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!