You're just like I was...

[imomus]

There's a scene in Happy Days. Richie Cunningham has to take a test, but someone has given him the answers in advance. He decides to come clean to his father. "Dad, I have something to tell you. I have all the answers." Howard, his father, isn't too concerned. "That's okay, son, at your age I thought I had all the answers too."

Howard, here, is failing to take on board the new information his son is trying to give him because he's too busy projecting himself -- affectionately enough, but also patronizingly and narcissistically -- into the situation. He's insisting on mapping his own experiences, his own former delusions, onto his son. He wants to help Richie overcome old mistakes that Howard made thirty years before. It's classic parent stuff. They never understand.

Tellingly enough, the Howard-mistake Howard mistakenly projects onto Richie is the delusion of omniscience: having all the answers. And although his answer seems to suggest he's over it, Howard still clearly thinks he has all the answers. About his son and what he's going through, anyway. Howard is still talking as if he's up on the high hill, that spot from which other people's errors can be seen, if only because they're your own. Sitting up on that high hill, Howard sees Richie as a little carbon copy of himself, thirty years down the line. "Oh look, here he comes, struggling up the same hillside path I came up, dealing with the same delusions and pitfalls. Thinking he's already sitting at the top, when in fact it's only me who's sitting at the top. He'll find out soon enough, I guess. And then wish he'd listened to his father."

Anyone with parents knows how infuriating this kind of assumption is. It's all the more infuriating when we look in the mirror and see fresher-faced versions of our parents looking back. In other words, when we suspect that there might be some truth in it. But the main thing that makes it wrong is context. In the twenty or thirty years that separate two generations, a lot has changed. Lessons learned in Howard's slumped 1930s are probably not particularly applicable to life in Richie's affluent 1950s. Imagine the Waltons trying to tell the Jetsons how to live.



Projecting yourself too much onto something inherently different from you -- even if it's only different because the context has changed -- is a bit like anthropomorphism; projecting human attributes onto animals. Contemporary Western culture is incredibly anthropomorphic. I was in the Post Office queue yesterday, examining Easter cards featuring rabbits. While all the cards based on photographs were forced to show the rabbit's eyes on either side of its head, looking out sideways, ever-vigilant for predators, the cards which used drawings of rabbits "corrected" this, putting the eyes on the front of the face, as they would be if rabbits were a predator species like humans, not a prey species. As a result, the rabbits looked like long-eared bears. Presumably this alteration was to make rabbits more like us, and therefore more loveable. But why must we only love things on the condition that we can project our own features onto them? The "modern Stone Age family" in The Flintstones is funny because of all the anachronism, all the projection of ourselves onto a different time. But would you want an Anthropology Museum, or a foreign policy, based on the idea that Stone Age people are just like us?

The problem is, that's exactly what we have. Every day we read the opinion that radical Islam is reproducing Medieval Europe, or that Japanese women are just about to go through a stage Western women went through in the 1960s. We invade Iraq thinking that they'll thank us for giving them the political apparatus we already have. Thinking that if it works for us, it'll work for them. We are perhaps the most narcissistic culture that has ever existed. We really think we're sitting on top of the hill, the pinnacle and culimation of all history and all progress. The fact that we have to kill so many people to help them see how they're just like us, really, doesn't seem to convince us that this view might be mistaken.

To say that an animal is like a human, or one culture is like another culture at a different phase in its history, is a metaphor, nothing more. It cannot be the case, non-metaphorically. Even when different calendars co-exist -- and they do; for the West this is 2007 years after the birth of Jesus Christ, for the Japanese it's Heisei 19, for Muslims it's Hijrah year 1428 -- we're all living in the same moment. And we're all living with each other, changing each other's context, redefining each other. Today's postmodernism has been influenced by Islamism, as Islamism has been influenced by postmodernism. Even if the Islamic 1428 resembled the Christian 1428 in every way, the fact that we were around would change the situation utterly. Context changes everything. Imagine a 1428 in which Christendom lived alongside a postmodern culture with TV stations, pop stars and the internet. It would be an utterly different 1428, one which defined itself (probably negatively) against the postmodern culture next door.

Think, too, of how insulting it is to say "They're living our 1428. They're just like we were." What would we think of a Japanese writer who said the West had just about reached Japan's Meiji 18? He'd be dismissed as an incredibly arrogant nationalist.

Borges has two short stories which have a lot to tell us here. One is about a poet who's writing an epic poem describing everything in the world using an Aleph in his basement -- a wondrous little model which makes the whole universe simultaneously visible in a space just a few centimeters across. The West really seems to think it's the Aleph, the model, the place from which everything can be seen, and in which everything is contained. We really act as if we're up on the hilltop, and have the answers. The trouble is that in our Aleph, everything looks suspiciously like us. The rabbits in there all have eyes on the front of their heads. Maybe we haven't kept it clean. Maybe it's a mirror.

The other story is Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote, in which a 20th century man attempts to rewrite Cervantes' 16th century novel from memory. Borges makes clear that even if Menard had succeeded (and of course he can't, just like the famous monkeys with their typewriters and their infinite bits of paper containing close-but-no-cigar versions of "Hamlet"), he would still have been an utterly original writer, doing something Cervantes wouldn't have dreamed of: reproducing Cervantes word-for-word.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single muslim who didn't know there was something newly radicalised in their religion, and that it had something to do with opposition to America and Israel, and something to do with the situation in Palestine, and an ongoing battle over modernity, Westernization and imperialism. I don't say that the West creates Islam, but it certainly has had a huge hand in creating what we now call Islamism, which is a postmodern and literally reactionary form of Islam.

Take the Deobandi movement, which influenced the Taliban (postmodern as they come, despite/because of the ancient affectations, just as Whimsy is postmodern despite the 19th century garb). "Developed as a reaction to the British colonialism in India," says Wikipedia, "whom they believed to be assimilating the Islamic religion. Fearing this, a group of Indian ˤUlāmā led by Maulana Qasim Nanautavi founded an Islamic seminary known as Darul Uloom Deoband. It is here that the Islamic revivalist and anti-imperialist ideology of the Deobandis began to develop."

I don't even need to go near the conspiracy theories which say that the Taliban and Bin Laden were directly created by US and Pakistani intelligence services. All I need to say is that these movements, whatever costumes their participants wear, exist in the context of global geo-politics (and cultural politics) right now. They are not beamed in from the Middle Ages, or "timeless", or "going about their lives exactly as they have for millenia".

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

They might read about the radicalised and reactionary in the news, granted, but most of those 1.3 billion are neither.

To say Islamism is postmodern is a definition by your lights - as an afficionado of fashionable Western theory - but it's an invalid one. If postmodernism is, shall we say, the lack of a common denominator - truth, God, progress, whatever - leading to self-reflexive finite systems, constructing and refining their own meaning and value, then it's clear that a Muslim is not 'postmodern'. You might be, but you just cannot say he is.

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Unless you enjoy epistemological superiority of course, which you do not.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If postmodernism is, shall we say, the lack of a common denominator - truth, God, progress, whatever - leading to self-reflexive finite systems, constructing and refining their own meaning and value, then it's clear that a Muslim is not 'postmodern'.

9/11 is perhaps the defining event of the "spectacular" period. Mohammed Atta studied architecture and town planning at a German university, for Allah's sake! And you say that postmodernism and Islam are pristine and don't infiltrate each other?

Islam is postmodern to the extent that it has ever, in any way, been in the slightest bit aware of the postmodern West, defined itself in relation to it, or impacted the postmodern West, becoming a spectacular event and part of this West's self-image. And right now Islam is "the designated other" -- what could be more central to the West's self-image?

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Islam is postmodern to the extent that it has ever, in any way, been in the slightest bit aware of the postmodern West, defined itself in relation to it...

OK. I'm a Nazi then.

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

You see my point sir?

And another thing:

And right now Islam is "the designated other" -- what could be more central to the West's self-image?

Again, does the 'West' transcend its individuals and communities? If not, did Westerners' self-understanding change with the switch from Ruskies to Ay-rabs?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid the idea that the people who fought the Nazis became them is not so much of a joke as you might like to believe. Some would say that the only reason we won against the Nazis is that we out-Nazied them (did they nuke anyone? Yet we did) and that Israel's current behaviour is a sort of grim pastiche of what the Nazis did.

And yes, I think Westerners' self-understanding has changed enormously, since the days even of the "New World Odour".

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

My point is that I am not a fascist by virtue of being aware of fascism or of my difference from it. I'm struggling to understand how I could be.

And yes, I think Westerners' self-understanding has changed enormously, since the days even of the "New World Odour".

Because of the switch from Cold War to the 'War on Terror'? There are many and varied people in the West, many ways for them to change in their self-understanding, and many possible causes for any such change. Your assertion suggests a certitude you really can't possess.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Your question then was a rhetorical one, since obviously no answer about Westerners in general would satisfy you? Including the answer that their self-perception had not changed?

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Islam is ... part of this West's self-image. And right now Islam is "the designated other" -- what could be more central to the West's self-image?

The West? What is the West? How does an abstract supra-personal entity have a self-image? Western individuals have self-images, but Islam surely isn't 'central' to them.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Good lord, you're going to tell me "there's no such thing as society, just individual men and women and their families" in a minute!

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Does that mean you'd have preferred it if the Nazis had won World War Two?

Freud's not completely full of Shit

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

Well, since you've made the statement one can assume you've made an identification with Nazis. To say you identify with Nazis is not to say you are one, but rather that you define yourself in terms related to them (e.g. that you are not one). To be not-Nazi is part of who you are, without Nazis existing that part of you would not exist since it cannot be defined as the absence of something which does not exist.

So too, modern Islam identifies with the contemporary West. Certainly it's not the case that Islam is the West, but without the West Islam could not exist as it does; they cannot set themselves up to be different from the West if there is no West or if it is not just as the West is. Therefore, since there was no "the West" when we were in the 15th century, the analogy of Islam to our 15th cen breaks down.

One can say "oh but they're just reverting to older ways" but that begs the question. Why are they returning to older ways? Why did they progress beyond them and then only now decide to undo that? These things don't just happen, there are reasons for them. One such reason may very well be that doing so is a way of their disavowing their identification with the West.

Re: Freud's not completely full of Shit

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

To say you identify with Nazis is not to say you are one, but rather that you define yourself in terms related to them (e.g. that you are not one). To be not-Nazi is part of who you are, without Nazis existing that part of you would not exist since it cannot be defined as the absence of something which does not exist.

What you are saying is this:

not-p is a part of me.

If p didn't exist, neither would the part of me that is not-p

because,

'it' (the part of me that is not-p) needs p to exist for it to be not-p

After 'because' you repeat yourself; the sentence becomes a tautology, and so we can dispense with it.

We're left with the simple question of whether I need the existence of Nazism for (so far undesignated) parts of me to exist. At random:

i) Hitler did not believe in ‘humanity’, but in different nations and peoples with opposing interests that can only be resolved with violence.

Instead of springing into existence only after becoming aware of this aspect of fascism, my belief in the common interests of humanity and peaceful co-operation might stem from pre-fascist systems of thought (Marxist Socialism or Buddhism for example); from my growing up in a multi-cultural society with non-White-English friends; from travelling; from innate good will (!); from reading novels, poems, plays, films; from… anything.

ii) Following (and misappropriating) Nietszche, Hitler believed love, tolerance and humility to be indicative of a slave mentality and inauthentic being.

In believing such things to be good and desirable, I might have taken my cue from the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. Or I might have learned from experience that these qualities make for a harmonious and joyful existence.

iii) Hitler was anti-Semetic.

I might be Jewish.

I won’t labour the point.

Re: Freud's not completely full of Shit

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

You won't labor the point because you have none. You dispense with the notion that one needs p in order to be able to speak of not-p because you believe it to be a tautology. Alas the world is not limited by the binary notion of truth presented in predicate calculus and so speaking in such terms misses the point entirely.

It is irrelevant whether or not you came to have certain beliefs prior to being made aware of Nazism. Even if we presume that such beliefs existed prior to that indoctrination, the fact of the matter is that you were incapable of referring to them in terms related to Nazism because you were unaware of such terms. After being made aware of those terms you become capable of using them to describe these beliefs you posit a priori, and thereby become capable of adding new layers of meaning to your discussion and understanding of those beliefs. Those layers of meaning did not and could not exist prior to the existence of Nazism or the knowledge thereof by yourself or those around you. Therefore the knowledge of these terms creates such beliefs by allowing us to speak of them to delve further into them, regardless of whether something all too similar 'existed' beforehand. And even if we do not use the terms now available to us, the fact that they are available at all changes the meaning of every other term at our disposal and so still changes the meaning, the existence, of such beliefs.

There is no absolute level of truth from which we can look down and claim things to exist or not to exist, and even if there were it would avail us none. Meaning does not exist outside of that which we create. Only through the awareness of history and our situatedness within it gives rise to meaning and allows the existence of interpretation of our actions. You can claim that the fruit we now call "apple" existed prior to our word for it or even mankind itself, but to call such a thing an "apple" is meaningless. For what does "apple" mean? It does not mean simply that aggregation of biomass which grows on a certain species of plant and may be consumed. "Apple" means everything in every context in which the word has ever been uttered. It means the immortality of Hesperides and Dawn, it means greed and discord, it means most beautiful, it means Discordianism, it means The Fall, it means that which we value in our children, it means computers, and a thousand other things besides. None of those things existed before humanity, and none of them before their precipitating events, and yet all of them are now tied up in that one little word. Suddenly it means something if a beautiful woman offers you a fruit with a bite missing out of it. Whether you are Christian or not, that Christianity exists imbues that act with meaning and signification.

Re: Freud's not completely full of Shit

[(Anonymous)]

No, you said the same thing twice. It's a tautology. But that in no way undermines your argument - I was just unravelling the statement for my own benefit. I found it confusing!

Sorry, I haven't time to argue about this at the moment. I appreciate what you're saying.

Eustace

Re: Freud's not completely full of Shit

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I must say, hats off to Wren for excellent "negation of the negation" work here!

Re: Freud's not completely full of Shit

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Bullied by two dogmatic materialist dialecticians!

Actually, I was being concillitary towards Wren (it pained me a little!) and I'm unfortunately pushed for time; there are certainly points at which I see serious problems and misunderstandings in her comments, and there were many important questions I put to you Momus that were ignored or answered poorly.

This whole issue, I hope you are both aware, requires a really rigorous treatment that would cover pages and pages - the examination of premises and their relevance and relation to conclusions certainly would unsettle things you cocksure monkies!

Now I really must sign off - I have a thesis on the feasibility of a reconciliation of Simone Weil's accounts of malheur and beaute in a coherent theory of the nature of God to complete. So no more of this, I'm sorry.

But if you have any suggestions regarding Weil they would be happily recieved...

Now why do I have a feeling that dialectics and the negation of negation will be blithely proffered!

Re: Freud's not completely full of Shit

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

I was so busy before that I could only skim your reply, and giving it a bit more time now I see that there is much value and subtlety in what you say. However, to return to the original issue - Islam and postmodernism - I'll just quote you...

And even if we do not use the terms now available to us, the fact that they are available at all changes the meaning of every other term at our disposal and so still changes the meaning, the existence, of such beliefs.

There is no absolute level of truth from which we can look down and claim things to exist or not to exist, and even if there were it would avail us none. Meaning does not exist outside of that which we create.

...and then say this: we could go on tracing the the relation between Islam and postmodernity in its dialectical complexity, but enough has been said over the course of these threads to indicate what has been my basic point. There is no settling of the debate: Islam's resistance to absorbtion by postmodernity is a refusal to grant that the meanings of Islam are contained and subsumed in postmodern thought and life, and appreciation of that refusal is essential for the 'postmodernist', tempted as she might be to claim a distorted and paradoxical kind of finality that - according to its own theoretical frame - never actually ends.

Now, I know this isn't the conclusion of the debate, but unfortunately it must be my final word for the moment. Thank you both for your very stimulating points of view.

Re: Freud's not completely full of Shit

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

My response is that "Islam" does not exist in any absolute sense either. But rather is constantly brought into existence by the actions of people who, through their very actions, construct themselves as "muslims" who worship Islam just as they construct "Islam" as a religion to be worshiped.

These individual people have desires which draw them towards Westernism and desires which draw them towards Islam (and desires drawing them away from each), and it is through their actions that they can mediate those desires to construct a self with certain beliefs, a certain blend of religion, a certain political stance, etc. And then it is these people taken in aggregate which construct a more singular idea of "Islam" rather than the millions of subtly different religions they each individually follow. There's a sort of recursion because what each person takes to be "Islam" from which they take what to believe and not from which in turn they derive their desires, is the very same "Islam" which they are constructing through their choice to follow it or not (along with the choices of millions of other people).

That Islam is seen as in conflict with Western ideals belies individual muslims' conflicts in choosing between their Islamic and Western desires. But that doesn't necessarily mean there needs to be such a conflict. Both Islam and Westernism are constructed through the actions of their society's members, and so there's no reason they can't find the points of conflict and then change what Islam is and change what Westernism is so that they no longer conflict.

The problem comes in when people say it's not that easy. People believe there actually is such a thing as platonic ideals for Islam and the West, and so believe that they cannot be changed. They believe they must choose between the two, and since they believe them to be solids they believe they must in all circumstances choose one over the other for fear that mixing them will destroy them (and legitimately so, though in their destruction it would also create something new). But religions and societies are ever changing, just rarely consciously.

And to a degree, people cannot realize these platonic ideals do not exist, since doing so means realizing that all social edifice is constructed and so, in a sense, meaningless. But even if they do not exist as platonic ideals, they are real. Just because they are fluid and dynamic does not mean they have any less meaning or power. People still live and suffer and die for the things they believe, whether they're a religion, notions of civil liberty, conceptions of what it means to be male or female, or anything else.

So in a sense, yes, the meanings of Islam are in conflict with postmodernity. And it is only because postmodernity exists that Islam can be in conflict with it. But Islam itself is a fluid thing, and so it need not always be in conflict with postmodernity.

Re: Freud's not completely full of Shit

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

not-p is a part of me.
If p didn't exist, neither would the part of me that is not-p
because,
'it' (the part of me that is not-p) needs p to exist for it to be not-p

Actually, what I was saying is subtly different than that. It's not that "it" would not exist, but rather that "it" would not be able to be described as "not-p" (since the definition "not-p" requires the existence of p). Consequently, the part of "it" which would have been able to be described as "not-p", with all the nuances that entails, can be said not to exist since we lack the descriptive ability to name, discuss, conceive, or otherwise manipulate it. The remainder of "it" may still exist, but that remainder is different from the initial "it" describable as "not-p" (hence "it" doesn't exist, per se).

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

I think the point that Eustace Plimsoll makes is that the majority of Muslims aren't extreme radicals in any sense. The militant practitioners of Islam are a small minority - just as the radical fundamentalist Christians in the West are a very small minority, compared to rest of Christianity.

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Quite so, Sir Robert.

As I walk down Bethnal Green Road (a Muslim area in East London), I see decent, friendly people: not the rabid psychos the Sun (the UK's most popular newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch) daily portrays Muslims to be.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Whimsy is postmodern despite the 19th century garb

As Whimsy would no doubt point out, his mode of dress is largely 2oth century.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're quite right, he has made the transition (rather dashingly) from 19th to 20th centuries. When I first became aware of him he rode a penny farthing and looked like this: