Eros so long.

From the point of view of evolutionary fitness, doesn’t the strong patriarchal adherent send the following message to his prospective mates?:

“Beware of me, for I suffer from all sorts of deficiencies. I cannot make it in this world on my own steam. I need a system to remain in place that would facilitate my success by imposing a handicap upon my competition. Without a patriarchal advantage, I will surely fail.”

Of course, one really doesn’t know if anybody truly thinks in this way, it’s just a guess based on circumstantial evidence.

What really needs explanation is how contact with patriarchal notions removes Eros from the picture — at least it does for me.

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what ails the right wing

(You will know who I am talking about if you are this particular kind of right winger.) I don’t think those of the right wing have any conception at all as to what it would be like if society as a whole gave in to their programmes. I’m speaking specifically right now about their agenda concerning women. They cling to the notion that we are humans without bodies and that power is immaterial. Gleefully they pat each other on the backs — the more power we take from women, the more we have for ourselves, they consider.

The world itself does not function on the basis of such a crude mechanism — even basic economics should teach you that. What are bail-out packages and other “stimulus packages” other than a tacit acknowledgement that the harm that befalls one sector of the community is likely to befall the whole?

Yet still right-wingers hold onto the idea that the more “woman” is whittled away, the more personality he will have for himself. The idea of whittling away at her even feels clever — it’s a formula reckoned not to lose, since building oneself up whilst chopping her down seems the best way to assure that she will gravitate over to your side and come and live in your pocket.

The truth is other than this — just as no ethereal women-concept can actually be embodied by a real woman. Material reality dictates that if somebody is whittled down, they do not fall into your pocket, but become ill, physically and mentally. Their capacity to participate in life becomes diminished. You have whittled them away.

Is there something romantic about cholera (love in the time of..?) Is there something romantic about malnutrition and an early death?

The right winger thinks there is — and that is why he and his ideas should be eliminated.

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the world in flux

To the see the world as being in a state of flux, as if one were separated from it in a transcendent position, watching its material vicissitudes, is this not the key to the paranoid-schizoid position of early childhood?

Contrarywise, to see the world from an integrated position, peering out at is from the point of view of one who has claim to some identity or other that is publically recognised and reinforced — is that not equivalent to the depressive position of the social realist who has accepted society’s shackles of the mind, and is now part and parcel of them: person and shackles in one?

Marechera speaks thus from the first position in critical analysis of the second:

What has not been done in the name of some straitjacket?’My soul a neat shirtfront; these star-studded galaxies. Ashtrays on the desk overflow with stubbed inventions. Night and sky are refuges on a quay; the world debris piled at the edge of neat memoranda. White pebbles on a white beach dazzle the eye towards the lighthouse; a spurt of flame is the whiteman shooting grouse. Orion smiles at cracked tiles on Brixton roofs. The mirror flinches. Torn commandments of clouds shroud the sky from me. Time and space enclose me in their fetid rooms.

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pre-oedipal defined

If Marechera’as “pre-oedipal” self has any revolutionary significance, it is in the sense that he observes its machinations from a transcendental or detached perspective. Its machinations appear, in this light, contingent, subject to change, conditioned by arbitrariness and apparently in a state of flux.

By contrast, the opposite way of viewing things has become generally enshrined within contemporary culture.  We tend to see through a lens of pre-oedipal differentiation of the world into opposites, wherein never the twain shall meet. We think we see fixed essences of identity — male versus female, and good versus evil. We impose upon the transcendental quotient of life a sense of fixed definitions, which somehow strikes us as resonating with a quality of the eternal (which is so because we impose our own arbitrariness of vision on the world as transcendental definitions — or eternal ‘essences’).

The pre-oedipal remains what it is — a developmental stage that leaves its mark on adult modes of perception. Yet one either can learn to see it through the lens of the arbitrary and the contingent (looking down on “fixed” as identities which wrongly believe themselves to be eternal and immutable).  One also sees through the eyes of an eternity detached from (and genuinely transcending) that which lies below it in the form of thinking processes that have their own vicissitudes, which form and deconstruct ‘identities’ as an ongoing process.

TONDERAI’S FATHER REFLECTS

FROM “THE CONCENTRATION CAMP” – “TONDERAI’S FATHER REFLECTS”

To suffer martyrdom is a fate that falls upon some, taking them outside the arena of rationality, to a place where death casts its irrational shadow. It is the destiny of Tonderai’s father to endure martyrdom for the sake of freedom, in Zimbabwe’s Second Chimurenga or war of liberation. Mr Murehwa is the father of Tonderai, a boy who had been taking food to support the guerilla combatants. In the three page soliloquy by Tonderai’s father, he commits to denying the torturers of the Rhodesian forces any information. Rather, he seals up his fate, along with the refusal of his words, in the metaphoric form of a burial ship that will take him to his death:

Well it’s done
Across this stuttering tongue of sea
My ship, The Wordhorde, sails
My burial ship, wrought from tough hardwood word
Sails … (p 195)

The writing is intra-psychological, dealing as it does with Tonderai’s father’s encounter and reconciliation with his superego, which he recruits to the side of his fight for liberation, using his memories that evoke hatred of the Rhodesian forces to enable him to face death in a manner that is “hard” in the sense of being unwavering and resolute.

From afar, listing into view,
The Towerman cometh; cloud and spray,
Rent apart, reveal
The Towerman’s glisped visage! (p 195)

This encounter with superego is destructive – not least because it involves reconciliation with what is right to do, rather than with what is merely comfortable and acting in compliance with the status quo. It would be easier to deny that deny that the Rhodesian forces really meant to do harm. It would be easier to defer to those who were already in power. So the reconciliation with his superego produces a tearing apart of mind and body – the body must submit to what the mind has commanded.

Like ‘lectric feather drop’t
From thunderbird’s tearing flight
(Darkness visible!) memory’s very light
Baptises the Towerman’s exilebroken
Return …

The “light” of memory (and the capacity of resolution that the recollection of hatred brings) enables Mr Murehwa to recruit his own superego for an appropriately warlike response to the war waged against him, despite his humble needs and desires.

The rest of the soliloquy reads like a “soul journey” of shamanistic dissociation. It is clear that the formlessness of the “ocean” forms the basis for the partial release of Mr Murehwa’s body from his mind, as he undergoes torture. The sea “stutters” (p 198), but does not speak. It is formless and “oceanic”, for it carries the victim away from the shores of reality and the victimisers who reside there.

This shamanic soul journey of dissociation enables the subject to transcend himself, so as to embrace his mysterious destiny to become a freedom fighter, although in a material sense he is merely a slave to circumstance:

Whose on the trader’s forearm these teethmarks?
A sudden mist
Casts mystery upon the cradle. ( p 196)

It also unites him in life and death with a transcendent image of eternity as the embracer of both good and bad fate – “This deep black-blue sky”, from which “no breath in hope’s breeze will blow her image.” ( p 197) The dissociation that enables the “soul journey” – the “sailing away” is facilitated in traditional shamanistic fashion, facilitating dissociation by the sense of a beating of a drum:

Only this drum
Of gloom and din
And gross dream
Wrought from tough hardwood word
Sails. ( p 197)

Pain takes on a rhythm of its own that enables the subject to endure his torment. Tonderai’s father reflects upon his wife writing an obituary in the newspaper after he has gone. ( p 197). He forecasts her endurance in an alienating cityscape after his death, and her meeting him there after they have both become ghosts. It is a place that uses up the poor as manual labour, and gives them only coldness (and nothing for the soul) in return.

Only this drum
Skyscapers of steel and sinew
Cement, plateglass, and workers’ blood
The Towerman’s sneer as wide as Fourth Street
Down which I walk hand in hand with the ghost
Of her who sailed the stuttering sea …
My burial ship, The Wordhorde. ( p 198)

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Marechera’s The Alley

THE ALLEY

Object relations psychoanalysis teaches us that as humans we keep many of the intra-psychological devices concerned with ego self-regulation, from our early childhood. As adults we defend our place within society by projecting, for instance, the qualities of masterliness upwards within a hierarchy, so as if to perceive our social context as if our own superior qualities were emanating from elsewhere, from those in the strata of social hierarchy above us. (Menzies Lyth). Likewise, to adapt to the logic of a pre-existing social hierarchy, we may be inclined to project onto those in the social strata below us our negative psychological qualities, being those we find less desirable in ourselves – in the terms of Menzies Lyth, we project downwards our incompetence.

To project upwards or downwards our emotional needs can end up with us losing touch with those particular elements. Along with the infantile but nonetheless adaptive tactic of projection, is the splitting of the self, so that parts of the self are acknowledged as being “really me”, because others are dissociated from, as being “other”.  The loss of parts of oneself – whether that be in the form of the sense of ones competency or the sense of one’s human fallibility (as the loss of the sense of this is also a loss in terms of self-understanding) comes under the contemporary or “new age” shamanistic paradigm as “soul loss”. The restoration of the “soul” – that is, of one’s true self, existing in a form that isn’t compromised by social and political necessities – is the key to shamanistic healing. It is not just the person who is restored and made whole by virtue of “soul retrieval” [term: Ingerman]. Society as a whole needs restoration from the states produced by primeval splitting, to move from stress-related (pathological) modes of coping towards a healthier model of relating within the social whole.

“The Alley” is a play that deals with this issue of societal and personal healing, through an encounter with the split-off aspects of the self. The play examines the traumatic legacy of post-war Zimbabwe (post the second Chimurenga that ended in 1980). Marechera is keen to show how the dissociation from the past (and from aspects of one’s self), in post war Zimbabwe, leads to a mode of forgetfulness that is the forgetting of the self. In such a condition, one goes through life without the sense of who one really is, or how one got there. One needs to face the trauma of the past to affect “soul retrieval” – that is, in order to become who one is, again.

In “The Alley”, a black and white tramp struggle with their tendencies to forget, as they fraternize in the streets of Harare, unable to recognise the cause of their demise. They had both fought in the war of liberation on opposite sides, and they had both had the privileged status of career lawyers, before making their descent into the grey mists of fugue and loss of social status, entailed in living the hobo lifestyle. Marechera borrows from Beckett – in particular from “Waiting for Godot” – in his idea of exploring the life of tramps through an aesthetic and conceptual lens of forgetfulness. His approach involves more of a psychological and political study of post-war Zimbabwe, however, and not being concerned with an existential statement of the human condition, which is how Beckett has generally been read.

The complication that Marechera introduces in “The Alley” is the question of gender and how that impacts on how trauma and recovery are experienced. Whereas Beckett also subtly implies a gendered aspect to his play in naming one of his male tramps Estragon (which sounds like estrogen), Marechera takes the issue of gender further, in order to show that post-war trauma in his contemporary Zimbabwe of the eighties, had a distinctly gendered quality. His mode of writing is both slapstick – Cecil Rhodes is introduced as “Cecilia” – and tear-jerking. This tragicomic mode is designed to break down the current ego-defences of the audience, with their current stress-based and probably pathological adaptations to the social world. It is designed to guide us, through laughter and tears, to see the real tragedy of those whose lives and potential were sacrificed during the bush war. Only then, upon recognition of what was sacrificed and lost, can a real restoration of the soul begin to take place.

As is common in Marechera’s writing, the aesthetics of the play are based upon the tacit psychological understanding that when we’re under deep emotional stress, the qualities we attribute to others are really a part of ourselves, and not something entirely separate from us.  Just as we might be inclined to socially eschew the other for being black or of the wrong gender, so we are also socially invested in maintaining the normal state of affairs that keeps others at a hierarchical distance as the psychologically dissociated aspects of oneself. To be compelled to know the other, through tears and laughter, is to come to know the socially alienated aspects of one’s self – the aspects denied when one adapts to a social role, within what is normal in society: a social hierarchy.

Marechera’s work shows to us the link between psychological self-alienation and societies that are organised by political and social hierarchies. The cost we pay for the latter is in terms of the former. In terms of the patriarchal and socially conservative society that was post-war Zimbabwe (and as it still is to a very large degree), Marechera’s exploration of the gendered base of traumatic dissociation is very radical indeed. Marechera shows that Rhodesia, on the sides of both black and white cultures, has had a patriarchal history, and leaves a patriarchal legacy to those in the present. To fully heal, society has to face that which it has dissociated from – which is hidden behind “the wall” of consciousness, in the unconscious or semi-conscious parts of the mind. Marechera points out that where the black and white men fought each other like “dogs in heat” ( p 46) , redirecting their erotic impulses towards aggression, those who really paid the emotional cost of the war were women – specifically the daughter and sister of the black and white men (who are represented by the two tramps).

The traumatic spectre that hides behind the wall is the damage done by this excessive “sexual” self-indulgence of the bush war to the women whom the men had no doubt sworn to protect. Rhodes – the black tramp – has been given slightly greater authority by author in terms of the moral ground for fighting for his liberation. It is he who introduces his “other” – the white tramp, Robin – to the spectre of his sister, Cecilia, who was raped and murdered by the Rhodesian forces, and now abides behind “the wall” of consciousness.

RHODES: Your daughter, Judy, is right there with her. I can see them. They are kissing.

Robin’s daughter, in turns out, was also a victim of the war, raped and murdered by the black “comrades”. Only when the brick wall in the alley is struck, with determination to know what is behind it, does it give us these traumatic answers about the cause of the tramps’ pathologies. Surmises Rhodes to Robin, speaking again with a margin of greater authority than his colleague has the right to:

I used to suffer from world weariness, but the wall says that too was nothing. I cannot get away from you, though that’s the only thing I want from life, from the whole last ounce of the universe. You also want to get away, but like me, you can’t, and for the same reason. I am your wall, and you are my wall. And the game we tried during the war of mounting each other like dogs in severe heat has not yet been settled. ( p 46)

The way to healing for these men is to face the traumatic and dissociated feminine aspects of these men’s identities, which lies behind the wall of consciousness.

Jaded

My dreams these days are jaded.

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transcending Nietzsche

TONY AND JANE CHRONICLES

The consciousness of appearance.— How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-à-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer,—I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the conciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish: as a somnambulist must go on dreaming lest he fall.—Nietzsche GS

Tony and Jane are clearly dreamers – a pair of cultural somnabulists – caught up in the ramifications of living in their post-liberation-war contemporary Zimbabwean culture. Tony clearly has aspirational desires, initially to keep his head above the water. He is a dreamer of a conservative sort. Such is the nature of his dreaming solely within the conservative paradigm that he cannot see that nature of Jane, or of her dreaming. Her dreams take her outside of the cultural paradigm of conservatism, in which Tony resides. The nature of her dreaming exposes her to animistic dangers that Tony, with his limited scope on his own life, is unable to protect her from. The conservative male dream that one becomes the head of the suburban household by toeing the line at work and by embracing “rationality” in one’s life’s goals is shown to be severly undermined by the daemonic forces brought into play within the nice suburban home, on the basis of Jane’s dreaming. Tony and Jane – or Tony-Jane, as the author occasionally refers to them, for their dreaming is compensatory of each-other’s shortfalls with regard to full participation in life – are participating in life as products of their society and culture. Only a shaman can enter their world, through dream-states, in order to appraise the situation they are in for what it is. Only he can truly laugh, and critique the absurdities that ensue because of their blind cultural participation in the status quo. The shaman passes between dream states of cultural normality into an alternative state of consciousness, and in so doing he reflects tacitly the degree to which a life which they could fully call their own is not within the reach of Tony and Jane.

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BLACK DAMASCUS ROAD:what is wrong with Paul?

BLACK DAMASCUS ROAD

Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one.
http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm

What is wrong with Paul, the character of this short story, other than the fact that he cannot reach his own depths – enough to know what he wants or does not want from life? Zimbabwe is not “his” in a true sense – he lives a dream life, neither fully awake nor fully asleep, but inbetween.

Perhaps is is thenature of his enduring somnabulism that causes him to finally “pull the pin” on life as he has come to know it?

A sheer delight.

I feel good about myself right now these days. I’ve cracked the puzzle! (The puzzle that is indicated by the image on the front of my book.) In cracking the puzzle, I know myself, and have no need for social approval. I’ve discovered who I am.

Last week I enjoyed two private sparring lessons, and improved my tactics ten-fold.

Today, I will do my best to rest — to rest and write. The Earth holds me in its little paw. A sheer delight.

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the oppressive double-bind

One of the ways authoritarians of all sorts manage to get control is through a particular double-bind that they are specialists in achieving.

1. They demand and expect perfection in every way.

2. They create exactly the sort of environment in which perfection is not facilitated but undermined.

This method was used against Rhodesian blacks. They had to be magically perfect, since every expression of life from them that was imperfect was taken as a sign that there was something inherently and irredeemably wrong with them. On the other hand, they were given none of the means by which they might express the levels of cultural and intellectual perfection that were demanded of them.

Caught in this contrived double-bind that demanded evidence of whiteness to advance, they were kept down. The evidence that they could not do perfection was used against them as evidence that they did not deserve to have the means by which they could achieve cultural and intellectual perfection. The increase in stress quotient, due to constantly failing to meet the mark set for them to show that they were deserving, would have made things even worse for them (but not for their colonial rulers).

Many use this same psychological justification against migrants, to prevent these from receiving equal treatment  (Their level of perfection — e.g. education, moral conformity and spoken English) is not already exemplary, therefore they cannot be given the equal treatment they requested.

Present day xenophobia also thrives around this psychological double-bind.

Zimbabwe is ours

Marechera’s skill is to be able to express, using a number of quite diverse literary techniques, including irony and humour, the hidden aspects of social injustice, which are experienced as this existential discontinuity and disruption of selfhood. The measure by which social justice can be estimated is, of course, by the ability to assert in a convincing way, that one’s environment is genuinely one’s own. Since this is the metaphysical measurement that Marechera brings to bear, within his writings in the book, it is clear that the approach he uses has radical social and political implications – one might say that they were anarchistic in design.

The metaphysics governing Marechera’s writing is thus a notion of selfhood that is affirmed at the greater social level: an existential sense of being that would give the affirmation to the concept that “Zimbabwe is ours”. In fact, his writing in Scrapiron Blues is highly ironic, for there is an inevitable discordance between how the characters see themselves and whether the author’s sense of organic truth — as an underlying ontological foundation with its own way of catching and holding the vibrations of human life — actually agrees or disagrees with the characters’ self assessments. The membrane that we hear echoing with a true or false note as pronouncement of a moral judgment says much about the characters relation to authenticity. There are characters in Scrapiron Blues who have been effectively pushed out of normal, everyday existence, to inhabit a spirit-realm. Here their ghost selves serve the truth through the authenticity of their personal testimonies. Compared to those who remain in a conventional relationship with life – that is, without the alienation that makes them into ghosts – Marechera’s spirit characters are on higher moral ground. Their voices echo with the sense that Zimbabwe is not yet theirs. Their cries, thwarted in their lifetime, but resonant in the spirit world, concern their right to participate fully in life as human beings who are not alienated from society at large. Their legacy to those still living is to catch them in their false notes in relation to authenticity. It is to put them back on course towards an authentic kind of living, in accordance with which they will be able to honestly pronounce that Zimbabwe is theirs. In Shona spiritualist terms, there is an unbroken chain of connection between the future and its well-being and the moral integrity of the past.

The aesthetics of moral discordance in Scrapiron Blues is a sign to his readers that there is more work in transforming everyday reality to be done. Marechera’s short stories for children were criticised for having a similar quality of discordance about them: “Publishers found the stories ‘unsuitable’ because of the disparity between the child-like narrator and the sarcastic, older voice which permeates the writing.” (p xiii). In terms of typical Marecherian sense of humour, those who embrace reality as it is without questioning it, in particular those who haven’t been pushed out of life, to live a shadowy liminal existence, are the least intelligent and most comical of characters. (The rest of his characters are involved in some tragic circumstances or other.) Thus it is the author’s cat, and not the author himself who can affirm reality as it currently is. For the author’s cat, it is the structure of archeological ruins of previous Zimbabwean civilisation that is to be applauded. What of Zimbabwe itself? The question is studiously avoided, for the cat can be pleased with that which the author, in his higher knowledge, cannot be:

My Cat looked at Great Zimbabwe.
“It’s huge! It’s very old.
“It’s made of great big stones!” my Cat
exclaimed.
“It’s ours. I am proud of Zimbabwe!”
said my Cat on the way home. ( p 224)

Marechera as the author of this piece is herein playing his part as mediator of the knowledge held by those already dead (the freedom fighters who fought for a better Zimbabwe) and those half-pushed out of life (those living in a mode of political and social alienation in his contemporary Zimbabwe). He knows the truth, but it is difficult to say it within a context of political censorship. (His last book published when he was alive, Mindblast, goes into more details about his censorship. Its contents caused a political furore.) The discrepancy between the “two voices” adds, in any case, an aspect of aesthetic complexity to the writing. Children may not understand sarcasm of this sort, but in due course they are able to understand that adults address them with different tones of voice, which have different meanings and repurcussions for them. A child can therefore grow towards understanding the meaning of Marechera’s text in light of his political critique and complexity.

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reichwing men for girls!

click on image to get the full size.

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answer to google keyword search

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=when did patriarchal society finish %28what year%29&meta=

the last day of 1982 at 5pm

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and still.

I’m still digesting my own memoir. It’s the horror of seeing myself reflected back by it so perfectly that I can hardly stand. Is this life? Is this my life? I recoil in perfect recognition. I cannot stand it.

Yet I’m in there and I can see so closely my actions and responses.

I’m no longer so close to it that I am still reacting in the way of “Blah! The suffocation of so much contingency.” I now see the action and reaction — that the reaction was mine alone (and not an aspect of contingent “fate”.)  I’ve now, out of boredom, turned the lens to observe the opposite angle of double-sided reality.

And still…

Sekuru Bob — great music!

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Scrapiron Blues

According to psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who examined psychological states as aesthetic modes of experience, the paranoid-schizoid position is the one that imparts visions – one is never truly an artist unless one can retain the element of hope and “immaturity” that would enable one to access to it; whereas, a “mature” psychological position is the attitudinal position of ordinariness. To move between both states of awareness is the artist’s lot.

One can imagine how the evolution of this more “mature” philosophical perspective would have affected the author’s sense of his role as a writer and his capabilities as someone who might influence the political situation of his time. The maturation of his perceptions towards seeing the ontology of the social world as psychologically and materially founded, but not influenced by metaphysical postulates would have led to an exceeding disappointment. This attitudinal posture is akin to the “depressive position” described by Bion. As an artist one communicates one’s “paranoid-schizoid” visions – (meant figuratively so, for an artist is creatively at odds with social norms, that is if he or she has any worth) – to the world at large but with the realisation that there are limits to one’s communicative reach, since one’s visions are not postulates of a general human intersubjectivity. This realisation involves embracing reality in the “depressive position”. One sees that others will automatically see things in a different light from how one experiences one’s visions. The “maturation” of the artist to the point of seeing reality in this light could logically lead to his movement out of an artistic perspective altogether. Marechera’s maturation as an author, seen in Scrapiron Blues, sees the beginnings of a permanent movement away from an extremely visionary approach to one that is more ordinary.

The greater degree of skepticism concerning the possibility of political change on the basis of visionary motifs was a useful turn for Marechera, since it enabled him to speak in a more ordinary (less esoteric or “elitist”) fashion about Zimbabwean social reality.

PSYCHOLOGY – YOUR DAILY DOSE OF MORAL FIBRE

These days, we are not prepared for life by the kind of culture which has any sort of psychological orientation. Even my upbringing in right-wing Rhodesia was kinder to the proletarian — which is to say, my education had more of an emphasis on psychological knowledge and psychological affirmation of others, compared to what is generally given in the educational systems today.

Why should we even care about psychology? What does it mean to us anyway?

Worker – it is your life and bread, your living or your death that is at stake.

The way I came to be a revolutionary was not through the ideological muttering or rhetorical flourishes of those of the left, who would attempt to persuade others with their words. I did not one day conclude that I would embrace a certain ideology over all others, until death do us part. My need to engage in revolutionary activity has to do with pure psychology. I have learned what makes me function effectively in this world. I have learned what kinds of factors and influences make me feel ineffective. I do what I can to reinforce my feelings of effectiveness. I avoid the situations that destroy my self-confidence and undermine my ability to act. I embrace the reality of myself as a psychological creature.

When I speak about psychology, I am talking about your right to make decisions for yourself on the basis of self-knowledge. What kind of work is right for you? What kind of work is simply soul-destroying, and must be refused at all costs?

We have been taught by our system of education to be humble, all too humble, when approaching this matter. We have been taught to ask for very little – only not to be kicked too often, at least not more often than the next dog … er, human being. All in all we lack character. Perhaps I have forgotten to mention it? Psychology is the basis for self-knowledge. Without self-knowledge, we cannot have character. Or, as those of the Australian Army like to put it: We are without “moral fibre.”

So, now we see how all these things I have been talking about are interlinked. Without moral fibre, we are unable to choose which situations we want to work with. Without moral fibre, we lack character. Having character is the same as moral fibre. Without psychological self-knowledge, we can have no character. Without self-knowledge, we can have no moral fibre.

As I said to begin with, the educational system of Rhodesia, for all its faults and racial limitations, gave me the power of control over my self, because I was instructed in the art of thinking of myself as a psychological being, living alongside others who acted towards themselves and others on the basis of their moral fibre. Bells of alarm would ring in my head when, later in life and long out of school, I came upon people acting out of a feeling of necessity, rather than choice. Such people had been put in a very bad situation with regard to life and their acquiescence to the impossible nature of their situation meant something even worse. People who accepted the dehumanizing situations imposed on them had been given no ways of thinking by the mentors in their school systems that they could have turned into moral fibre. They were lacking in the fundamental quality of self-knowledge, which would have forced them to speak up for themselves.

Think about how the rules and regulations of bourgeois tutelage – as system of complying with the bosses – undermine your character. You are told not to see many things that you do, in fact, see. You are warned not to consider what kinds of workplace situations would be damaging to your health and well-being, as compared to which would be supportive of those things. You are taught, in fact, to act without discrimination concerning the kinds of situations you put yourself in, and even what the outcomes mean to you. “Don’t think about that,” you are told. Instead, “Concentrate on proving your compliance with the system through a lack of adequate psychological discrimination and self-knowledge. Accept any sort of job. Don’t consider what it means to you. Only consider that there can’t be any questionable gaps within your résumé.” The psychologically adept person immediately asks “why not?” The psychologically knowledgeable boss replies at once: “A gap means non-compliance with the will of bosses.”

Only the boss does not reply like that of course. It is not in the interest of a boss to school you in the meaning of the system that has been imposed on you. A psychological perspective isn’t meant for you, but for others.

Which brings me to my other point: You are not meant to have the moral fibre that would enable you to resist a situation that is not in accordance with your will. If you don’t know why you are complying with the bosses, except for out of fear, if you don’t know what a human being is, and how it differs from a dog, if you accept what the educational system tells you, without deeper psychological reflection, then you have been deprived of your fundamental human essence. The one aspect to your existence that should have been of the utmost importance has been taken from you. Without psychology, you can have no humanity.

bourgeois individualists…

…..cannot be moral. Even if they want to.

They cannot because they cannot know themselves. They are the unknowable thing in itself, separated forever from self-knowledge since they are, on principle, separated from their bodies as sources of meaning and knowledge.

Since they cannot know themselves, they are subject to all sorts of social manipulation. They are conditioned by forces outside of their consciousness.

You cannot trust them.

They seem reliable and logical enough — up to the point that they blow up and attack you.

Why the attack?

For reasons that they do not know.

Sexism is founded on regressive psychological dynamics

I am now convinced that pre-oedipal dynamics are used in order to maintain gender roles. The male asserts itself as the infant does against its mother: “You are are my waste matter. I insist on dominating at your expense.”

What keeps women down is that they constantly receive the message: “You are are my waste matter. I insist on dominating at your expense.”

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

Remember me not

Bourgeois ideology creates the basis for postmodernist consciousness. The reason is its mind-body dualism. To have a real identity, within the bourgeois system, is the moral and phenomenological equivalent of being caught loitering. The body is the concrete aspect of the self that is capable of giving us a real sense of being. However, under bourgeois ideology, the body is necessarily divorced from the mind. Freed of its anchor in the real world, the mind is left to wander, moving from one mental state to another, without a consistent feeling of having any particular underlying identity. The disembodied mind thus believes that it has freed itself. Such freedom is a moral imperative — not to be bound by the “body” and its memories, which are believed to pertain to a lower aspect of life. Those who remain attached to concrete aspects of the self, including bodily knowledge and memories of self-identity, appear to be spending too much time in one place. Morally, they are suspicious, for they link their sense of self to their bodies in a manner that bourgeois folk would consider quite unseemly.

Those who remember who they happen to be loiterers and spiritual offenders, from the point of view of bourgeois thinking.

desperate to survive?

Really, how do you relate to someone who genuinely thinks that they are “struggling for survival”? I’ve had people backstab me for no reason other than to eliminate one element of their competition — when, in fact, I was by no means their competitor, but was actually watching their back in many ways.

How do you deal with those who are that fearful and that desperate that they think everything that happens threatens to put either your neck or theirs on the chopping block, but not both?

Such people are functioning regressively, with a very primitive mythology, and if they’re hinting around me that they want to be the fittest to survive, I would most likely give them as wide a berth as possible.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

Go ahead, and struggle for your mere survival.

Ultimately those who want Social Darwinism should have it. I would never consider withholding it from them. Perhaps, in a subtle way, they have selected themselves out, for all people, to embrace this particular theory, and the Darwin Award rightfully belongs to them, above all others.

If the best come to the top of society, then that is well and good. I’m not going to hang around to see if the particular defenders of Social Darwinism are going to make it. It doesn’t matter to me. But I am not the issue here, since the giving or denying of my approval from the ideology of Social Darwinism is unlikely to make any difference to the actual outcome of any particular person’s success in the world on the basis of Darwinistic principles. So let them struggle to survive, in whatever way they choose to.

Just don’t expect to receive either my recognition or moral approval of any apparent success. After all, that would be to take things too much at face value — which Nature doesn’t do. Nature, raw in tooth and claw might well be giving certain people the illusion of success only to demolish them a little later. Nature withholds her final judgment from all stakes of “struggle for survival” until the last man or woman is left standing. Even then, she is probably just playing some sadistic joke — for only one to be left standing means no perpetuation of the human race. And to fail to perpetuate one’s genes is the quintessential definition of failure in Darwinistic terms. But such is life, viewed in its purely naturalistic sense. You’re just not that important as person, viewed in Darwinistic terms. Your demand for moral approval of your Darwinistic stance involves a logical contradiction which may or may not serve the species — indeed, as humans we will never really know the final judgment as to whether we are deemed by Nature to be the most successful of all humans.

But go ahead, and struggle for your mere survival.

I, like Nature, will look the other way, and will withhold my moral judgment until the end.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

ACT WITHOUT DENIAL

Zˇizˇek does not recoil from relating our time to Stalin rather
than to Lenin. Of course, we no longer adhere to Stalinist
doctrines, nor do we suffer under a similar terror, but our
post-modern certainties – those that tell us there are no certainties
– nestle just as much in their own pretensions. Although
it considers every ideological battle over, it nonetheless
shamelessly functions as a real ideology, and holds each every
revolutionary e´lan or truly political act at a great distance.
The consequences are even no less drastic as in Stalinist times,
except that, seated at the rich Western table as we are, we
never feel it that way. We leave that feeling to our fellow
world-citizens in the ‘South’. They personally experience what
it means to live in a so-called post-revolutionary world, freed
from all ideology. In other words, they feel directly how the
one and only dominant capitalist ideology maintains its
totalitarian grip on the whole planet, and how terribly difficult
– if not simply impossible – it is not to become the victim of
its perverse tricks and ruses.

MARC DE KESEL
ACT WITHOUT DENIAL
Slavoj Zˇ izˇek on Totalitarianism, Revolution and Political Act

—–

Consider the issue in relation to contemporary Zimbabwe and ZANU-PF’s ‘incomprehensible’ stance.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

Minus the Morning Rhodesian/Zimbabwean coming of age memoir

Now available for purchase from Lulu:

http://www.lulu.com/browse/preview.php?fCID=5487684

****

The publisher who almost published the book a few years ago, before going bankrupt, said:

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/2006/01/publishers-remark.html

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/