eleutheria >Philosophy

December 16, 2004

on criticism & understanding

...there are no simple misunderstandings. Each time you read a text-"and this is my situation and the situation of every reader-"there is some misunderstanding, but I know of no way to avoid this. Mis under-standing is always significant; it-™s not simply a mistake, or just an absurdity. It-™s something that is motivated by some interest and some understanding. Sometimes the most ferocious Critics who react vehe-mently and passionately and sometimes with hatred understand more than supporters do, and it-™s because they understand more that they react this way. Sometimes they understand unconsciously, or they know what is at stake. Sometimes I think that this enemy, because he-™s so ferocious, so nervous, is more aware of what is at stake than a friendly ally is. So, sometimes misunderstanding is understanding, and the other way around.

September 22, 2004

The second "contradictory expectation": Beauty

(the first is Compassion)

A few quotes from Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman
to back up Glueboot's glamasochism post, with which I am in agreement.

...equality legistation could not give me the right to have broad hips or hairy thighs, to be at ease in my woman's body. Thirty years on femininity is still compulsory for women and has become an option for men, while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character. If femaleness is not to be interpreted as inferiority, it is not to signify anything at all.

While western feminists were valiantly contending for a key to the executive washroom, the feminine stereotype was completing her conquest of the world.

If equality means entitlement to an equal share of the profits of economic tyranny, it is irreconcilable with liberation. Freedom in an unfree world is merely licence to exploit.

Wars nowadays are fought against civilians; the bulk of military casualties these days are women and children.

On every side we see women troubled, exhausted, mutilated, lonely, guilty, mocked by the headlined success of the few. The reality of women's lives is work, most of it unpaid and, what is worse, unappreciated ... yet every day we are told that there is nothing left to fight for. The old enemies, undefeated, have devised new strategies; new assailants lie in ambush. We have no choice but to turn and fight.

While women were struggling to live as responsible dignified adults, men have retreated into extravagantly masculinist fantasies and behaviours.

The sex of the millenium is pornography. Women are not the point of pornography. Pornography is the flight from woman, men's denial of sex as a medium of communication, the denial of sex as the basis for a relationship. ... The victims of pornography are men not women. ... [However] the substitution of masturbation for seduction means even more loneliness for heterosexual women, loneliness that is keenest within the embrace of a lover.

Every woman knows ... she cannot be beautiful enough. There must be bits of her which will not do. Even if all these are fine and flawless, she knows that within she has guts full of decomposing food; she has a vagina that smells and bleeds. She is human, not a goddess or an angel. However much body hair she has, it is too much. However little and sweetly she sweats, it is too much. Left to her own devices she is sure to smell bad. ... A woman who disported herself in a bikini out of which a bush of pubic hair sprouted would be regarded as a walking obscenity. No-one would say that the woman who puts herself through the agonizing ordeal of hot-waxing her bikini-line must be suffering from BDD

BDD is Body Dymorphic Disorder, abnormal preoccupation with a percieved defect in one's appearance. Greer quotes David Veale of the royal free hospital: '"These individuals are very socially handicapped. There is a high rate of depression and 25% have attempted suicide ... Micheal Jackson seems to be a clear case of BDD" What is pathological behaviour in a man is required of a woman. ... Such insecurity has been instilled into women over generations; we have made not the least headway in the struggle to dispel it'. Instead, it is being encouraged by commercial companies to sell beauty products.

Conditions that practically all women 'suffer from' are spoken of as unsightly and abnormal, to make women feel that parts of their bodies, perhaps their whole bodies, are defective and should be worked on, even surgically altered.

These sales tactics are now also being used on men (ie, optional femininity for men = more equality in an unfree world).

Preoccupation about her appearance goes some way towards ruining some part of every wonan's day. Multi-million dollar industries exploit both her need for reassurance and her need to do something about the way she looks.

Thirty years ago it was enough to look beautiful; now a woman has to have a tight, toned body, including her buttocks and thighs, so that she is good to touch, all over. 'Remember' she will be told, ' beauty starts from within'. Being beautiful from within takes even more time than slapping beauty on from without.

this process starts with young girls, and continues until old age.

It must be a sad world when what every mother wants for Mother's Day is 'younger-looking skin'. That is the one thing she is never going to have, not even if she endures all the agonies of a face-lift.

What is truly depressing about the false dawn of feminism is that, as we have been congratulating ourselves on largely imaginary victories, BDD has become a global pandemic [even, eg, women of provincial cities in China are being pushed into the Baywatch image of beauty]. ...

... Barbie with feet so tiny she cannot stand on them ... unattached career girl, woman's liberation in effigy ... is currently put together by 11,000 Chinese peasant women in two factories in Guangdong Province; 23p of the total price of a Barbie doll is payment for their labour.

... recognizing only one physical type as having any pretensions whatsoever to beauty.

September 11, 2004

Human, All Too Human

I've found it through google: http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/human1.htm
The quote is from Human, All Too Human

The logic of the dream.� When one sleeps, the nervous system is constantly excited by manifold internal stimuli: almost all the organs secrete and are active; the blood circulates turbulently; the position of the sleeper, his blankets, influence his feelings variously; the stomach digests and disturbs other organs with its movements; the intestines turn; the placement of the head occasions unusual positions of the muscles; the feet, without shoes, their soles not pressing on the floor, cause a feeling of unusualness, as does the different way the whole body is clothed after its daily change and variation, and all this excites by its unusualness the whole system, including the brain functions. Thus there are a hundred occasions for the mind to be surprised and to search for reasons for this excitation: the dream, however, is the searching for, and the imagining of, the causes for these excited feelings, i.e., the supposed causes. For example, if one ties two straps around one's feet, one may dream that two snakes are coiled around one's feet. This is at first a hypothesis, then a belief, accompanied by a pictorial idea and elaboration: "These snakes must be the cause of that feeling which I, the sleeper, am having"�thus judges the mind of the sleeper. What is thus inferred to have been the near past becomes the present through the excited imagination. Thus everybody knows from experience how quickly one blends a strong sound�e.g., the toiling of bells or cannon shots�into his dream, i.e., how he explains them ex post facto through his dream, in such a way that he supposes that he experiences first the causal circumstances and then this sound.

Of First and Last Things, 13.

Anti-revolutionary

[Most scholars and thinkers] imagine every necessity as a state of distress, as a painful compelled comformity and constraint; and thought itself they regard as something slow, hesitant, almost as toil and often as 'worthy of the sweat of the noble' - and not at all as soemthing easy, divine, and a closest relation of high spirits and the dance! ... Artists may here have a more subtle scent: they know only too well that it is precisely when they cease to act 'voluntarily' and do everything of necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height - in short, that necessity and 'freedom of will' are then one in them. In the last resort there exists an order of rank of states of soul with which the order of rank of problems accords; and the supreme problems repel without mercy everyone who ventures near them without being, through the elevation and power of his spirituality, predestined to their solution... . coarse feet may never tread such carpets: that has been seen to in the primal law of things; the doors remain shut against such importunates, though they may batter and shatter their heads against them! ... Many generations must have worked to prepare for the philosopher... ."

Beyond Good and Evil, We Scholars, 213

This links in with undercurrent's work on Bacon, freedom, chance. Progression by chance, but well bred chance - never man-made revolution which, to me, is a pretender to nihilism (as in the pro-capitalism theorist's attitude that once everything is destoyed, then we'll have some excitement; that revolutionary anti-human destruction is the only way forward. Deuleuze and Guattari misread, and used to shout at people "Don't stratify me, man!"). Give yourself up, but have 'control' at the same time: Bacon style.

Now I'll keep looking for that bit about sleep and body....

September 10, 2004

Ruth

First attempt to clear up a few issues.

"Therapy-monger despatched with the same Ruthless, sorry ruthless, efficiency as Arnie takes out the oedipeddlar... or leon takes out the blade runner... 'let me tell you about my mother....'"

Quoted from Mark's blog, taken from his list of people he has argued against, Socrates style, or rather shouted at until they give up.

I don't know what 'Therapy-monger' is meant to mean, but anyhow, I suppose he's talking about bringing Germaine Greer into play against the 'cyber female'? Mark implies that he has argued against me successfully, however, it's quite clear to me that he hasn't engaged in anything I've said (at least Socrates always does manage to do this, even in the most annoying way possible!). It's obviously impossible to have an argument in this case, as it's obvious there is going to be no resolution or giving way. I'm also not clear about what I am arguing against. My criticism of the content was not acceptable because I was not engaging with the theory behind it - but I am in still no way clear what the theory is, so can't argue against it.

I've been planning to write about Germaine Greer for ages now, anyway, so hopefully I will be able to steer some people in her direction and maybe show what is wrong with this idea that there is nothing further for women to "moan" about, because of the 'cyber female', and "even Sadie Plant says so". (Mark brings up cyberfeminism in his defence now after a decade of slagging off Sadie's work, of course)

I have only just started re-reading The Whole Woman, but would like to quote her a few times in what I have read so far. I do this for men, and but obviously, especially women because "A woman's first duty to herself is to survive this process [to be described in The Whole Woman], then to recognize it, then to take measures to defend herself against it."

"Post-Modernists are proud and pleased that gender now justifies fewer suppositions about an individual than ever before, but for women still wrestling with the same physical realities this new silence about their visceral experiences is the same old rapist's hand clamped ocross their mouths. Real women are being phased out; the first step, persuading them to deny their own existence, is almost complete."

"The future is female, we are told. Feminism has served its purpose and should now eff off. Feminism was long hair, dungarees and dangling errings; post-feminism was business suits, big hari and lipstick; post-post-feminsm was ostentatious sluttishness and disorderly behaviour."

"...the causes of female suffering can be grouped under the heading 'contradictory expectations'."

I will mention one of these expectations now - it is particularly relevant, and important to me because of my name: Caring.

"Women have historically been committed to caring; if they are now condemned to be uncaring can this be a liberation? Or should feminists establish the female principle of caring as a political principal? To do that would be to became that most absurd and outmoded of beings, a socialist... . Should we accept altruism as part of the psychological make-up of the whole woman, or should we politicize the principle of altruism on the grounds that it is no more than enlightened self-interest? We live in this world together and how we live together affects the way we live alone"

This is particularly pertinent, given that the example of one success - Grace Jones - is used to justify the position that 'everything's ok', (in the same way does Richard Branson's success justify the position that 'everything's ok' with capitalism - isn't that the opposite of mark's position?)

As undercurrent reminded me, Mark is not the the first person to imply that Ruthlessness, as well as ruthlessness is what is needed philosphically. I most certainly take exception to this. It was a devastating moment, aged 18, to be told this by the (then) well respected Nick Land. He did tell me to my face, though, and made no secret of his feeling towards me, which changed gradually into what I felt to be revulsion around the time of the CCRU. At first, his behaviour towards me was very playful - "penny for your thoughts", is something he once said to me, I swear!, so the change was clear.

Anyway, I was gutted by his analysis of my character, and took it to mean: destroy yourself: your love, your compassion disgusts me. Neither did I really understand where I was meant to start. I felt myself to be mentally very strong, and also ruthless, intellectually: ie, intelligent. At any rate, I began to engage with my name, and began to consider what it meant to me. Perhaps other girls with different names would not do this - to me, I am Ruth*. Luckily, this gave me strength against Nick's well-aimed assult on my personality. And it still gives me strength now, against the same from Mark's. These people who spit in the face of compassion don't realise how strong the compassionate need to be: to contain themselves, and persevere in fruitful ways. (See this at undercurrent).

In the early days of the CCRU formation at Warwick, I saw Mark coming out of a room in the Philosophy Department corridor. He looked so sad that I put my arms around him, an irrepressible urge to comfort him that overcame me. The worst accusation that can be made to me is that, like Nietzsche with his fallen horse, I am compassionate. At the other extreme attacking someone for falling short of your hopes, even when they are totally confident, is also an act of compassion, not sabotage.

I think compassion is crucial to think about, and that is why I have put the above Greer quotes in. Obviously, there is tonnes more thinking to be done - not only on compassion, which is closer to my heart than beauty, and the other important areas of interest Greer highlights - but got to start somewhere.

* I know this all sounds a bit, "but I'm Michelle, she's Shell, if she becomes me, then who am I??" wide eyed confusion from "Big Brother's Michelle", as she is known. But there we are.

Dictionary definition of Ruth (from the very useful dictionary.com site):
1) Compassion or pity for another.
2) Sorrow or misery about one's own misdeeds or flaws.