Category: identity

That Asshole Is You

~ Clarissa ~ 19 Comments

People don’t seem to understand why I find the following post (and so many more like it) to be injurious and disgusting:

I don’t know what asshole invented the idea that teenage girls are the cause for all evil, but I really hope that person never has to raise one. I don’t want him to see her dissolve in his fingers as society tells her to eat less, be thinner, be the damsel in distress, be something for a man to fix, be different but not too different, be special but never ever a special snowflake – I don’t want him to watch as she realizes that no matter what she loves, she’ll be made fun of for it. She can simply like her coffee from Starbucks and suddenly she’s vapid and thinks herself poetic. She’ll want to play video games but be called a fake nerd, particularly if she poses in any remotely flirtatious way because for some reason despite the entire community playing games with poorly dressed women they still hate it when a real girl wears less clothing, she will be seen as trespassing in a specifically male space – but when she falls in love with a female-based television show for children, she’ll watch as men step on themselves to sexualize it.

(There is a lot more at the link, of course.)

In college, I used to know somebody who’d say the most insulting anti-Semitic things to me and my Jewish friend. These messages were always accompanied by, “I can’t believe how vicious those anti-Semites are. They say. . .” and a torrent of abuse would follow. My friend and I were young and we couldn’t really identify what was bothering us about this way of denouncing anti-Semitism.

Today I’m older and I see this fake concern for what it is. And I prefer an honest woman-hater, anti-Semite or any other kind of jerkwad who declares his or her hatred openly and directly to a fake progressive who hides behind imitating concern while pounding people over the head with vicious insults. The quoted text literally drips with enjoyment of female degradation. But it’s presented as an attempt to vindicate women, so nobody dares to criticize. Nobody even wonders why a supposed vindication of women is coming from a person who sees womanhood as so relentlessly horrific.

This is such a convenient role to assume. You can say any number of sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. things but as long as you preface your offensive rants with, “Nasty evildoers are, of course, completely wrong when they say. . .” you will be immune from all criticism.

Have you noticed how every initiative aimed at discriminating against women today disguises itself as coming from a place of concern for women? “No, it’s not victim-blaming. And no, we are not the ones trying to make women believe that leaving the house puts them in mortal danger. It’s just that there are all those nasty rapists around, it’s all their fault.”

So the answer to the linked post’s question as to “what asshole invented. . .” is obvious. Such covert woman-haters reinvent these pernicious messages every time they engage in their “defense of the downtrodden.”

V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River: A Review

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

I want to begin this new year of blogging with a review of one of the most famous books by V.S. Naipaul, a controversial writer and a Nobel Prize winner. Before I begin, I want to warn you that if you are here with the goal of ripping off this review to pass it as an essay at school, you are making a huge mistake. Not only because plagiarism is always stupid and wrong but also because my reading of this novel is very different from what your teacher wants to hear. Feel free to see if I’m right at your own peril.

V.S. Naipaul differs from many other postcolonial writers in that his attitude towards independence is a lot more complex, painful, and honest than the usual starry-eyed “Yippee! We are finally free from the vile, horrible empire” we keep getting from the writers of the postcolonial reality. I am a postcolonial subject, too. Believe me, there is nothing I like more than denouncing the ills of imperial domination. This is why I have to admire Naipaul’s courage in demonstrating the fallacies of an unconditional acceptance of independence.
A Bend in the River describes post-independence struggles of an unnamed African country whose experiences are in many ways similar to those of other newly independent nations irrespective of their geographical location. The process of creating a new, post-colonial identity is central to such nations. Naipaul realizes that the only way of analyzing the workings of identity formation is from a distance. This is why the first-person narrator of this story, Salim, is a perennial outsider in all communities he inhabits. As an onlooker, Salim is in the position to notice and analyze identity-related issues better than others. This capacity, however, results in his marginalization:

A Bend in the River is a story of Salim’s efforts to accept unquestioningly the nationalistic discourse of the country where he comes to reside and his failure to do so. As hard as this character tries, he never manages to escape the realization that independence is a lot more problematic than anybody around him wishes to accept. In the novel, we see a gradual disintegration of a newly independent country that leads to an ever-growing violence.

So from an early age I developed the habit of looking, detaching myself from a familiar scene and trying to consider it as from a distance. It was from this habit of looking that the idea came to me that as a community we had fallen behind. And that was the beginning of my insecurity. I used to think of this feeling of insecurity as a weakness, a failing of my own temperament, and I would have been ashamed if anyone had found out about it. I kept my ideas about the future to myself.
Naipaul’s writings have been very controversial because he verbalizes those feelings and experiences of post-colonial that we don’t want to acknowledge even to ourselves. Salim’s friend who is even more removed from his country of origin by virtue of his European education expresses some of these concerns whose mere existence is unacceptable to many:
I hadn’t understood to what extent our civilization had also been our prison. I hadn’t understood either to what extent we had been made by the place where we had grown up, made by Africa and the simple life of the coast, and how incapable we had become of understanding the outside world. We have no means of understanding a fraction of the thought and science and philosophy and law that have gone to make that outside world. We simply accept it. We have grown up paying tribute to it, and that is all that most of us can do. We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones among us to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything. When we land at a place like London Airport we are concerned only not to appear foolish. It is more beautiful and more complex than anything we could have dreamed of, but we are concerned only to let people see that we can manage and are not overawed. We might even pretend that we had expected better. That is the nature of our stupidity and incompetence. And that was how I spent my time at the university in England, not being overawed, always being slightly disappointed, understanding nothing, accepting everything, getting nothing.
“Our stupidity and incompetence?” How dare he? Haven’t we been schooled to proclaim ourselves as owners of alternative and much better forms of knowledge, inhabitants of a different kind of civilization? Haven’t we been told ad nauseam that we have our own Prousts and Hegels? And if nobody knows or appreciates this special contribution of ours, that doesn’t mean anything is wrong with the contribution. It just means the world is unjust and its system of values is all wrong. This is what we defend with everything we have while falling over ourselves in our rush to possess as many attributes of the hated colonial masters. Contempt and desire of that which is apparently so disdained are among the unavoidable attributes of the postcolonial experience.
Naipaul’s analysis of every facet of how national identities are created and imposed is nothing short of brilliant. To give just one example, every national identity requires legitimizing heroic figures that embody the best characteristics of the nation. These figures are invented, distorted, mythologized and contested by groups within the country that struggle for the right to propose their own version of national identity. Naipaul demonstrates with absolute brilliance how such symbols of national identity end up robbing the national subject of individuality:
I studied the large framed photographs of Gandhi and Nehru and wondered how, out of squalor like this, those men had managed to get themselves considered as men. It was strange, in that building in the heart of London, seeing those great men in this new way, from the inside, as it were. Up till then, from the outside, without knowing more of them than I had read in newspapers and magazines, I had admired them. They belonged to me; they ennobled me and gave me some place in the world. Now I felt the opposite. In that room the photographs of those great men made me feel that I was at the bottom of a well. I felt that in that building complete manhood was permitted only to those men and denied to everybody else. Everyone had surrendered his manhood, or a part of it, to those leaders. Everyone willingly made himself smaller the better to exalt those leaders. . .  We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves.
As much as one might admire Gandhi, it does get annoying to encounter yet another set of pious platitudes every time his (or any other independence leader’s) name is mentioned. Any national identity is based on a set of myths that fall apart under even a very superficial kind of scrutiny. This is why national identities are so bound with emotions: we have to be blinded by our deeply emotional response to our particular piece of painted fabric, venerated independence leaders, mythology of first oppression then liberation in order to buy these poorly constructed myths.
Naipaul has made himself hated by many when he started discussing the problematic nature of each newly-achieved independence, each nationalistic mythology. His honesty leaves me speechless, while his beautiful writing style makes me feel ashamed of everything I have ever written in English. We often believe that a great writer is somebody who makes us nod our heads and think, “Oh, this is so true.” That isn’t greatness, though. A true genius tells us things we never thought of before, makes us angry by an assault on widely-accepted trivialities. This is precisely the kind of writer Naipaul is. A Bend in the River is, in my opinion, his angriest and consequently his best novel.

>Zygmunt Bauman’s Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?: A Review, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

As I mentioned in the first part of this review, Bauman’s vision of today’s world is, at the very least, flawed. The impression his analysis often makes on me is one created by a person who is so afraid of certain aspects of life that he never ventures outside of his ivory tower. He hides from reality and theorizes about it from the
place of his fear. As a result, a lot of what he has to say bears no relation to reality. For instance, Bauman sees us as constantly moving away from coercion and towards freedom. He observes (or he believes that he observes)

the ever more evident dismantling of the system of normative regulation, and thereby the releasing of ever larger chunks of human conduct from coercive patterning, supervision, and policing, and relegating ever larger numbers of previously socialized functions to the realm of individual “life politics.”

I thought about this statement for a long while, but for the life of me I can’t see how anybody can say that the world today is moving away from supervision and policing. I don’t want to keep belaboring the point of those new airport scanners ad infinitum, but what about the US Patriot Act? If that is non-invasive and non-coercive, I honestly don’t know what is.

Bauman spends quite a lot of time attempting to construct an argument on the basis of this perceived disappearance of coercion and its substitution with something else:

Coercion is being replaced by stimulation, forceful imposition of behavioral patterns by seduction, policing of conduct by PR and advertising, and the normative regulation, as such, by the arousal of new needs and desires.

I have no idea why Bauman needs to present PR and advertising on the one hand and policing and coercion on the other as mutually exclusive. Coercion and advertising are part of the same system, two sides of the same coin. The arousal of new needs and desires is a product of both PR and policing. If we know that we will be policed (say, at an airport), we are very likely to provide ourselves with a kit that will make the process of being policed easier. People who travel a lot nowadays have a special personal grooming and make-up kits that come in small bottles and that are packaged separately. Before your trip, you can just grab your pre-packaged kits and head to the airport. In a similar fashion, one could give many examples of coercion and stimulation working together to impose new behavioral patterns. Advertising often serves not so much to provoke new desires as to give us a justification for accepting the needs imposed on us by coercion.
Another topic where Bauman’s argument is wide of the mark, is his description of an ideal employee for big corporations. For some reason, he has decided that in order to be competitive on the job market one has to be single, unattached, and not burdened with responsibilties:

Bosses tend nowadays to dislike having employees who are burdened with personal commitments to others-particularly those with firm commitments and especially the firmly long-term commitments. The harsh demands of professional survival all too often confront men and women with morally devastating choices between the requirements of their career and caring for others. Bosses prefer to employ unburdened, free-floating individuals who are ready to break all bonds at a moment’s notice and who never think twice when “ethical demands” must be sacrificed to the “demands of the job.”

Nothing in this statement makes sense. A commitment-free individual, unburdened with a mortgage and dependent family members, is the worst nightmare of repressive employers. Such an employee feels free to leave the second she feels unhappy with the conditions of her employment. A “free-floating” individual doesn’t scare as easy as the one who is the only breadwinner for a group of people. If I have several mouths to feed, I am more likely to swallow a lot of shit coming from my bosses in order to keep my job at any cost. If, however, I don’t owe anything to anybody, I will leave the company without a second thought and will have no trouble moving to a different city, state, or even country. This is precisely why we are so constantly brainwashed into marrying and having children. Free people pose the greatest danger to the system. Why Bauman would wish to claim the opposite is incomprehensible to me.
In his desire to signal his rejection of the way the world is today, Bauman allows his argument to become sloppy. For instance, the philosopher bemoans the lack of interest in politics in today’s world:

All over the “developed” and affluent part of the planet, signs abound of fading interest in the acquisition and exercise of social skills, of people turning their backs on politics, of growing political apathy and loss of interest in the running of the political process.

He fails to mention, however, when that happy age of political participation that is “fading” today actually took place. I believe that any argument about things getting much worse absolutely has to mention the time period with which today’s reality is being compared. Otherwise, there is no value to this line of reasoning.
To summarize, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? offers an insightful discussion of identity construction. However, as soon as Bauman begins to theorize about the subjects of ethics and consumerism, he cannot avoid the need to massage reality into the confines of his flawed system.

Zygmunt Bauman’s Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?: A Review, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

Zygmunt Bauman is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers. His interest in the mechanisms of identity construction is enough to make me follow his work with great dedication.

Bauman’s recent Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture Series) made a dubious impression on me. Everything Bauman has to say about identity is really good. Everything he has to say on other topics, however, is really not. This is unusual, since normally philosophers are provoked by the topic of identity into uttering strings of annoying platitudes. Bauman avoids this danger and talks about identity in a thought-provoking and profound way. The other subjects he addresses in Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? , though, are analyzed in a much weaker way. Unfortunately, a moment comes in everybody’s life when our brain cannot process change as effectively as it used to when we were younger. As a result, we see any change in our world as at worst terrifying and at best negative. This is, sadly, what happens to Bauman. His fear of today’s reality taints his analysis and robs it of any intellectual value. I have no patience with anybody whose sexism and racism do not allow them to recognize that life today is without a shadow of a doubt better than at any other point in history. Bauman’s lamentations about some unspecified past when everything was better, fresher, and sweeter are a testimony to his nostalgia for his lost youth. This nostalgia is so strong that it overruns the obvious ethical considerations that should have helped Bauman remember that the current historical period he dislikes so much is characterized by an incredible progress in the rights of women, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

In this review, I will first address the parts of Bauman’s argument that I really liked. Then, I will proceed to discuss the much weaker second half of this book.

Bauman starts his discussion of identity formation by observing how much the task of creating an identity is linked to fear, anxiety, and constant insecurity:

Identities exist today solely in the process of continuous renegotiation. Identity formation, or more correctly their re-formation, turns into a lifelong task, never complete; at no moment of life is the identity “final” There always remains an outstanding task of readjustment, since neither conditions of life nor the sets of opportunities and threats ever stop changing. That built-in “nonfinality,” the incurable inconclusiveness of the task of self-identification, causes a lot of tension and anxiety.

The idea that identity today is negotiable, fluid, and non-static has, of course, turned into something of a favorite platitude among the theorists of identity. What is different in Bauman’s analysis is that his thinking does not stop there. He realizes that the qualities of fluidity and variability of contemporary identities do not in any way rob them of their potential to do harm. It is a given that everybody today moves seamlessly between identities. This mere fact, however, does nothing to alleviate the dreadful burden of identity.

By its very nature, collective identity requires a common enemy. The ever-growing complexity of today’s world makes the need for this enemy stronger, instead of weaker:

The act of selecting a group as one’s site of belonging in fact constitutes some other groups as alien and, potentially, hostile territory: “I am P” always means (at least implicitly, but often explicitly) that “most certainly, I am not Q, R, S, and so on.” “Belonging” is one side of the coin, and the other side is separation and opposition-which all too often evolve into resentment, antagonism, and open conflict. Identification of an adversary is an indispensable element of identification with an “entity of belonging”-and, through the latter, also a crucial element of self-identification. Identification of an enemy construed as an incarnation of the evil against which the community “integrates,” gives clarity to life purposes and to the world in which life is lived.

Consequently, when the world becomes less clear and more complex, a group needs to construct an enemy who is more and more evil with every passing day. Thus, those who believe that we live in a post-identity world are completely wrong. I have no idea whether these people even follow the news or turn on the television. There are no structures in place today that would dilute the strength of collective identifications. Just the opposite.

After this impressive discussion of identity, Bauman proceeds to talk about the actual subject of his book, which is the relationship between ethics and consumerism. And here, unfortunately, his argument begins to fall apart. In order to introduce the topic of ethics, the philosopher comes out with the following bizarre statement:

In order to have self-love, we need to be loved or to have hope of being loved. Refusal of love-a snub, a rejection, denial of the status of a love-worthy object-breeds self-hatred. Self-love is built of the love offered to us by others. Others must love us first, so that we can begin to love ourselves.

It honestly took me a while to realize that the author was completely serious in this statement. When I finally saw that no punch line was coming and this is exactly what he meant to say, I felt pretty embarrassed for Bauman. You cannot proceed to theorize on the basis of your psychological insecurities and neuroses. Of course, we can never escape them, but the least we could do is avoid projecting them onto the entire world. The kind of self-love that is so dependent on the aceptance and approval of others is beyond unhealthy. A theory constructed on the basis of this vision cannot convince anybody.