Watch this in its entirety. Many of my students’ only influences resemble the discourse of Pastor Manning. That is why it is so hard to get them to be rational. It is why you have to prove basic facts to them.
*
I am back in Maringouin where the house and garden are very beautiful. They also need work. But I am on vacation from all outdoor work until 1 October as it is entirely too hot.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Welcome back.
I have no sense of the cultural context of the video, and so cannot comment on it.
Yesterday, I went to a session on postdoctoral studying and fellowships and it really seemed to me then that there is such a thing as too much studying.
Oh, it is just one of the many that says Obama is a socialist and a pimp.
Too much studying, yes indeed.
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Something I should post on re academia: when I got disenchanted. I knew women had to do twice as much as men to succeed and so on and was ready for that. What I didn’t know was that workplace survival had nothing to do with quality of work but with hobnobbing, cliquishness, socializing — at sort of a junior high school level. That is when I gave up.
That is the reason you failed, you gave up. I have seen it happen time after time, you can only fake it for so long, people who are true and talented will prevail in the long run. It is important to socialize on a small scale if asked, keep it casual, no one is forcing you to be their best friend. Don’t blame your lack of accomplishments on others.
N. Ed.: It is hard to tell before publishing what this comment responded to in this thread. We’ll see if I am missing something … but I think it might be something the writer is pushing through so they can then spam with ads or something, because it doesn’t seem to respond to anything in the post or the comments. –Z
OH, now I get it — Ryan, you haven’t read the blog, it seems, that’s why your comment seems so out of context! I don’t mean I can’t make small talk at parties. I’m an experienced and well connected senior faculty person famous for giving great parties and knowing how to meet and charm people.
What I am talking about is the immaturity, the gossip, the backbiting, and the dysfunctional family atmospheres that reign in some of the colleges and units I’ve experienced. I have never wanted to join such atmospheres — most of us are glad to be out of middle school for a reason — and I have in fact found discouraging the years when I have had to live in such atmospheres day in and day out.
I am not talking about learning to socialize and network but about surviving viciousness and workplace brutality when you are living thousands of miles away from your research site or anything else sustaining. It is difficult to sustain enthusiasm for the profession when the actual conditions in which you live are antithetical to it.
In some periods my error was to feel I had to get used to these conditions, enjoy them, find virtue in them, call them good. To do so means engaging in too much denial and too much self sacrifice, compromising oneself too much, committing a kind of psychic suicide, sacrificing the sense of self and purpose one needs to do well in one’s job for the sake of trying to become a person who enjoys abuse more than I do so as to “get along” with fearful and destructive people. It’s a bad idea.
hobnobbing, cliquishness, socializing
That was the message I got, too, from yesterday’s seminar. You had to apply for fellowships as a way of hobnobbing and socialising, not just in order to acquire them.
Really, Jennifer? That sounds bizarre.
Well, networking is one thing … but having too much based on ingratiation is something else again, I feel.
Well the presenter didn’t use the term hobnobbing, but I think it is a way of putting in extra work to distinguish you from those who do not, since the positions are so competitive.
On an entirely unrelated note, Nietzsche and Melanie Klein come together.
I will have to write this up more formally some day.
Yes — postdocs, they definitely are a two edged sort of thing. I read the Nietzche-Klein post but have not yet digested it.
Herd morality seems to be based on the Kleinian splitting and projective identification model. One projects (expels) the accumulated negative feelings that one has, about things. One projects them outside of one as if they originated not with oneself but from somebody else who has been identified as their originator (indeed, perhaps they didn’t originate with oneself, as in the case where a whole group of people can be systemically victimised, but such negative feelings of worthlessness still ought to be examined more productively than simply by projecting them onto someone else, as if they had really originated from a specific person. That specific person chosen to bear this negativity as if it were their own is usually just another powerless individual.)
This kind of dynamics that I have explained above is the basis for “herd morality”. Nietzsche identified that once one has found the “evil” people and condemned them, one is free to feel good, oneself. But it seems to be based upon the dynamic of expelling the evil properties in order to become good. Also, to be noted, this is a dynamic that pertains to herds, rather than to individuals per se.
The opposite morality is the “master morality”, which involves proclaiming oneself good as THE PRIMARY ACT. (Note: One does not need to excrete and expel something negative at first, in order to finally become good in one’s own eyes.) To proclaim oneself and one’s desires good is the act of one who has an the characteristics of being masterful. (Even in this case, Nietzsche acknowledges, one may project one’s occasional bad moods into another, as if they were the cause of them, but one does so carelessly, rather than maliciously. But the splitting and projective identification as one’s essential and prime need is of the “herd”. It basically reflects a passive — [in Klein’s terms, “infantile” — way of coping, whereas Master morality is more that of a mature adult.])
I see it and I see why it is a little dangerous to let the macho teenaged boys read this.
Meanwhile Hattie would seethe — there was a substitute yoga teacher again this morning, a different one, and she led prayers (not qualified to do this) and also said we surely thought ourselves different from and better than others and surely needed to learn we were not separate from them. “Separate for a reason,” I could have growled, naturally. Not that I don’t get the point but that the “lesson” is meant for someone else, I am quite sure.
I see it and I see why it is a little dangerous to let the macho teenaged boys read this.
Yes– because they misunderstand the underlying critique that Nietzsche is making, which is a psychological one, and based upon experience. They think he is calling them to proclaim themselves wonderful and go about stomping on others like nobody’s business. (And in setting themselves up in this narcissistic way, without any substance to it, they do end up turning themselves into exactly the herd that Nietzsche despised. Their very weak character structures can see nothing more enticing than pouring out scorn upon women, who are chosen for projective identification as (effectively) ‘everything about me that I disown, because the qualities are not overmannish for me to claim as my own’. But they’ve only become good (“noble”; “strong” in their own eyes) by forcing women to take on the opposite identity and becoming evil.
Anyway, it is clear that, in Nietzsche’s terms, what amounts to strength is the capacity to process one’s own emotional material and not to require others to process it half-chewed, so that you can feel better about yourself.
This is key to understanding why it is that the “strong” must stand alone.
Yes. And yes — weakness = making other people process it half chewed, this makes a lot of sense.
Hmmm… people tend to freak out at my independence but I think that is just another one of the sexist barbs. I think it is why Reeducation freaked out as it did.
(The Saturday yoga teachers. They really do think most people have false senses of superiority that they need to unlearn. I wonder if this is generally true, or true in Maringouin.)
The other link is that if you do not feel capable of processing the nature of other people’s difficulties or tragedies, you tend to moralise.
Moralising not only provides an easy explanation for the difficult aspects of reality, thus saving lazy people the energy of having to think, but it also defends a very weak and shaky ego from the impact of the intense aspects of reality.
That is why Nietzsche sought to provoke by investing in the imagery of barbarism (Bataille, too). It actually cuts against the lazy moralism that is predominant in right wing circles, and would have the victims blamed for their own victimisation.
And this of course is why I now intend to moralize more, not less, since I seem to have the opposite set of problems than the typical being. 😉
But what we’re doing is not in Nietzsche’s terms moralising, but psychological analysis or review of the pathologies within the petri dish.
Important point.
It’s a very important point to remember, because if you do not allow that the social pathologies can actually be analysed, then you completely gut Nietzsche’s philosophy so that it becomes a simple prescription: “Obey power people and always do what they say, unless you are lacking in reverence and a sense of reality.”
And most of the unschooled do, in fact, read him this way.
But there is a shamanistic critique that he brings to the table, which is completely hidden from their eyes. They read exoterically, rather than esoterically, and so cannot see how Nietzsche’s ideas can be applied except in a prescriptive manner. But that leads to the nazi stupidity: vamp on women, Christians, and others whom you have decided are those categorically weak.
A shamanistic sensibility, however, would be able to determine on an individual basis whether or not any particular woman, Christian, etc. was really in the camp of the weak.
But a shamanistic reading is precisely what is missing from most people’s minds.
On the other hand, I think the Neechy probably actually wanted to be misunderstood by the macho Teutonic types, so that things could be stirred up a bit, and be less boring. They could put on their jackboots and go traipsing around the world. Happy times.
What a way to get un-bored, though!!!
I can understand it because of the kind of society I come from. I find normal everyday life quite boring.
But I think that Nietzsche was working on a theory that if aggression is discharged outwards, it doesn’t become projective identification — which is largely true in principle. However, if you are counting on an “either-or” scenario, then you may be overlooking the possibility of “both-and”. So the militarisation of Germany that allowed it to discharge its aggression outwards was also accompanied by ressentiment against the Jews and others. Ressentiment = projective identification.
I still say, what a way to de-bore oneself.
“Ressentiment = projective identification.” That is a handy statement. I might put it on a post-it at the office.
I think that if you have been hugely victimised by other people’s projective identification (which of course has an overt social form and quality, as well as a surreptitious mechanism that nobody can clearly see, by which it operates) you can become suddenly and shockingly “enlightened” as to the extremely amoral nature of the world and universe compared to how you were seeing it before. This painful induction into the knowledge that the world operates on the basis of amoral principles — on the basis of principles of need, hunger and avarice, which are all communicated via the mode of projective identification — is akin to a variety of shamanistic initiation. You see things very differently from how you did before. So in the case of Nietzsche, he thought, very naturally: “What about my own needs and desires? If the world is amoral — as it has revealed itself to be, through the relentless pressures of other people’s projective identifications — then there is no moral law to stop ME rather than THEM from being satisfied by what the world has to offer. And, as for my own needs, I demand to no longer be so bored.”
Victimized by projective identification, I guess I might qualify. But have not entered conscious of that degree of baseness as a majority thing — I am still in denial, I suppose.
But to be less bored, why does N. have to have the Teutons Teutonize themselves, instead of, say, run off to Africa like Rimbaud? Or does he just want these people to act overtly as they are secretly feeling, or something like that?
Perhaps you are just too much in the majority to have experienced it as an attack FROM the majority? Another word for “herd” is “tribe” and you have not been in a position to be a victim of mass tribalistic consciousness.
No — I think that’s ridiculous and presumptuous, something an ignorant European would say but not a Buddhistic Native American like myself. 😉
No — I think that’s ridiculous and presumptuous, something an ignorant European would say but not a Buddhistic Native American like myself.
Say what?
I do believe that you are searching for deeper shamanic wounding so that you can get status from that in accordance with the shamanic tradition, which states that the greater the wound one has survived, the more powerful a shaman one is.
But it is a GOOD thing to have a tribe!
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On another note, I am considering the difference between a shaman and a fascist. Both are intrigued by pre-Oedipal dynamics, however the shaman is like one who goes into the boxing ring determined to win over his opponent at any cost. He or she wants to utilise the pre-Oedipal dynamics in service of ego. The fascist, on the other hand, has something different in mind. He wants to submit to power. And nothing would delight him more if the pre-Oedipal dynamics got the better of him and he could submit wholeheartedly to irrationality.
But the shaman MUST remain in control of any fire he starts. At least in principle, if not in practice.
But to be less bored, why does N. have to have the Teutons Teutonize themselves, instead of, say, run off to Africa like Rimbaud? Or does he just want these people to act overtly as they are secretly feeling, or something like that?
Yes, I think that’s it. You can more easily get them to act more overtly what is already in them.
And damn the consequences, I suppose?
I think Nietzsche’s understanding of psychology gave him the impression that he was choosing the better of two evils.
Nietzche, figuring he is choosing better of two evils, I can see that.
It may be true I am actually seeking a deeper shamanic wound. Standard advice about life is about how to avoid this. Very interesting.
Good distinction shaman/fascist and actually, the fascist version of things once again fits the recipes of — Reeducation!
A shamanic wound is not happy joyful times. But it’s an initiation and like any initiation will change your overall perspectives.
I am interested in how Bataille seems to replicate Nietzsche, in his own writing. Bataille’s writing acknowledges and at times echoes the formal structure of Nietzsche’s writing, point for point. But there are some changes in the interpretation of the shamanic project, psychologically and politically. (It is just the structure of the shamanic project that is left untouched.)
So there is the issue of self destruction in both writings, and a certain ambiguity as well, as to whether and how there is something to be gained from this. I think this ambiguity reflects a key aspect of any shamanistic project, which is that it really depends on how alive you are to begin with, whether cracking the shell of your external being will reveal more aliveness or will just confirm an already existing state of inner death. Consequently, experimenting with destruction (the thanatos drive towards ego dedifferentiation) is invited — but nothing is promised. Eros either will or won’t be released more freely from its shell. It depends on what’s in there.
I think the “eternal recurrence” is recognition of this. One returns to one’s core being, which is the pre-Oedipal state of health, or of sickness. If there is something good there, more can be added. But if not, seeking a shamanic wound is merely foolhardy, since nothing good will be generated from it. In either case, the eternal return is a return to the resources that are at the core of one’s being. And having or not having these resources defines every moment of your actual, waking reality.
Once again, this is why the Reeducated mentality does not want one to return to the source, as it supposes one will find nothing good.
Once again, this is why the Reeducated mentality does not want one to return to the source, as it supposes one will find nothing good.
Well, for that and for other reasons. Because, it is objectively dangerous to dig down to one’s core self. One can find all sorts of things there, but not only that, eros and thanatos encounter each other there. And thanatos might win, which means you will be even worse off than when you begun your journey. The shaman, however, has to assure that the force that ultimately reconstitutes one as a whole, and encourages abstract thinking (Eros) triumphs over Thanatos. However, Thanatos is the facilitator of the shamanic journey — the means for it.
All of that is just why you cannot undertake such things with flaky guides (or be overly tolerant of such). No babalus but big-time babalus. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babalu_Aye)
Right. And actually conventional “therapy” is itself very dangerous, since most therapists only presume to understand what they are doing from a book.
And life, too — isn’t it very dangerous?
Conventional therapy, sure, but also flaky shamans or flaky religious types. Life is dangerous, sure, but not unequivocally / not an *assured* path to destruction.
Most shamans will be flaky in a capitalist economy, because they have to offer something to you as a consumer, when the essence of shamanism is an extreme pursuit of knowledge in an active, inwards way — all aspects that are contradicted by consumerism.
Best to go to Nietzsche and Bataille.
You know, to be frank I’ve never been able to pay attention to them for more than a few pages … so male, so European, so alien, and there’s so much else to read. Maybe some day I’ll have the patience. In the meantime I am just reading your blog and the quotations some other people pick out. Terrible, I know, but there it is.
I had forgotten about commercial shamans. I was thinking more of flaky voodoo dabblers and things, but yes. Of course. In Candomblé (one of the PZ religions) you do sometimes pay to get your shells read — it depends on the situation — but it’s not because of commercialization.
They’re really not like white men, though. The very structure of the paradigm that they are into undermines this category and status. Actually, they are men, and I think this is enough to make them unreadable for some people, as everything they do/say is interpreted back into the paradigm of male privilege. But to me, such categorical thinking about identity is like shackles on my arms.
It may have to do with the contexts in which I’ve mostly read what I have read of these people. PZ the stela would actually be a lot more sympathetic.
Back when we read them in class and all, it always seemed to me that they were trying to deconstruct the Western self and thus constantly referred back to it, assumed it as the given, and so on, whereas the entities I was actually studying were on the margins of that if they were in it at all.
I think a lot of shamanism has been misread as deconstruction. But desconstruction is a purely intellectual activity, which is merely assumed to affect you all the way down to your feelings and your identity. Perhaps in a way it is an attempt to do shamanism without risking anything — which is counter to the principles of shamanism. One must risk oneself to get any results. Similarly Romanticism is an intellectual (or, perhaps more specifically, creative) movement that nonetheless stays altogether too much on the surface level of the mind. No wonder it is said of Romanticism that its expression finds full existence only in the imagination and that it has no direct influence upon the parallel and dreary world of everyday reality. Shamanism proper, though, has such an influence.
Right now I am reading The Freudian Mystique by Samuel Slipp M.D., which explains how Freud could have been “so wrong about women”, and why the patriarchal system is one that is thoroughly based upon regressive principles of projective identification, as I has already hypothesized it to be.
Another way to look at it: The masculinity part of Nietzsche’s writing is not part of the core shamanism. It actually goes some way towards misleading the readers about the aspects which probably attract them to Nietzsche’s writing in the first place, which are the shamanistic components. Sometimes Nietzsche himself seems to acknowledge that there are arbitrary elements to his writing, especially concerning women, ie. “These are merely MY truths”. In that case, he is referring to his own psychological make-up, which is not part of the shamanistic agenda of transformation and regeneration as found generally in Zarathustra.
In Bataille’s terms, those aspects that are resistant to inward transformation — in Bataille’s terms, resistant to becoming part of a flame (and to shamanic burning) — pertain to the “profane” aspects of existence, and not to the sacred. So, in other words, they are not part of shamanism.
Shamanism is all that which pertains to the possibilities of radical transformation and to change.
But what we do find is that those who adopt Nietzsche’s misogyny and his versions of masculinism do tend to self-destruct in a radically NON-SHAMANISTIC sort of way. That is, they become misled by the non-shamanistic aspects in Nietzsche’s writing, and tend to become dogmatic, resistant to change, and do stupid things.
That is because they don’t understand the core message of Nietzsche — although they are intuitively attracted to the shamanistic parts.
Yes. Actually the misogynistic speech in Nietzche doesn’t perturb me at all — it seems to be just some sort of surface feature.
And another thing: I am so much into focussing on Marechera’s form of ‘initiatory experience’ that I overlook that mine, such as it was, was entirely different.
The key point is to “face death”, which M. did through descending into a kind of temporary madness. However, this isn’t something that happened to me. Actually I did “face death”, but I was holding Hegel in mind all the time.
It was more like standing on a statement of principle: “I would rather cease to exist altogether, than allow others to treat me badly, like a slave.”
So I kept saying “no” all the time, to others views of me, and to their demands on me as someone who owed them something, due to my gender (or immigrant status). I refused anything that would turn me into a person who complied with requests out of fear. And it was in this manner that I faced the death of my former self.
Is it also a kind of madness? I did allow anything that pertained to compliance to be torn apart, as if by spirits.
Well, mine seems to be about taking power. 🙂
Well, mine seems to be about taking power.
What is the nature of the negative dialectic that will allow you to claim power?
I don’t know that there is a negative dialectic — I’m not killing off an old self, really, it’s the old self that I’m CONVOKING.
it’s the old self that I’m CONVOKING
But to be honest, I’m not sure that anything I’ve read in shamanism suggests that it is possible to convoke an old self.
It’s always more or less about submitting to the creation of a new self, which is possible be evoking the negative dialectics that are intrinsic to the psyche and how it is made up. (Note: “negative dialectics” do not mean negativity in the positivistic sense.)
So I just can’t imagine how you would bring about an earlier state using shamanism. There are other methods, such as hypnosis, which would do this, I imagine.
But shamanism can only create something new. It can’t reinvigorate the old.
I think that Ingerman’s way of talking about the shamanic project as “soul retrieval” is a way of acceding to positivistic notions about identity, but that it is mere figure of speech, and does not describe what actually happens in shamanism, which is not the retrieval of a pre-existent identity, but rather, the retrieval of pre-existent intrapsychic energies of various specific sorts.
“I think a lot of shamanism has been misread as deconstruction. But desconstruction is a purely intellectual activity, which is merely assumed to affect you all the way down to your feelings and your identity. Perhaps in a way it is an attempt to do shamanism without risking anything — which is counter to the principles of shamanism. One must risk oneself to get any results. Similarly Romanticism is an intellectual (or, perhaps more specifically, creative) movement that nonetheless stays altogether too much on the surface level of the mind. No wonder it is said of Romanticism that its expression finds full existence only in the imagination and that it has no direct influence upon the parallel and dreary world of everyday reality. Shamanism proper, though, has such an influence.”
***That’s very interesting, on shamanism AND deconstruction AND Romanticism.***
“Right now I am reading The Freudian Mystique by Samuel Slipp M.D., which explains how Freud could have been ‘so wrong about women’, and why the patriarchal system is one that is thoroughly based upon regressive principles of projective identification, as I has already hypothesized it to be.”
Bingo then – it’s all coming together – and that is another book I’ve been hearing of since it came out and really want to read, yet have not.
“‘it’s the old self that I’m CONVOKING’
“But to be honest, I’m not sure that anything I’ve read in shamanism suggests that it is possible to convoke an old self.
“It’s always more or less about submitting to the creation of a new self, which is possible be evoking the negative dialectics that are intrinsic to the psyche and how it is made up. (Note: “negative dialectics” do not mean negativity in the positivistic sense.)
“So I just can’t imagine how you would bring about an earlier state using shamanism. There are other methods, such as hypnosis, which would do this, I imagine.
“But shamanism can only create something new. It can’t reinvigorate the old.”
I’m not seriously claiming to be doing anything shamanistic, though. Negative dialectic … I’m not adept at Adorno expert, either …
What I’m dropping isn’t anything deep enough that I’d call it a self, it’s just some roles and subject positions I’d been trained to. I think. And I don’t have a good track record on destroying old selves — tried to destroy one I actually liked during Reeducation, and so on, and so forth, but even then it didn’t work. I’m better off just letting certain bark fall off, so to speak, or at least that is how I feel now. I did a deeper type of operation a few months ago, I think. Now’s not the time.
[“soul retrieval” as] “the retrieval of pre-existent intrapsychic energies of various specific sorts”
— yes, that would describe what I am up to, more like. Remember we *aren’t* identities, we’re confluences of energies, and so on, and those energies are in motion.
Also if you want to acquire a new energy, you need to get rid of something to make space for it. Otherwise you will not be able to acquire it.
Yes indeed!