Saturday 26 July 2008

iconoclastic efforts and Marechera's ethics

Marechera, although a through-and-through iconoclast, appears to have been more a product of Enlightenment thinking that a product of postmodernist relativism. I believe he played two games -- one, iconoclastic destruction of ideas (especially those of identity) that he thought put a limit on human dignity and freedom; and two, an attempt to assert truths that were absolute, as insights into reality. (The latter was a kind of neo-paganism, which nonetheless was not opposed to enlightenment precepts, but was another musico-aesthetic strand or "voice" in his oeuvre.)

His enlightenment credentials can be seen in his embrace of science (see: eg. the scientific motifs in The Black Insider.) Also, throughout his work, his attitude in relation to himself is one of an intellectually moderated skepticism concerning whether or not he does succeed in getting to "the truth" of the matter in terms of his neo-pagan voice, and the rationally based possibility that he has failed (because of his personal limits in knowledge and accurate empirical data) in being completely objective. (The self conscious critique of the limits of objectivity is also, as I take it, an aspect of the self-critique that rationality is obliged to make of itself, in terms of its objective limits.)

Marechera also embraces enlightenment ideals in that he eschews identity politics. Whilst he adopts an identity at times -- namely a peculiarly black identity -- he does so more in order to denounce its limitations that to embrace it as a political basis for meaning and action. Identities -- including (very often) the social limitations on female identity (see how he breaks the mould for women with his iconoclastic female identities in Black Sunlight), are seen as products of social supersitition, veiled in darkness. It is various forms of colonialism, read as social oppression, which creates these identities. Therefore, one does well not to perpetuate them, but to break out of the mould.

In my view the adoption by contemporary society of identity politics, as a means to justify oneself in the face of social discord and political aggression, is a compromise with the principle of irrationality as a social force, along with an acceptance of the darkening and compromised psoition of universal ethics, and a reconciliation with social unreason. For all of his iconoclastic efforts, Marechera was pro-enlightenment (working to break down the illusions of identity), rather than inclined to embrace the illusions of identity as God's mysterious gift to Man.

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