Manly Women and Wikipedia | Clarissa's Blog
Something I've been reflecting on lately is that it is all just a game, this feminine-feminism, much like most things in US life are a marketing ploy. People say the sorts of things that others are already primed to respond to, so that they can get marketing leverage. It is much like using the basic appetites -- sex, hunger, desire for recognition -- to sell sugary beverages. If people are primed to feel guilty about not including women, this can be played upon to get the writer of the article about Wikipedia notoriety and funding support. She certainly does not have to mean every word she says. Those words are for leverage, on a deep emotional level, not meaning.
In terms of something slightly different from that, the expansion of traditional feminine modes of perception, reaction and behavior, into the mainstream is, I think, recognisable in the demand that other entities ought not to stand apart from the one who judges them, but be one with the judger and melded into a particular shape by him or her. This extends to much of literary theory as it is currently practiced. For instance you will find people asserting that the author has "gone too far" or made a structural mistake in his or her mode of writing. I noticed this most strongly when studying the criticism that had accrued on Marechera's writing. For the most part the critics seemed to become out of breath and confused very easily, at which point they would return to that which was already familiar to them, like the concept of fixed identities, or proper social structure or a good upbringing. They couldn't really extend themselves very far beyond their anchors in convention.
But what if the author writes a paranoid book not as a mistake, or because he can't contain himself to write a more sane and sensible book, but because he WANTS us to feel paranoid? That level of artistry is hard for the majority of critics to countenance, but there is no a priori reason why this could not be so.
That we cannot know for sure what a book like BLACK SUNLIGHT is about, but still we think we recognise certain familiar shapes and forms in it, gives it a paranoid aura in relation to us, the readers. If a reader starts the book with a feeling of political certainty that war and/or revolution are desirable and for the best, by the end of the book one is left alone with oneself and with a feeling of extreme paranoia about both war and revolution and their viability. It is a paranoid book, written by someone who involuntarily lived through a revolutionary war and suffered as a consequence of that.
If you can't take in that message as a critic, perhaps a differerent job would be more suitable for you. It's just too conventionally feminine to want to make the author part of one's own already existing system of values and beliefs and to berate him in a motherly fashion for going outside the bounds of what would be considered normal in one's own society. "I chide him because I love him and I want him to do better!"
To demand that others be a part of you so that you can manage them better, shape them, and turn them into what you want them to be, is archetypal feminine relating. It is the typical manner with which managers, identity politicians, teachers and critics approach the subject today. They do not allow anything to stand apart from them, to be a thing separate from the mother/teacher/critic. They don't seem to even have the courage to say, "I hate this thing! I'm going to let it go." Their instincts are to draw everything under the control, by not permitting separation.
This means you can't learn a complex lesson from a writer who is trying to teach you about your political over-certainties. You can't even see that lesson, because you are too busy trying to impart your own about how there are certain things than can and cannot be said, in terms of your own existing perspective.
The feminine mode is like this though. It always tries to "shape" the other right away, rather than reach an understanding of what that person or thing is in its own right. It doesn't even see anything separate from itself, just some amorphous mess to be reshaped.
And abusers are the same. They come along and try to shape things, on the basis of the feelings about what ought to be in place. But this betrays their lack of a desire to even try to understand what has actually come to be in place of its own accord, and in its own right, independently of the manager/critic/abuser. They don't even have a faculty for handling real otherness -- yet, many of them will talk endlessly about "the other". Nothing they love better than talking about themselves!
Something I've been reflecting on lately is that it is all just a game, this feminine-feminism, much like most things in US life are a marketing ploy. People say the sorts of things that others are already primed to respond to, so that they can get marketing leverage. It is much like using the basic appetites -- sex, hunger, desire for recognition -- to sell sugary beverages. If people are primed to feel guilty about not including women, this can be played upon to get the writer of the article about Wikipedia notoriety and funding support. She certainly does not have to mean every word she says. Those words are for leverage, on a deep emotional level, not meaning.
In terms of something slightly different from that, the expansion of traditional feminine modes of perception, reaction and behavior, into the mainstream is, I think, recognisable in the demand that other entities ought not to stand apart from the one who judges them, but be one with the judger and melded into a particular shape by him or her. This extends to much of literary theory as it is currently practiced. For instance you will find people asserting that the author has "gone too far" or made a structural mistake in his or her mode of writing. I noticed this most strongly when studying the criticism that had accrued on Marechera's writing. For the most part the critics seemed to become out of breath and confused very easily, at which point they would return to that which was already familiar to them, like the concept of fixed identities, or proper social structure or a good upbringing. They couldn't really extend themselves very far beyond their anchors in convention.
But what if the author writes a paranoid book not as a mistake, or because he can't contain himself to write a more sane and sensible book, but because he WANTS us to feel paranoid? That level of artistry is hard for the majority of critics to countenance, but there is no a priori reason why this could not be so.
That we cannot know for sure what a book like BLACK SUNLIGHT is about, but still we think we recognise certain familiar shapes and forms in it, gives it a paranoid aura in relation to us, the readers. If a reader starts the book with a feeling of political certainty that war and/or revolution are desirable and for the best, by the end of the book one is left alone with oneself and with a feeling of extreme paranoia about both war and revolution and their viability. It is a paranoid book, written by someone who involuntarily lived through a revolutionary war and suffered as a consequence of that.
If you can't take in that message as a critic, perhaps a differerent job would be more suitable for you. It's just too conventionally feminine to want to make the author part of one's own already existing system of values and beliefs and to berate him in a motherly fashion for going outside the bounds of what would be considered normal in one's own society. "I chide him because I love him and I want him to do better!"
To demand that others be a part of you so that you can manage them better, shape them, and turn them into what you want them to be, is archetypal feminine relating. It is the typical manner with which managers, identity politicians, teachers and critics approach the subject today. They do not allow anything to stand apart from them, to be a thing separate from the mother/teacher/critic. They don't seem to even have the courage to say, "I hate this thing! I'm going to let it go." Their instincts are to draw everything under the control, by not permitting separation.
This means you can't learn a complex lesson from a writer who is trying to teach you about your political over-certainties. You can't even see that lesson, because you are too busy trying to impart your own about how there are certain things than can and cannot be said, in terms of your own existing perspective.
The feminine mode is like this though. It always tries to "shape" the other right away, rather than reach an understanding of what that person or thing is in its own right. It doesn't even see anything separate from itself, just some amorphous mess to be reshaped.
And abusers are the same. They come along and try to shape things, on the basis of the feelings about what ought to be in place. But this betrays their lack of a desire to even try to understand what has actually come to be in place of its own accord, and in its own right, independently of the manager/critic/abuser. They don't even have a faculty for handling real otherness -- yet, many of them will talk endlessly about "the other". Nothing they love better than talking about themselves!
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