My instinct, right from the start, has always been to combat biological determinism wherever it may appear.
The cultural and historical element to all this is of critical importance, although genetic heritage, personal heritage and underlying character structure also have a role.
The issue was subjectivity – and so was the prize. Rhodesians allocated subjective rights on the basis of status. I think this is probably true in all societies, throughout history. If you want to be taken seriously, you must have status, otherwise you can make assertions about things until the cows leap over the moon made of blue cheese, but nobody will believe you.
Less familiar to contemporary individuals is the probability that one may not even believe oneself. “Did I really experience what I thought I did?” – everybody, including random passing strangers says, “no”.
To have socially sanctioned subjectivity is to have the expectation that when one says, “I really did experience what I said I experienced,” others will say, “Oh, it must be so, since you were the one experiencing it!” Otherwise, one’s subjectivity is not socially sanctioned – leading to self-doubt and possibly to madness.
Subjectivity of this sort is like the water we drink or the air we breathe. I’m sure we don’t notice it is missing until we start to struggle for air or for a drink of water. Otherwise it seems quite ordinary and nothing to get worried about.
When I was a child, I roamed freely and had a deep subjective engagement with the wilderness, although not so much with my family. When I started to get older, my father became literally quite enraged and started to superimpose others’ subjective interpretations onto me, whilst denying me the right to my own.
This was the beginning of a prolonged war I fought against biological determinism – or at very least, the ideology supporting it.
Supposedly, it should not have made me angry to have my subjectivity denied in favor of random strangers views and values, whoever they might be. It did cause a lot of trouble for me, though. I became easily upset and withdrawn. Ultimately, I turned my rage inward and developed chronic fatigue syndrome as a result.
It wasn’t as if this event of being denied the reality of my own experiences had occurred only once. First my father took issue with me in this way, and then, upon migration, random people told me I hadn’t really experienced the life I had claimed to have lived: I was really an opposite sort of person, arrogant, and a colonial oppressor.
So I doubted myself yet again – and my scope of subjectivity was further reduced.
To have such an intense capacity to be authoritarian against oneself is probably unusual – but, remember, my early life had been casted by a war. In combat circumstances, obedience is really a matter of life and death. One doesn’t sit there and negotiate about the meaning of reality. One simply accepts what one’s authorities say. One conforms – and thus life is permitted to continue.
To me, the males of our Rhodesian war were the real heroes, who deserved respect and an understanding of their subjectivity. I thought I could do without that kind of honor and attention, but I had left myself a little less than was necessary to barely survive.
As I tried to assert my sense of my losses, to see who could help me, the people who believe they already understanding everything about reality, moreover on the basis of biological categories, told me I was certainly just being oversensitive. What about? In relation to whom? Their collective intellect did not stretch that far to be able to come up with an answer. They just seemed to know what they knew. The only way that I could see I was being “sensitive” was in my intention to treat others scrupulously, according to what they deserved. So people seemed to be urging me not to do that anymore, supposing they made any sort of sense. In retrospect, it would have been wiser not to try to get advice from strangers, especially from those who kept themselves deliberately apart from me, but at the time I didn’t know better than to look everywhere in my attempt to solve my problem.
My problem was that I wasn’t really in the stream of life. I had been part of the wilderness in Zimbabwe, in that I had emotionally melded with it, but I wasn’t in any other particular stream, having migrated.
It would have been okay had that original relationship with the wild continued. Then I would have had another, externalized self, and my subjectivity would have been replete. I couldn’t find a method to get my mind to work this way anymore though, as the modern landscape was off-putting.
The quest of my life therefore became to recover my subjectivity by breaking down the walls of consciousness that the Rhodesian war had put around me. To do this, I needed to go to war, in effect. I had to overcome my fear relating to the limits of life and death, as they had been symbolically imposed into my mind. There were certain life and death emblems there. One was the idea that the Rhodesian white male was there to protect me and could be relied upon. Another was that associating too much with black people leads to a loss of spiritual integrity. Another was that women are congenitally unable to do some of the things men can. I had to combat these particular old ways of knowing – but they were deeply imprinted in my head; at the level of my emotional reactions.
I wasn’t doing this for identity politics purposes but to free myself in a way that had the opposite point of view of what was ethically expedient. Rather than sacrifice more of myself for others, I had to regain for myself the subjectivity of others and appropriate it as my own. Identity politics sets up another wall in consciousness and assigns what is outside the wall to another mode of being. I, by contrast, has to break down those kinds of walls, so that I could experience more and greater subjectivity. I was keen to understand the Rhodesian, white male war mentality and also the mentality of the victims. I wanted to know what it meant to fight back. In all, I wanted to re-experience my past more vividly.
To redeem myself in this way, I had to ignore all the shouts about my putative “essential, biological nature”. These really got in the way of developing subjectivity.
I’ve never wanted to have a child, like a small animal to pet. I’ve only wanted one outcome in life – which was to bring myself more fully into the world as a subjective being.
I’m really glad to have finally achieved this very extreme goal of recuperating myself, using the energies from the past. I would be dead by now or on a mountain of drugs had my attempts been unsuccessful. Instead, I’m happy. All of my relationships are good.
I don’t have any respect for those who would have tried to rob me of this outcome, through enforcing a biological determinist agenda on me.
The cultural and historical element to all this is of critical importance, although genetic heritage, personal heritage and underlying character structure also have a role.
The issue was subjectivity – and so was the prize. Rhodesians allocated subjective rights on the basis of status. I think this is probably true in all societies, throughout history. If you want to be taken seriously, you must have status, otherwise you can make assertions about things until the cows leap over the moon made of blue cheese, but nobody will believe you.
Less familiar to contemporary individuals is the probability that one may not even believe oneself. “Did I really experience what I thought I did?” – everybody, including random passing strangers says, “no”.
To have socially sanctioned subjectivity is to have the expectation that when one says, “I really did experience what I said I experienced,” others will say, “Oh, it must be so, since you were the one experiencing it!” Otherwise, one’s subjectivity is not socially sanctioned – leading to self-doubt and possibly to madness.
Subjectivity of this sort is like the water we drink or the air we breathe. I’m sure we don’t notice it is missing until we start to struggle for air or for a drink of water. Otherwise it seems quite ordinary and nothing to get worried about.
When I was a child, I roamed freely and had a deep subjective engagement with the wilderness, although not so much with my family. When I started to get older, my father became literally quite enraged and started to superimpose others’ subjective interpretations onto me, whilst denying me the right to my own.
This was the beginning of a prolonged war I fought against biological determinism – or at very least, the ideology supporting it.
Supposedly, it should not have made me angry to have my subjectivity denied in favor of random strangers views and values, whoever they might be. It did cause a lot of trouble for me, though. I became easily upset and withdrawn. Ultimately, I turned my rage inward and developed chronic fatigue syndrome as a result.
It wasn’t as if this event of being denied the reality of my own experiences had occurred only once. First my father took issue with me in this way, and then, upon migration, random people told me I hadn’t really experienced the life I had claimed to have lived: I was really an opposite sort of person, arrogant, and a colonial oppressor.
So I doubted myself yet again – and my scope of subjectivity was further reduced.
To have such an intense capacity to be authoritarian against oneself is probably unusual – but, remember, my early life had been casted by a war. In combat circumstances, obedience is really a matter of life and death. One doesn’t sit there and negotiate about the meaning of reality. One simply accepts what one’s authorities say. One conforms – and thus life is permitted to continue.
To me, the males of our Rhodesian war were the real heroes, who deserved respect and an understanding of their subjectivity. I thought I could do without that kind of honor and attention, but I had left myself a little less than was necessary to barely survive.
As I tried to assert my sense of my losses, to see who could help me, the people who believe they already understanding everything about reality, moreover on the basis of biological categories, told me I was certainly just being oversensitive. What about? In relation to whom? Their collective intellect did not stretch that far to be able to come up with an answer. They just seemed to know what they knew. The only way that I could see I was being “sensitive” was in my intention to treat others scrupulously, according to what they deserved. So people seemed to be urging me not to do that anymore, supposing they made any sort of sense. In retrospect, it would have been wiser not to try to get advice from strangers, especially from those who kept themselves deliberately apart from me, but at the time I didn’t know better than to look everywhere in my attempt to solve my problem.
My problem was that I wasn’t really in the stream of life. I had been part of the wilderness in Zimbabwe, in that I had emotionally melded with it, but I wasn’t in any other particular stream, having migrated.
It would have been okay had that original relationship with the wild continued. Then I would have had another, externalized self, and my subjectivity would have been replete. I couldn’t find a method to get my mind to work this way anymore though, as the modern landscape was off-putting.
The quest of my life therefore became to recover my subjectivity by breaking down the walls of consciousness that the Rhodesian war had put around me. To do this, I needed to go to war, in effect. I had to overcome my fear relating to the limits of life and death, as they had been symbolically imposed into my mind. There were certain life and death emblems there. One was the idea that the Rhodesian white male was there to protect me and could be relied upon. Another was that associating too much with black people leads to a loss of spiritual integrity. Another was that women are congenitally unable to do some of the things men can. I had to combat these particular old ways of knowing – but they were deeply imprinted in my head; at the level of my emotional reactions.
I wasn’t doing this for identity politics purposes but to free myself in a way that had the opposite point of view of what was ethically expedient. Rather than sacrifice more of myself for others, I had to regain for myself the subjectivity of others and appropriate it as my own. Identity politics sets up another wall in consciousness and assigns what is outside the wall to another mode of being. I, by contrast, has to break down those kinds of walls, so that I could experience more and greater subjectivity. I was keen to understand the Rhodesian, white male war mentality and also the mentality of the victims. I wanted to know what it meant to fight back. In all, I wanted to re-experience my past more vividly.
To redeem myself in this way, I had to ignore all the shouts about my putative “essential, biological nature”. These really got in the way of developing subjectivity.
I’ve never wanted to have a child, like a small animal to pet. I’ve only wanted one outcome in life – which was to bring myself more fully into the world as a subjective being.
I’m really glad to have finally achieved this very extreme goal of recuperating myself, using the energies from the past. I would be dead by now or on a mountain of drugs had my attempts been unsuccessful. Instead, I’m happy. All of my relationships are good.
I don’t have any respect for those who would have tried to rob me of this outcome, through enforcing a biological determinist agenda on me.
No comments:
Post a Comment