UPDATE: This I had formulated a long time ago, but is slightly off the mark, mostly because I underestimated Lacan's misanthropy. I was responding to what I saw as shamanistic about the Marechera novel, BLACK SUNLIGHT.
According to Lacan, an individual moves from the paranoid-schizoid psychological state of early childhood, and then on to an adult level of consciousness via an encounter of oneself as ontologically whole (through gazing, literally or figuratively, into a mirror) roughly approximates Lacan's set of ideas (although it is not necessarily the same). However, Kleinian and Jungian psychology are also relevant for understanding the scheme and meaning of the protagonist’s shamanic journey.
Bataille is also particularly instructive with regard to his self investigations, as in, for instance, Inner Experience. The capacity to perceive inwardly the psychological repercussions of Lacanian theory is a rare ability that pertains to shamanism, but not to Lacan’s or Freud’s systems themselves (it is a feature of the shamanistic imagination, that it is possible to travel backwards and forwards developmentally, and with clear vision). The shamanistic imagination maintains a bridge of psychological discourse between two versions of the self – that of the normative consciousness and the other of the psychological unconscious. (The latter, in Lacan’s terms, is the same as the self who pre-exists the transformation that takes place when the child starts to learn language. At this stage, the child’s self-awareness is no longer personal and immediate, but is abstracted from his or her direct needs. Also, after this point, the child no longer has an awareness of being ontologically linked to everything in a state of oneness with it, but must stand alone as a discrete and separate entity from other things. This represents a loss of primal unity, which the shamanistic imagination seeks to restore, if only temporarily.)
The shaman sees both sides of the psychological coin (the advantages of the early world of paranoid-schizoid consciousness, and those that pertain to the adult state of rationality). Bataille’s approach, which like all shamanistic approaches, seeks to draw dialectic of communication between the two. In the paranoid-schizoid state, there are only singularities, with nothing else sufficiently resembling each event enough to acquire the label of being “the same”. It is with this awareness in mind that Bataille rails against the limitations of the “I” that is adopted when we take up language.
Bataille, however, is also keen to use language (the other way of formulating reality) effectively, to convey, if possible, this sense of lack he feels in having to imply that his identity is general and universalisable.
(He expects to fail in his attempt to bridge the two worlds that divide our self-identity, to the degree that we, as readers, lack the capacity to take in a point of view that does not depend on language.)
Marechera's Black Sunlight maintains knowledge of the two different modes of being, building a bridge between the paranoid-schizoid position and language.
Thus it expresses a shamanistic view of reality having two very different sides to it.
According to Lacan, an individual moves from the paranoid-schizoid psychological state of early childhood, and then on to an adult level of consciousness via an encounter of oneself as ontologically whole (through gazing, literally or figuratively, into a mirror) roughly approximates Lacan's set of ideas (although it is not necessarily the same). However, Kleinian and Jungian psychology are also relevant for understanding the scheme and meaning of the protagonist’s shamanic journey.
Bataille is also particularly instructive with regard to his self investigations, as in, for instance, Inner Experience. The capacity to perceive inwardly the psychological repercussions of Lacanian theory is a rare ability that pertains to shamanism, but not to Lacan’s or Freud’s systems themselves (it is a feature of the shamanistic imagination, that it is possible to travel backwards and forwards developmentally, and with clear vision). The shamanistic imagination maintains a bridge of psychological discourse between two versions of the self – that of the normative consciousness and the other of the psychological unconscious. (The latter, in Lacan’s terms, is the same as the self who pre-exists the transformation that takes place when the child starts to learn language. At this stage, the child’s self-awareness is no longer personal and immediate, but is abstracted from his or her direct needs. Also, after this point, the child no longer has an awareness of being ontologically linked to everything in a state of oneness with it, but must stand alone as a discrete and separate entity from other things. This represents a loss of primal unity, which the shamanistic imagination seeks to restore, if only temporarily.)
The shaman sees both sides of the psychological coin (the advantages of the early world of paranoid-schizoid consciousness, and those that pertain to the adult state of rationality). Bataille’s approach, which like all shamanistic approaches, seeks to draw dialectic of communication between the two. In the paranoid-schizoid state, there are only singularities, with nothing else sufficiently resembling each event enough to acquire the label of being “the same”. It is with this awareness in mind that Bataille rails against the limitations of the “I” that is adopted when we take up language.
Bataille, however, is also keen to use language (the other way of formulating reality) effectively, to convey, if possible, this sense of lack he feels in having to imply that his identity is general and universalisable.
(He expects to fail in his attempt to bridge the two worlds that divide our self-identity, to the degree that we, as readers, lack the capacity to take in a point of view that does not depend on language.)
Marechera's Black Sunlight maintains knowledge of the two different modes of being, building a bridge between the paranoid-schizoid position and language.
Thus it expresses a shamanistic view of reality having two very different sides to it.
1 comment:
I am mediated by language because I am living within the human community. Before I start living in the human community, I have no language to conceptualize, to frame my conscious view of the world. At night, I go to sleep and live through my dreams and return partially to this state of being before I was rationally conscious of the human community and my ability to conceptualize is flooded with creative thought mixed with experience of conscious reality.
Lacan seems to be saying that the human being is somehow losing authenticity by gaining consciousness of the human community through the exchange of thought via language.
Bataille is reminding us of how far we have come from a state of Nature and how we need to remember/experience it by shattering the dominant paradigm of ideas.
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