In the past two weeks I have read the following works by Tolstoy, all stories and novellas:
The Prisoner of the Caucausus
The Diary of a Madman
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Kreutzer Sonata
The Devil
Master and Man
Father Sergius
After the Ball
The Forged Coupon
Alyosha the Pot
Hadji Murat
These are all late works and I read them in the Volokhonsky translation, which is excellent. Tolstoy writes about a foreign culture. I used to want to go to Uzbekistan but now I want to go to the Caucasus.
Tolstoy is a Christian man and is worried about the sorts of things Christians and men are. It is interesting to see his analyses of some gender related issues — as in the Kreutzer Sonata, for instance.
Tolstoy lived during the nineteenth century, which is one of the centuries I would like to visit. In it, people deal with many issues that are still most current. Yet unlike now, these issues are new and are thus seen more sharply.
Tolstoy and many of his characters are not Reeducated. They look at things, and act without as many filters as Reeducation demands.
Some of the characters are Reeducated, however, and it is a problem. One sees that Reeducation is a bourgeois thing.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I am starting to recognise the tropes of reeducation more and more these days, to the point that its implicit dichotomies seem very strange to me, indeed laughable. But they are never made explicit — rather just used as a means for social control. For instance, I came across the following one when I was defending a woman against mob mentality. It’s the dichotomy between being “a girl” (i.e. “immature”) or being intelligent. And of course, the way this works in terms of rhetoric is that one is supposed to work towards proving one’s “intelligence” by being less of “girl”. Actually it is just psychological and social blackmail, but the people who use it tend to be genuinely oblivious as to the “correction” they are trying so hard to apply. It’s so very much part of bourgeois consciousness to use emotional blackmail, that nobody sees it.
“It’s so very much part of bourgeois consciousness to use emotional blackmail, that nobody sees it.”
And they even think it is kind.
People try emotional blackmail on me once. But not twice.
Yes, it is very kind, because they could just kill us, but they are giving us a chance.
Condescending.
What you call Western is exactly what we call, variously, “Anglo,” “Protestant,” and “white.”
(All of which adds up to white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, of course — WASP.)
I honestly think that some people are not aware of their own social conditioning, and so they have these values, which are very much internalised, but do not seem to realise it. I used that term, WASPy, in my thesis conclusion. I used to be very much caught out by that binary/dichotomy/division between “immature” and “intelligent”, myself, because the seeds of that emotional segregation of ideas were within me, even though not as a fully grown plant. I knew there was something very wrong with it, but I couldn’t effectively combat it for a number of years. The only way to do so is to get completely away from the company of these anglos, and to be able to think differently for awhile.
Anyway, perhaps that was the whole point of my exploration into shamanism through regression — to be able to say that “immaturity” is also definitively INTELLIGENT. I really think that our potential to self-liberate from authoritarian blackmail rides on this realisation. But it is hard to realise just intellectually. One has to realise it emotionally above all.
But to realize it at all one has to perceive it and name it. There’s the immaturity I and my ilk get accused of — being the ones who say the Emperor has no clothes — and the actual immaturities in which many engage: passive aggression, waiting for an “invisible hand” (i.e. overdetermination + peoples’ laziness and passiveness) to resolve things, and also putting up with poor behavior. These are considered adult behaviors because they are authoritarian. Conformity is also commonly considered “mature,” as we know.
“Self-liberation from authoritarian blackmail,” that is this blog’s secret (or not so secret) lemma!
It’s really weird, because when I read about Lacan and the “mirror stage” books tell me that this stage is a two-edged sword. On the one side, one has developed an internal impression of version of oneself that is untrue in a fundamental sense. It seems that seeing oneself from the outside is a form of alienation, which makes one’s perceptions “untrue”. But then, on the other hand, it is supposed to be a positive thing (probably because it stabilises you within a much broader authoritarian context) to develop a notion of the “big Other” — a projected father figure, although in the abstract. So the passivity that develops is supposed to be a stabiliser.
But I think that the Nietzschean viewpoint runs directly counter to this. Whereas most people are weak, and so are helped by such a stabiliser (despite its falseness) the strong are not aided by this at all. Rather, it becomes a millstone around their necks.
I am not sophisticated enough in Lacan to hazard this scientifically but I really think his whole schtick is descriptive of the authoritarian personality and isn’t universal.
I’m not qualified to say that about Nietzche, either, but I get it. I don’t think the weak imagine it. Thence all the misunderstandings of Nietzche. I really *don’t* think his model is an authoritarian one.
Yes, it is authoritarian, but I think it becomes (within a certain industrial context) “universal” because one alienates one’s power to the employer in order to make a living. It is only not “universal” in a context that is prior to mass industrialisation.
Also, in general Nietzsche’s philosophy is NOT authoritarian (but is misunderstood and turned on its head by authoritarians). His view is much more in tune with what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the productive nature of the unconscious. Authoritarians fear the unconscious, and rightfully so, since they have buried into it all of their bad faith and those things they fear to confront in life. But the opposite perspective — the Nietzschean one — sees the unconscious as the beginning of the stream of life. So, unless one is in tune with it, one is not really living, just existing. That is the fundamental difference between the sickly and the well people — their relationship to their unconscious mind.
What did you mean by you don’t think “the weak imagine it”. What is “it”?
Yes. And I meant, I don’t think the weak have the capacity to see what Nietzche is really saying — or Deleuze for that matter.
The reason is, they are so caught up in the “weak world-system,” as it were, that they cannot see beyond its own interpretive horizons.
On the Ucs, yes. The body and the Ucs are what make the Cs mind sharp, but people do not realize this.
Reeducation, of course, was about dulling all three of those, dulling the body and the Ucs so as to dull the Cs and at the same time dulling the Cs so as to dull the other two.
This was what was so hard for me to understand about it because I expected the opposite. Had heard in books that the opposite was the goal.
Yes, I think they genuinely don’t have the capacity to see what Nietzsche is actually saying, so instead they read their own authoritarian bigotry into his philosophy and make it out to be a doctrine of racial purification or something else equally noxious (“Let’s get rid of the women, because they are dragging us down!”)
It’s hard to read Nietzsche because he writes against the backdrop of this whole authoritarian normality, so the language he employs is necessarily ironic. But instead of HEARING irony, it seems that most people HEAR the booming authoritarian voice of their own inner parent. And I suppose some people find this voice impossible to bear after a while. They can’t live up to it — so they seek some numbing device like reeducation. I think they see no alternative — and Nietzsche would add that in the case of the majority, they are right, as they are already too lacking in a firm psychological foundation to have the power to aim for the genuine alternative.
Yes. And my anti-reeducative realizations and techniques of the last 15 days and more, the future are:
a. Why am I so easily derailed? Well, because I learned (via the Reeducative model, of course) that I am not worthy to be on the rails. So I only dare stay on them for short periods of time, and am easily scared off. This has a simple, if not easy antidote, of course — shed that learning.
b. The pleasure based life. That was what I lost first in Reeducation, and I see getting on the rails as some form of discipline, “getting straight,” so to speak. When really it is allowing the what I would call pleasure (and that’s not dissolution) to be central.
Well efficiency and pleasure are represented as opposites, according to the castrated binary thinkers of our time, but actually as you have already pointed out today, you cannot actually think efficiently without pleasure. The two must become one!
I was looking at some of the Youtube women’s self defence videos last night, and most of them, whilst capable of teaching you something, are pretty woeful. It’s almost as if “self-defence” is taught as a reified set of techniques, rather than as second nature. “Believe in the magical potency of moving in a precise ritualistic fashion, and you have the capacity to save yourself!” This is what I saw. Very few of the women — even the instructors as such — actually seemed to have the knowledge of how to defend themselves already ensconsed in their bodies.
In a way, this told me something about the U.S. — since most of the videos had orginated from there. Gender roles seem pretty well established there, even more than here. There were so many videos, too, that aimed to teach self defence as if it were not for pleasure but something you had to learn as a moral duty. One particular instance of this came across to me in the very formal way the woman was performing. Actually, she was one of the better demonstrators from a technical viewpoint, but she seemed to have the ritual down to such robotic precision that one has to wonder if she really is okay. It’s weird. Saying, “kick him in the groin three times and then move on to y or z part of the body” — well what if he comes at your from a totally different angle than the one you have been practicing for? Also, most of the women had no muscles! Now, I consider myself to be a bit out of condition as I have been writing a PhD, but I have more actual muscle than almost all the actual self defence instructors in the videos!
I don’t know, but I think that what I am seeing is a cultural de-emphasis on the body, that makes a lot of what people are attempting seem to be a bit unrealistic.
Of course, techniques are fine, but you can have all the perfection of technique in the world, and if you do not have at least a moderate amount of brawn, then I don’t think you are learning realistic self-defence.
This is all related to my points a and b above, to which I should add point c, namely that there is no point in converting everything to drudgery.
If pleasure is off limits, things turn to drudgery. If it is not socially acceptable to put affection into one’s activities, then you get oppression and resentment.
I remember when things turned to drudgery for me: it was due to Reeducation. Reeducation said I shouldn’t be so capable / efficient, I didn’t have the right background for it (ha! what did R know?), it must be a false act. I said but, if I am not capable and efficient, things will fall apart, I do not have a driver and a house cleaner and a trust fund, I have to do my own work, I am sorry, it is not because I think I am especially deserving of the seal of competence or anything like that, it is because I have no choice but to be competent.
I said this to try to get special permission to be competent but the price of saying it was that I was ashamed of competence after that and felt that to be proper, I should have to strive for it and only make minimum levels. The only decorous thing to do, the only non egotistical thing, was to struggle along in a poor way and not enjoy!
Therefore part c of my manifesto du jour is no drudgery. How do you convert boring work to non drudgery: you take authority in it and over it. (Authority, of course, as I have already said at length, was also bad in Reeducation.)
Anyway: zero drudgery, this is part c!
If you want to take authority over things then you have to deemphasise a relational way of looking at things. The problem is that males in particular (but also subordinates and those who fear female power) are inclined to play a little game with you whereby they take on a concessionary attitude. I am starting to notice how incredibly subtle this is. It is intended to disarm you. Instead of seeing the principles that are at stake in a position you are taking, they focus on something personal and/or relational, instead. This power play (which is disguised, as I said, as a “concession” — much in the same way that in chess a pawn may be sacrificed in order to set up the game for a bigger move) is designed to get you looking inwards, or to be grateful for a small amount of seemingly genuine human interaction. But if you do fall for it (for example by looking inwards, or feeling grateful) then you lose. You lose your authority in the big picture. Your principles are belittled in the eyes of others and in your own eyes.
Yes, very good points!