I
In the 20th century, what I disliked about the patriarchy was being told, simultaneously, that I would not do well enough to satisfy men, but also that I must not do well enough to scare them or any other authorities. In the 21st century what I dislike about authoritarian society, aside from corporatization and Wal*Martization, is infantilization and passive aggression.
II
I believe I have finally learned what passive aggression is: it is a lack of autonomy combined with a lack of cooperation, and the expectation of a “feminine” attitude. In the world I imagine and sometimes remember, there is or was solidarity or at least collegiality. These assume autonomy, not the enmeshment that is such a great tool of coercive power.
Reiterating:
Infantilization + Passive aggression + Femininity = Authoritarianism.
Autonomy + Cooperation and/or Collegiality and/or Solidarity = Relative sanity.
Not only are these combinations not the same. They are entirely different configurations. Yet I often see people mistaking the one for the other.
III
Everything I dislike, of course, has to do with not being treated like a person and having to put up with this, and also seeing people not being treated like people. I am also tired of the negative atmosphere which is created to weaken us all so that we accept, internalize, or believe we have created this situation, or decide that it is inevitable.
I believe it was made and was not natural, that it is not our “fault” and that even if it is, we do not have to consider it permanent, and that we should un-make it for the sake of the collectivity whether we can find within it solutions for individual situations or not.
Is this possible in the context of late capitalism? Some say the empire has no exterior, but I am not convinced.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Here’s something I really enjoyed recently, especially pp 81-86.
Theory, Culture & Society
http://tcs.sagepub.com
Politics and the Impossible: Beyond Psychoanalysis and
Deconstruction
Glyn Daly
Theory Culture Society 1999; 16; 75
DOI: 10.1177/02632769922050728
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/4/75
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
OK I’ll read this. Also, now I see this came through after the other comments, so its number of links isn’t what caused the fiasco with the other comments. HMMM.
Perhaps the ideological trend-setters of Western society would find themselves less boxed in and stymied for choice if they were to take a much closer look at where they’d come from. They need to overcome their shortsightedness (as a result of cognitive dissonance and fearing to see political reality within an historical context), as well as their blind supposition that morally purifying themselves internally (whilst turning a blind eye to external — that is real — abuses) will do any good.
My suggestion is that they need to look at colonialism openly and objectively, and start to see themselves and their own attitudes in it — not as a way of condemning themselves (or me! — since it is a Western tendency to project what they do not like about themselves on to me, the identifiable “colonial”). Rather, they need to talk to people with a view to understanding, not condemning, not hiding.
Who are you dealing with, who are these people you are arguing against, why do they formulate the world as they appear to do? It is very strange. I wouldn’t say countries colonized by ‘western’ powers are outside the West. I don’t see how the central / metropolitan countries are *not* part of the colonial world (they’re its epicenter, for Heaven’s sake), and I don’t think it’s really possible to say colonialism is over.
Also strange and interesting: I think you’ve been tortured by the denizens of political correctness as I have by Reeducation, and that it’s why we keep returning to these topics. (Another one I keep returning to is academic feminism, which I abhor because I think it has sold out to the Man and betrayed me and mine….)
Now I am trying to read the article, and it is ahead of me. 😉
No, I deliberately use the term “non-Western” to describe myself as a rhetorical device. The reason is that those who are using political correctness for their own political gain feel free to “discipline me” by claiming me as one of their own, only more evil. So, the point I am making is that I am not — was not ever — one of their own, and so they cannot claim to know me well enough to “discipline” me. What they would need to do is to get to know me first, and then show that they can relate to me in a human manner — intersubjectively. Failing that, they are only disciplining someone who they cannot claim to know — an illogical position on their parts.
Who are those people? They are anyone who presumes to benefit politically, economically or socially by taking an anti-colonial stance that is superficial enough to rely upon the presenting of scapegoats.
ahead of you? in what sense?
Disciplining someone they cannot claim to know … illogical indeed and I cannot figure out where the impulse comes from, some sort of fear.
“They are anyone who presumes to benefit politically, economically or socially by taking an anti-colonial stance that is superficial enough to rely upon the presenting of scapegoats.”
But do they have any education on these matters? How common are these people … or are they like the Yankees who say all Southerners are more racist than they … ?
Article, ahead of me, author has read Zizek and I have not really, so I can understand the article but not engage with it as a better informed reader. But it is interesting and from what I can gather, quite good.
But do they have any education on these matters?
Well of course there are varying levels of education on these matters. However, in almost all situations, what little knowledge there is is permeated with a metaphysics of good and evil (rather than with values of good and bad, as Nietzsche suggested would be better.) So this leads to the use of colonialism (and one’s relation to it) as a token for political self-promotion. So that is the problem — right there (the impurity of the knowledge that is attained with the hidden motive of achieving social and political advantages).
I cannot figure out where the impulse comes from, some sort of fear.
I think it comes from the fear of being exposed as having colonial vices. It’s the same as homophobia — you know, you bash the gay guy because you worry about your own latent homosexuality.
I guess it *must* come from the fear of being exposed as having colonial vices. But Australians, for Christ’s sake, they have them by definition … like the British or the Americans, who are they trying to fool? It seems really weird, where did they come up with this idea that they aren’t colonizers, I really wonder?! (But I have made this exclamation before…. )
It seems really weird, where did they come up with this idea that they aren’t colonizers, I really wonder?!
Like good Christians, they have purified themselves from within. They may still deny Aboriginals equality as economic equals or as human beings, but whereas in the past they were openly oppressive and actually killed Aboriginals for fun, these days their hearts are shiny and they are heaven bound.
Furthermore, the opportunity to score political points by any means available is impossible to ignore — They know there may be not truth in seeing me in one way and themselves in another, but there is political hay to be made, for heaven’s sake.
If you want to know of someone who did this — Lynaire Stacey, now of the Queensland Finance Sector Union.
Article, ahead of me, author has read Zizek and I have not really, so I can understand the article but not engage with it as a better informed reader. But it is interesting and from what I can gather, quite good.
They key point of the article so far as I’m concerned seems to be in the thesis of the incompleteness of identity as a psychic (soul) structure. Nobody’s identity is as complete as they feel it should be. We are all, necessarily, “decentered” in the postmodern sense — which is to say, in the Lacanian sense, we are all necessarily “castrated” (unless we are psychotic and do not feel that there is any difference between subjectivity and objectivity — but it is awareness of this difference that in technical terms “castrates” us whilst making us able to communicate objectively, in a way that makes sense to others). So we are all “castrated” into society and therefore have a depletion of jouissance (which I interpret to mean that sense of immediacy, of direct gratification in communion with the world, where pleasure-pain are barely differentiated). Nonetheless, none of us completely lack jouissance, or we would be robotic and spock-like. We have been castrated away from an infantile repletion of jouissance, but we still experience it, within the cracks of our socialised existence and the logic that pertains to that.
According to the article, however, the ruling classes and other politically influential groups are inclined to the mode of thinking that it is normal not to be decentred, but to have a fully complete identity. I read this as meaning that they want to have their cake and eat it too — to be able to be non-psychotic members of society, but also to have all of their jouissance (the collapse of objectivity into subjectivity, which defines sexual pleasure and/or psychosis).
Because they implicitly lack the understanding that in the psychic economy we cannot have all our jouissance AND be functioning members of society, and because these influential groups experience that necessary and universal constraint as being a “lack” in the constitutions of their own identities, they feel resentful. Instead of embracing the reality principle that this is simply how it is, they go on the warpath.
Specifically, they conclude that is is the social “other” — those who are not fully assimilated to a particular nationalistic identity or so on — who have stolen the interest group’s “jouissance”.
The dynamic of mis-identification that I have outlined above explains why it is that those who have the most power in society often attack those who have the least power in society. They see in the definitive “other” the missing element of their own jouissance. It is as if they figure out that the missing part of their totalitarian nationalist identity can be found in this other, who has gone astray by virtue of being “other”. By being other, they reason, these (marginal people or members of the oppressed classes) have undermined and decentered the national identity. They have stolen the “jouissance” — the sense of completeness — from the national state. That is the reasoning of the dominant classes, who want to get their “jouissance” back from those who are most oppressed.
In order to get back “their” jouissance (which obviously never was theirs in the first place), the dominant classes seek to prevent the lower classes from experiencing any jouissance of their own, by constantly harrassing them (or in the case given by the article, regarding Muslim women in Bosnia — by removing the community’s ability to experience jouissance by means of rape.)
Article – merci!!! This part about the ruling classes, I had not figured out. Although it is perfect grist for the mill of my abandoned dissertation, where I claimed the same, except that I identified inhabitants of central countries in the place of ‘ruling classes’ … which was harder to defend. Hah … I need to get back to that project after I do this one.
Australians, purified from within, I see … aargh …
Australians, purified from within, I see … aargh …
So what I was saying before (my post disappeared) is that is seems that Americans are, too. I think anyone who uses their command or a moral discourse (or — their moral command of a discourse?) instead of working to change actual things “out there” is being slowly roasted (purified) from within.
Correction: “I think anyone who uses their command OF a moral discourse …”
And on a different note: What I’m now getting from a more direct read of Lacan than I had attempted previously is that — no matter what its other attributes are — the Symbolic register (entry into which that is marked by the acquisition of language) enables a degree of maturity that stands above and beyond the need to see oneself as a complete identity independent of social relations. That latter state of affairs relates to the mirror stage and the Imaginary register.
So, now we have a way out of the ideological morass — at least, we know that an ideological position that claims this or that “is my identity” (such as identity politics) is working at the level of the Imaginary and that this entails certain limitations a per intellectual and emotional maturity.
Many regular Americans are utterly delusional but I don’t take it personally – or as a surprise. I was born here too, I’ve been hearing this stuff since Day 1, I have as much authority as citizen as they do, etc. They believe the Founding Fathers were Christians, that the U.S. is profoundly virtuous, and so on. I’m so used to this that it doesn’t bother me except to organize against it / vote against it / shut up about it when speaking up will do no good / etc.
This is *fascinating* on Lacan and yes indeed, it explains a whole lot.
I tell you I am so OVER the lauding of mediocrity in culture as the only option, because it is Western. This is the power of numbers acting as if it were qualitative superiority. I’m dying to take a Nietzschean turn on all of this.
Well I am so FRUSTRATED with it. It appears one must take a Nietzchean turn, but keep this under wraps!
(It is very hot here, which is not helping.)
Hahaha!
Well maybe there are certain strategies you can use if you are devil may care.
By the way, if you were thinking that Americans cannot presume themselves just as purified from within as Australians presume themselves to be, check out the comments exchange for the one track mind.
“if you were thinking that Americans cannot presume themselves just as purified from within as Australians presume themselves to be”
I hardly was – I encounter it daily!
OK. Well read my comments on my site. Or not as the case may be. I claim epistemic privilege!!!
Epistemic privilege, OK! 🙂
[I moved a comment here to another site and answered there instead of here for reasons of discretion which, for reasons of discretion, I cannot reveal! ;-)]
I understand. I’m not trying to cause harm.
Anyway, I think that the terms of the debate on the other site are unhelpful. We might need to concoct some very different terms to understand each other.
The question I would like to ask is: “If I notice some features that happen to be Colonial — ie. related the environment of a colonial social and historical situation — and if I notice that those who have not been brought up in this situation but have been brought up in Britain, Australia and America and New Zealand have quite a different point of view, how do you imagine that I should frame my observations?”
I think we may not understand each other fully, or agree fully, at least not by discussing this in brief blog comments. The colonial situations you know aren’t those I know, and I’m not very familiar with Britain, Australia, New Zealand, or the parts of the United States whose colonizers were British.
You’ve also emigrated from a colony which became an ex-colony to another ex-colony of the same European power, now turned large modern nation-state.
I wouldn’t say colonial vs. western although I might refer to central / marginal, metropolitan / peripheral, colonizer / colonized, and also Anglo / Iberian in other contexts. I’d also say European vs. Latin American, for other contexts. But I wouldn’t say both weren’t in the west, unless I were referring to really non westernized cultures in L.A.
In the Latin American colonial world, which has existed now for over 500 years (during some of which it has been formally decolonized), there were huge distinctions between people born in Europe and those born in America of European descent.
Yet both are still colonizERs, part of the colonial / western / modern enterprise, not part of the Precolumbian world or even the post-Conquest mestizo world, although though many of those born here took on (or in some cases appropriated) characteristics of the native populations here, and of course had a very different life experience than people in Europe.
A lot of what you call seem to “western” I call British / Anglo commercial and popular culture of the last twenty years, plus superficial political correctness. It sounds to me as though you are reacting to a lot of really ignorant and mean people who aren’t worth thinking about.
I am not always sure what you call “colonial” is: do you mean the entire colonial world generally, as it sometimes seems, or British descended people from British colonies, whom the British seem to have called ‘colonials’ … and it’s hard for me to believe the experience of a post- British Zimbabwean is the same as that of one of non British descent, etc., etc.
So that’s why I sometimes wonder or ask what you mean by the use of these really broad categories. But I think by colonial you mean people like yourself whose first experience is in non-central countries … ?
Anyway where we disagree is on the polarization. Looking at the world I am *much* more interested in the more subtle gradations of cultural and ideological difference between those who live in the central countries and in the margins of the West than in saying those in the margins are not in the West (there are people who *really* aren’t, and I do *not* want to elide that, it’s really important).
Just after formal decolonization – this was in the early to mid 19th century – a lot was written by Latin American elites about how they were not culturally the same as European elites. That *still* didn’t mean they weren’t part of western culture, or the modern – capitalist – etc. world system.
I have the impression I’ve hurt your feelings, and I’m sorry, and I could write whole long books about this, but I have so much work to do and so many things to deal with IRL, and I’m finding this argument somewhat sterile and draining. I am more interested in this comment: https://profacero.wordpress.com/2008/06/09/magic-charm-2/#comment-23098
Not hurt my feelings. Let me explain
(I will be brief as I have to work this morning.)
It is important for me to be able to talk about my experiences using terminology that makes sense to me and strives to make sense to others. The fact is, whereas under certain circumstances the terms I have chosen to use might seem like a polarisation (perhaps because they invoke guilt feelings by spotlighting the behaviour of the other party),they are merely terms that are intended to invoke a sense of difference — not a series of connotations and associations that I have no control over. If the terms I use sometimes get a polarising feel — an ironic one — that is because of a new level of resistance that has built up against hearing what I was simply trying to say in the first place. So, I am able to register that secondry level of resistance, hence the polarising feel that you experience.
Now, I want a term that can describe those who will not see my attempt as one of innocent communication but of somehow speaking out of turn.
I must say that my whole experience with those who are not able to immediately understand me when I talk about my experiences is that they imply that i am speaking out of turn. This is a way of shutting me down. And the people who do so clearly have their own cultural and political reasons that are different from mine. The point is that they are quite happy not exposing these political or cultural reasons — so much so, that they eschew any name or identity. They are shadowy assassins, who refuse to be named or identified. Their unwitting allies are the postcolonial theorists who urge: “it is essentialising and wrongheaded to attempt to name these shadowy assassins or to give them an identity by which they can be recognised.”
So there it is. There are additional postcolonial myths — such as that black and white, in a particular culture, can share no common cultural elements because one is the oppressor and the other the oppressee. I would say that this is another myth of the shadowy assassins who cannot be named.
BTW–Yeah I find it a draining topic too — because all I am saying is that “let us not impose stereotypes for real life” Strong historical method is the answer.
PS– I don’t see myself as a Westerner — and this is what the terms “shadow and periphery” insist upon. I was a naturalised African — still very much unaccepted here.
Re. The Lacan comment — I am considering these days that Lacan’s description of the developmental process may have some merit.
Where I have doubts are:
What place does his system give to creativity? — I know that many orthodox psychologists tend to pathologise creativitity, as if it implied a deviant pathway of development. However, I am more Frommian, and tend to see the normative concept of maturity as indicative of an “Escape from Freedom”. I am also more Nietzschean- I see that creativity takes a great deal of courage and energy that most people do not possess and are thus, “everyday” sort of folks. So, I don’t see such a great deal to laud in the condition of normality that psychoanalysis traditionally aims for.
Secondly: It seems that Lacan’s model may wrongly push us to presume a rather universal rather than culturally specific mode of development. I haven’t found a place for the use of libidinous energy to form connections with one’s environment in Lacan — however this is surely a central aspect to the thinking of peoples of traditional cultures, and forms the core of shamanism and animistic thinking. However, with Freud and Lacan, libidinous energy ricochets purely off the other members of the nuclear family. So there seems to be a lot that potentially at least escapes his purview.
“There are additional postcolonial myths — such as that black and white, in a particular culture, can share no common cultural elements because one is the oppressor and the other the oppressee.”
WOW, I’ve never heard this – who says it ???
Lacan, a universality (that is actually metropolitan and male) as opposed to cultural specificity, yes.
More on all of this later, I’m in transit …
WOW, I’ve never heard this – who says it ???
It’s a moral truism. Or maybe your communication has been unclear to me. To admit cultural cross-pollenation between oppressor and oppressee makes the harsh moral lines drawn between them less apparent. How can this be permitted?
(Actually, most of the mistakes of this sort seem to come across as a result of people’s ignorance — often deeply entrenched and self-serving. The schematic view of history and what oppression really means in a particular instance, is often a result of not having experienced any of it, but nonetheless being in a position of power that gives one a voice.)
It’s absurd though – nothing I’ve ever said, sorry, and utterly inaccurate historically.
OK — I thought you were chastising my observations earlier by saying that colonial and colonised did not have much in common? When I hear such a thing despite the fact that I have observed and studied some commonalities for a long time, I consider that I must have stepped out of line by saying something that went against the Orthodoxy
I never said that, either.
No it seems not. Or at least I might find such a comment on another day but not this second. Somebody said it though — and recently. hmm.
In any case, it might just be best to presume that I am not making any metaphysical polarities out of Western and Colonial –at least not in the first instances of my attempts to communicate perceived differences between them. I think that this might be where the error in communication lies. When I say there is a difference, I am NOT defining ontologies. Actually, let me say what I AM doing, since I have just read about it.
See pg s77 ff. under section “animism as relational epistemology”, which refers to cutting trees into parts versus talking to trees.
—–
“Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology [and Commentsand Reply]
Author(s): Nurit Bird-David et al. Current Anthropology, Vol. 40, Supplement: Special Issue: Culture. A Second Chance?,
(Feb., 1999), pp. S67-S91
—–
See, my epistemology is not modern and totalising –so when I say that I notice a difference, I am not allocating identities in a fixed way, once and for all. I’m not “cutting down trees” — instead I’m “talking to trees”.
It’s when I am forced to dig in my heels because my paltry observation is not attended to and instead the metaphysics of identities hold sway that I start “cutting down trees” — which is because people seem to be entrenching their positions, instead of acknowledging what I have to say.
I never didn’t acknowledge it. My main interest from
it, for purposes of this conversation, is what is western? I’m genuinely curious, as it isn’t clear to me.
From my own perspective it has to do with the advances in industrial modernism, which create a particular kind of mind-body dualism that you do not see so much in the industrially modernised East. This mind-body dualism posits identity as a rather fixed metaphysical construct, rather than as a condition of relationality. (This is why I can relate better, in some ways, to Japanese culture than I can relate to core Western culture proper — Identity for the Japanese is relational, rather than discrete and separable from other aspects of living.)
So, the point I was trying to make earlier is that when I say that I sense a difference between something I label as “colonial” and something I label as “Western”, one of the differences is the very concept of difference itself and how it is managed — (the source of our miscommunication).
For instance, from the perspective I am taking which I have more or less arbitrarily labeled “colonial”, I can look at difference in a way that by no means posits permanent and fixed identities. Even the way I use the term “colonial” is, in this way, less relevant than the characteristics I am ascribing to the position. In my view, the term is open to revision depending on what more might be discovered about the phenomena I am describing, and the limits of the behaviour I am observing (ie. to whom it may be ascribed). So it really misses the point to latch on to the terms I’m using, rather than the phenomena I am describing as the key point to my communication.
So, getting back to the point of what seems “Western” to me — it is the tendency to separate reason from experience, along the lines, broadly, of a mind-body dualism. This leads to the positing of a rather fixed identity as fundamental to the Western way of seeing things. Categories of identity are prioritised in terms of the Western way of viewing the world. However, in terms of my way of viewing the world, personal experience is prioritised, and identity is only ever provisional and subject to revision upon having different experiences which bring newer information to light.
……so you can see that when I learned that I had a fixed identity, and that it had negative characteristics according to the Western metaphysical schema, it took me a long time to work out what to do about it.
Western thinking tends to fix identities as permanent. There are peoples who are defined as good and peoples who are defined as evil, and it is difficult to change the Westerner’s perceptions once the idea of good or evil is locked into place. That is why it is possible for the West (unless you want to argue that it was someone else) to invade Iraq and still have its postcolonial theorists posit that it isn’t evil, whereas 19th Century colonials are compelled to have the role of pure evil (although Ashis Nandy points out that this is a psychological misappropriation of concepts). Once metaphysical identities are locked in, actual behaviour counts for very little, and perceptions of identities are not, or rarely, revised on the basis of actual behaviour.
….anyway, I think the isolation and refinement and (indeed) development of the ego along the lines of “I think therefore I am” where thinking is the condition and justification for being is also what is quintessentially Western.
I don’t want you to think that I am making my comparisons on the basis of some emotional reaction, ie. “hurt feelings” — a mode of reacting that is somehow separate from thinking…
However, it seems that the polarisation of consciousness into EITHER ‘thinking’ OR ‘reacting’ can also be identified as quintessentially Western. (And this, in turn, links with the development of ego as the prime decision-making faculty that not only “decides” but also furnishes the basis for a sharply delineated identity that is separate from others.)
Conversely, weak identity, which renegotiates its position in every new situation is something that I — rightly or wrongly — identify with my African upbringing. This is not “I think therefore I am”, but the reversal of this equation. It is, “I am, without a doubt, and therefore, sometimes I may think.”
Identity is, in the latter case, something that is incipient, that emerges within a social situation and endures for as long as that social situation endures.
That is why the questions concerning fatalism (as per the responses to the post on my blog) are interesting but somehow seem to miss the point of what I was trying to say. Because the kind of fatalism I was describing was not, as I saw it, a feature of choice or of identity, but was rather much more linked to the principle of “I am therefore I think.” In other words, the identity that comes into being is determined by fate, and not by an overt act of thinking (ie. “let me go and live in Africa, so that I may….” and “my justification for this is…”). Rather, the basis for thinking are the already existent modes and traditions of the community. (It does not seem overwhelmingly productive to speculate about the origins of that community and how it got its fatalism to begin with. At least this approach would be in danger of suggesting a false identification between original motives for colonial migration and the kinds of cultures that the migrants alighted upon and assimilated as their own.)
Ok
My energy levels have returned to normal. Huge depletion of energy does give you a shamanistic perspective concerning the underside of society, viewed from a rather weakened position.
But I think I’m on track with the above views. I think any society which has internalised as normal a rather extreme condition of mind-body dualism will demand that somebody name their identity before they speak. Thus their speech can then be interpreted retroactively into the identity that is already at least to some degree “known” or much more often presumed, merely, to be known. (The mirror stage gives us the capacity to make such presumptions. Yet mirror stage presumptions are qualitatively different from the long and hard process of actually ‘getting to know you’. The latter is empirical rather than ideological — hence my reference to the value of studying history, earlier.) Perhaps the animism of more primitive societies has more psychological acuity to it than identity politics (engendered by late Modernism) has, to boot. In my view, identity politics puts the cart before the horse and demands that someone prove the merit of their worth as a human being by engaging in dialectical politics. Animistic thinking and empirical thinking take being for granted and analyse what is presented by someone’s actions, in a way that can bypass their claims about identity.
Hey – I’m not ignoring you, I’m just jet lagged and so on. I’m in coastal Peru which is colonial (despite being a republic) and also Western although differently so than, say, Paris. Western consciousness does end, however, somewhere in the Andes.
Gossip detail: which postcolonial theorists supported the Iraq invasion? I’ll read more closely / say more later on.
… I’m not interested in identities but I am interested in contexts.
Renegade Eye’s favourite leftist, though not a postcolonial theorist did, I believe (in answer to your question).
Glad you’re having fun, btw.
IN response to your assertion about identities, I think that it is imperative to do a metatextual study on the performativity of identities. I don’t think you can understand my context unless you understand the layers of meanings that have been placed over it.
Anyway, when it comes to postcolonial studies, I think the key point — and it is an interesting one — is the likelihood of projective identification. (Klein)
Various elements of the dominant society do not label elements of society evil without that forming a feedback loop that has further effects. The recognition of 19th (and earlier) colonial society as evil does not complete the end of the line in terms of cause and effect. And this is why I said the postcolonialist theory, in general, seems to have a blind spot, because there seems to be the assumption that once something is labeled then it is dealt with.
Yet the labeling of 19th (and earlier) colonial society as evil has further run-on effects that are far from being uninteresting. One of these effects is, as I have mentioned before, to create a distraction (projecting evil firmly into the past) so that present day aspects of dominance and submission, moreover, imperialist invasions of other countries do not seem so comparatively evil as the evil which “we have dealt with”.
Another way that types of postcolonial discourse which condemn the past but doesn’t focus on the present create a distraction is by overtly reprimanding attitudes identified as “colonial” whilst pursuing a neo-liberal or neocolonial agenda in the ex-colonies.
And so on.
The reason I consider that projective identification — the projection of one’s “evil” or waste matter on to another — is involved is that I have generally been treated with poisonous contempt by first world whites who are themselves beneficiaries of colonialism. But I do not recall an instance of a black person making a similar assumption about me that I am evil. Therefore the treatment I get from most whites is indicative of the fact that I serve a purpose for them — they can use me to convince themselves that they are pure, despite their agitating doubts.
Ah — the theorist of Renegade Eye’s preference, who advocated invading Iraq — Christopher Hitchens… although not a postcolonial theorist.
Hitchens – ? – he’s just a journalist / commentator – ?
It sounds as though Australian academics are not very serious or very well informed, based on what you say here. I don’t know too many academics who don’t look at history and who simplify things to the degree you describe. In the U.S. it would be hard to get through graduate school doing that.
And: it also isn’t true I am not interested in identities – I always defend them against bland and hegemonic ‘universalism’ – !
And Jennifer, I don’t really appreciate the tone here – “No it seems not. Or at least I might find such a comment on another day but not this second. Somebody said it though — and recently. hmm.”
Throughout this conversation you’ve insisted on putting words in my mouth and I am trying to be polite but I am somewhat put out. I agree with much of what you say, etc., and it is interesting, etc., but remember: you came over here to publicize a blog post you had written and on which I commented at your site, then you still wanted to continue that conversation here, although it is something from your site not this one.
I really don’t think there is time in a blog thread to share all of the information and background that would be necessary to talk about all of this.
I appreciate your comments and I’ll come back as I can.
And so, coming back systematically, to your second to last comment on postcolonial studies … I’m not in that tendency very squarely but to my knowledge the location of ‘evil’ in the past isn’t what it does.
I’m sorry you’ve been encoded as evil by white people, etc. It is something I am very much used to as an American – people, especially Europeans, expect that I will oppose immigration, favor Bush, feel nostalgic for Jim Crow, hate the Indians, and on, and on. I don’t take it personally since I have basically the same criticisms of U.S. governments past and present. Yet it can be wearing.
On the comment before that, layers of meanings – of course, but this is not unique. But I’m not fighting with you over your right to be who you are – you do have a right to be who you are.
On the comment before that, re identity politics: I’ve decided the main identity politics are colonizer – type politics!!! They decided to do that, because of who they were they had the right to do certain things, and others, because of who they were, would not have rights. Then the universal subject was the colonizing Subject, and identity politics as in claiming marginal identities arose in protest … identity politics as in people in universities making sure they are being good liberals does not have a really close connection with that. [This is my tentative and schematic theory on these things.]
Interesting other comments. In the colonial worlds I know and know of, identities *are* officially fixed. You have to have things like certificates of whiteness to get into school. People are obsessed with identities, heritage, names, etc., because that is what has kept / is keeping the whole edifice in place. Names, race, etc. = property, power, etc.
With regard to your comment above, the reason that I am stating what I have stated is as a corrective to a certain interpretation that I have experienced of your comment above. I cannot say how many times I have been verbally assaulted by people on the Internet who have thought I was hoity-toity in some way. I’ve listened to them as they have put on a mock black accent expecting to scare the bejeesus out of me, or have mocked me in other ways with supposed reference to my culturally engrained aloofness, and I’ve had to patiently wait until they’ve finished, so that I can find the reflective space to figure out what they were doing. It has taken me a very long time to figure it out — that and other misplaced assumptions — because it has been so far from true. (If you want to have an accurate view of how I lived my live, read my autobiography online.)
So, yes, whilst I cannot imagine any cultures in which social status doesn’t play some sort or role –including those of the glorious United States and Australia — I am afraid that, so far as I have been concerned, the Australian and American image of “the colonial” is nothing other than a caricature.
and it’s hard for me to believe the experience of a post- British Zimbabwean is the same as that of one of non British descent, etc., etc.
I’m sorry I strained you to maintain your politeness. It was this expression of disbelief — so standard and so typical — that I remembered. I must have misunderstood it to mean something else. You know, I am so used to a kind of vicious and aloof racism
Anyway, as I said before, my point is not to evince a hurt tone — such feminising misappropriation of my words!
I’m trying to point out how there is a structure of meaning that subverts anti-colonialism in the true sense. I am trying to show how that works!!
But this is a recreational blog, not an academic one, and it is not an academic conference, and you do have an emotional load on this thing, all of these accusations by Australians of you because you were post Zimbabwean, so to speak. From what I can gather it was a trauma for you, as Reeducation was for me.
What colors the whole exchange is that, and the fact that the colonial worlds I am from and that I study being very different from those you deal with, etc. That’s why I have never gotten into this with you. But you came over here and wanted me to visit that post, and then brought the discussion on it over here again despite my effort to send it back where it came from. I have been feeling somewhat invaded and pushed. I don’t want to teach my basic Latin American history class over a blog. I feel that this thread has been hijacked. I am irritated and I have been for days.
On another note: my youngest brother also says he doesn’t want a fixed identity. He is mad because he is seen as Black by other Black people when he wants to be seen as something else, and mad because people he gets involved with then expect some kind of consistency and yet he dances off with someone of the other gender. He sings the no fixed identity song to get himself off the hook. I have seen other people do this and I do not entirely trust the no fixed identity song, I have seen too many people use it in self serving ways.
All of these are reasons why I just don’t think this can be worked out in a blog thread. When I said I found this draining, I was trying to hint gently, let’s call this off, I am calling this off.
Ok — call it off.
I did understand you all along, except I didn’t realise you felt that other comments I made more recently shouldn’t be posted on this blog either.
I think part of your problem is that you feel a need to educate me as a professor on topics that you presume I know nothing about. Then you presumed I was an oaf not to take your gentle hints and be put in my place.
This is your blog, and let us keep it light, however. I just thought some gentle sparring might have been revelatory, but I guess not.
By the way, apart from my misreading of one of your comments because I was tired, and (what may be seen as emotional, but wasn’t) my attempt to point a critical spotlight in a direction that it isn’t usually pointed, it is a mistake to view what I have said as being wrongly spoken or hysterical. I was simply trying to make some points I thought you might be interested in (and doing so a little more directly than usual).
Another thing I hate that the Europeans say: Americans cannot speak foreign languages, you speak foreign languages, therefore you cannot be American.
I am in an American household right now and English, Spanish, Quechua and Aymara are all spoken. And there are differences between us:
People who speak English and Spanish
People who speak only Spanish
People who speak Spanish and Quechua or Spanish and Aymara
Those differences correspond to different positions within this not really postcolonial space.
Mike is considered to be not a real American by Europeans — because he is seen as being intellecttual rather than arrogant and self-willed.
I think that two issues to be carefully distinguished between are culture versus power. The two are not the same, by any means, and having or not having power can be — as you know — very decisive in terms of what happens to you.
For instance, like many defeated enemies in historical tradition, I have also been subjected to the treatment of defeated enemies — a relentless but milder version of the Aztecs’ torturing of the defeated warriors’ bodies following by their rolling down the steps of the shrine: an image designed to boost the sense of local power. That is the collective nature of power (or the lack thereof) at work.
Now there are those who consider that because I was treated this way, (and I have been mistaken on this matter too), that I must have said or done something overt that somehow betrayed a negative aspect of “my culture” in order to have deserved it. But I had not and did not. That is a huge misunderstanding that assumes that people are basically moral and will only call you out if there is indeed something to call you out about.
It would be good if we all lived at this transcendent level of culture, but the majority do not. And intellectuals, I think, tend to misunderstand them and presume that they do.