Here is a small excerpt from one chapter of a book by Robert Jay Lifton.
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. In [Chinese Communist] thought reform, for instance, the phrase “bourgeois mentality” is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome concerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of alternative ideas, and the search for perspective and balance in political judgments.
[I]n addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these cliches become what Richard Weaver has called “ultimate terms”: either “god terms,” representative of ultimate good; or “devil terms,” representative of ultimate evil. In [Chinese Communist] thought reform, “progress,” “progressive,” “liberation,” “proletarian standpoints” and “the dialectic of history” fall into the former category; “capitalist,” “imperialist,” “exploiting classes,” and “bourgeois” (mentality, liberalism, morality, superstition, greed) of course fall into the latter.
Totalist language then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “the language of nonthought.”
If you read the whole chapter you get a very good idea of why I call Reeducation that. People keep trying to explain Reeducation theory to me. They say it is not what I think it is. Slogans, for instance, they say are helpful and freeing. Yes, I suppose so, if one wishes to be freed from thought.
I could of course qualify this, as I well understand why people attend some forms of Reeducation. Nevertheless, for purposes of the wider world I do insist that my point stands.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
OK – thank you very much for that chapter. I’ve added something from it to my thesis, so let’s hope it stays online for a while, or else I will have to reference the MLA to find out what to put as reference for it.
Argh. That will suck!
Anyway, the stuff about totalising experiences sort of fits in with the stuff from that Jewish guy about narcissism. The split self.
I think we all have split selves to some degree — to the degree that we obey what superego wants us to be (societal dictates) — whilst misunderstanding that this isn’t who we are. Perhaps this is behind Bataille’s urging that we plunge into the abject. It may not directly produce “knowledge” — but we gain a different way of relating to the world other than narcissistic.
In any case, it takes a while to process the negative aspects that condition our existence. We are all rightfully terrified of them. So, we remain superficially and defensively “in” ideology!.
Here are some of my recent uncoverings. (They help to explain my general attitude to medical personnel and why I freaked out at the black nurse, whilst unconscious.)
AHA, this is deep. I have just superficially read the Portrait of Dorian Gray, a book purporting to be about surfaces. I have not figured it out. I wonder if it is possible to think of Bataille, Vaknin, and Wilde / Gray all together.
I wonder if it is possible to think of Bataille, Vaknin, and Wilde / Gray all together.
I think it would be possible to do so, but the danger to avoid would be making too much of a metaphysical theory out of this.
I think that we all repressive negative data, and try to accentuate the positive about ourselves and our situations. We do not need a right wing populist injunction to do so — although we often readily receive one! This is the way the mind is structured so that we do not fall into the doldrums but attach ourselves to the reality of what is. A certain amount of repression of the negative aspects of experience would seem to be part and parcel of what it means to embrace the “reality principle” (paradoxically enough).
It is only those who are a little odd — like myself, for instance — who want to go deeper and be more analytical about the whole affair.
On second thought, I suspect Wilde/Gray/Walter Pater/Huysmans don’t fit because they are about plunging into sin, not into the abject. I am momentarily obsessed with them, however.
well sin is the abject, I would think. More conceptually loaded, though. Spiritual rather than moral. Hmmm…
But bataille did talk about sin also, in rather the same terms….
But I thought it wasn’t just that in Bataille? I had thought so when I read him but you have been convincing me otherwise?
Getting beyond the bumper stickers, as one of my old profs used to put it.
However, one can get lost in a thicket of twisted and convoluted notions.
In the end, clarity ensues.
I do need to know more about reeducation. Could you give me some links, Professor Z?
Reeducation – ai ai. It is my term for so-called psychotherapy from an all too inexperienced M.S.W. in New Orleans, originally from Abbeville, Louisiana, heavily and ineptly informed by the 12 Steps, gay and insecure, with very negative countertransference toward me, a lot of undefined misogyny, and a lot of 1990s style interest in repressed memory syndrome. I went to see him to try to deal with family alcoholism and verbal abuse but he was convinced I must be a sexual abuse victim who needed to repress memories, and that my being a professor was a mere coping mechanism I needed to drop in order to assume my true identity as victim, and that being an intellectual was a terrible thing. The entire experience was very destructive and I could not believe what was happening which is why I tried to stay there and fix it. I really did try to reorient my thinking toward this point of view which was presented to me as health … it was also in all of the magazines and many of my 12 stepping academic friends were saying the same things, and dropping psychotropic prescriptions to get through it all. I became very confused and I often find myself acting now as though the world really were this way, which it is not. The antidote is this blog, which I use to remind myself and be reminded that I was saner before this experience, and can be again.
But I thought it wasn’t just that in Bataille? I had thought so when I read him but you have been convincing me otherwise?
He spoke of sin, and probably in the religious sense. I think he was trying to bait the locals.
But he was interested in the anthropological sense of “sin”. He was interested in the “taboo”.
But I thought it wasn’t just that in Bataille? I had thought so when I read him but you have been convincing me otherwise?
Anyway, I seem to have lost the thread of this conversation — but “sin” reunites us with the force of the superego, so the sinners are brought back to the fold, only changed somewhat. It creates an internal dialectic of subjectivity.
I think that one of the problems with narcissists (and social conformists) is that the do not have these sorts of dialectical conversations with themselves. They relate to something outside of themselves — social judgement. But this is objectifying, rather than deeply subjective. Perhaps this is Bataille’s point in his book, Inner Experience, which is basically about giving up one’s pursuit of transcendence.
From Abbeville — gah! I grew up in Louisiana and oh, yes, being an intellectual is a Very Bad Thing. Immoral, even! when there are so many More Important Things to worry about…
I got out — what was it — eight years ago; I’m still repairing the damage, or trying to.
Ai, human, I’m glad it isn’t just me. Immoral, yes.