exchange on Nietzsche/shamanism

Alex Zane said...

Very helpful post, and a lot of other great ones lately.Could you say some more about how participatory experience in both objectivity and subjectivity enables the two to communicate? Isn't it all too common to experience and engage in both (whether consciously or otherwise) but to keep the two separate? Perhaps one must purposefully seek communication between the two and this is part of the shamanistic initiation?



Jennifer F. Armstrong said...


Well I find Lacan useful here, which I know is odd, since his ideas are less radical than are Nietzsche's.But basically, as per the previous post, when we move from infancy to adulthood, we lose access to a certain range of experience, as well as a certain way of looking at the world. It appears that this access to a more immediate kind of experience (preoedipal subjectivity) is connected to the learning of the logic of instrumental reason through learning language. So it is that in the natural course of events, the executive powers of the mind move from R-complex (oriented towards the world on the basis of experience of the need for power) to the neo-cortex (instrumental logic).

According to Lacan, once the earlier infantile realm is closed off from experience, by the natural course of development towards cerebral maturity, we do not experience it directly again. By being cut off from this immediacy of experience, we are "castrated" (Lacan's term: we are deprived off a sense of direct access to power.)It seems that nonetheless we do experience subjectivity as adults, but only in a reactive sense rather than proactively. That is why "emotion" in more advanced societies, which require a system of mind-body dualism to function, ends up acquiring a pejorative connotation -- rightfully so, because generally, subjectivity is merely reactive.The point is to undergo shamanic initiation so that one can reacquaint oneself with this R-complex system of mind, which according to Lacan, has become profoundly repressed. (It now functions as an element of the unconscious -- which is to say, reactively rather than proactively.)

To access that which has been long repressed is very dangerous. One is not accessing the repressed elements of the unconscious so much in shamanism, rather one accesses the actual centre of thinking that operates them -- R-complex. Thus one accesses a different system of intelligence than that which views the world in terms of instrumental reason -- one which reasons according to survival and power.In order to access this centre of intelligence that has long ago lost its executive power, one must submerge the ego and "go under".It is a very fraught process, and can be achieved naturally by experiencing psychological trauma (due to external events) or in traditional shamanism by imbibing certain kinds of psychoactive drugs that causes one's ego to lose its executive control over the mind.