REPOST: GETTING IT BACKWARDS

The Brits are peculiar to me in their strange psychological insularity, and I shall make no attempts to understand them. I do like — and understand — the self-acknowledged working class Brits, actually. I could joke with the bus drivers and found them to be largely pleasant characters. Their extraversion and tough mindedness amused me. I had the following conversation with one of them:

“My bus ticket it booked for 11 am, but is it okay if I catch this [earlier] bus anyway, if you can check and confirm this ticket?”

Bus driver says: “The number on the ticket doesn’t mean anything to me. If you can show me some photo-ID, you can catch this bus.”

I said: “So long as my photo-ID looks like me, I can catch this bus?”

Driver: “Yes, if your photo-ID looks like yourself, you can catch it.”

[I show him my University photo-ID.]

Driver [Scrutinising it]: “This photo-ID doesn’t look like you. It’s older than you.”

***

On the other hand, the culturally static and inert nature of most of what passes for British “culture” gives me pause for thought.

I am particularly inclined to rethink the value of the school of British psychoanalysis, in particular in terms of whether it pertains largely to the British character structure (in its more common and passive forms) rather than to the human character as such.

I’m thinking about Donald Meltzer and his idea (which now appears in starker relief to me, than before embarking on this trip) that somehow eros (in its mastubatory forms) puts a premature end to epistemological enquiry. This, it seems, could be the case in an incredibly culturally inert societal context. Yet it is counter-intuitive that it would be the case in any other societal context. Rather than being a mind-coagulating, inwards-moving and psychologically narrowing force, eros seems to me to be an expanding and expansive force — if anything, quite the opposite to how I now see Meltzer as portraying it.

It is the opposite force to that of eros — the death instinct, and that depicted by Freud as “Thanatos” — that, for me, has the quality of inertia (or at most a centripetal energy,) according to my cultural experience in Australia. Nietzsche seems to agree with me that it is energy or positive life-force that causes us to separate (as if it were a centrifugal force), whereas “ressentiment” (or a barely contained hostility to others, along with the need for an assured proximity to others in order to take out one’s vexations on them) causes us to bind together.