Currencies of our Society: My Personal Crisis

I recall one morning, speaking to my Social Theory lecturer, Prof Burton, commenting on Postmodernism, telling him that the central problem I had with "thinking in a postmodern way was that their were no handles, and the arguments or sketches provided by postmodernist thinkers just never seemed to land... they remained afloat in the air of academic jargon, so to speak". My professor, without even thinking too deeply about what I had raised, within a split second said to me, "perhaps your inability to think in a postmodernist way is proof of how deeply oppressed your mind has become amidst the prevalent systems of analysis..." and that was it. Lol. I truly enjoy our intellectual encounters.

 

This particular encounter happened some 7 months ago, but it left we extremely uneasy. I am particularly petty in the sense that my mind tends to become easily obsessed with every small claim I encounter on the daily basis. The possibility that perhaps all I knew and understood was merely a prescribed system of order to provide a basis for imbuing familiarity upon social life was too much for me to dismiss. And I subsequently pondered considerably around this claim's possibility.

 

Perhaps nowhere else does one find a similar unrest, and upheaval, to distill reality than within the realm of feminist thinking. Naively, in the past, I dismissed faminism as merely a political activity aimed at engendering a fairness between the sexes. However, further reading into feminism has awakened me to the possibility that perhaps the oppression of women points towards a different sort of oppression that is incurred by both men and women together. In simple terms, "he who enslaves another must commit a large amount of resources and will to ensure that the oppressed party remains a slave." Below, I will attempt to put these seemingly isolated paragraphs into something coherent, using my personal crisis as an illustration.

 

Feminist thinkers, especially those who theorize about the formulation of identity at the infancy stage, essentially argue that the human being, is born with an amorpheous slate of mind. As the child experiences the world, be it through engagements with the family and other people generally, they begin to acquire a sense of self that is distinct and separate from the objects, inclusive of people, that constitute social reality. With this development of self, comes the stratification of the mind, the psyche, that imprints upon the very soul of the person a sort of blueprint for all manner of social transactions. The individual is coded with a lingu franca so to speak, that is essentially the very, albeit intangible, material that composes and orders the social world as it operates. This means therefore that the individual becomes instrumentalized to think and know in a manner that is ingredient for the continuity of the social machinary. By the time the individual comes to see themselves as female or male, they are not only seeing this difference of sex as a matter of mere nomenclature, but rather, this view of self is in fact the self itself, along with all the blueprinting that permits any kind of functioning within the social setup. Essentially, for feminists, this is how patriarchy continues to be self recreating. It activates itself continuously via the creation of new "humans". Anything outside that strict definition of human is insane or not human, just as Foucault argued in his The Order of Things.

 

Personnally, and in deeply reflecting upon my own life, I find that I agree with the transactory aspects of these postulations. Social transactions, here standing for all manner of intra- and inter-human engagement, are not at all natural. They are in fact, despite being realities in themselves, actual manifestations of people's individual blueprints. We hear not merely because there is the propagation of sound through the air, but also because what is spoken co-relates with what we have already been inscribed with as persons within our stratified minds. Take for instance, language. We understand a language because we already know that language. The resultant harmony and coordinated essences of social life vis-a-vis could therefore be seen as, to put it mildly, the familiarities seen in what is completely unfamiliar by human conduits, who relate with each other based on the interplay between internal databases and external things. This position is similiar to what Sassaure and subsequent others argued about signs (signiers and signieds, and even Derrida's critique of the text).

 

Because I lost my mother when I was 12, and then my father when I was 20, I had to, from that age of 12, adopt a view of life that instrumentalized all material and immaterial resources for my own survival and betterment. This attitude forced me to see my environment, both inside and outside myself, as a vast array of affordances or a storehouse of equipment. My duty was to reach into that environment and attempt to form any number of tools that would help improve my position in terms of survival. As a result, even culture seized to overcast me, rather, I reduced it to a mere toolbox for solutions. If certain aspects of that culture proved irrelevant to my survival, I discarded them. If they proved useful, I kept them. Culture became merely a tool for me, as did all other things in the social environment. The one thing I did not anticipate though was that once I had turned my social reality into nothing more than a catalogue of affordances, the very essences and blueprints that I had been imbued within me as a child would also change both in terms of what I meant when I wished to extend meaning, as well as what I heard when others, external to me, attempted to transact meaning. In short, I had began to fracture my blueprint to violate what constituted a normal social transaction. The result, as years when on, in my early twenties, I began to experience a significant crisis of identity. I simply could not relate to much of what was going on in society - that is, much of everything had lost all meaning to me. Furthermore, I felt as though everytime I attempted to render a meaning towards the social, that meaning was often not understood. The only thing I new for a fact was my deep love for my sister. That was never in any state of doubt.

 

To translate all this abstraction into something tangible, and in returning back to my earlier take on feminism, even my relations with members of the opposite sex seemed off. My approach to any kind of relationship is that everything around us and within us was ultimately at our disposal to use for the betterment of ourselves and our relationship in the long run. I would often hear, amongst the more self-aware and outspoken female counterparts, powerful arguments for equality and their aspirations to see a different organization of the social in which men and women had the same status. I must admit that I had never thought about gender issues much except that I simply did not see why men were valued more in society than women simply because it just didnt seat well with any kind of value-free logic, and secondly because amidst the rampant poverty in Malawi, I did not see why I would want to oppress my wife if her success in her profession gave us a better chance to survive and live under more favorable conditions. Again, for me, life is all about affordances and culture is nothing more than a tool that I can be discarded or enforced on the strict basis of relevance.

 

But when I would then get closer to these powerful advocates of equality, I often found that their blueprint for functioning socially was still very much hardwired towards maintaining the prevalent social contract that informed social transactions. To cut a long story short, a man who keeps coming back to the women he is dating or to whom he is married to confer with her over every matter under the sun is simply viewed as a weak man in my society, and such relationships are often doomed to failured. Its almost like, right in our souls, we are only able to relate with one another on the basis of domination and oppression. The prison of patriachy that the activist so powerfully criticizes is also the basis for that activists' own security. The severing of the social order that prescribed meaning and purpose to the entire array of social objects and things we encounter daily for a newer one is too unsettling. Furthermore, in much the same way as I felt when I told my professor that I could not think in a postmodern way, we, both men and women, are simply so deeply "oppressed" by our current arrangements that we simply would not have a language that would permit us to familiarize ourselves with a blank, value-free reality absent of the ordering forces of culture, of "present society", of patriarchy. So the man must continue to man the cage, and the women must continue to woman the space within that cage, and humanity must continue to organize itself around the very limited experience of guards and prisoners that makes up society as we know it.

 

In conclusion.... well, there is no conclusion, except that it is entirely possible to feel completely alien to ones own social environment despite having been produced by and grown up in it. Secondly, a huge amount of helplessness can characterize a life in which one observes the actions of some many others and wonders why those actions are given such transcendental meaning. Why women in Zambia must see themselves as the sole liabilities for failures in their marriages, singing songs such as "I was nothing but today my vagina has set me free" at their weddings. Why women in Zimbabwe must go to great lengths to practice and become experts of the bedroom, going so far as to even make sure that their husbands pleasantries are kept nicely clean and tidy with an assortment of bedside hand towels and scented soaps (as if the man was not able to clean his own body). Why women in Malawi testify proudly about what is clearly oppressive and unfair treatment when men sleep outside the home, blaming their own inability to tame their own loins on one or another inadequacy of the wife.

 

These are simply observations and criticisms I am making about instances of already set up "patriarchical" institutions. A feminist would perhaps argue that all such institutions ought to be abolished in the first place before true transformation can occur. That is, to deliberately castrate the institutional aspects of the social system so as to limit its damning instrumentalization of people. Because in simple terms, oppression and generally "order" is just the language we speak. As Derrida so prolifically summed it all up, albeit in a somewhat different analysis, "there is nothing outside the text". Surely, as a young man who has sought to critique his own culture, there truly is a crisis of identity beyond the cultural transcript of society. However, we must be willing to develop a new system of transactions that would permit us to arrive at a more just and fair society. That transcript could in fact be the genesis of a new modernity, in which social currencies carry within them inherent essences of equality as well as an internal call for expansion and freedom. A society whose anchoring locality, which is presently a system of guards and prisoners, is delocalized into a different system even though I am not able to name it or describe it, so to speak. Recall, there is nothing beyond the text - or to put it sternly, what is not within the realm of transactory currencies, including language, simply does not exist. Fatalistic, huh?

 

I know, there are numerous detours in the course of this writing. But I hope the gist has been transmitted accordingly. Thanks for reading.

 

Cheers!

Intentional Reflexivity: A note on Malawi's Culture within the Discourses of Modernism

Recently, the Justice Minister of Malawi announced the suspension of anti-gay legislation pending further deliberations on the same in Malawi's Parliament. Well, several human rights organizations including, most notably, Amnesty International applauded the move as an unprecedented step forward in the history of this matter in Malawi particularly, and  perhaps even in Africa generally. While it is not the concern of this article to talk directly about this particular case, I would like to point it out that it is unconstitutional for any member of the executive to suspend or shelve any law in Malawi. Those functions are strictly reserved for the Judiciary and the Parliament ONLY. It was surprising that our good old Western Government buddies who are so quick to point out our failures in governance have not yet raised concerns, as they usually do concerning every small thing in Malawi, about this gross violation of the principle of separation of powers. Furthermore, in terms of the social psyche of our country, it proves my earlier arguments in this blog in which I have stated that in Malawi, activism and political participation is not necessarily about Constitutionalism, rather, it is about livelihoods. As long as livelihoods are not threatened by Executive decisions, then nobody cares about what the executive does. Any upheavals resulting from such executive actions are primarily informed by culture as a standard for practises in a democracy as opposed to a reflection of what constitutes democratic practise within the ambids of the Republic's Constitution. As such, activism seldom about the principles of constitutionalism; it’s about the pocket and the stomach. But let’s move right along...

When the Europeans first arrived on the shores of the African continent, they did not find paradise. They found societies. Societies with positives as well as negatives, just like all other societies of the world. Over the next several decades and centuries, they embarked on various projects driven by whatever political and economic pursuits they wanted to realize. Some of the more notable ones were slave-trade and colonialism which impacted on the African continent in a myriad of ways. In fact, such were their pursuits that even some economic-historian scholars have argued that the World Wars of 1914 and 1940 were really wars over African colonies. Their arguments are compelling even though we can’t side-step great atrocious evils suffered by some races simply because other races foolishly thought they were superior. Perhaps it would be better to presume that those wars were the articulation of the various interests of different powerful actors of that period. *I only comment on the war here to skip to the next section of my discussion which is the independence phase of African states.

However, the next couple of decades following the Second World War period saw several African countries attain independence, including Malawi in the 1960s. The following years after independence, African States sought legitimation by projecting government as the solution to the huge number of socio-economic problems that beset African countries. Discourses were marred within the contradictions of efforts to reclaim an African identity, which was supposedly lost due to colonialism and Western activists on the African continent, and the need to modernize and attain to the very same standards of life in Western societies albeit mostly seen via the very same vehicle of colonization.

Overtime, a rapture occurred as the liberationists (the African movements that rose to power after gaining independence) begun to use the material as well as immaterial essences of modernization to portray power and prestige on the one hand, while preaching a message of Africanization on the other to pacify the people into an acceptance of their deplorable conditions. The matter of the African identity became conflated with African culture, and African culture became anything that legitimized the ailing state of leadership on the continent. For example, it was African culture for the President to be seen as the father of the nation and therefore he was infallable and beyond reproach. Meanwhile, the father figure enriched himself and his cronies using that same culture as a means of legimitzing his poor style of governance. Its my opinion that culture, however it was defined, became instrumentalized for oppression.

Furthermore, these were, in a Sociological view, the early indications of the failure of the Africanization project promised at independence. Subsequent occurrences such as the commodity price shock that many attribute to the present heavy indebtedness of African countries found fertile ground for its occurrence at time when the State was living beyond its means, and white elephant projects had to be endeavoured in order to portray some kind of socio-economic progress some 30 years after independence. Meanwhile, the liberationists were gaining great wealth from their control of the State and its resources. And the order of business on the continent, which was stricken by great poverty, became about livelihoods. Politics of the belly were beginning to set in. I wish to not articulate this condition further.

Presently, and specifically in Malawi, this contradiction continues to ensue. Case in point, gay rights. The arguments that abound within the social sphere are that gay and lesbian activities are un-African (that is, they are not of African culture). The concept of what is African itself remains more or less as ambiguous as it was in 1960 when the Malawi got its political, and not necessarily economic, independence of the Britain. Meanwhile, large motorcades that escort the presidency are seen as African; State residences all over the country are seen as African; Condom use for sexual relations with multiple partners are seen as African; and so on, and yet the right for two consenting adults to engage in same sex relations are seen as un-African. Bear in mind also that these laws were not introduced by African leaders but rather by colonial masters prior to independence. I only articulate this argument in order to illustrate a point further down, and not to get into the technicalities of what is right or wrong within the Malawian context. By and large, I think our problems aren’t about wrong or right, but rather what is practical and impractical for moving forward in a project of all-inclusive development.

The point I seek to make is thus as follows. A practical way of going about a relevant African renaissance at this point in our history is to come to the acceptance that we need to begin to relate and compare so many things we have held as static with those goals we seek to achieve. This means that we need take stock of our culture, our ways of life, our beliefs, our customs and other social things, and to match them against our goals, our aspirations, our visions. Then we need to realistically reflect on what it is we can hold on it as assets for moving forward and what we need to drop as liabilities. We must reflect upon our own culture and stop seeing it as something that was ordained by God or some sovereign "other" entity. Culture is merely a tool that permits us to see order in our World in an apolitical sense. In a political sense, culture can be and has been instrumentalized on this continent for illegitimate forms of rule and pacification for deplorable living conditions. For me, the question is no longer about what is modern versus what is traditional. It’s more a matter of what works and what doesn’t.

Modernism then becomes a project of cultural reflexivity and not necessarily a project of attempting to be like Britain or America or Japan. It is simply the task of equipping ourselves towards the betterment of ourselves within the prevalent condition of our times. In this sense, all things become African if they are used to our betterment and progress. And all things become un-African if they hamper that progress. If wearing miniskirts assists our efforts to empower, to put it in an African manner, our beloved sisters, then so be it (*satirically speaking). However and fortunately, the nature of our problems are characterized by evident conditions. People have poor or no housing, have no clean water, have little access to what is poor education, have poor access to what is low quality healthcare, have few opportunities to develop themselves economically and socially, have little influence over the course of their governments because of poor governance institutions and systems, and so on. I say all these things are un-African because they hold us back from a better life, and not because they are the features that have been largely been dealt away with by more developed countries like Japan for instance.

This argument is a mere sketch of many potentially controversial and intricate debates pertaining to numerous forms of life within the Malawian and African context, but the key is to venture into thinking about them as opposed to keeping to this fixed-static state of culture approach we have seen for way too long now. Like I said before, before Europeans came to this continent, we were not a paradise or an Eden, we were a continent full of societies that had negatives and positives. And as such, an African model for development cannot hold culture as a central incontestable and infallible feature of the African society when that culture, even in its pure pre-Europeanized form was imperfect. Again, we need to deliberately and intensively critique our cultures in order to make them more compatible for and with our efforts to develop. That, in my opinion, would constitute a more progressive African Modernization project than the antagonisms we have seen between what is Western and what is African. All things are African provided they become tools for progress, including this Windows HP computer that I so frequently use to upload updates to my little humble blog.

Cheers