Objectification

On “objectification”: the media avoids showing the heads of fat people because they don’t want to seem to shame them as individuals and end up with a law suit. It’s not about showing bodies without heads in order to remove the subjectivity of the respective fat people. I don’t think the images displayed convey objectification, necessarily, since objectification is (paradoxically enough) a subjective attitude of being prone to treat other people as objects. One has to wait and see whether or not this attitude is present before assuming that it is — otherwise, like most forms of identity politics, you are engaging in objectification yourself (in this case, objectification of the potential onlooker).

I’ve mentioned before the case of Georges Bataille and how he used prostitutes in order to engage in perverse forms of intersubjectivity. Feminists don’t seem to like this guy, but what he was involved in was not “objectification”.

Not impressed by postmodernism

Academics say that the unstable, heterogeneous elements of society have been made part of the production system (e.g. shit and punks and so forth are now salable) -- this co-option of the heterogeneous cannot be automatically presumed to be a good thing. It just flattens out emotions a lot more -- gets rid of the highs and lows by making us blasé in our expectations of finding everything about life to be equally integrated. So, that is the postmodern condition, which superseded, you know, Bataille's modernism.

But, in my opinion, it is still possible to transgress. Just as it was ever possible to transgress. The postmodern condition is a social condition which has been introjected to become most people's modern "natures". Transgression would be in any state of mind that denied this postmodern condition -- especially at the level of its emotional normalization. That means that radical Nietzscheanism is transgressive, radical Marxism is transgressive, hell, fundamentalist Christianity would be transgressive to the postmodern model. Too obvious, I think.  But, I kid.

People who don't imagine that their selves have boundaries based on socially conditioned premises haven't bothered to check themselves out at all.  The inability to look within is the real postmodernism condition.

Rhodesia and my knowledge deficit

Even as an adult, I was often very insecure about my knowledge of the world. That was because everything I'd grown up with had been defined in extremely patriarchal terms. Both men and women had authority in every aspect of life in my childhood. Women's authority was on a par with that of their male counterparts. The only difference was that men knew about politics in a way that women didn't. The men went to war and it was forbidden to tell the women back home everything they had experienced. To this degree, women were on a par with children -- although they were authoritative in public life, they were not expected to carry the emotional burden of war.

The structure of colonial society was hierarchical in terms of knowledge.  As it seems to me now, there was a cabal who knew what was really going on with regard to the war and the likelihood of winning it. Then, there were those like my father, who went along with the program because it was the decent thing to do. As in the second world war, the lack of men around the place meant women had fairly high status, being those who were able to manage the running of institutions with an old-fashioned whip-hand.


They had greater power than women have today, when men are present and competing with them (which leads to gender war and psychological strategies to demoralize the other).  Despite this, they did not speak of the war "we" were prosecuting, and indeed, in the high school I attended it was forbidden to speak of it.

That was how it came about that my peers and I grew up with a traditional British education, but remained wholly naïve about politics.  We studied the history of Europe but we did not study recent, colonial history.   When "Rhodesia" became "Zimbabwe" and an uncensored version of "The Herald" began to appear on the library lectern, we sometimes used to flip its pages with a sense of fascination and complete incomprehension.  The tactile sensation of flipping the pages and observing the strange imagery in the late morning sun was enough for me.

Children were a step below "women" in the Rhodesian hierarchy, so we occupied a world of our own.   We were not to know anything at all, but to be protected from it.   That was the role of the strong Rhodesian male -- to protect the (white) women and children from too much knowledge.

The structure of the antiquated society explains everything about my attitudes as I became an adult and understood that I was suffering from a knowledge deficit.  I had a number of strategies to try to cope with this, most of which failed me.

One was to try to get adults to tell me what I was missing -- to fill in the gaps that comprised my knowledge failures.   This was a wholly failed strategy.  Whenever I went to see a psychological counselor of person of that nature (which I did sporadically, at various points in time), I generally wanted to draw from them the knowledge I'd been lacking.   I had a feeling that if I could get the knowledge I didn't have, I'd be able to piece together all sorts of aspects of my reality that didn't make sense before.

Needless to say, the psychological counselors I saw were not trained to fill in the gaps of your missing knowledge and it was hard even for me to try to gauge what knowledge I had to get to make reality into a coherent whole.   A lack of substantive knowledge can become a psychological problem, interfering with one's way of interacting with the world, but contemporary psychology doesn't recognize this as a fact.  I would inevitably talk at cross-purposes with such helpers -- and then leave feeling that I hadn't obtained much of what I'd hoped for.

The problem was:  I never had a psychological problem so much as a deficiency in understanding, which made me seem like an idiot, walking into walls that others already seemed to know were there.  I'd tripped up on too many barriers due to my worldly ignorance (which also related to sexual matters).

Much of what had led to this was that my Rhodesian engendered superego defined my limits.   I couldn't do the work to find out what was "out there" because to be quiet and accepting of all sorts of boundaries was my acculturated norm.

To "transgress" authoritative boundaries, whilst defying the superego, became my means to escape from the Rhodesian cultural identity that had failed me.

Moi and daughter in law, as it were

The illogical "logic" of patriarchy

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One used to fly by vision and now one flies by radar — blindly, as it were. That is the destiny of women within patriarchal societies – to have to rely upon a set of “civilising” values. That way, their navigation systems can always be jammed if they become too vocal. Women who have been “translated” into beings with now ‘ Civilized’ as opposed to Natural demeanours, have been taught to rely only upon those forms of communication that have been narrowly defined as “sensible” according to expectations which are starched, formal and conservative. How does one live within patriarchal society as a woman? Blindly, and disregarding of one’s own experiences, lest they puzzle and derange one enough that one finally takes action. Women are born to be castrated, according to some.

I'm not sure that the psychoanalytic notion of "castration" can really mean more than the inability to trust one's five senses. One's methodologies for drawing conclusions from them have all devolved. One sits there, stuffed: A scarecrow or a mummy. I have long resisted ideological castration. I didn't know I was resisting it, only that I angrily opposed the way in which my sincere tokens of communication were being deliberately thwarted. At one time, what I said made clear and logical sense. This changed around a certain time, when I was twelve or so. My own attitudes hadn't changed. My father's had.

Suddenly what I said had no natural meaning to him -- nothing that had to do directly with the practical affairs we were involved in. Instead, my assertions suddenly took on ethereal and disconnected emotional resonances for him. What was I meaning all of a sudden? I could use the exact same words and a similar tone to tones and words I'd used before, but now an enemy was jamming my communication. No longer could I be permitted to relate my own experiences -- so far as my father was concerned, I'd gone over to the other side. I had become his enemy, due to my gender. I was, within several weeks, though far from puberty still, no longer a child. So, if I said anything, it had to be negated as if it contained so much potential evil. That was how my father turned against me -- treating me like I was now merely a turbine generator of 'emotion'. What I had to say, I learned, I shouldn't speak.

I knew that something had gone wrong with him mentally when he first obstructed my conversation. The first time, I thought that he was merely being odd -- obsessed with some particular concern, which I had simply not mentioned.

We were down at the stables, attending to my very old horse. I was regularly concerned about her general condition. Was she sprightly and well today? Were elements of old age setting in already? She was 28 when I got her, which was very old in horse years. She was a lovely horse! I owned her and I did my best to take care of her.

When I climbed on to her back, she seemed a little stiff that afternoon. She carried her hind legs more awkwardly when I pressed her to canter. What could the matter be? Perhaps little -- perhaps just the need to stretch, to warm up further, plying muscle and flesh. Still, it was worth mentioning -- perhaps a small stone had gone caught within her hoof.

"Her hindquarters feel rather stiff today!" I called out to my father, as I sailed around the circle of the paddock. As I said it, my voice was snatched by fresh afternoon winds. I loved nothing more than lively afternoon rides -- each one was an entire new adventure!

"What did you say? Are you talking about how it's feeling?" my father intoned. "Feelings are for artists!' he announced, before proceeding with a more verbose warning about distrusting feelings in general.

Feelings -- yes, emotions -- were quite a different subject from the information I'd been trying to convey. No, father, I didn't have an emotion about stiffness. Rather, this was the sensation of the horse that day: her kinetic manner had become somewhat stiffened and foreshortened. There had been no specific emotion in my imparting of this particular information.

This was the first instance I noticed that my father was thinking weirdly. I thought that his obstruction of my message at the time was odd, but nothing much to worry about. I didn't mention it to my mother or to anybody. It just wasn't that important. Not at that time

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE: will to chance, Bataille

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE: will to chance, Bataille

My inheritance from my family: the psychology

As it has turned out, my injury was related to the specifics of my father's madness. I don't blame him for going half-mad. In fact, it was the decent and honorable thing to do. To fail to react to maddening situations would have been even more maddening. I would never have realized the truth behind the madness of life had he kept up a veneer that everything was fine when it wasn't.

My father's madness involved a reversal of typical parent-child relations, where I was held responsible for all sorts of things that seemed to have gone wrong, in the eyes of my father. I didn't know what these things were, as they have occurred before I was born. It has taken me about twenty years to find them out.

I remember when my father was yelling at me, attacking me, with one term of abuse after another -- it finally dawned on me that he saw me as impervious to any insult, not matter how hurtful. From then, I realized he wasn't really talking to me personally, when he got into a rage. Rather, he was addressing an adult, omnipotent figure, from the point of view of angry two-year-old, who knew no limits to his anger.

This, in turn, explains my own lifelong preoccupation with not being pushed into a role where people feel it natural to take out on me their undefined or barely articulated aggression. I'm afraid of  the inarticulate emotion of those who seem to demand my unconditional approval at great cost to myself. When people complain that their emotional expectations were not met, I never know how to discuss that, least of all in a workplace setting, where the implicit threat of losing my livelihood hangs over me. My understanding is that these demands are potentially infinite, unless someone in authority steps in and draws a clear line about what is expected from me. For the reasons I've just outlined, this is why I prefer typically "masculine" work environments, where my ability to cater to others' emotional needs is not assessed as a feature of my ability to do the job at hand.

They cannot be satisfied by any act on my part. It expresses an infinite source of destruction, always in opposition to any form of reason. That was how I had experienced my father's rage, growing up. It had increased exponentially the moment there was no hope for "Rhodesia". My father's faith in the established order was shattered. His ideals of permanence and stability -- the ideals he'd sacrificed for -- were suddenly gone from the realm of possibility.

I was trying to grow up, but in many ways I had to play the role of the parent. This was exacerbated for me as the eldest child of new migrants, who expected me to teach them the ropes. My parents lent on me for support, but became embittered at any turn away from narrow, conservative values -- those of family, God and Church. I was being exposed to more liberal values, thus the tension.

The problem at the core -- well, there were a few. The main one was I was ill-equipped to be my father's mother in a culture which I couldn't understand whilst I was still trying to grow up and make adjustments of my own. The secondary problem was patriarchy. Yes, it exists and the reason I know that is I couldn't get any help in dealing with my father and his strange ways. He burdened me into feeling guilty for his negative emotions. He leaned on me to play a mothering role. I lacked the necessary emotional and intellectual resources to appease him. Nobody I turned to would believe there was any sort of problem -- except, perhaps with me.

My father had certain ideas about people who depart from conservatism "going off the rails". I think he sincerely believed I had "gone off the rails" due to my adjustment to a more liberal culture, which Australian culture seemed to be at that time.

Nobody ever assisted me. That's because Judeo-Christian culture maintains the men are rational and women just aren't. This is the theological structure of its belief system and I only found out how pervasive it was by turning to various people only to find them repeat their version of the "men are rational; women are emotional" formula. That is how it went. My concerns entered the "too hard basket". As for my family, it was more convenient for them to keep up the pathological state of relations, because blaming the family's new migrant difficulties on the only atheist in the family hid a multitude of sins.

My father's psychological problems did give me insights into human behavior, in particular how authoritarianism is structured by finding a scapegoat and projecting. It is quite clear, people actually aren't aware that they're engaging in this pattern of action. My father's madness gave me the basis for understanding that one can't simply adapt to one totally different situation after another, willy-nilly. To expect people to do that is inhuman.

His reactions also formed my character in giving me an extreme aversion to playing the role of anyone's early childhood mother. I won't play the part where anyone unleashes their tantrum at me and expects me to help them deal with their anxieties, just because I'm female. I have a completely traumatic reaction to this kind of attitude. I realize I'm doomed and that I can't cope with it no matter what forms of reason or logic I bring to bear. After all, I'd tried to tell people of my father's attitude before, using only cold logic and reason -- and this hadn't worked out.

Tactical shamanic doubling: Nietzsche

Shamanic "doubling" appears quite clearly at the end of sequence of books, in Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche speaks of having a privileged understanding of what constitutes health, due to his tendency to become ill.

To view healthier concepts and values from the standpoint of the sick, and conversely to view the secret work of the instinct of decadence out of the abundance and self-confidence of a rich life-this has been my principal experience, what I have been longest trained in. If in anything at all, it was in this that I became a master. To-day my hand is skillful; it has the knack of reversing perspectives: the first reason perhaps why a Transvaluation of all Values has been possible to me alone. [my emphasis]

 In Gay Science, Nietzsche also speaks about the basis for self-overcoming, though sinking into the depths of despair and learning to think more suspiciously about the structure of reality:

Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time—on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood—compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium—things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us "better"; but I know that it makes us more profound.

Such a descent into pain, along with exercises in mistrust of how things appear to be,  make a thinker more profound.  We become more profound because we become suspicious of what we used to "know"
-- i.e. "things in which formerly we may have found our humanity". One, in effect, sinks to the underworld and then comes up transformed.

This is one direction of the Nietzschean dialectic:  the underworld of experience in relation to normal life. Nietzsche points out in Ecce Homo that dialectics are a sign of decadence, but nonetheless a person who is healthy overall turns even injury into an experience for learning. This is as per the historically recurrent motif of "shamanic wounding" -- but one must be strong enough to begin with for any suffering to be able to yield genuine insights, rather than merely pathological notions about the world.

This "down-going" or "going under" relates to an age-long shamanic notion of the underworld (met by facing death, first figuratively and then literally).  It is also indicative of Darwinian advancement of humanity.  One succumbs as a herald to "better players".  For the individual who must "go under", though, there is a sense of sacrifice and evocation of the sacred in relation to the whole of humanity.  One descends into an underworld of non-being, so that humanity might have its chance to progress.

A middle level of experience comprises the everyday world.   More interestingly, in shamanic terminology, there is also a realm of the heights.   To reach one's inner heights, one transcends oneself.  This has the structure of tactical self-doubling.  Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes the nature and meaning of self-transcendence; a particular Nietzschean motif (Bataille contrasts it with immanence, which he logically prefers):

One day wilt thou see no longer thy loftiness, and see too closely thy lowliness; thy sublimity itself will frighten thee as a phantom. Thou wilt one day cry: "All is false!"There are feelings which seek to slay the lonesome one; if they do not succeed, then must they themselves die! But art thou capable of it—to be a murderer?Hast thou ever known, my brother, the word "disdain"? And the anguish of thy justice in being just to those that disdain thee?Thou forcest many to think differently about thee; that, charge they heavily to thine account. Thou camest nigh unto them, and yet wentest past: for that they never forgive thee.Thou goest beyond them: but the higher thou risest, the smaller doth the eye of envy see thee. Most of all, however, is the flying one hated.

Self-transcendence is fraught, as it involves being aware of the contemptible aspects of one's self and moving above those cowardly elements.   Consciousness is thus doubled in the process of moving between what we are and what we will to become.   This process implies painful self-knowledge, which nonetheless one must accept if one wishes to explore a higher realm.

Happy days June 2012

Nietzsche, agitators and psychology

I'm reading Nietzsche's ANTICHRIST again.  I find it perfectly logical.  What can make a difference is the perspective of the reader.   It takes a while to develop the capacity to read it without the lens of contemporary ideologies.   I remember being very much enmeshed in some of the contemporary era ideologies that were invented to smash the left.  You were either on the side of "civilization" or against it.   This kind of reading distorts Nietzsche's writing so that instead of making logical points, he seems to be taking sides in a political struggle.  To read Nietzsche as making psychological observations, not political ones, gives coherence and intelligibility to his whole approach.

When I consider his opposition to the anarchists, I can reflect from the standpoint of today that I have met many left wingers who seem emotionally weak.  I've also met their equivalents on the right.   Nietzsche thought that the disruptive people, who looked to undermine society, were intent to undermine a structure which they could not enjoy anyway, due to their dependent natures.    It wasn't the society that had something wrong with it, but these agitators themselves did.   Psychologically speaking, I have found this is often true.  It doesn't work to condemn all agitators as weak personalities, though, because to generalize in that way is only possible by invoking metaphysical -- that is theological -- principles.   That's exactly what Nietzsche's writing wants to avoid.  Rather it seems one should exercise intellectual caution and view everyone on their own merits.

From my point of view, I find Nietzsche's commentary on those who want to overthrow the established order to have incredibly complex ramifications.   Consider that I had barely become an adult, when my own established order was completely overthrown.   Almost nothing remained, except for a small core of agitators for the extreme right and another skeleton group taking refuge in denial within the protective bubbles of their Christian ideologies.  For me, life itself, in almost every sense that I had known it, had been completely overturned:

Let no one doubt for an instant! One has truly not heard a single word of
Nietzsche's unless one has lived this signal dissolution in totality; without it,
this philosophy is a mere labyrinth of contradictions, and worse; the pretext for
lying by omission (if, like the fascists, one isolates passages for purposes which
negate the rest of the work).["will to chance," Bataille]

I immediately saw through the ideological, defensive response, and I only considered the alternative -- the hive of right-wing agitators -- when the aggressive people of the left had begun attacking me too much.  Primitive emotional responses are common when a defeated enemy (me) is in your grasp.  They're also common when the prior rulers realize they have been defeated and seek to take revenge for their humiliation.  I've experienced this aggression from both sides of politics.   Both have seen me, somehow, as their enemy -- someone whom they need to pick on to score points, or prove themselves worthy of their particular political ideologies.

The Internet is a big place: make it work for you!

Top of Form

Martin Ape · 
There always is a reason people do what they do, there is always a reason for people to be who there are. A truism, important but empty. I think we have to ask: Why do you do what you do, why are you what you are? Are you happy with what your are doing? Do you really know who you are? Are you happy with who you think your are?

about an hour ago · Like

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Jennifer Frances Armstrong Oh, it's only empty if the person saying it is empty.

about an hour ago · Like     

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Martin Ape · 

No, a truism is always empty if you don't fill it.

about an hour ago · Like

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Jennifer Frances Armstrong You're being pedantic. But don't stop there. There's the whole Internet that has blanks for you to fill in.

59 minutes ago · Like

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Martin Ape · 

Pedantic because I demand more content than simple truisms?

56 minutes ago · Like

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Jennifer Frances Armstrong Are you demanding I supply you more content on Facebook? Tsk

55 minutes ago · Like

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Martin Ape · 

Tsk?

54 minutes ago · Like

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Jennifer Frances Armstrong You really are an imbecile! Go and read a book!

53 minutes ago · Like

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Martin Ape · 

I am an imbecile because I ask you what Tsk means?

51 minutes ago · Like

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Jennifer Frances Armstrong Were you asking me what that meant? I had no idea, because you didn't make a full sentence. It's a sound of subtle disapproval.

51 minutes ago · Like

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Martin Ape · 

No, it's not. My comment was: "Tsk?" It' s a simple question, as clearly indicated by my question mark.

47 minutes ago · Like

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Jennifer Frances Armstrong Yes, well I'm glad YOU know what you're talking about, but most English speakers would not have had to ask that question, therefore I had no idea what you were implying. Anyway, please go and find something to your liking on the Internet, or read a book. There's a lot out there to engage your mind.

46 minutes ago · Like

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Martin Ape · 

Very condescending.

44 minutes ago · Like

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Jennifer Frances Armstrong As has been your tone throughout this

43 minutes ago · Like

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Martin Ape · 

Yo post a pretty female face with some very simplistic truisms. What do you expect?

40 minutes ago · Like

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Jennifer Frances Armstrong misogyny.

40 minutes ago · Like

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Martin Ape · 

No comment

36 minutes ago · Like

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Jennifer Frances Armstrong blocked

33 minutes ago · Like

Bottom of Form

What not to do at home

My attitude in exploring Bataille's philosophy

They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others....

(comment by Nietzsche)

Refereeing ZKA

ZIMBABWE KICKBOXING ASSOCIATION

Bats coming out of a cave at Mavuradonha, Zimbabwe

ZKA women fighting

MavuradhonaWilderness.wmv

moral agendas

People have never really stopped trying to morally reform me because they believe I don’t really understand issues of racism properly, or because they believe I was born into unfair advantage. But, if you take a look at my father’s experiences, as he tells them to me, there was nothing particularly advantageous about his upbringing. One might say he had been set up for failure. That he didn’t completely fail was to his credit. I have encountered a lot of jealous and resentful attitudes among those who are uneducated and desire to have status, in Australia. They want to believe that colonial life has given me all sorts of unfair advantages, that were denied to them, for having to live “moral”, normal lives. The fact is, unless you love war, wildness and nature, you will not have obtained all that many “unfair advantages” due to being brought up as I was.

Certainly, I wasn’t set up in life to have any particular economic advantages, not is you compare my life to that of the average Westerner of my same age group, who had access to more material valuables, was trained to believe they ought to have a career, and so on. I was quite literally brought up very wild. But, people prefer the image that I lazed around and had all sorts of delicacies bought to me — and consequently, that they need to teach me a moral lesson.

Horse safari, Zimbabwe

Sakubva, high density area in Mutare, Zimbabwe

Self defence training in Mutare, Zimbabwe: fun and games!

Mutare teachers and parents learn self defence

RURAL PRIMARY SCHOOL LESSON: SELF DEFENCE AWARENESS

STRANGER DANGER: SELF DEFENCE FOR GIRLS

BREAK FREE: some of our training sessions!

We all have core beliefs, unless we don't. Here are mine

1. Everybody is “conditioned”. It is your responsibility to work your way from a conditioned to a thoughtful and genuinely reflective state.

2. Both women and men have emotions and intellect. It’s a biological fact, so you can’t go dividing it up and making out that one group has the emotions and the other group has intellect.

3. Humans have the neurological capacity to experience mystical states. Your sense of the sacred is demeaned if you try to make it mine as well.

4. Morality and politics are worlds apart. Aim for a sustainable life and don’t get caught up by either of these principles. They’re the left and the right of delusion, respectively.

5. I’m not responsible for your feelings. It’s not my job to cooperate with you (generic you) in order to prove my sincerity, value, political credibility, anything.

6. If you do anything in order to feel “powerful”, you have already lost. Don’t succumb to delusion. Be pragmatic.

BOXING TRAINING WITH WINNIE IN MUTARE

Jenny "the hen" Armstrong: faster than a speeding frapper

Self defence for women!

Women of rural Zimbabwe learn self defence

Stoicism, my aesthetic preference

Modernity makes life easier -- I don't automatically want that. 

 I particularly can't understand the people who complain about anything, implying that the system ought to make things easier for them, although  I can understand complaining against the system, to take on a challenge and see where that leads.  

Stoicism is the basis for my aesthetic appreciation of life and this is why I have such a strong aversion to modernity in many ways.   

I can't understand the demand that structural aspects of society be altered so that one does not feel  any emotion or sensation anymore.  




Whereas old-fashioned Stoics may oppose certain tendencies in the other person, moderns seek to reduce the other's differences in all but the slightest matters, to escape from being influenced by the disliked aspects of another person.

To complain goes against my stoical vein.   I'll do it to combat oppression but never simply to make life feel easier and nothing more.   Complaining is bureaucratic.  It's a way of inviting the system to tie the noose around people's necks by making them conform to regimented patterns. If it's not your own neck you are requesting to have constricted, it's the neck of somebody close to you.   

People who complain are confessing, "I can't handle this on my own. I need a more circumscribed environment to make me happy!"

I've never felt it shameful, or all that weird to be out of step with other people.  This was in my upbringing:  I was never "in step". 

Being very obviously "out of step" happened to be the essence our national pride.

You know your power!

Middle class Zimbabwean girls

Shamanism, language and the limits of therapy

The difficulty of relating to others about what I have called "shamanic experiences"  (more specifically those described by modernist intellectuals)  is that these involve changes that are not necessarily able to be related through language.   When we are children, we have a certain arrangement of experiences, including those that are common and/or significant for us, and we end up associating these with certain words.Thus language expresses emotional values and meanings for us.   That is why it is difficult to try to resolve some kinds of emotional issues with the assistance of therapists.  If the therapist does not attach the same emotional meanings to words as you do, you will end up effectively speaking a different language.  You will become tied up in language, as generally happens to me when I try to get into any depth about emotional topics with most Western people.

Cultural differences are extremely significant.  There have been women who have tried to get help from Western authorities, such as the police, because they saw that they would become victims of a culturally driven "honor killing".  The police may not necessarily believe the future victim, as she does not use the words that are emotionally loaded, in Western cultural terms, to imply genuine and significant danger.   The future victim is dismissed as being merely "manipulative" and ends up in a suitcase, dead.

Emotional meanings and the way these are associated with language are different in every culture.  Thus, language can obscure, rather than reveal meanings, when one relates in a cross-cultural situation.

Shamanism, however, is the means by which one exits language.  One resolves one's emotional issues independently of language -- and then, the issues having been resolved, one re-enters language.

The difference in the initiate has to do with the degree to which one can now experience oneself as a whole, rather than as fractured parts.  These are differences concerned with inner experience and have to do with the capacity to speak more confidently about one's inner experience. That this difference is not easy to relate in language is to do with the nature of language itself.  As Nietzsche says:

Ultimately, what does it mean to be ignoble?—Words are sound signals for ideas, but ideas are more or less firm image signs for sensations which return frequently and occur together, for groups of sensations. To understand each other, it is not yet sufficient that people use the same words; they must use the same words also for the same form of inner experiences; ultimately they must hold their experience in common with each other. That’s why human beings belonging to a single people understand each other better among themselves than associations of different peoples, even when they themselves use the same language; or rather, when human beings have lived together for a long time under similar conditions (climate, soil, danger, needs, work), then something arises out of that which “understands itself,” a people. In all souls, a similar number of frequently repeating experiences have won the upper hand over those which come more rarely; people understand each other on the basis of the former, quickly and with ever-increasing speed—the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation. On the basis of this rapid understanding, people bind with one another, closely and with ever-increasing closeness. The greater the danger, the greater the need quickly and easily to come to agreement over what needs to be done; not to misunderstand each other when in danger is what people simply cannot do without in their interactions. With every friendship or love affair people still make this test: nothing of that sort lasts as soon as people reach the point where, with the same words, one of the two feels, means, senses, wishes, or fears something different from the other one. (The fear of the “eternal misunderstanding”: that is the benevolent genius which so often prevents people of different sexes from over-hasty unions, to which their senses and hearts urge them—and not some Schopenhauerish “genius of the species”!—). Which groups of sensations within the soul wake up most rapidly, seize the word, give the order—that decides about the whole rank ordering of its values, that finally determines its tables of goods. The assessments of value in a man reveal something about the structure of his soul and where it looks for its conditions of life, its essential needs. Now, assume that need has always brought together only such people as could indicate with similar signs similar needs, similar experiences, then it would generally turn out that the easy ability to communicate need, that is, in the last analysis, familiarity with only average and common experiences, must have been the most powerful of all the forces which have so far determined things among human beings. People who are more similar and more ordinary were and always have been at an advantage; the more exceptional, more refined, rarer, and more difficult to understand easily remain isolated; in their isolation they are subject to accidents and rarely propagate themselves. People have to summon up huge counter-forces to cross this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile [advance into similarity], the further training of human beings into what’s similar, ordinary, average, herd-like—into what’s common.

Whereas therapists tend to try to bring you in line with what is experienced by the rest of the herd, shamanism invites you to experience your subjectivity in non-linguistic ways.   This doesn't mean you lose your capacity to speak -- only that problems are resolved far away from the purview of the crowd.

Zimbabwean women

See how they are also lacking in selfconsciousness. They go along with the mood of their peers.

African children playing

You can see how they move together, as a group, listening in to the vibe and not being self-conscious.

This is lateral self-awareness, in relation to the group.   Nobody stands alone.

Cross-cultural perspectives on shamanizing

Everybody has a different need from shamanistic experiences, therefore everybody's encounter with the void will not be the same.   I had two aspects to my identity when I migrated from Africa. One was that I was barely socialized.  I did not relate so much to people as to pleasures and experiences.  The second was that I was extremely emotional repressed at the level of individual expression.  To summarize both points, I had no self-image.   I didn't consider myself to be a "self" with an identity of any sort, but rather a mobile locus of experience.   This remains largely true of how I am today.  Although I have developed quite a number of sophisticated notions about identity, I can often let self-image slide, and just be totally spontaneous.   It's actually a task for me to remain within the ideology of self-image, since this isn't how I was brought up.   Consequently, if someone attacks me, through their image of me, I'm usually inclined to think they're going mad.   I don't have very much invested in my image of myself, but I do have a lot invested in relationships.   Images have to do with Western culture and its mores, but as Toyin Falola says, only a fellow African can know his true name.   The rest is just image and idea.

This is why I keep injuring myself on the sharp edges of Western culture.   I don't take anybody's idea of their "true identity" very seriously.  How can I, when I don't even take my own self-image all that seriously? So, losing and gaining aspects of identity is, for me, a natural course.   So long as I have my rich, African experiences at my core, nothing else seems to matter.   For others, shamanistic experiences may pose a real threat to the identity they've managed to build up.   For me, they represent a return to myself and the African wilderness.  My encounters with representatives of Western morality have always followed the pattern below, whereupon I get returned to the shamanistic void (and by default, to the African wilderness of my early childhood experiences):

"Drown me! Roast me! Hang me! Do whatever you please," said Brer Rabbit. "Only please, Brer Fox, please don't throw me into the briar patch."
"The briar patch, eh?" said Brer Fox. "What a wonderful idea! You'll be torn into little pieces!"
Grabbing up the tar-covered rabbit, Brer Fox swung him around and around and then flung him head over heels into the briar patch. Brer Rabbit let out such a scream as he fell that all of Brer Fox's fur stood straight up. Brer Rabbit fell into the briar bushes with a crash and a mighty thump. Then there was silence.
Brer Fox cocked one ear toward the briar patch, listening for whimpers of pain. But he heard nothing. Brer Fox cocked the other ear toward the briar patch, listening for Brer Rabbit's death rattle. He heard nothing.
Then Brer Fox heard someone calling his name. He turned around and looked up the hill. Brer Rabbit was sitting on a log combing the tar out of his fur with a wood chip and looking smug.
"I was bred and born in the briar patch, Brer Fox," he called. "Born and bred in the briar patch."  [emphasis mine]

Tough and sparse the "briar patch" may be, but people like me need this kind of experience, indeed we thrive upon it.

***

Shamanic encounters have taught me more about individuality than I knew at the age of 15 (when I had migrated).  I had to train myself against colonial authoritarianism (and the expectation of paternalism, which never gratified me in this current culture).  I learned to take advantage of each of my thwarted expectations of society by going inward.  On this basis, I developed a different kind of individuality from that based on self-image, one that is extremely hardy and robust.

What attracted you to a shamanistic perspective?

What attracted me?  Quite precisely, it was that the colonial way of life I’d been bought up to experience as normal was no longer viable for me. This is, to sum it up, what attracted me. Beyond this, also that I was brought up to have a colonial feminine personality. My superego was very badly formulated, that is, it was formed to suit a very different culture, which was also now defunct. It also made me subservient to men — my superego. This was all very, very bad for me. I’d reached a dead-end so far as my psychological survival went. So, I got into this mode of “facing death” for renewal. I discovered this method originally through Nietzsche, but it is also highly prevalent in Bataille, and one can see the death and renewal motif in Marechera’s writing, especially THE HOUSE OF HUNGER, although his is the most anguished of the three.  I suspect that psychological pressures from home, also accompanied by an extreme sense of the social and cultural frameworks shifting, brings about the existential crises that can lead to a beneficial reappraisal of one's purpose and state of being.

This solution has turned out to be very, very useful to me. On it’s basis, I have an extremely viable marriage/relationship, I only do the work that fulfills me, I have found deep companionship with many black Zimbabweans (which my superego had later drawn limits against, post-migration). I go against the grain that has been established for my peers, many of whom are housewives. I do kickboxing. I have a high (no longer repressed) sex drive. And so on.

Valid human beings & the shamanic void

In much of my experience, I haven’t been a “valid human being” at all. I think that is the starting point for shamanic initiation — where one recognizes that one is not a valid human being in some sense. Then one loses one’s humanity and regains it — that is the definition of initiation.

You have to enter non-being. Then, that kind of sticks with you, and you don’t employ moral categories so readily.  There are no longer any "“valid human beings”, just the totality of human experience, for better or worse.

A “valid human being”, for instance, is a moral category implying person-hood, with all that this entails according to people’s trained or educated notions as to what differentiates people from each other. So, on the basis of my education and training concerning “validity” I may come to certain conclusions about the kind of person who is valid, what characteristics they have, how they conduct themselves, their ontological status (as being redeemed by “God” or by morality, or by virtue of the state granting them their “rights”) or what have you. So, I’ll have a certain image of that person, perhaps very distinct, or perhaps rather fuzzy. In any case, I’ve created a categorical demarcation as to what constitutes validity in a human being.

This logically and practically also implies that I have it in the back of my mind as to what would make a human being "invalid". So, maybe that kind of person would be immoral, evil, strange, not my color of skin, or whatever. In any case, I’ve set up a mental barrier that mediates my experience of the world on the basis of categories of “valid” or “invalid”.

For instance, like a certain male feminist writer does, I might mentally erect a category of oppressed people who have great validity as human beings. On the basis of that, I’d start to show great indulgence and forbearance in relation to these oppressed people. It may happen, though, that mediation of reality through defining a category of oppressed (versus less oppressed or not oppressed) means I can’t experience the shades of grey that make up the world as it actually is. There’s too much mediation of reality and not enough direct experience of it. That’s what moral categorizing does.

By contrast, entering non-being means we can open our minds a bit more, after we are not afraid of losing some structure and entering the void.

The meaning of amoralism, according to Nietzsche and Bataille is to become wilder, stronger in oneself, more independent and less tame. This is not a moral injunction that everybody has to do it. You can try it or not attempt it. It’s not even an issue of having the power of free choice. One can be seduced into trying shamanism, or one can avoid it. There are no transcendental principles governing this choice.


***


NOTE: Nietzsche’s amoralism is viewed most commonly as lauding the rights of the oppressors to oppressor whomever they please. But that view assumes a very morally delimiting perspective, as it makes it out that he was maintaining a moral position on who gets to oppress who. He isn’t.
Bataille’s dalliances with prostitutes have also been criticized for their immorality. But that was precisely the point of Bataille’s actions, to slip out of the grasp of morality.
Thirdly, the idea of renouncing judgement on people would need to acquire a moral motivation since it is a categorical distinction — i.e. that it is a good idea to renounce judgement on others.


Shamanism is not about establishing a moral position but about exploring a psychological void where making moral distinctions has not yet become automatic for you.