Transformative Politics – A Brief Departure

[This is from the old Slant Truth. It was originally posted on 22 September, 2006]

This is part of what I read this morning and I thought I’d share. Just some ideas to think about.

From an essay by Terry Eagleton on Georg Luk�cs¹

Changing the world involved a curious kind of doublethink. For us to act effectively, the mind must buckle itself austerely to the actual, in the belief that knowing the situation for what it is is the source of all moral and political wisdom. The only trouble is that such knowledge is also desperately hard to come by, and perhaps in any complete sense unattainable. What is difficult is not so much solutions, but grasping the way it is with a particular bit of the world. If you get this right, it will intimate the kind of solutions you should look to. Answers are not the hardest thing.

The problem is not that there are many competing versions of how it is with the world, including the postmodern belief that it is no way in particular; it is also that to bow our minds submissively to the actual requires a humility and self-effacement which the clamorous ego finds hard to stomach. It is an unglamorous business, distasteful to the fantasising, chronically self-deceiving human mind. Seeing things for what they are is in the end possible only for the virtuous.

There is no point in demanding an end to capitalism if the system was wound up several decades ago and one has simply failed to notice. In this broad sense, all prescriptions about what to do imply descriptions of what is the case. Values must be in some sense linked to facts. But at the very moment the mind is required to be chaste, rigorous and self-forgetful, it is also asked to spurn the actual in the name of the possible.

It must combine the indicative mood ² with the subjunctive one ³, yoking a coldly demystified sense of the present to a warmly imaginative leap beyond it. It must repsect and refuse the world in the same act. The mind is called upon to be both mirror and lamp, faithfully reflecting its surroundings while shedding a transformative light upon them. The flights of fantasy which get in the way of trying to see the situation straight are vital to imagining an alternative to it. We must be moved by visions of a future in which men and women would be made physically sick by the act of dominating others, while remaining stony-faced and churlishly suspicious before the blandishments of the present. If the Romantic conforms the world to his or her desire, and the realist conforms the mind to the world, the revolutionary is called upon to do both at once.

In this sense, radical politics demand a strangely hybrid kind of human being, one who is both more sceptical and more trustful than the average run of folk. Such characters are more gloomy in their view of the past and present than most conservatives, but also more open to a transformed future than most liberal reformists. Because what is awry with the the present is a structural affair, it runs far deeper than individual folly or knavery, which is the bad news; but for the same reason it can in principle be changed, which is the good news. It is when radicals are decried as Jeremiahs by the liberals and as starry-eyed utopianists byt he conservatives that they know they have got it more or less right.

1. Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent (London: Verso, 2005). [↩]
2. For the non English major, the indicative mood expresses facts or a factual condition, e.g. “Kevin is damned” [↩]
3. The subjunctive mood expresses wishes, possibilites, hypotheses, things that aren’t true presently, e.g. Kevin be damned [↩]

Transformative Politics — More Quoatations (or Rigidity Means Death)

[This is from the old Slant Truth. It was originally posted on 26 September, 2006]

*I leave these posts not only to introduce or remind others of important writers who have or are currently influencing my thinking, but also as notes for future reference that I hope to draw back on (or critique) in the future. I do hope that if you aren’t familiar with the writers I excerpt here that you take the time to check them out in more detail.

From Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza ¹ by Gloria Anzalda:

Within us and within La cultura chicana, ² commonly held beliefs of the white culture attack commonly held beliefs of the Mexican culture, and both attack commonly held beliefs of the indigenous culture. Subconsciously, we see an attack on ourselves and our beliefs as a threat and we attempt to block with a counterstance.

But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs, and, for this, it is proudly defiant. All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with authority–outer as well as inner–it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and seperate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

A TOLERANCE FOR AMBIGUITY

These numerous possibilites leave la mestiza floundering in uncharted seas. In perceiving conflicting information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. She has discovered that she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. Only be reremaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a singe goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, ³ characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rahter than exludes.

The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode–nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.

She can be jarred out of ambivalence by an intense, and often painful, emotional event which inverts or resolves the ambivalence. I’m not sure exactly how. The work takes place underground–subconsciously. It is work that the soul performs. That focal point of fulcrum, that juncture where the mestiza stands, is where phenomena tend to collide. It is where the possibility of uniting all that is seperate occurs. This assembly is not one where severed or separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness–a mestiza consciousness–and though it is a source of intense pain, it’s energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm.

En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos–that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselvese, and the ways we behave–la mestiza creates a new consiousness.

The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consiousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.

LA ENCRUCIJADA/THE CROSSROADS

A chicken is being sacrificed
at the crossroads, a simple mound of earth
a mud shrine for Eshu,
Yoruba ⁴ god of indeterminacy,
who blesses her choice of path.
She beings her journey.

So cuerpo es una bocacalle. La mestiza has gone from being the sacrifical goat to becoming the officiating priestess at the crossroads.

1. Gloria Anzalda, “From Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et. al. (New York: W W Norton & Company, 2001), 2211-2223. [↩]
2. Chicanos are portrayed by Anzalda as existing between Anglo (white European) U.S. culture and the indigenous Native American culture of both Mexico and the United States [Editor's note]. [↩]
3. In part, I derive my definitions for “convergent” and “divergent” thinking from Rothenberg, 12-13 [Anzalda's note]. [↩]
4. One of the two largest ethnic groups in Nigeria; many Carribbean and Latin American blacks come from the Yoruba and have retained elements of the ancestral culture [Editor's note]. Eshu particularly is a subject of my own scholarly interests [Kevin's note]. [↩]

Transformative Politics — A Manifesto of Sorts (The Beginning)

[This is from the old Slant Truth. It was originally posted on 12 September, 2006]

I begin this with a series of statements of purpose:

1. Art and creativity are not so different from science and rationality. Indeed, they all spring from the same fountain. You can not have one without the other. They all have their beginnings in what Einstein called a “holy curiousity.”

2. Resistance is often not pretty. If you are trying to appease everyone all of the time, if you are trying to create a world where everyone agrees with you, if you are trying to bend the world to your will, you are more than likely not committed to real social and transformational change. The fact of the matter is that often people that are fighting against the status quo must speak and act in terms that are not polite. They must speak and often offend even those that are their friends. But it is important to remember that self-reflection, the ability to recognize that sometimes you are wrong, that you have missed the boat, that you must rethink your thesis and alter it, is key. A transformative politics must be willing to undergo revision.