Mirroring

The following is a point I've taking from the psychoanalytic writings of the post-colonial critic, Ashis Nandy -- although it could more easily be related to the neurological output of "mirror cells". I want to talk about the way in which a non-interventionist approach to psychological abuse creates profoundly mixed messages, which stymie the capacity to participate effectively in the world. Nandy's insight is that there is a certain tendency to psychologically alienate aspects of oneself that relate to aspects that one has been taught to despise in the person of the cultural Other.

The principle is one of recursive calumnification: One cannot emotionally accept aspects in oneself that one has condemned outside of oneself -- that is, if one is a normal, relatively healthy human being. Dislike of the other, for whatever features they seem to represent, will also lead to an ultimate dislike of oneself to the degree that one appears to be much like the other (from the point of view of the ruthless, primary-processing parts of one's mind). This is an analysis concerning what those who dominate will tend to experience, as it happens, generally on the principle of excluding others from their realm "on principle". A mounting paranoia on their parts is to be expected.

Oddly enough, perhaps, I'm not concerned with the moral implications of this principle, as its apparent psychological determinism can regularly be got around, through the promotion of certain ideologies and the systematic promotion of fear. What is more interesting to me is the kind of training for misunderstanding that eventuates when the presence and existence of mirroring as a basic psychological phenomenon is not taken sufficiently into account.

I'm more interested in the way that this phenomenon of mirroring works from the point of view of one who in an outsider, or is oppressed. Let us talk about me. I have an aggressively healthy attitude towards my own education, in every respect. I have learned that aggression of this sort is also rationally self-defensive. Why so? Because to deny that an event happened is to lose the ability to learn anything from it. To accept that one must succumb to denying important parts of reality is to accept a mental dulling. One switches off and refuses to know. Intellectually one may shut down, but emotionally one detaches. An originally inexplicable event then just becomes another dull (or, dully violent) eventuality to learn to ignore, as one passes, without thought, along the stream of what passes for life. This is the diminishment that I am pressured to accept whenever somebody says, "Oh, what you're interested in (regarding gender, to take one example) is just so much whining. What I hear then is "You must accept diminishment! You don't deserve to remain alert or to have answers." I understand such as response as a way to cast me down into an inferior social place.

But, I wonder, despite all this pressure from above, why my self-education remains important to me. This struggle for survival is vital to me at the most visceral and fundamental level. It is by means of this effort that I untie myself from various ideological and political knots; the profoundly mixed messages that end up being produced when ideological systems, based on fear, have taken control in any society. My situation then is as follows: My experiences as a cultural outsider have made it very difficult for me to learn the values of this, my current, culture. The manner in which we conventionally learn -- by mirroring -- has been the one most essentially blocked. And this provides a quandary -- psychologically. I am blocked from learning by doing. I am free to learn only from books.

How does it happen that one is not free to treat others the way one treats oneself? This is the principle by which learning is facilitated, and it is the one that Nandy points to in indicating why Kipling had so much trouble, as a British colonial, accepting his own Indian "otherness". (In effect, I am suggesting that he could not even learn from his own psychologically and socially assimilated experiences concerning what another culture had to offer.) The principle of othering seems to trump the principle of learning through mirroring. Whenever this happens learning processes are stymied.

I think of why it seems to me that there are so many contexts of the Australian workplace where I am fundamentally unable to function -- where participating is much more difficult than going for one's black belt, and where a mechanism of coercion always hangs over one's head: an injunction to become duller and to experience and see less than one does. It is because as one lower in the hierarchy and also a migrant-outsider, I am not permitted to learn by mirroring -- in other words, I do not have the freedom to adapt.

I have wondered why school teaching seems like the hardest, most impossible job of all for me, when others manage it in a relative stride. It is hard because I cannot treat others the way I treat myself. If I am firm with myself, I am only permitted to be sensitive to them. If I am sensitive, I am not permitted to show it. In all, my cultural training has had too many mixed messages, which all obey the construction: "treat us as if our sensitivities really, really matter, or you will be deemed immoral. As for you, your sensitivities are really nothing to be concerned with. Get over it!"

I've tried being less sensitive to the injunction to get over essential parts of my experience -- but that only makes me treat you more firmly, in fact in precisely that way that you have taught me to treat myself, which now seems natural. But for me to treat you as I do myself is precisely what is most unacceptable to you -- you cultural insiders!

The whole scenario does not compute. If I cannot simply treat you how I treat myself, then I am forced to make every sort of action that I engage in, in relation to you, very, very conscious. I have to parse it through consciousness in every way before I act on it, and the amount of effort that it takes in doing this is more than I can humanly manage. Much easier, if it were permitted, would be to mirror the emotions and attitudes that are directed at me. But a cultural outsider is expected to toe the line. Small infractions of standards of politeness or small expressions of impulse seem much more dangerous from one who is already deemed a cultural outsider. There's just no way of getting to the inside then, no easy way-- only via the well-worn route of intellectual and spiritual deadness.

Enjoy.