Tuesday 31 March 2015

Published on 31 Mar 2015 A Nietzschean view on psychological and political health, compared to the prevailing Christian mentality. Historical fact and individual psychology are necessarily one and ought to be understood as interwoven, but current Western culture has developed a bipolar disorder on a broad, political and social scale by attempting to use morality to rise above the historical dirt -- an impossibility.A Nietzschean critique of the Western psychological disconnect





Published on 31 Mar 2015
A Nietzschean view on psychological and political health, compared to the prevailing Christian mentality. Historical fact and individual psychology are necessarily one and ought to be understood as interwoven, but current Western culture has developed a bipolar disorder on a broad, political and social scale by attempting to use morality to rise above the historical dirt -- an impossibility.

Superficial politics


I’m thinking about Nietzsche’s critique of Eugen Karl Dühring  as a kind of intuitive leftist. Nietzsche critiques in him an attitude of feeling hard done by and wanting to equalize the score. This also fits the model of passive aggressive complainining that some leftists engage in. I think most of the complainers in life really don’t know what is getting their goat, just that other people seem to be happier than they are, have more to live for, and seem to be doing well. The complainer feels like they must be getting more than their fair share out of life and decides they need to even the score on the basis of the assumption that making someone else more miserable will make them feel better.

Women, females, are the worst at this, I find. I mean they’re often very good at it, which makes them horrible.  This doesn't happen in an everyday context, but in a workplace situation, where they are relegated to the lowest levels and have no means to fight back against this hidden injustice.  It's not genetic, by any means.  Japanese women do not manage their lives in this way.   It seems that this is a mode of behavior specific to contemporary, quite-modern, Western women. Other denizens of destruction also adopt an identity politics model of reality to wreak their revenge.

Both the complainer and the identity politics denizen are superficially credible. Identity politics is a form of superficial intellectualism.

Monday 30 March 2015

Communication, historical trauma and how they are linked





Language comprises a power house to which only certain people are allowed full entrance.
Please also consider that the contemporary West will not regain its wholeness — meaning its capacity to theorize and act coherently — until it comes to terms with its colonial past. I know it already thinks it has done so, but feeling guilty and ashamed only leads to the splitting of the psyche and moments of illusionary transcendence with a sensation of shooting into heaven, followed by plummeting into emotional hell. It is not a stabilized state. All countries, all cultures, all societies, have had a history. History itself seems terrible to us above all because it is a concrete encasement and fixedness of solid facts we cannot hope to change. Therefore the untrained mind encodes history as “evil”. However, as Nietzsche saw, “evil is man’s best strength”. And even if we didn't want that strength, we can't actually negate it because when we look back upon our lives, however well-intentioned we have been and however determined to transcend our concrete realities, we will still have created history. That is to say, there will be concrete and fixed facts, which now strike us as evil. Only we will not have created our lives with any will, or reason or determination.
Therefore, so long as you are denying your evil, you are not strong and you cannot act concertedly or with any clarity of thought. You can turn political actors into caricatures but you cannot think coherently about them. Everything becomes a cartoon.
Individual Westerners keep impressing on me that their distrust of themselves lies in the fear that they may be in some way evil or 'fascist'. This is the main cause for their paranoia and fear, but also their inability to communicate effectively. I have not yet found a Westerner who will speak to me on the same level that I am talking about history, without running away with childish retorts.
I keep on saying (and I re-emphasize my view) that to feel childish guilt and shame is very different from coming to terms with actual historical fact. In the case where one ascends to intellectual adulthood, one integrates the knowledge of historical fact back into one’s identity, and this makes one psychologically better balanced. I have just completed such a shamanic re-integration with historical fact and now I sleep very peacefully and I feel very much stronger and more solid in myself.
My writing (newly re-issued) addresses precisely this matter, but I honestly think it will take about a century before the Western cultural maturity develops so that history and psychology can be viewed as one.

Repost: The Western postcolonial cringe

The contemporary West will not regain its wholeness — meaning its capacity to theorize and act coherently — until it comes to terms with its colonial past. I know it already thinks it has done so, but feeling guilty and ashamed only leads to the splitting of the psyche and moments of illusionary transcendence with a sensation of shooting into heaven, followed by plummeting into emotional hell. It is not a stabilized state. All countries, all cultures, all societies, have had a history. History itself seems terrible to us above all because it is a concrete encasement and fixedness of solid facts we cannot hope to change. Therefore the untrained mind encodes history as “evil”. However, as Nietzsche saw, “evil is man’s best strength”. And even if we didn't want that strength, we can't actually negate it because when we look back upon our lives, however well-intentioned we have been and however determined to transcend our concrete realities, we will still have created history. That is to say, there will be concrete and fixed facts, which now strike us as evil. Only we will not have created our lives with any will, or reason or determination.
Therefore, so long as you are denying your evil, you are not strong and you cannot act concertedly or with any clarity of thought. You can turn political actors into caricatures but you cannot think coherently about them. Everything becomes a cartoon.
Individual Westerners keep impressing on me that their distrust of themselves lies in the fear that they may be in some way evil or 'fascist'. This is the main cause for their paranoia and fear, but also their inability to communicate effectively. I have not yet found a Westerner who will speak to me on the same level that I am talking about history, without running away with childish retorts.
I keep on saying (and I re-emphasize my view) that to feel childish guilt and shame is very different from coming to terms with actual historical fact. In the case where one ascends to intellectual adulthood, one integrates the knowledge of historical fact back into one’s identity, and this makes one psychologically better balanced. I have just completed such a shamanic re-integration with historical fact and now I sleep very peacefully and I feel very much stronger and more solid in myself.
My writing (newly re-issued) addresses precisely this matter, but I honestly think it will take about a century before the Western cultural maturity develops so that history and psychology can be viewed as one.

2.

"The common accusatory stance towards perpetrators and victims reinforces such a constricted state of mind and narrows the range of opportunities for traumatized individuals to reenter the libinized social matrix." ---49. 
Emery, Paul F. & Emery, Olga B. "Psychoanalytic Considerations on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 19.1 (1989): 39-53.


Shamanism, however, enables a re-entry in the libidinised matrix, by compelling you to encounter psychical forces as they are, that is as contingent forces (and to view yourself as a contingent being.)

This is in contrast to the traumatised mind's tendency to understand psychical forces as traumatic absolutes, which were directed at you personally.

Such a traumatised perspective wastes much of ego's energy because of an investment in the idea of absolute forces – ie. the idea that there are absolute victims or absolute perpetrators – which, in turn, leads to a "repetition compulsion" .

And the "repetition compulsion" involves constantly trying to itch a wound, as if to grasp some non-existent revelatory meaning, assumed to lurk behind the original experience of the trauma.

By contrast, shamanistic experience reveals that life is contingency, and that such an absolute meaning does not exist to be found, but that life has much to offer if we recognize its contingency.  By means of this very different experience of coming to terms with history, shamanism cures.

Repost: demystifying sex drives

Why Do Many Older Men Chase After Much Younger Women? | Clarissa's Blog: "I think those who comply with social norms lose their sexual drives because sex drives are a measure of one’s overall vitality and enthusaism for life. Over time, men may be inclined to compromise more and with with social expectations about what lifestyle to live and what possessions to own and how to conduct themselves to keep their status in society, which they have been gradually accumulating. By contrast, women will have been gradually learning how to free themselves from the oppressive constraints of mind-numbing gender roles. The more successful they are in this,the greater will be their sex drive. If the typical life trajectory for men is toward greater conformity and compliance with externally-determined norms, to shore up their status, the women who are alert will have the experience of becoming increasingly indifferent to social status, since they are often blocked from it, and so have come to realize status seeking is a trap.
That is why male and female sex drives have different trajectories and also peak at different times."

Western styles of communication and their relative outcomes

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Repost: Georges Bataille

A handicap that is far from physical can affect your mind.  If you have internalised a whole lot of false premises to the point that they have become instinct, you will feel thwarted in various aspects of your life.  People will act in ways they are not supposed to.  Your relationships will fail without you having any clear idea as to why.

The philosophy of the redemeer has worked its way under your skin to the point that it has become flesh.  Now you are dizzy and twisted.   You make endless sacrifices but then you latch onto the sadist who wants to exploit you, because his words somehow ring true, appealing to your twisted instincts.

This redeemer haunting your soul needs to be exorcised so that you will rely on yourself alone.

1.  One must negate the validity of his commands by training one's instincts to do the opposite to what he says.

2.  One must then negate the original presence of the messiah in one's heart.  This is the negation of the negation; the only way to become free.

UPDATED:  I was articulating Georges Bataille's ideas here.

Sunday 29 March 2015

Repost: mind the gap


+Mark David O'Connor By the way, this is not just about the trolls....there are people who can go for years thinking they know me when suddenly the gap between us appears and they have a total, like massive freak-out, realizing they never knew me at all. Then they accuse me of being evil or playing all sorts of tricks, when I had told them from the start my experiential basis and way of processing things came from an altogether different cultural and historical setting. I've tried to tell them and I've tried to tell them and I've tried to tell them, but speaking of historically engendered differences gets re-interpreted as "so and so thinks she's special". I keep going until the difference makes itself apparent all by itself and then there is a lot of upset. But this is connected to the limit is of communication. Some things can only be experienced, like the historical past. And sometimes it is only the gap between two speakers, rather than meaningful communication, that is experienced at long last.

Sweden’s feminist foreign minister has dared to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia. What happens now concerns us all » The Spectator

Sweden’s feminist foreign minister has dared to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia. What happens now concerns us all » The Spectator: "Finally, and most revealingly in my opinion, the non-affair shows us that the rights of women always come last. To be sure, there are Twitter storms about sexist men and media feeding frenzies whenever a public figure uses ‘inappropriate language’. But when a politician tries to campaign for the rights of women suffering under a brutally misogynistic clerical culture she isn’t cheered on but met with an embarrassed and hugely revealing silence."


'via Blog this'



I'm well experienced with the enormity of this deafening silence.

Sweden’s feminist foreign minister has dared to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia. What happens now concerns us all » The Spectator

Sweden’s feminist foreign minister has dared to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia. What happens now concerns us all » The Spectator



It is a sign of how upside-down modern politics has become that one assumes that a politician who defends freedom of speech and women’s rights in the Arab world must be some kind of muscular liberal, or neocon, or perhaps a supporter of one of Scandinavia’s new populist right-wing parties whose commitment to human rights is merely a cover for anti-Muslim hatred. But Margot Wallström is that modern rarity: a left-wing politician who goes where her principles take her.

Repost: objectively existing differences

It is missing my point to say, “People have always been like this” when I am pointing out that the psychological structure is different now from what it was before. I mean it would be nice if I could see my point was first understood for what it is, before being disagreed with and denied, othewise it would seem like I am simply unobservant or idealistic, making things up as I go along.
By the way, my point has nothing to do with ideologicallly criticising capitalism. I’m suggesting that it is necessary and possible to stand outside of a competitive viewpoint that would tend to posit that any and all positions are primarly or innately competitive and self-interested. If this isn’t done, then it will seem only as if I am making an ideological statement, which would have to be assumed to be self-serving, as all ideological statements are. But I’m very much NOT AT ALL interested in having a left versus right debate, especially in the terms fixed by current ideological denizens. My paradigms are intellectual and abstract, not ideological, and have to be addressed as historically engineered structures, not ideological propositions. That is, we need to take the sense of competition out of what I am putting accross in order to understand the structures in a purely scientific or intellectually disinterested way, not in a way that makes the world seem all too narrow by viewing reality solely in terms of competing ideological propositions.

In short: I am not interested, either now or in the future, in competing with you.

Saturday 28 March 2015

Repost: On political power

It may be unwise for me to evoke Klein's name as the originator of any true -- that is to say, broad enough to be genuine -- understanding of psychological splitting. It seems that her views may be too limited and limiting in terms of giving us any real understanding of the depths and breadths of this phenomenon. In attributing psychological splitting to "unconscious envy" Klein performs a typical Freudian term in blaming the victim for bearing the consequences of whatever crime had been afflicted on them. Judith Herman's view of this phenomenon presents a far more reasonable hypothesis that splitting occurs in order to protect a part of consciousness that wants to remain innocent of the violation of the whole. Her view is that splitting facilitates survival in situations where psychological survival comes under extreme threat (as in the case of torture, prisons etc.) 

Other writers like Sandra Ingerman suggest that even in the case where survival is not threatened, the survival of previous lifestyles may be threatened by sudden change -- thus leading to the ego defence that is psychological splitting. Thus a separate part of consciousness comes to deal with the new, more nefarious circumstances, whilst a part of oneself is preserved in the previous state of innocence, unsullied by the pressure of change.

Splitting as so represented may be less "unconscious envy of others" and more related to the unconscious envy of one's previous life (before it came under threat) -- the envy of a life that one had, that one is no longer able to live. That change itself could represent a very great threat to self-consciousness and its survival is something to contemplate.

It is hard to see how the unconscious envy of others can be intense enough to produce an internal splitting of the psyche, in any case, unless the circumstances causing it were life-threatening. If we are to consider Kleinian psychology for what is actually is: the relationship of the very young infant to the maternal parent, then we can see that denial of milk, of comfort, and of maternal communication might seem to hold life-threatening implications for the child -- that is, if they are denied. So in this sense, we might be able to interpret or perceive some kind of "envy" that the child has for what it has been denied. But Klein seems to confuse, in terms of this scenario, the quality of something seeming life-threatening to the child's undeveloped consciousness with the more adult sensibility of "envy". The practical issues of life and death are really what preoccupies the child, whose infantile consciousness knows neither envy (conscious or unconscious) nor the capacity to measure right from wrong.

Mary Daly also makes the picture clearer for us, in showing that split consciousness is the result of justice and fulfillment withheld:

Consciousness split against itself suffers from an inability to reach beyond externals. Thus patriarchally controlled consciousness is broken-hearted. It's impotence to reach beyond ap-pearances (sic) expresses itself in reduction and fragmentation of be-ing (sic). (Gyn/Ecology, p 386)


Whilst it may seem flattering for the perpetrators of crimes such as rape, torture and other forms of injustice to believe that their victims "unconsciously" envy them (and what victim is in any postion to argue otherwise?), it is extremely perverse.

Primeval thinking


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 and the reality of death (not so much Thanatos, but death as a force to be overcome) in the realm of the primeval mode of thought. Other forces that we meet in Black Sunlight relate to Marechera’s knowledge from childhood – his “object relations”.

Therapeutic culture caters to an unnecessarily collapsed modern psyche

Therapeutic culture caters to an unnecessarily collapsed modern psyche

Slim range of perception and over-reliance on what is 'known'

The need for the warrior class


Repost: on how to look good without actually being good

A majority of people seem to feel there's little advantage to be gained in educating themselves, compared to the feeling of moral superiority one can have by not educating themselves. Educating oneself takes time, often money, and substantial effort to move oneself from a state of ignorance to one of being able to understand complexity. Being moral superior takes a certain amount of confidence that one’s views predominate within a particular cultural matrix. Would you change that easy position of feigned superiority for one that is considerably costly?


I find that people of the English speaking world have also invested quite a lot of energy in the belief that their countries are no longer ‘colonial’ (like they assume to know what mine was). They know better. They would never participate in such a thing so resonant with negative meaning. It’s not that they would feel comfortable speaking to an actual non-white person — they wouldn’t — they just think that it is up to them to teach me better manners whenever I make reference to others

There are specific forms of jargon that one absolutely needs to separate oneself from seeming to have any nefarious, colonial intent.

Repost: catering to the child of three

I’m not close enough to tell if American religiosity is hysteria. What I do notice is compared to British crime dramas, Americans tend to make out that there is such a thing as real, palpable, evil — and not just psychological states.

This assumption, that people are, at their baseline, nasty, appears to me to thread itself throughout American culture. For instance, see my conversation with cliff arroyo yesterday, where I was trying to get across the idea that men who are anxious to read women as highly emotional creatures will end up mis-reading any failure to confess all one’s emotions as signalling intent to willfully manipulate the other. Cliff constantly misread everything I’d written as if I were saying: “Yes, women are deceptive or manipulative.”

This is the effect of the weight of religiosity on America. It has entered even secular life, to the point that the notion neutrality is hard to understand and even harder to achieve. I’m not saying America is the only country with this problem. Australia also has it to an alarming degree, in its embrace of identity politics, which does not allow anyone to take a neutral position without seeming to harbor some evil intent or manipulative orientation.

A secular view would dispense with the notion that we all have knowable but hidden motivations. Communication becomes hindered to the extreme when “demographic” or “identity” suffices to clue others in one “hidden motivations”, which do not actually exist, but are ascribed to one.


2.  About the commonly held view that women are emotional and manipulative: this whole assumption makes communication seem redundant. Of course, the key word here is “seem”. If women are viewed as creatures who compulsively externalize aspects of their minds via the medium of emotion, another will be able to know what they are feeling. So much can be said on the basis of logic.  Each woman would be an open book. First, she’s crying, now she’s acting hysterical in another way, now she’s belly-aching about the other thing she belly-aches about. No need to ask her what she’s thinking, as it’s written all over her anyway.  That is, unless she is deliberately withholding something in a way that isn’t true to her allegedly essentially emotional identity. Well, then we would imagine some deception taking place, that by not expressing emotion openly she is expressing deviousness.   She is not allowing herself to be read like a book.  Not any book, but a very, very simple book that a child of three ought to be able to understand.  By seeming to hold back something that would be understood by a child of three, she is behaving “like a man”.   Such obduracy on her part could even have the catastrophic effect of necessitating adult communication for the first time.

All the same this will never happen, since communication on neutral premises is impossible for a religious mind-set.  Instead of adult communication there has to be a feverish attempt to find out what  devilish force has corrupted her allegedly true nature to give the impression she’s holding something back.  It must be an insidious, nonhuman deviousness that makes her act not emotionally at all but "like a man".

The desire to discover such hidden "evil" is mistakenly called “communication” by those of religious minds.

Friday 27 March 2015

Repost

My level of diligence in trying to understand some things has always been extreme and this could never be understated, but it has been very difficult for me because the configuration of my own psyche has not been in accordance with the patterns described in much of the material I have been reading (for instance during my PhD).
Books address common phenomena, but usually within a cultural and historical context.  When it is not explicitly noted that there is a particular cultural and historical context to the writing, or what that context is, is can seem as if the book is addressing everybody, in the sense of giving a very broad map of the human soul, when in fact its notions are far more specific and limited than that. 
In my experience, anyway, much of psychoanalytical thinking seems to provide a backwards map.  I mean it has many of the features of my own psyche labeled in reverse, with some additions made and much of what I have in me missing from the map’s representation.
For instance, take the phenomenon of core narcissism.  This is equated with an notion of a core, irrational self, which is also very self-interested or self-absorbed and – because it is irrational in its nature – prone to outbursts or assertions that have no objective meaning or value.  This is what psychoanalysts refer to when they refer to the internal structure of the psyche. 
Logically, if one thinks of the most core part of the self in these terms, it makes sense to assert that by accommodating oneself to society’s demands, one gains rationality, real power and benefits – all the things one ought to want from life, which are not available so long as one is under the sway of the dominance of the core self.
Now that I have articulated it in this way, it makes sense.  It is amazing how long it has taken for me to grasp a simple concept.  That is NOT because I lack intelligence by any means, but because I could not help having my own SELF as a looming reference point, which meant that I was working with a sense of two maps, each having very different coordinates.
As I have said before, it seems to me that I am closer to being a Gas Giant, with some hardened external features.   I do not have a molten core – which is not to say that after a very great length of time I cannot be provoked!
When people may suggest, “Oh, you shouldn’t have tried many things, because that only reveals your core narcissism (i.e. your unsightly larval core trying to extrude itself),” I’ve never understood how that could possibly be.  To try or not try many things doesn’t seem to make any difference to a Gas Giant.  One tries this or that, and if it doesn’t work out, one reforms oneself.  What would be of benefit (at one time) would be to break some of one’s rigid features on the outside.  But there was never any core narcissism, just a core diffused state of being. 
To speak as if daring too hard in terms of diversity of experience, or daring too hard in terms of intensity of experience was innately wrong-headed leads to confusion and misunderstanding.  (Even in the case of larval personalities, that would be, I think, generally a wrong-headed form of moral criticism.)
These assumptions regarding character structure seem too narrow and too inappropriately  moralistic. 
But there is another avenue, too, of misunderstanding.   That is in terms of the capacity to feel guilt.  I believe it is what separates the modern character from the more old-fashioned type, definitively.
The modern type does not feel social guilt or responsibility.  They may and almost certainly do feel individual guilt and responsibility, which can lead to an even greater refinement of character and oversensitivity in some ways, but they do not tend to feel any social guilt, as if something they could have done might affect the whole social group for the worse.  That kind of thing would be very unusual.
The modern type thinks narrowly and must be gradually induced to participate in a broader reality through gentle coaxing – designed to draw them out of themselves. 
By contrast, the one who thinks almost entirely in terms of social guilt and responsibility does not have need of any such coaxing.  Imagine saying, “Well try to have a social conscience about you!  You are too narcissistic!” to such a person whose real problem is that they are overwhelmed by social  conscience to the point that they are stuck in a petrified condition in relation to what seem to be very fixed and overwhelming Truths.   (If you are really crazy, you can further tell them that any act they may decide to perform is an act of narcissism, because they are trying too many things.)
Bataille speaks to people in the second category of being, but not those who are already very much at ease with themselves and with asserting their wants and needs in the world.
Of course the first type of person just thinks Bataille is encouraging people to act out, to go the wrong way and to become irrational in many regards, but that is because what this kind of person who criticizes thus has the greater need for is a gentle coaxing in the opposite direction – away from the core self and toward the greater good.  But there are some who still haven’t discovered their core selves yet, and for whom such misdirection could be disastrous, even deadly.
The people who need Bataille the most are the old-fashioned types of personality who can still experience social guilt, but perhaps experience it overwhelmingly, and need some method to break down some parts of their encrusted shell. 


There are different sages for different types of people and for different needs, but nothing guarantees their adherents will not misunderstand each other, especially when their psyches have to be mapped differently.

COMMUNICATION SABOTAGE AND INTELLECTUAL SHAMANISM

Thursday 26 March 2015

Repost

Validating Emotions | Clarissa's Blog

It’s psycho-pop language, but if it were not, it probably would not be able to communicate anything in any case, to a world dominated by psycho-pop.

Emotions are often the first indicator that something is wrong, so I like to pay attention to them. Constitutionally, I understate things and under-react to most things, as does my family of origin. If it’s a life and death matter, we are a family of stoics. Therefore, when I say that something feels very, very wrong, I actually mean that I am facing an issue that is heavy indeed.

There are people who will say, “No, you are exaggerating.”

Me: “I am facing a very desperate issue indeed.”

Them: “No, you are exaggerating.”

Of course they are as welcome to their beliefs as I am to my self-reliance. I’ve learned a lot about self-reliance from such people and you can see it in my current lifestyle..

"Communication" works in a way opposite to what we typically suppose





Published on 26 Mar 2015
Communication is a power structure. Consequently one should not aim to communicate unless one explicitly wishes to participate in power. In some instances, it may be neither viable nor desirable to participate in power. In those cases, unlearning, plus new knowledge and new training are necessary to be able to be at ease with one's singularity (i.e. one must learn how one's trauma necessarily sets one apart from others so that can never be fully understood).

Against Western over-psychologizing





Published on 26 Mar 2015
We are mostly just human beings immersed in history, with mere human powers. The dynamics that can take place in the course of things do not have to stamp and define "identities".

Wednesday 25 March 2015

VLOG 6.2 ON 'SENSITIVITY'

On expressing emotion

Repost: an example of an initiation rite

An initiation ritual does something to your character structure --it adds something and it takes something away, making one's destiny more fated, more certain. My PhD was like that for me, because I wrote it in such a way as to take seriously Nietzsche's injunction, "live dangerously". This meant that my thinking was very independent indeed and far from being able to resort to academic assistance. The way this changed me was I gained a hell of a lot of self-respect. I established my right to be thoroughly independent. What I lost through the thesis process was the sense that I was a particularly special person or that my ego amounted to very much. But these had been only Western ephiphenomena, not something real to a person of an African upbringing.  In fact, I was much more gratified to be counted in the ranks of those who have thought and acted dangerously. I mean, bravely.

To experience deeper levels of emotion as gunpowder




Published on 25 Mar 2015


A part of human life can take on the dangerous quality of an explosive material. Those of us who grew in war may experience emotion as if it were gunpowder. For some emotion is not a natural language or resource. It represents a danger to our well-being that must be accessed with great care.

Repost: releasing subjectivity

Let us assume society's authoritarian strictness is fiercely biological.  In that case, logically, I would also have to succumb to it, as I also have a biology.

I don’t think the analysis of biologically determined social strictness can work unless we give “biology” a very loose definition.  It obviously has a social component, or else we would not be able to talk about different expressions of authoritarian strictness, as they may change throughout historical time.

I have actually entertained this idea before, of a kind of “biological” strictness in the very loose sense of what that might mean.   More precisely, I looked into the the nexus of Bataille’s and Lacan’s formulations regarding psychology.  Both do actually address the issue of authoritarian strictness as a feature of everyday psychology.  In fact the model, as you would guess, is largely psychoanalysis – although Bataille, unlike Lacan, brings in Nietzsche and Marx.

So we have this idea of biological strictness that is actually also social in some way.   How do we codify this?   Well, we give it the term, Superego.

But then there is the question of how overarching superego is.  Bataille addresses this question, but not Lacan.   For Lacan the internalization of authoritarian strictness just is what it is.   There is no possibility of modifying the structure of the psyche.

For Bataille, the answer is different.   Bataille is strange because, without wishing to deny biology, he is determined to be fiercely human.   Therefore, he embraces the authoritarian strictness, but only up to a point.

In fact, Bataille wants to benefit from the existence of the internalization of authoritarianism relating to our biological nature.  He realizes that such internalization of authority keeps us in thrall to societal mores, as narrow social objects.   To increase subjectivity one must shatter this social object one is prone to become.  Shattering the object releases the subjectivity from this narrow objectification of the self (for what is authoritarianism other than self-objectification?)   One has to shatter the objectified self again and again.   In doing so, one releases subjectivity.

How does one shatter “the object”?  By defying the limits of socially imposed biological strictness.  Bataille is famous for his dalliance with prostitutes. 

Again and again he shattered his prestige-seeking social self, to release the potential of life as lived experience.

You see the exchange?  Social virtue versus lived experience.

It seems the two are dynamically in opposition, much of the time.

Of course, most academic readers recoil in horror at the idea of shattering the prestige-seeking social entity (I hesitate to use the term, "subject" , because that which reflexively seeks status is more of an "object" unto itself. ).   They don’t believe there is anything that can exist beyond this state of being.   So they stop there and label Bataille as some kind of deranged monster, without understanding that he was addressing deeper human needs in relation to the real dynamics of the psyche.  It’s very interesting how this can be overlooked, because the tactics he uses do really increase subjective pleasure, subjective self-knowledge and one’s ability to live on one’s own terms, rather than complying with authoritarian strictness.

All the same, the barrier to understanding Bataille properly  is in the the way the already existing authoritarian strictness limits self-knowledge.   For most academics, this is like the angel that guards the Garden of Eden, informing us that we are “sinners” and preventing our return.

Bataille, however, says, “Sure we are sinners!  That is our human nature. “  He encourages us to return to the Garden of Eden to relive his fall from grace again and again.

Tuesday 24 March 2015

Repost: Rhodesia at war

What about using  “tough love” to solve all problems? This was exactly what was used on me to silence me about the real issues in our family and the struggles I was having as a migrant. I became the one scapegoated for my father’s emotional problems in particular. These were more extreme than mine, but he put up such an act and made it so convenient for everybody else to treat me as if I were the problem. Interestingly, my father chose to view my interest in reading as a sign of depression. Actually, it was my lifeline — my means to try to find a way out of the idiotic situation. Lying in bed late to recover from the ‘flu was also viewed by him as succumbing to blind depression.  Indeed, he was making me depressed — but so was my inability to rise above the situation whilst others continued not to listen to me.

Tough love may seem like a really clever solution in all circumstances, but usually it’s just an excuse for others to pile on and express their particular immature states and barely disguised malice. I’m not conforming. I’m reading too much. I’m trying to engage in self-care when I’ve been knocked down hard. It takes an extreme amount of mental and emotional discipline to follow the golden thread that will lead you out of a cave, when others want you simply to conform and justify their own views, values and perspectives. To me it was vital to stick to my own path with only a small margin for falling into non-being, as my health had become extremely eroded by being obedient to others’ needs and suggestions. It’s not that I hadn’t tried conformity, but it clearly had not worked out for me. I’d developed chronic fatigue syndrome and a digestive system that did not easily tolerate solids, and made this known by developing huge and painful air bubbles. I was in a bad way, since all my repressed rage had been turned inward. I’d been directing it inwardly for years.

I sensed that accepting more of others rage and then repressing it would have pushed me over the edge. I had to develop other ways to see the world, which would give me other methods of coping. Hence, I had face in various philosophy books, much of the time. I wasn’t doing this to waste time, but to save myself. It was vitally important that I find the means to get out of the Christian indoctrination that had held me to a standard of perfection whilst telling me that as a woman I was worthless. These were, indeed, my father’s views of me and consequently I had to draw together all my mental and emotional energy to defeat his perspective that I had started to internalize.

2.

I did not get any feminists on my side during this long drawn out psychological battle. I know why. A battle is an ugly thing. There are no clear marks defining good and evil. One has to do combat just with what one has at the time and sometimes one is poorly prepared, one’s weapons are not sharp or effective and one is immersed in a lot of ignorance. It would have been nice to have feminists on my side during this time, but I can’t say they were.  Many feminists tend to side with the person who seems to represent the neatest solution to the problem, even if that person is a patriarch.

 Many feminists prefer neatness to reality and they like to be one the side of what society defines as “good” — that is, they prefer a posture of moral conformity over understanding a complex issue.


3.

My solutions, although they did not involve socially condoned productivity, involved pushing myself into my discomfort zones, with regard to expressing emotions, especially those that were not socially acceptable -- for I had a lot of socially unacceptable emotions during that time and I had never beel allowed to express any emotions during the war.  Expressing distress of any sort had been strictly forbidden.  At times a male may be forgiven for ascending to a state of rage, but not I.  Should I become upset for any reason, my father would descend aggressively on the behavior to quash it.  My father had been engaged in an actual war for fifteen years and he had repressed all those emotions, including the ultimate humiliation of defeat. Then he'd taken it out on me.  I had some extremely warlike emotions in me, as a result.   In fact these were his, that he had given me to cope with.

Repost

In the Preface of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche outlines the project that was also to be mapped out and re-formulated in more detail by Bataille. In more well-known Freudian terms, to get control over one's Superego and to master it, rather than to have it controlling one from above.

More to come later, but the three stages of becoming healthier he describes are:

1. One starts off life as the unquestioning servant of one's Superego.
2. One moves to losing a sense of ego, in the sense of no longer taking anything personally, but transcending "for and against" (thinking about right and wrong in a self-serving manner).
3. Adopting a perspective based on these earlier stages of experience, whereby one understands that "injustice" is written into the framework of all things.  This insight accompanies a state of being whereby one comes to master Superego and thereby to gain mastery of one's "for and against".  One might put this in a different way, by saying one's "for and against" become relativised on the basis of having seen oneself transcendentally -- from a distance.  These are then now no longer absolute and rigid, and one is no longer unquestioningly subservient to them. (One is healthier than previously.

It may never gets so far that someone has a desperate need to be an identity that isn't the consumer unit -- most people have a desperate desire to be one that IS the consumer unit because Superego (the device that makes us conform from within) is going to make us conform to the prevailing paradigm/s. This is why intellectual shamanism counsels that one should depart from everything one thinks one "knows" or feels to be true about oneself and one's world.
Sacrificing one's "self" -- as one mistakenly understands it to be -- one has a much greater chance of finding one's true nature.  (This principle is in some ways more Bataille's than it is Nietzsche's.)

Repost

Hard to understand for some people, I know — but identity (including racial identity) — was far more of an ideologically entrenched affair in industrialized Western culture, than it was for me under Rhodesian colonialism. It really is like well meaning Westerners have to bend over backwards to combat their own entrenched ideas about race, because the categories that define identity here are so absolute. In my generation’s experience of Rhodesian culture (which was different from that of my parents), racial difference was more organically (rather than mechanistically — as in the West) defined. So, we could traverse boundaries through social interaction without feeling that we were taking up any particular political position in doing so. This was, of course, in the case of my generation — and of course there were variations, I suppose, in different individuals’ behaviour, but it was more or less along this line. I only learned later that I was supposed to have the negative and profoundly condescending attitudes towards blacks that westerns harboured themselves, and which they were keen to combat within themselves. I was not psychologically constructed in such a way that I felt the need to combat some kind of a priori presupposition of superiority within myself. Being brought up during war time in Rhodesia, I already felt that difference (virtually of any sort) was a manifestation of creativity in the world. My favourite compliment for someone was that they were “mad”. I had a very different way of looking at things way before I came to the Western environment. I couldn’t believe the stiffness of people here, and their deeply held intentions to prove themselves in every way to be ‘not mad’.

Modernity, Kipling and psychoanalysis





I can neither forget nor erase from memory that in a spirit of militaristic pride, my father gave me any of the good things in life,  quoting Kipling.  In a spirit of militaristic defeat, he took them away again, quoting nothing at all.  I do remember that as a basic lesson.  You get defeated and anything good is taken away.  Maybe you are rolled down a hill, or pyramid, to teach you a lesson.  Nothing is good enough for you a vanquished warrior.  But everything would be still perfect if you hadn't allowed yourself to be defeated.

As standards go, that was pretty absolute.

Another afternoon I had the most extraordinary dream where two delightful cherubs were playing footsie with each other.  It was amazing and it really drew you in, the perfection of it all.  Like being spell bound.  But it was too human and too warm, because you had to return to the numbness of war and switch of your mind and your body to make it an instrument of a higher cause.  As there were only a few seconds remaining, you had to pull yourself away from the amazing spectacle of life. 

And I don't normally dream about soft cherubs. My brain must have made an exception, for some reason, to point something out.

I don't expect you to understand that, because that was a weird contrast more evoked by a shift in knowledge and in mood than anything else.  There is the mood of wanting life to go on forever, and then there is the mood of reconciliation with the facts, some mood of death.

One of these things is not like the other.

There's no point  crying over spilt milk.

I love the way that everything within modernity is just reduced to a standard cliché.  I could blame the moderns for this, but they'd just go right ahead and blame me right back.  Tit for tat.  Toe for toe.  Nothing doing and no-one has the right to know.

Anyway, what was I saying?

So my brain was on fire at times, but I always felt like I had been defeated. 

I once had a standard dogma in place but it was run over by my cat-ma.

What's hardest about describing knowledge gained through texts is that you can acknowledge patterns in the writing, but those patterns are only evocative if you have already established very intimate terms with the writer, but otherwise they're not going to leave much trace.  There's such a thing as not being for public consumption.  Like Marechera's brain, if you peeled it off and looked inside, you wouldn't find much going on.  You'd have to have a peeling mind and brain, and then whatever you found would be significant, but you would never be able to tell anyone about it.

Command or defeat perhaps, but I am rambling.

Did you look inside of it yet?

So that was my story as I am able to relate it.

I came across these patterns that stood out.

I hope you like them too, but secretly (between you and I) they are not for you.  I really only need them for myself.

I hope you like them too!

(2) According to the Islamic documents

(2) According to the Islamic documents



According to the Islamic documents and Muhammad’s explanations, Muslims' paradise seems to be illustrated with explanatory and decorative images proper to the male dwellers of an oasis. It characterises the norms, criteria, taste, and dreamful wishes of the patriarchal desert-society of Arabia in 7th. Century A.D. Unlimited sex games and plenty of delicious food, wines, fertile and green area belong to such dreamful paradise which are available forever.
Allah’s paradise is described as a mixture of the sex, orgy, sodomy, wine, and overeating for the Muslim male dwellers. Muslims’paradise is the highest spiritual attainment of faithfully righteous Muslimswho believe in the Quran and prophecy of Muhammad as the God's last messenger. As such, Allah forgives all their sins and rewards them paradise and in pleasant shade of thrones believers' mission is to deflower “Houris” or thevirgins of paradise!! (Refer to Zamakh-shari, part 4, page 21; Jalalan, page372).
In this perspective, the fourth Caliph and first Imamof Shiites Imam Ali reported that the Apostle of Allah said, "There is inParadise a market wherein there will be no buying or selling, but will consistof men and women. When a man desires a beauty, he will have intercourse withthem."
Attested by scholar Tirmizi, Muhammad was asked"will we have sexual intercourse in paradise? He said, “Yes, I swear bythe One who holds my soul in His hand that it will be a vigorous intercourse, and as soon as the man departs from her (the Houri) she will again become immaculate and virgin.”
("Legal Opinions", Sheikh Sha’rawi page 36) adds, “Every morning one hundred virgins will be (the portion) of each man. The same book page 148, Sha’rawi adds, “the houris’s two breasts are like thecones, they are not hanging loose, (page 265 and 266). The houris in paradiseare white with big eyes (page 448) voluptuous women, beautiful virgins with lustrous eyes, appetizing vaginas. Every man of the dwellers of paradise is given the power of a hundred men for eating, drinking, intercourse and sexual desire.”
Described by Al-Tadhkira by Qurtubi, quoting Ali Abual-’Abbas page 41, “the Women of paradise are classified as the Beauty of virgins. All of them have appetizing vaginas, so that the erected penis never softens. The erection is eternal"!!!!! Confirmed by the (Tafsir ibn Kathirby Ibn Kathir/ hasan hadith from Ibn Majah).”
For the believers who have appetite for young boys forsodomy, Allah has provided plenty Ghelam, young boys for sex, in paradise: The Quran 52:24 ( وَيَطُوفُ عَلَيْهِمْ غِلْمَانٌ لَهُمْ كَأَنَّهُمْ لُؤْلُؤٌ مَكْنُونٌ). These boys are around to serve devoted Muslims. Young male (handsome) as Pearls well-guarded. /Quran 56:17 يَطُوفُ عَلَيْهِمْ وِلْدَانٌ مُخَلَّدُونَ Round about them will (serve) youths of perpetual (freshness), /Quran 76:19 وَيَطُوفُ عَلَيْهِمْ وِلْدَانٌ مُخَلَّدُونَ إِذَا رَأَيْتَهُمْ حَسِبْتَهُمْ لُؤْلُؤًا مَنْثُورًا:If thou seest them, thou wouldst think them scattered Pearls.)
The dwellings are in the palaces made of pearl. In each palace there are seventy mansions. In each mansion there are seventy houses. In each house there is a bed. On each bed there are seventy sheets of different colours. On each sheet there is a nymph wife houri and in each house there are seventy tables, and on each table there are seventy kinds of food" (Volume 4, page 537 of "The Revival of Religious Science"—The Ghazali). BUT the first meal which the people of Paradise will eat, it will be the caudate (extra) lobe of the fish-liver!!!!! (Sahih Bukhari - Hadith No: 275(Vol: 5) Abdullah bin Salam,s testify) Quran 88: 12 "Therein will be abubbling spring, raised throne-like couches, drinking cups ready placed, cushions set in rows, and rich silken carpets all spread out."
Believers are permitted to drink wine in Paradise:
- xx Quran(47:15) مَثَلُالْجَنَّةِ الَّتِي وُعِدَ الْمُتَّقُونَۖ فِيهَا أَنْهَارٌمِنْ مَاءٍ غَيْرِ آسِنٍوَأَنْهَارٌ مِنْ لَبَنٍ لَمْ يَتَغَيَّرْ طَعْمُهُ وَأَنْهَارٌ مِنْ خَمْرٍلَذَّةٍ لِلشَّارِبِينَ وَأَنْهَارٌ مِنْ عَسَلٍ مُصَفًّىۖ وَلَهُمْ فِيهَامِنْ كُلِّ الثَّمَرَاتِ
وَمَغْفِرَةٌمِنْ رَبِّهِمْ ۖكَمَنْ هُوَ خَالِدٌ فِي النَّارِ وَسُقُوا مَاءً حَمِيمًا فَقَطَّعَ أَمْعَاءَهُم"
(Here is) a Parable of the Garden which the righteous are promised: in it are rivers of water incorruptible; rivers of milk of which the taste never changes; rivers of wine, a joy to those who drink; and rivers of honey pure and clear. In it thereare for them all kinds of fruits; and Grace from their Lord. (Can thosein such Bliss) be compared to such as Hell dwell for ever in the Fire, and be given to drink boiling water, so that it cuts up their bowels (to pieces)?"[Islamic source of translation: http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp? chapter=47&verse=15]. (83:22)إِنَّ الْأَبْرَارَ لَفِي نَعِيمٍ"Truly the Righteous will be in Bliss:"(25) يُسْقَوْنَ مِنْ رَحِيقٍ مَخْتُومٍ"Muhammad Sarwar: They will be given pure wine out of sealed containers"[http://corpus. quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=83&verse=25].
Such an attractive male paradise contributes to political Islam a great chance in order to recruit young men around the world. The naïve jiahdists are mentioned from religious sanctification against non-Muslims and even other thinkers inside the Islamic communities. Killing and being killed for the sake of Allah is a perversion for normal people, but unfortunately an interpretation of Islam providing one-way ticket to paradise for these jiahadists. After the inception of the Islamic regime in 1979 in Iran, this perversion appears in different forms and places like ISIS, Boko Haram, Taliban, Al Qaida and certainly other forms.
Jahanshah Rashidian

Cultural barriers to objectivity