Posts Tagged ‘Psychology’
Dust on the mirror…
“How can we be sure that we are not impostors ?”
Jacques Lacan
Ever since Lacan it has been common enough to understand our Self as being a psychological entity defined reflexively through the image(s) we perceive, interpret or project upon the world. That the image in the mirror of culture, language, media and narrative represents something of an idealised and eternally unattainable complete and perfect symbol of a notional psychological wholeness is of no great contention. We human beings are narrative creatures – we tell stories, we gossip, we collect anecdotes and news items. Our psychological essence is, in many ways, a composite or amalgam of many creatively fabricated, collected and thoroughly plagiarised stories which we manage to weave into one grand narrative of Self. This makes our temporal, time-based existence and our cognitive understanding of this sound very fragmented, partial, incomplete and unsettled. It appears this way because it is incomplete and fragmented and in a fundamental way.
On Conflict, Gender and Rethinking the Battlefield
Conflict. While I do not think that letting select issues just “fly under the radar” will solve any problems I get a feeling that fighting across well-worn battlefields will only obscure the ultimate goals of reducing the need for conflict at all. I am responding creatively here to a previous post about the predominance and apparently endless ascendency of Man and masculinity at the cost of Woman. I agree that there is a certain undeniable centrality and power that has been assumed by the male in relation to the female in culture, history, media, politics and so on. However – I feel that the battle is being fought over ground so wretched with despair and the intellectual corpses of so many great thinkers that it has come to resemble a kind of Somme battlefield of muddy and endless carnage and destruction. I frame this as a separate discussion than that of the analysis and uncovering of the many ways in which men do exploit, dominate and abuse women – the argument as demonstrated here is about what may be underlying issues to this gender imbalance.
On Borders and Beyond
We all live in a world which is in so many ways defined by boundaries, borders, measurements, limitations and attributed (arbitrary) values. That these various metrics are themselves only really tools with which to understand the world was long ago obscured by a culture and society that has become enamoured of it’s own image, projected upon the world, and mistaken for the essential reality underlying that world. That the boundaries, borders and many measurements we make of the world, that we impose upon the world, are not themselves the actual world they refer to appears to be illustrative a of deep error in our existential calculus. The old Zen proverb about the finger that points to the moon not itself being the moon is a salient reminder of the limitations of language, of number and of measurement or differentiation.
