Mimesis/Liminality/"Je Suis Charlie"/Catharsis-NLP Theater
Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2015 1:16 amI wouldn’t normally be paying attention to this news story because I don’t normally pay attention to the news. Paying attention to this story has underlined why I don’t normally pay attention to the news. Blatant lies and the smug disregard for our intelligence and discernment or our ability or willingness to stop and question the official narrative, that's like watching a really bad movie that knows it's going to make loads of money anyway so doesn't give a shit about what anyone thinks. Insulting but nothing really new there.
The part that hurts me is when the piece of crap gets critical raves and I get to watch people go along with the sham docilely and obediently, like lambs to the epistemological slaughter. But even that wouldn’t bother me if I didn’t have a personal stake in it, which is: I’m supposed to be doing a podcast with someone who joined the “Je Suis Charlie” solidarity movement or whatever-TF it was, and now I feel like the difference in our worldviews has turned into a fault-line rapidly extending in both directions between us—a great divide.
It struck me, while wrestling with this situation and catching up on “world events”—i.e. the dominant narrative—that what I feel above all now is: powerlessness. The idea that this is what “They” want you to feel popped up, of course; but what felt more real to me was that this is how I need to feel. No, I'm not a masochist; it's just that powerlessness is the primal experience of all living beings and it’s also the one we end up staring in the face, one way or another (at least if we see the bullet/truck/terminal disease coming). So why kid ourselves it’s ever any different in between, right?
So feeling powerless is like a State-given opportunity to re-experience and integrate the primary formative experience of (my) life? Yay, thanks Power Elite! All right, whatever; that’s the obligatory philosophical lead-in to what led me to RI after a long hiatus, to see what was up here, seek a little community perhaps, and inhale a breath of relative sanity…
Skimming the thread on Charlie Hebdo, the image of all the white rich folk holding up their JSC banners and wearing their buttons gave me an idea about what’s going on here and why I experience this sort of hypocritical human solidarity (huddling) as so oppressive. It’s mimesis.
Recently I’ve been looking into Liminality; it started as a literary interest but I quickly found out how closely it pertains to other areas of personal interest, include socio-political.
Wiki:
Mimesis brings us to Rene Girard, whose work I recommend to anyone interested in reaching a better meta-understanding of current events. Here’s a summation for dummies (by a dummy, so grit your teeth if you are already well-versed in Girardism): Mimetic rivalry is when/how mimesis leads inevitably to violence, because when imitation spreads, two things happen: people desire what other people have and end up using violence to get it; and, as violence spreads in an already heightened environment of mimesis, the violence itself is imitated and escalates to the point that it becomes irrational, undirected, primal, an uncontained frenzy of killing, like a forest fire.
Girard sees this as probably the primary threat to all communities and civilization in general. Community can’t work together without mimesis, yet mimesis leads to mimetic rivalry which leads to violence which leads to the destruction of community. How to square this frikkin circle?
The solution Girard traces through civilization is that of the scapegoat: an individual or individuals whom the community on the edge of chaos first agrees is guilty, and then gets to participate in some way in his destruction. The Greeks acted this ritual out via cathartic theater, Oedipus being the main scapegoat-figure, and it was crucial in Greek theater that the killing of the scapegoat was enacted off-stage, because to see the violence would risk enflaming the crowd with blood lust. It’s interesting to note in relation to this how the recent Charlie killers were caught and killed off-camera, even though everything else got filmed. It was similar with Adam Lanza/Sandy Hook, and even Osama bin Laden, if memory serves.
After the scapegoat sacrifice has been made, the community is bound together by the ritual killing and experiences a new degree of solidarity. Whatever differences were threatening to tear the community apart have been projected onto the guilty party—whose difference is so marked that it reduces the community’s internal conflicts to nothing—redirecting the fear and hostility outward while unifying the desire by focusing it on an external element: something that the whole community can share in together, rather than fight over.
“Je Suis Charlie” is the unified voice of the community expressing its solidarity, agreement, over this “wrong” committed and the corresponding “rightness” of recognizing the “wrongness”: basically: “Them bad—us good!”
The funny thing is that the designated Other that threatens the community only does so because it desires the same things but goes about getting them in a different way.
In the current global narrative, the two opposing communities are Islam (meaning surrender!) and Western/Christian “freedom.” “Je Suis Charlie,” if I grok correctly what people are huddling together about, is an expression of the sanctity of “free speech,” in contrast to the evil intolerance of fanatical Islam. Yet, as has been pointed out, France has plenty of laws against free speech when they are considered “hate crimes,” only these laws are generally not extended to Moslems. Even more revealingly, the reaction to this latest (seemingly staged, pls note!) event has been to further reduce freedom of expression within the Western world under the guise of defending freedom of expression!
I am just groping my way through this material now, but this seems to relate to something called “the double bind”:
So double-bind = powerlessness??
After that the next passage was this one:
Or, the afore-mentioned paradox in which standing up for free speech means imposing ever-more draconian laws against free speech.
Step away from the theater. This ain’t rock n’ roll. This is suicide.
The part that hurts me is when the piece of crap gets critical raves and I get to watch people go along with the sham docilely and obediently, like lambs to the epistemological slaughter. But even that wouldn’t bother me if I didn’t have a personal stake in it, which is: I’m supposed to be doing a podcast with someone who joined the “Je Suis Charlie” solidarity movement or whatever-TF it was, and now I feel like the difference in our worldviews has turned into a fault-line rapidly extending in both directions between us—a great divide.
It struck me, while wrestling with this situation and catching up on “world events”—i.e. the dominant narrative—that what I feel above all now is: powerlessness. The idea that this is what “They” want you to feel popped up, of course; but what felt more real to me was that this is how I need to feel. No, I'm not a masochist; it's just that powerlessness is the primal experience of all living beings and it’s also the one we end up staring in the face, one way or another (at least if we see the bullet/truck/terminal disease coming). So why kid ourselves it’s ever any different in between, right?
So feeling powerless is like a State-given opportunity to re-experience and integrate the primary formative experience of (my) life? Yay, thanks Power Elite! All right, whatever; that’s the obligatory philosophical lead-in to what led me to RI after a long hiatus, to see what was up here, seek a little community perhaps, and inhale a breath of relative sanity…
Skimming the thread on Charlie Hebdo, the image of all the white rich folk holding up their JSC banners and wearing their buttons gave me an idea about what’s going on here and why I experience this sort of hypocritical human solidarity (huddling) as so oppressive. It’s mimesis.
Recently I’ve been looking into Liminality; it started as a literary interest but I quickly found out how closely it pertains to other areas of personal interest, include socio-political.
Wiki:
During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt.
Liminality in large-scale societies differs significantly from liminality found in ritual passages in small-scale societies. One primary characteristic of liminality (as defined van Gennep and Turner) is that there is a way in as well as a way out. In ritual passages, “members of the society are themselves aware of the liminal state: they know that they will leave it sooner or later, and have ‘ceremony masters’ to guide them through the rituals”. However, in those liminal periods that affect society as a whole, the future (what comes after the liminal period) is completely unknown, and there is no "ceremony master" who has gone through the process before and that can lead people out of it.
In such cases, liminal situations can become dangerous. They allow for the emergence of “self-proclaimed ceremony masters”, that assume leadership positions and attempt to “[perpetuate] liminality and by emptying the liminal moment of real creativity, [turn] it into a scene of mimetic rivalry”
Mimesis, or the imitative aspect of human behavior, is an important aspect of liminality. Individuals who are trapped in a liminal situation are not able to act rationally for two reasons: “first, because the structure on which ‘objective’ rationality was-- based has disappeared; and second, because the stressful, emotive character of a liminal crisis prevents clear thinking”. This can lead to “mimetic” behavior on the part of the trapped individuals: “a central characteristic of liminal situations is that, by eliminating the stable boundary lines, they contribute to the proliferation of imitative processes and thus to the continuous reproduction of dominant messages about what to copy”. Without stable institutions (which are effectively broken down in a liminal period), “people will look at concrete individuals for guidance.”
Mimesis brings us to Rene Girard, whose work I recommend to anyone interested in reaching a better meta-understanding of current events. Here’s a summation for dummies (by a dummy, so grit your teeth if you are already well-versed in Girardism): Mimetic rivalry is when/how mimesis leads inevitably to violence, because when imitation spreads, two things happen: people desire what other people have and end up using violence to get it; and, as violence spreads in an already heightened environment of mimesis, the violence itself is imitated and escalates to the point that it becomes irrational, undirected, primal, an uncontained frenzy of killing, like a forest fire.
Girard sees this as probably the primary threat to all communities and civilization in general. Community can’t work together without mimesis, yet mimesis leads to mimetic rivalry which leads to violence which leads to the destruction of community. How to square this frikkin circle?
The solution Girard traces through civilization is that of the scapegoat: an individual or individuals whom the community on the edge of chaos first agrees is guilty, and then gets to participate in some way in his destruction. The Greeks acted this ritual out via cathartic theater, Oedipus being the main scapegoat-figure, and it was crucial in Greek theater that the killing of the scapegoat was enacted off-stage, because to see the violence would risk enflaming the crowd with blood lust. It’s interesting to note in relation to this how the recent Charlie killers were caught and killed off-camera, even though everything else got filmed. It was similar with Adam Lanza/Sandy Hook, and even Osama bin Laden, if memory serves.
After the scapegoat sacrifice has been made, the community is bound together by the ritual killing and experiences a new degree of solidarity. Whatever differences were threatening to tear the community apart have been projected onto the guilty party—whose difference is so marked that it reduces the community’s internal conflicts to nothing—redirecting the fear and hostility outward while unifying the desire by focusing it on an external element: something that the whole community can share in together, rather than fight over.
“Je Suis Charlie” is the unified voice of the community expressing its solidarity, agreement, over this “wrong” committed and the corresponding “rightness” of recognizing the “wrongness”: basically: “Them bad—us good!”
The funny thing is that the designated Other that threatens the community only does so because it desires the same things but goes about getting them in a different way.
In the current global narrative, the two opposing communities are Islam (meaning surrender!) and Western/Christian “freedom.” “Je Suis Charlie,” if I grok correctly what people are huddling together about, is an expression of the sanctity of “free speech,” in contrast to the evil intolerance of fanatical Islam. Yet, as has been pointed out, France has plenty of laws against free speech when they are considered “hate crimes,” only these laws are generally not extended to Moslems. Even more revealingly, the reaction to this latest (seemingly staged, pls note!) event has been to further reduce freedom of expression within the Western world under the guise of defending freedom of expression!
I am just groping my way through this material now, but this seems to relate to something called “the double bind”:
The double bind is often misunderstood to be a simple contradictory situation, where the subject is trapped by two conflicting demands. While it's true that the core of the double bind is two conflicting demands, the difference lies in how they are imposed upon the subject, what the subject's understanding of the situation is, and who (or what) imposes these demands upon the subject. Unlike the usual no-win situation, the subject has difficulty in defining the exact nature of the paradoxical situation in which he or she is caught.
Girard's mimetic double bind
… According to Girard, the “internal mediation” of this mimetic dynamic “operates along the same lines as what Gregory Bateson called the ‘double bind’.” Girard found in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory, a precursor to mimetic desire. “The individual who 'adjusts' has managed to relegate the two contradictory injunctions of the double bind—to imitate and not to imitate—to two different domains of application. This is, he divides reality in such a way as to neutralize the double bind.” While critical of Freud's doctrine of the unconscious mind, Girard sees the ancient Greek tragedy, Oedipus the King, and key elements of Freud's Oedipus complex, patricidal and incestuous desire, to serve as prototypes for his own analysis of the mimetic double bind.
Far from being restricted to a limited number of pathological cases, as American theoreticians suggest, the double bind—a contradictory double imperative, or rather a whole network of contradictory imperatives—is an extremely common phenomenon. In fact, it is so common that it might be said to form the basis of all human relationships.
Bateson is undoubtedly correct in believing that the effects of the double bind on the child are particularly devastating. All the grown-up voices around him, beginning with those of the father and mother (voices which, in our society at least, speak for the culture with the force of established authority) exclaim in a variety of accents, “Imitate us!” “Imitate me!” “I bear the secret of life, of true being!” The more attentive the child is to these seductive words, and the more earnestly he responds to the suggestions emanating from all sides, the more devastating will be the eventual conflicts. The child possesses no perspective that will allow him to see things as they are. He has no basis for reasoned judgments, no means of foreseeing the metamorphosis of his model into a rival. This model's opposition reverberates in his mind like a terrible condemnation; he can only regard it as an act of excommunication. The future orientation of his desires—that is, the choice of his future models—will be significantly affected by the dichotomies of his childhood. In fact, these models will determine the shape of his personality.
If desire is allowed its own bent, its mimetic nature will almost always lead it into a double bind. The unchanneled mimetic impulse hurls itself blindly against the obstacle of a conflicting desire. It invites its own rebuffs and these rebuffs will in turn strengthen the mimetic inclination. We have, then, a self-perpetuating process, constantly increasing in simplicity and fervor. Whenever the disciple borrows from his model what he believes to be the “true” object, he tries to possess that truth by desiring precisely what this model desires. Whenever he sees himself closest to the supreme goal, he comes into violent conflict with a rival. By a mental shortcut that is both eminently logical and self-defeating, he convinces himself that the violence itself is the most distinctive attribute of this supreme goal! Ever afterward, violence will invariably awaken desire...
—René Girard, Violence and the Sacred “From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double”, pp.156–157
So double-bind = powerlessness??
After that the next passage was this one:
Neuro-linguistic programming
The field of neuro-linguistic programming also makes use of the expression "double bind". Grinder and Bandler (both of whom had personal contact with Bateson) asserted that a message could be constructed with multiple messages, whereby the recipient of the message is given the impression of choice—although both options have the same outcome at a higher level of intention. This is called a "double bind" in NLP terminology, and has applications in both sales and therapy. In therapy, the practitioner may seek to challenge destructive double binds that limit the client in some way and may also construct double binds in which both options have therapeutic consequences. In a sales context, the speaker may give the respondent the illusion of choice between two possibilities. For example, a salesperson might ask: "Would you like to pay cash or by credit card?", with both outcomes presupposing that the person will make the purchase; whereas the third option (that of not buying) is intentionally excluded from the spoken choices.
Note that in the NLP context, the use of the phrase "double bind" does not carry the primary definition of two conflicting messages; it is about creating a false sense of choice which ultimately binds to the intended outcome. In the "cash or credit card?" example, this is not a "Bateson double bind" since there is no contradiction, although it still is an "NLP double bind". Similarly if a salesman were selling a book about the evils of commerce, it could perhaps be a "Bateson double bind" if the buyer happened to believe that commerce was evil, yet felt compelled or obliged to buy the book.
Or, the afore-mentioned paradox in which standing up for free speech means imposing ever-more draconian laws against free speech.
Step away from the theater. This ain’t rock n’ roll. This is suicide.
, what are power people trying to do?
