What it feels like to be a fly caught in a web: Althusser and interpellation

Let me summarize what we have discovered about ideology in general.

The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously:

1. The interpellation of ‘individuals’ as subjects;

2. their subjection to the Subject [the specular image of 'God'];

3. The mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects’ recognition of each other, and finally the subject’s recognition of himself;

4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen — ‘ So be it ‘.

Result: caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses. They are inserted into the practices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. They ‘recognize’ the existing state of affairs (das Bestehende), that ‘it really is true that it is so and not otherwise’, and that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt ‘love they neighbour as thyself’, etc. Their concrete, material behaviour is simply the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘ Amen — So be it ‘. (p 168-169).

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gender versus humanity

One of the strangest things a human being — which is to say, a person — can experience is in simply trying to tell about her experiences honesty and forthrightly, and getting the response, “Well why don’t you just conform more and be quiet?”

It’s a completely shocking answer because what goes through your head is “Well wouldn’t a normal human being –anybody at all — be completely outraged if this had happened to them? And wouldn’t it be logical that they should be able to tell their story and have injustices redressed?” So then you are thinking about what a normal person would react like, an everyday joe bloe –when suddenly it dawns on you that you are not joe bloe. You have been relegated to play the role of NON-PERSON!!! It is shocking. And then, you finally work out that it is because of your gender.

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reflecting, just reflecting

A pre-sleep reflection; an unwinding one…….

I reflect on what is a natural situation to me, a healthy one, a reviving one — a situation comes to mind wherein I don’t need to observe social niceties, where talking tough is a code for transcending collective anxieties (rather than what it tends to be within the suburbs: a means to dominate and/or infict brutalities). I’m thinking of the kind of shared understanding whereby everything is understood in relation to survival, even the smallest aspect of experience that produces mirth because of its absurdly tiny nature. I’m thinking of the kind of situation where multiple, contending values are reduced to one simplicity — where this simplicity, this interest in survival, is broad enough to encompass all other values: a rough exterior but with the softness at the core. I’m in harmony with those who have a rural upbringing as instinctively they sense how to find calm in the middle of the storm.

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Sadomasochism — the informal religion of Western culture?

No! I do not consider sado-masochism, in any of its forms, to be a turn-on. I know that sets me apart — indeed sets me aside for the kind of reeducation that would bring me in line with the category of contemporary femininity. Forgive me, Westerners, for I have sinned as I do not see any benefit in worshiping at your holy temple!

Westerners — they can’t get enough of sado-masochism! And yet, to look at it for what it is, it is nothing, just the emptiness of soul, and a fruitless attempt to make something — anything — out of this emptiness of soul. No, Westerners, I shall not be worshiping at your temple!

When the capacity to live as if reality were real disappears, when all that remains of life is its shadow, the generation of distorted images, that is when the quintessentially Western religion of sado-masochism comes into its own. The call to worship at this temple comes with an addendum: “If you don’t join in at once, you will be left out of the principle that governs everything that’s real.”

Good. Leave me apart from your clammy hands that only telegraph the empty nature of your soul.

Enjoy your religion.

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Westerners and their false attributions concerning knowledge

Westerners have a strange relationship to knowledge. The best I can say about it is that it is by no means natural or organic.

Knowledge, for the typical Westerner, has a moral meaning above and beyond any other value. Its importance is not related to the realm of practicalities, to the ability to learn and/or perform new actions with greater capability.

It is very important to realise, that a typical Westerner will become very confused (ultimately leading to punitive behaviour) if he catches wind that gaining knowledge has changed you in any way. Instead of understanding that you have just confessed to intellectual growth, the computer of his mind will spew forth the data: “Either she lacked moral character before, or else she lacks it now.” It’s at this point that he will start his punitive behaviour, which he thinks you well deserve, due to what he considers to be your moral inconsistency of character.

He has merely misunderstood you — but he is not in any position to know that. He is just trying to rectify your character, to make up for the fact that you have changed. Although he isn’t sure if the change he hears about is good or bad, he thinks a certain amount of punishment is always good for restoring moral order. (And he is not to know any differently about that, since he has been taught that knowledge has a moral character primarily.)

It is extremely likely, too that such a person feels threatened by your additional knowledge. He feels that by claiming to have gained more knowledge in your travels you are casting subtle moral aspersions at him, to make him feel more badly about himself in comparison to you. He can’t get to the bottom of these aspersions and what they might mean because, actually, they don’t exist. Nevertheless, he feels them to be present. That is another reason why the typical Westerner, feeling you have a different basis for knowledge than he does, typically attacks. He becomes very aggressive and even vengeful — but his feelings of inferiority are all in his head.

Westerners, most typically, view the possession of knowledge as something that assures the moral superiority of the one who has it. They are at one with Plato, in fact, equating knowledge with morality, with power. (This is typically why they make another error — they assume that is you claim to have knowledge but do not also have power then your claim to knowledge much be spurious, morally reprehensible. Little do they know!)

Knowledge, however, is a practical affair. To claim I do not have knowledge in some areas does not signify me as morally weak. It signifies, more likely, a lack of education in a particular area.

Nobody should be made ashamed for admitting that they do not know something. A lack of knowledge has no direct relation to the integrity of one’s character.

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scrapiron blues

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

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Derrida

Consider Derrida’s notion that language always needs supplementation to give it its metaphysical “presence”. Otherwise, it tends to remain slippery, unstable — which is effectively to say “without authority”. I think about how much of patriarchal thinking is designed to make language seem to be stable — indeed to stabilise it so that certain words can have only one meaning, or at best a few of them, that are considered to be authentic currency.

And yet, despite all this effort to stabilise reality through language — to, in effect, hypostatise language into ideology — the patriarch remains victim to slippages, to the assaults of contingency against the absolutism of the ideological system he wishes to set up. That is why he tries to bring women into play, to BE that supplementation of language, that emotional presence, that gives language its ideological quotient — its stability.

But this means that women cannot be their own meaning; cannot position themselves at their own centre (not even for a moment). Rather, they are made to be decentered from themselves — so that patriarchal meaning can be furnished by women’s emotional quotient.

This is why men are typically inclined to preach at women: “What you say isn’t what you mean, it’s just emotionalism. In fact, what I am saying, as a male, in re-inscribing the overarching ideology (the hegemony) is what is really meaningful.”

At the same time as he says this, however, the patriarch must surely also sense that his words are just words — basically inclined to slip away from the emotional quotient of his intended meaning. He implicitly understands then that it is not the words themselves, that have meaning, but rather his capacity to decenter women with them that makes them seem so meaningful. For it is by this practical (and not at all merely intellectual or symbolic means) that he seeks to give his words a more stable and thus “objective” meaning.

It is only by destabilising women’s meanings that he seeks and obtains his psychological supplement — giving to his words an emotional presence. “These words,” he says to himself “are Spirit. For see how they are can actually create  reality.”

black sunlight

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/3blacksunlight.htm

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Patriarchal persecution of the sex drive

The dirt from Dirt: The Future of Butch Genocide

Here is a cause we need to oppose — the attempt by the psychiatric establishment, representing patriarchy, to label those who do not fit neat gender stereotypes as “mentally ill”.

Speaking for myself, and as a heterosexual, I see that the attempt to revive an antiquated attitude towards gender is extremely perverted and pathological from the point of view of humanity.

Consider the normal, heterosexual sex-drive for instance. If a large part of me does not actually “identify” as male, then I am unable to empathise with a male on a sexual level. The lack of empathy means the lack of intersubjective connection, which means in turn, the lack of eroticism during a sexual encounter.

The inherent bisexuality of human beings (which was even recognised and acknowledged as such by such patriarchal perverts as Freud and Jung)ought to be brought more to the fore of our consciousness, not pushed aside by threatening and stigmatising practices of labelling and “fixing”.

The castration of human sexuality by trying to push people into too narrow categories ought to be outlawed.

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Last night’s dream

Last night, I was in a hotel, where I had been for two days. I hadn’t checked in yet, because I had become distracted by all the gizmos, and the food. Eventually I realised that I should check in, and I got a room, but the room led to the outside of the building. A prostitute had climbed up the stairs into my room, and was helping herself to any of my clothes she fancied. I caught her red-handed, and she argued that it was only necessary for her to take the items of clothes that I hadn’t really wanted anyway — like a bikini. (I know exactly what this dream is about — my resentment about continuing to give any money to the Third World when my own resources are limited. The dream also recognises that any luxury I have is in the shape of clothing.)

I walked her back down the steps and out of my apartment. As she left, she said (in an American accent) that she must try really hard to remember the details about me and what I had said.)

Another part of the dream was that I was walking on water — literally on a very stormy ocean, at night time. As I approached the shore, I hoped that the final wave would not be a tidal wave, which would dump me, as if from a cliff face, onto hard gravel.

But meanwhile, I am back at the hotel…

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Patriarchal mind reading

Let me give you a more succinct definition of a patriarch. A patriarch is somebody who presumes to read minds, most especially and predominantly the minds of women.

A patriarch doesn’t need to read a book, because he already knows what is in it — that is, if said book has been written by a woman.

You can talk to a patriarch about all sorts of things, but at the end of it, he will only register about 10 per cent of what you had to say. He will mingle that in with his vague ideas about “what all women really are like,” and will draw his conclusions about you on that basis. This is the precise manner by which a patriarch does his mind reading: He will allow his lack of attention and vain imaginings to run away with him. Finally he will pronounce his views — and nothing about them will be right.

A patriarch is nothing if he is not a mind reader. He will second guess any woman — even about the details of her own life’s experiences. He will come up with some generalisation that somehow just seems more apt to him than any explanation she has given.

“I get a sense that this is how it REALLY was,” he will say. “A lot of what you are saying does not correlate with my own experiences and therefore doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Let me tell you the real truth about your experiences from my perspective,” he will drone on.

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kangaroo envy

I have observed that one of the best of the Australian female fighters fights like a kangaroo.

Consequently, I now have kangaroo envy.

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Minus the Morning and Mourning

There is something about the truth that is worth grabbing onto and holding no matter what happens. There are those like Nietzsche who see too much truth as destructive, and hold onto an idea that it is better to embrace a noble lie, under some circumstances. He is right that we can traumatise ourselves by looking too deeply into some things. There is a world of suffering out there. It depends on what mentality you have when you face it. Perhaps digging too much into the facts of Gukurahundi can make the Shona and Ndbele hate each other more. But if you have a powerful mind, you can look at all these facts, as painful as they are, and they do not need to become a cause for more war, but rather for mourning.

Minus the Morning is a narrative about how I was not allowed to mourn my loss of a country, because I am white. I felt like I couldn’t go back there because I was hated, and I couldn’t stay in the West because I was hated. This all had to do with history, not with me. (I was born too late even to be in the know about very much, not less that I was not a decision maker about UDI and war and so on.) Then my father ended up hating me, for reasons to do with his own disturbed upbringing and because he felt that I was becoming a liberal.

I didn’t even know that there were different sides of the political fence in those days — I was just trying to adapt to the new culture and get along. But my father was having none of that. He wanted me to grow up as if it were the early 1950s, and to attend to his needs (which were mostly emotional neediness for a self-sacrificing female/mother figure). To even consider sacrificing myself in that way when I had the huge task of adapting to a thoroughly foreign (and somewhat hostile) new society was way beyond me. I didn’t know my way around this new culture any more than my parents did. They were leaning on me –the eldest –heavily for support, but I didn’t even have the basic necessities to get along in this new place — the right refence points, the right clothing, the sense of being surburban middle class. I had none of these things in order. And then my parents started to attack me, claiming that I was their spiritual and political enemy. All too traumatic.

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Vicious? I’ll show you what that is! Meet The Patriarchy!

It seems that even at the moment that I cast my suspicions, namely that Western patriarchy is essentially a pathological group structure, I also at that moment, underestimate the degree to which this statement holds water.

If one is not really pathological then anger or disappointment might be the most logical result at being thought to be otherwise. But a patriarch who is in fact really pathological will not take kindly to being labelled as he is. So one must walk with greater caution in labelling what is in fact pathological correctly.

And there is always also the danger of using one of patriarchy’s most potent weapons against it. Keep in mind that women per se (that is before they speak, act or do anything whatsoever) have been labelled by the patriarchy as insane/disordered. This label is linked to the idea that they do not have male body parts, and thus cannot be “normal” (wherein “normal” is that which conforms to existing patriarchal ideals — a logical vicious circle).

So women are wrongly regarded as disordered before they even have anything to say, and when they do say, “patriarchy is pathological” (that is, they give verbal expression to the contents of their everyday experience), it is a conditioned reflex of every hardline patriarch to turn around and say: “But you’re the woman of the group. So, it’s not me — it’s you!”

Due to the very minimal amount of effort that a patriarch puts into any kind of thinking, he will feel vindicated in expressing these views as well. (He thinks that the genteel inwards sensation that taking the path of least resistance engenders in him is a sign that the gods are actually smiling on him.)

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feminism is about covering for you

Feminism — the way I practice it — is not about putting people down. Feminism is about covering for them when their public face is diminished and they do not know it yet.

My immediate response, when I discover that somebody harbours misogynistic values is not — as the propagandists would have you believe — outrage, or terror or inwards deference. Rather it is shame.

It’s the shame you feel for somebody whom you had respected only to find that they are walking around in public with a big gob of green snot on their nose.

The question becomes what to do about it.

Do you tell them that they have publicly lost face? Empathy intervenes against such direct measures. Do you suggest it to them indirectly, that there might be something really wrong with their personal hygiene?

Under such circumstances, it is not easy to know what to do.

At times I have risked my own well being (which is best maintained by pure and simple detachment from those who profess misogyny). I’ve said or done something to indicate the nature of the problem.

Almost always I have regretted this. Objectivity, rational self-examination and ideals of “civilisation” may be the values with which those who uphold patriarchal ideals want to be identified. The opposite is actually the case. Those who want to be identified with these ideals often turn out to be the most subjective, self-aggrandizing and irrational of all people — who want to label women with these qualities in order to take the pressure of themselves. (Indeed, this seems to be the strategy that lies behind much of the illogical nature of patriarchal ideology, per se.)

I have found it near impossible to inform a dedicated patriarch that he has something on his face.

I had a hectic week!

I had a hectic week, tis fair to say. I’m not sure quite what made this last week so hectic, except perhaps that I am trying to process very many different parts of my thesis at once. I felt short of breath, in some ways — in other ways, as if I’d entered the eye of the storm: the storm of mental altertness.

It’s been an odd week indeed. A week of second guessing myself, at least that is how the beginning of the week started. It ended with me pushing through the haze, and getting a certain amount of work done.

I had delayed my library trip until Wednesday — the day I was to redeem a number of the key reference books that I had earlier given up to being restacked, after 6 or 7 renewals (I believe this was the limit of renewals allowed). Mindblast — the library has one copy of this Marecherian rarity — had gone missing from the shelves (and not on one, on two occasions). It had been misplaced in the “323s” instead of the “325s”. But this was way back late last year, when I had first gone looking for it, and put in an order for a library search for it. But then it was refound! But then … I was notified and did not receive the email as my student emailing system had been changed. When I went looking for this book this week, it wasn’t anywhere to be found again. So I commissioned another search. It turned up. I carried two armloads of books to my car, about 10 minutes away. I’d found one of the key books needed to complete my thesis. (And it is published by “College Press”, Harare, so the pages are out of order, and some of them repeat. I wonder if I have been deprived of any key works.)

Then I got some work done that night. I didn’t feel like it, but then I didn’t not feel like it. Too many unrelated ideas were circulating in my head. But then there were also some key ideas therein circulating, and I made a concentrated effort and got some concluding paragraphs done.

I wanted to get this out of the way anyway, because there was a sparring session that Mike had organised with little Mike, (or rather vice versa), and I didn’t want to miss it. Got there in a daze the next day, and enjoyed the first round with (l’il) Mike and the fourth one.

He tends to stand still and let you clobber him. Reflexes took over and I was laying in 11, 12 punch combinations. Such was Thursday.

On Friday, I reworked Black Sunlight, to make it a smaller and hopefully tigher chapter. I introduced some key insights that came (rather indirectly, I would have to say, via Deleuze, Guattari, who borrowed from Nietzsche). Also contributed to a Zimbabwe newspaper source regarding Break Free.

Last night I couldn’t do any more work as I was still mentally processing the changes I had made to the aforementioned chapter. Today I woke up feeling kind of shell shocked — slightly dehydrated from the fan blowing on me whilst I was sleeping, from the wine I had consumed, and perhaps from the sheer heat of the Perth summer.

I need a day off to recharge my batteries.

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MINUS THE MORNING: eternal recurrence, not reactivity

If one is free from guilt, one’s experiences are light, but it is a struggle to become free from the past. It requires seeing it as both necessary and contingent. Not to condemn the past for what it was, and yet not to be commanded by it, and the shadow it would like to leave on the present — that takes immense strength of mind!

My memoir is the culimination of an effort leading to being able to see things in this light. I don’t hold anyone responsible for the past. I see that the way it panned out was necessary. At the same time, I am not a victim to the past’s agendas. I am no “white child” Ian Smith supporter, nor am I a reactive Mugabe supporter. My position is not one of reactivity.

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The everyday mystification of Judeo-Christian epistemics

It is profoundly interesting how Judeo-Christian culture does not pay attention to the nature or the legacy of anybody’s experiences (or whether these be positive or negative).

It presumes to draw all of its information about the world by reading into (that is, projecting into) the ostensible “inner nature” of any individual, which logically (and except for generalising and/or stereotyping) it is materially impossible for any of its representatives to know.

The shamanistic tradition, however (Nietzsche, Bataille, Marechera), is concerned overtly with experiences and their value.

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Melanie Klein and "splitting" versus "soul loss": psychoanalysis versus shamanism

It may be unwise for me to evoke Klein’s name as the originator of a true 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.

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primeval guilt and Nietzsche

I wonder if the reason that so many males are attracted to Nietzsche is that he seems to solve their problem of primeval guilt. Primeval guilt is not like ordinary guilt, as Deleuze and Guattari, in their reading of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, (Psychoanalysis and Ethnology) makes clear. One need to have done anything wrong to suffer from it. Rather, one has it as a result of being born, and of feeling that one owes one’s parents, something.

Not feeling this sense of primeval guilt is possible if one can ascend the social hierarchy and stay there in such a way that you make others feel it. This is the fundamental goal of patriarchy and of all patriarchal ideology. It is not too extreme to say that patriarchal ideas and values create a permanent underclass of women, who can be permanently blamed for various feelings of exitential guilt, that might arise for one reason or another.

It is important to realise the dependent nature of one who has developed himself along these lines of coping. He “needs” women (to stand in for him as social martyrs), but he cannot admit this to himself. To do so would be to open the doors to an even more overwhelming sense of guilt about what he actually is and what he has done. This is no longer any theoretical or unfounded guilt lurking in the subconscious. He has built himself up on a false platform and has become habituated to making others suffer in order for him to maintain his feelings of power.

Such a person is unlikely to have the nerves of steel that would enable him to contemplate his own life in a true sense of its Eternal Recurrence.

His barely repressed awareness knows that he would need “woman” to come on the journey with him into every event of his life, for he cannot go there alone — he needs women in the worst possible way!

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marechera’s black sunlight

black sunlight

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conservative females and their role as misogynist policeladies

It seems that humanity is prone to guilt, and that patriarchal society, in particular, is a means for dealing with this sense of primeval guilt. It creates a class of people who are guilty, no matter what they do. If women are always guilty, then there is a class of people who are free to act and behave without fear of repurcussions (especially from within their own subconscious). The primary sin that feminists commit (which is why they are hated by those who uphold this psychological status quo) is that they demystify the whole process of attributing blame and guilt to an underclass of women. The danger that this poses to males who have not been used to assuming responsibility for their actions is immense. It is above all a psychological danger of feeling overwhelmingly guilty for one’s actions (whether rightly or wrongly). Conservative women step in a prevent this outcome from taking place. They make sure that women continue to bear the brunt of society’s sense of guilt. In a way, they must feel like they are saving society per se, but actually they are only preserving a particular, (and particularly false), version of it.

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Masculinity, Mary Daly, and artifice

In her book, Gyn/Ecology, Mary Daly points out, although in not so many words, that projection and distortion of women’s images is one of the prerogatives of patriarchy. No wonder so many men do not want to be cured from this. They feel that curing them would also undermine their masculinity! But of course it is entirely fake to begin with, that sort of masculinity. All the more reason for some men to be afraid of losing what is only a disguise from the offset. How much more shame in losing that, when there is nothing solid, nothing real, underneath!

I differ from some of the radical fem. school that she represents in that I do not think that all masculinity is like this — necessarily artificial, which is to say socially constructed. When a man is not afraid to be himself, that is, when he refuses to be socially contrived, to put on an image and distort the images of others, he cannot help but be much more appealing. This takes genuine force of character, even guts. Daly doesn’t think men are capable of this, because she thinks they can only be masculine by artifice — that is by virtue of smoke and mirrors and by putting women down. (Unfortunately this is most common.)

There remain many men who are not afraid to be real.

conclusion section

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

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When addressing a patriarch.

When you are addressing a patriarch, it is imperative to learn sooner rather than later, that ironic statements of attitudes do not get through to him. There are many reasons why patriarchs are impervious to irony — I will seek to name just a few.

One of the reasons why patriarchs tend to be quite oblivious to ironic comments is that they have been conditioned to think that you are “just silly”. Consequently any witticisms that come their way tend to be viewed as beneath them, rather than over their heads, as is actually the case.

Secondly, the patriarch, stuffed animal that he is, has not been taught the method of survival that all of those he deems inferior have had to learn. He hasn’t learned, that is, to double his consciousness, so that he can see both his own perspective as well as the perspective of the other, whilst drawing a link between them. Whereas others have long been adjusted to seeing the patriarch’s perspective as well as their own, the patriarch himself is limited to only one point of view — his own. The problem with this situation is that no ironical perspective can result from this.

So, the patriarch is, as I have suggested, a creature set apart — existing totally without irony. He is thus one who mistakes his views for being higher than they are. It is all down to the fact that he simply cannot see any other perspective than his own.

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Bad dream–I mean, really.

I have no idea where this dream came from. I suspect that I went to bed last night thinking of gender politics, and the right wing term of “right to life”, along with the idea that Japanese are killing snow monkeys as “pests”. And my parents came over, for a somewhat surprise visit yesterday, and I am reading Deleuze and Guattari, which give me a kind of inner creepiness (I know, quite odd) with their views about liquidising consciousness down to a fundamental molecular level. I am also on the track of Oedipus within the Western consciousness, thanks to D&G. (I maintain that a lot of Freudian dreams result simply by being exposed to the theoretical material, and not necessarily because their concepts are already buried in the subconscious.)

Anyway, my mother bought home foetal sized elephants and hippos, along with the lettuce from the supermarket, that she now had on the chopping board. These pink elephants and hippos were roaming between the lettuce leaves. (It is true, that when I was a child, my mother bought home two baby chicks, along with her shopping. The Shona salesman outside the supermarket had assured her that they were female chicks, and it was upon his assurance that my mother bought them. They both turned out to be male — white cockerals — very aggressive, and territorial. They pecked at, and chased us children from their section of garden until they finally met their demise in becoming the gardener’s dinner.) But in this case, she had bought home elephants and hippos. She said they were a novelty, and she would have to kill them now, before they got much older. (They were already moving around precariously close to the lettuce knife.)

I thought that if this is what had to happen, then I would switch my mind off from it, but as I did so, somebody else chimed in that it would be a shame not to let the animals have a life, now that they were in the world. Before long, they were spirited down to a mud pool in the front of the garden, whereupon they proceeded to grow exponentially — to full adult size. Somehow they were exceedingly deformed, however. I said to my mother, “You have to find a gun, so that you can shoot them!”

She looked under a pile of items, up upon the shelf, and found the hand gun she was looking for. It was time to kill the ugly beasts.

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