oh, well, no it can't really be said in plain English without losing something, but I will say it, with the understanding that something will be lost.
      12 minutes ago · · 2 people

    • Charlton Tsodzo i have tried google translate...it can't seem to also find the english translation...this must be Facebookese :-)
      12 minutes ago ·

    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong
      It means that some people see everything as having pretty much immutable (unchanging qualities) that are defined by something deep and essential to that type of thing. Thus, if we look at gender -- which is one area I continue to go on about -- we have the idea, for instance, that female humans, no matter who or where they are, all have (or ought to have) particular qualities that define them as "feminine", that these are not subject to change very much and that they belong to the inner core or 'identity' of every particular female being.


      9 minutes ago · · 2 people

    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong So, that is "essentialism".
      9 minutes ago ·

    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong Dialectics, is kind of the opposite of essentialism, in the philosophical realm, because it implies movement from one state or condition into another.
      9 minutes ago · · 1 person

    • Charlton Tsodzo sounds deep...me likes :-)
      5 minutes ago ·

    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong A dialectical way of thinking is, in my view, way more sophisticated than essentialism -- yet most people are still very much stuck at a level of essentialistic thinking.
      2 minutes ago ·

    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong If you are an essentialist and you encounter someone who thinks dialectically, they will throw all of your calculations out of order.
      2 minutes ago ·

    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong Your predictions will end up all wrong and your actions will even have the opposite effect to what you had anticipated.
      about a minute ago ·

    • Jennifer Frances Armstrong For instance, treating a woman harshly because you want to make her more "feminine", will not lead her to retract into a particular essence. She may expand the other way, instead.
      A few seconds ago ·
So, to have the kind of vision that takes into account the likely or possible effects how identities can expand or contract in response to particular kinds of violence or provocations -- I call that kind of an awareness an awareness of shamanistic doubling. It's like seeing beyond the person to the kinds of responses they are likely to have to different types of pressure. They respond by changing and/or by hiding something of themselves. In every interaction that involves pressure, they become something other than they had been.

Cultural barriers to objectivity