Monkey bars: Lacan and nurturing, 2008

What I don't yet understand about Lacan's notion of castration was whether the process of it was presumed to produce a universally predeterminedperson, or whether cultural variations are possible in terms of his paradigm.

As I am learning to draw lessons from my own experiences with greater care, I am in turn confronted with the possibility that there are many levels of nature versus civilisation, or maybe in almost the same terms, immanence versus civilisation.

To me, for instance, my Zimbabwe acculturation represents a form of immanence -- or even "nature" -- in relation to the Western culture. If was compelled, through force of circumstances, to learn a new language, a new cultural paradigm from scratch. So, my understanding of Western culture (when I am not condemning it for being too abstract and narrow in its transcendental cultural distancing practices in relation to such things as impulse and spontaneity) is actually a transcendental achievement of which I am proud.

Bataille's favouring of "immanence" seems to be as a way of correcting the process by which civilisation loses its experiential content by relating everything within the realm of abstractions -- what Lukacs calls "reification". It is specifically a corrective to reification by reintroducing elements of direct experience into the equation in order to disrupt the overly certain and reified thinking processes of the Modernist mind.

I can recall from memory very different sensation of immanence -- to which I could not relate at all, from any element of my being except with a sense of being slightly repulsed and feeling slightly helpless. This was during my middle school teaching practice, during which time I kept imagining that I could smell the loamy quality of afterbirth -- or so my suggestible mind kept telling me. This was the smell of "nature" rather than "civilisation" which still clung to the school setting with its compulsory agenda of nurturing -- a pressure on female teachers to relate in a pre-linguistic way that I couldn't adjust to. Actually, my own school upbringing had been more military (from grade 1 up) than "nurturing". So the nurturing environment is culturally bizarre to me, on a psychological level, from the offset and seems to represent a prolonged accommodation of "nature" rather than "civilisation". To me, it would be kinder to introduce the children to a new way of experiencing the world, that involved an immediate severance from nurturing, from the outset.