ideology versus discourse

There is one main difficulty I have had in communicating across cultural boundaries -- which is to say communicating as one who was brought up within Zimbabwean culture to those who were not. It is that my natural mode of speech is never ideological, but rather discursive. I would say that this is the quintessential difficulty that I have had had in communicating across boundaries right from the beginning. It is perhaps a more intellectual approach, to begin with, to speak in a way that takes into account another person's perspective. Intellectual life differs from the politics of everyday life in that one accords the other person's perspective some value.

Ideology, by contrast, works to exclude all alternative perspectives, so that it seems as if only one perspective governs every detail of reality. Considered in these terms, my approach to life has always been intellectual, rather than ideological. In the initial stages -- immediately after immigration and for many years beyond -- my intellectual approach was non-ideological, but all the same, it was very uniformed. (I suspect that this extremely uniformed nature of my earlier perspectives must have made many people presuppose that I was not capable of adopting an intellectual perspective at all, but that kind of judgement is, I now believe, based on ignorance about human developmental processes.)

Back to my main point -- my goal in life has always been to develop my knowledge, and not to bolster any kind of ideological position. This is what has set me apart, and made it difficult to communicate clearly when others have assumed that being from a particular place automatically embues me with an ideological perspective of some sort. Such a preemptive assumption immediately causes a communication barrier to emerge, as one struggles to communicate intellectually -- which is to say, discursively -- into a field of thinking that is defined by ideological warfare. One doesn't communicate very well in those instances -- above all, one does not learn anything from the engagement (which means that intellectual life is thwarted). Yet, this intellectual deadlock describes the overall nature of my attempts to be myself in relation to Westerners --- and to learn from them. (They generally seem very ideological in orientation, but maybe that is circumstantial and is only in relation to me -- which is to say, more accurately, in they may be that way because of their perceptions of my origins and what they take to be the implications thereof.)

As little as I may have seemed an intellectual in the past (such as when my standpoint, through no fault of my own, was basically one of ignorance) I have always been an intellectual in my mode of operation. I have always risked much to learn more about the world, and have never exhanged the possibility of learning with the opportunity to bolster a particular ideology of any sort.

I am sure that my approach to life, which requires accepting a certain vulnerability in relation to the broader sphere of knowledge (that which I do not yet know) must make me seem weak or uncertain compared to one who denies that there is anything that doesn't make good sense within the auspices of his ideological position. The capacity to question one's views and values belongs to the discursive mode of thinking about the world. An ideologist, by constrast, will seek a sense of strength in precisely the opposite approach -- in denying that any of his perspectives are less than absolute and certain. He will find the logic of the discursive approach very difficult to understand -- but even more impossible to bear. The practical gap between the two ways of approaching the world is almost impossible to bridge.

I am far from being weak and shaky. Views of the latter sort do not make sense to me, since I always have a good and logical reason for changing my perceptions of the world.

Also, I find that most Zimbabweans will understand me, quite implicitly, when I speak phenomenologically about my experiences in the world. Westerners cannot; or else, they seem to manage less well in understanding that my views and perspectives are not designed to merely bolster my self-image in relation to the world.

No! I don't need any illusions popped, and least of all by Westerners, who know me least -- for I am not in any kind of ideological bubble!