Thursday 15 January 2009

Remember me not


Bourgeois ideology creates the basis for postmodernist consciousness. The reason is its mind-body dualism. To have a real identity, within the bourgeois system, is the moral and phenomenological equivalent of being caught loitering. The body is the concrete aspect of the self that is capable of giving us a real sense of being. However, under bourgeois ideology, the body is necessarily divorced from the mind. Freed of its anchor in the real world, the mind is left to wander, moving from one mental state to another, without a consistent feeling of having any particular underlying identity. The disembodied mind thus believes that it has freed itself. Such freedom is a moral imperative -- not to be bound by the "body" and its memories, which are believed to pertain to a lower aspect of life. Those who remain attached to concrete aspects of the self, including bodily knowledge and memories of self-identity, appear to be spending too much time in one place. Morally, they are suspicious, for they link their sense of self to their bodies in a manner that bourgeois folk would consider quite unseemly.

Those who remember who they happen to be loiterers and spiritual offenders, from the point of view of bourgeois thinking.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity