#self-other

[impoliticwestie]

'It was a nightmare. I was outside myself. She was inside me.'

[redshift-13]

More impressive than I can describe.  

The poems are replete with hints of an exalted way of being just beyond current reach.  Rumi often speaks of Shams, his spiritual mentor and mystical intimate.  What did they talk about?  (Certainly, conversations that would last the ages.)  What could they communicate without speaking, with gesture and glance, with the voice of the eyes?

I often wonder when reading Rumi about what would happen if you were to meet that other person who would complement you in profound ways, bring to a highest pitch your compassionate self, your inner knowing, your creativity, your rebellion, your knowledge, your self acceptance, your vulnerability—any one of these or some combination.  

This is one of the books I’ll always have with me, along with my late grandmother’s early 20th century copy of Leaves of Grass, a few picture books, Proust, various poetry books.

Note to self: Meditate, then read Rumi, then imagine my life anew.

[hersaffroneyeballs]

Fanon proposes that in the system of power-knowledge that upholds colonialism, it is the white man who lays claim to the category of the Other, the white man who monopolizes otherness to secure an illusion of unfettered access to subjectivity. Deploying the conventional psychoanalytic grammar of "the other" and "the Other" to distinguish between imaginary and symbolic difference, or between primary and secondary identification, Fanon implies that the black man under colonial rule finds himself relegated to a position other than the Other. Colonialism works in part by policing the boundaries of cultural intelligibility, legislating and regulating which identities attain full cultural signification and which do not. For the black man, the implications of his exclusion from the cultural field of symbolization are immediate and devastating. If psychoanalysis is right to claim that "I is an Other", then otherness constitutes the very entry into subjectivity; subjectivity names the detour through the Other provides access to a fictive sense of self. Space operates as one of the chief signifiers of racial difference where: under colonial rule, freedom of movement (psychical and social) becomes a white prerogative. Forced to occupy, in a white racial phantasm, the static ontological space of the timeless "primitive," the black man is disenfranchised of his very subjectivity. Denied entry into the alterity that underwrites subjectivity, the black man, Fanon implies, is sealed instead into a "crushing objecthood." Black may be a protean imaginary other for white, but for itself it is a stationary "object"; substituting for true alterity, blocks the migration through the Other necessary for subjectivity to take place.

Diana Fuss, Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification

[scienceanddogs]

Blurred Lines: Social Bonds Blur Distinctions Between Self and Other

Feeling what another feels; stepping into someone’s shoes; entering into another’s inner life;…

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[thesacred-and-theprofane]

Although the autonomous Western self has long been an object of anthropological critique, it is also the case that the fieldwork process itself still largely proceeds by a self–other conception (e.g., it without exception guides the training model of dissertation fieldwork), where the introspective, autonomous, individualized anthropologist self is the organizing trope for narrating ethnography.

Marcus, Clifford. 2012. Cultural Anthropology 27 (1): 170.

[onlyspeakifyouimprovesilenc-blog]

This is the real secret to eloquence.

Michael Landy's "Acts of Kindness" on the Tube, is worth noticing if you want to be a great speaker. Landy's expression "Self-Other" is a good reminder of the maxim for performers: Eighty percent attention on other (are my audience getting what they want and need?), twenty percent on self (am I breathing low?, going slow enough?, how much time is left?). As David Hare puts it, nerves are vanity. When it comes to performance, once you are structured (and that in itself is about a gift to the audience), self means little, other is EVERYTHING.