Tag: Story

The energy of dislike

Featured Monica Carroll5 Comments

As a writer it is your privilege to privately write whatsoever you wish about whomsoever you choose. You can write bad things happening to bad people. And in doing so, know you are in fine company.

Lucian of Samosata wrote satire, his work often targeting public figures. In the quote below, taken from The Passing of Peregrinus, Lucian recounts his version of the life and death of the cynic Peregrinus Proteus (100-165CE). Lucian witnessed the suicide of Peregrinus when he set fire to himself at the 165CE Olympics.

Thereafter he went away a third time, to Egypt, to visit Agathobulus, where he took that wonderful course of training in asceticism, shaving one half of his head, daubing his face with mud, and demonstrating what they call ‘indifference’ by erecting his yard amid a thronging mob of bystanders, besides giving and, taking blows on the back-sides with a stalk of fennel, and playing the mountebank even more audaciously in many other ways.

If you feel blocked in your writing take these words as permission to privately write all the things you think you ought not.

Write your foe into the town-square with a shaved head and dirty face. Write them ‘erecting their yard’ in public. Write them taking blows from vegetables. Expose them as the fraud you know them to be.

Rebel. Be bold. Write what hurts so that you may write free.

 

Why did we hurt sadism?

Featured Monica Carroll3 Comments
This post condemns emotional, physical, verbal, etc. violence upon non-consenting creatures, things and persons. Transgression without permission is law-breaking criminality and should not be confused with the art of sadism.

Most people, even those who claim to be learned, parrot predictable narratives about the function and meaning of a thing called ‘sadism.’ Sadism lurks in the realm of the sexual, the perverted, the immoral and the violent. Sadism is, a typical parroted narrative claims, a disorder in which sexual gratification is achieved through the infliction of pain.

Most texts on sadism will trudge through the accepted historical emergence from the chronicles of Sade to the delousing of Deleuze. As this has all been done to the point of boredom and it will not be repeated here. The accepted history of sadism is a cliché, i.e. a concept drained of any genuine meaning. Moreover, it is a lazy history. Does anyone truly believe that up until the novel Justine no one explored the dimensions of being alive?

Turning anything into an ‘–ism’ is a way of killing our ability to see the thing itself. Once an ‘-ism’ is consigned to a thing it becomes forced to bear the burden of moral consensus and is, therefore, subject to policing. A person who participates in an ‘-ism’ is usually labelled and ‘-ist’.

Imagine something that is not an ‘-ism’, e.g. a deep love and commitment to dogs. Of all the mammals, four-footed things and living creatures, our Dogist practices Dogism in her choices because it gives her pleasure. (This notion, of desiring a thing because it has a consequence, a result, or an end goal, of personal pleasure, is another unfounded and oft repeated fiction in the realm of sadism.)

She is naturally wired (another parroted narrative) to prefer the experience of dogs. Dogs are part of her cognitive pleasure structure.  She prefers to pat dogs, to walk them, to groom them, to throw a stick and see the dog leap with joy and energy. She once patted a budgie but it did nothing for her.

Some texts speculate that when she was a young girl she had a negative experience that shaped her towards being a dogist. Some significant adult figure was either overbearing or absent, cruel or neglectful, and in those early experiences her dogism seed was planted.

We study her and try to ‘explain’ why she is different. We begin to call her difference a perversion, and she, therefore, a pervert. She has a condition, a disorder.

We need to medicalise her condition. Psychoanalysis, hypnosis, behaviour therapy, cognitive therapy, drug therapy, exorcism, and a transition to synthetic dogs. Dogism, however, presents treatment challenges, because it is often concealed, and is often associated with guilt and shame. (Another cart-before-the-horse parroted narrative; shame is result of dominant cultural values, not individual biological processes.)

The Kennel Club argues that behind closed doors consenting, mature adults should be allowed to keep and care for dogs. We once had a robust licencing system and dog-friendly public spaces but they have fallen away. As the medicalisation of dogism as a disorder grew, we began to forget the art of ourselves as being alive and capable of diverse and beautiful experiences.

We have confused dogism and few of us bother to remember when things were different to today. We have polluted dogism with the crimes of people who are cruel and violent to dogs. Those people are not dogists, that much is obvious. The spaces that accepted dogists have become both shameful in mainstream life and commercialised as a role-driven industry.

Our dogist, our heroine, tries to fight on all these fronts, to remain true to the practice of living as she knows it. She is not a dogist at all; she is a person with a timeless love and infinite care for dogs because they are dogs.

Opening into the dog; how phenomenology gives us fresh eyes

Featured Monica Carroll10 Comments

Phenomenology goes against the tide. It embraces the first-person, or subjective experience, as authorised, logical, valid and legitimate. In phenomenology the first-person point of view is generous, trustworthy and valuable. To understand the strength and uniqueness of the first person requires we release particular stories or myths about the world and how we perceive it.

We are given a script for how the world works yet often, if we stop and look beyond the script, we can see the story fails to fit, to varying degrees. The world itself differs to the story. Our experience of the world exceeds the structures we have constructed. And, if we allow the old story to crumble, we may see the world with fresh eyes, as it is, not as we narrate it.

Many elements of the script, or story, can be safely discharged. Below is my first suggestion.

First, we must reject the idea of perception as a script between two parties; the seer or perceiver and the seen or perceived. The accepted story of perception is that you look at, for example, a dog. You then perform a mysterious, cognitive, internal, private magic called cognition, perception, thinking, representing, etc..

Many textbooks contain a version of a familiar diagram that claims to depict ‘the act of perception’. In this, a drawing of your eyeball may project an arrow onto the form of a dog. From the dog, a second arrow draws out and targets your eyeball. Inside your skull, or above your head in a fluffy cloud, sits a smaller version of the dog. This script has two roles: there is you, looking, and there is the dog, being looked at.

Yet, what of the arrows? Looking is not an act of the eye upon an object. Looking contains not two ‘performances’ in the looker and the looked. To see is a three part event. Seer, seen and seeing itself. The experience of looking seeing, perceiving is not one of cognising then representing to oneself.

If we are standing beside each other, both having an experience that includes looking at a dog and I ask you, “Where is the dog?” you do not point at your head. You point to the dog. When we perceive the dog, we are putting ourselves ‘in’ the dog. We are not creating a small dog within us. We are, instead, reaching out, accepting the givenness, opening into the dog.

Phenomenology is built on the idea that when we experience, we are experiencing something. That is, that consciousness is always a consciousness of something. ‘Of’, which seems a small word here, is actually doing an incredible amount of muscle work. The phenomenological idea of intentionality is often defined as “consciousness of something” yet this ‘definition’ tends to produce fog not clarity. The key is the power of ‘of’.

The experience of perceiving a dog is an experience whereby our consciousness is sited within the dog. Our act of intentionality is to find that consciousness there.

Let me know what you think of this idea.

And look out for the next few posts where we will challenge other aspects of ‘the script’ about perception through the clean-cutting power of phenomenology.

 

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