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first off--lurkette-i have a bit more time now and want to qualify something that i said. fact is that i was mystified by the responses from you because i didnt see where we actually had any disagreement. later, it occured to me that such problems as happened probably followed from my way of writing, and so were my problem, not yours. apologies.
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ustwo: i dont like how caps look. that's all there is to it.
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more generally---i was thinking about this thread while i was teaching amiri baraka's book "blues people" this afternoon--curious, that, as usually these things dont linger much my mind---anyway---i think the sense of some superiority as jinnkai states above is a function of a bigger process of acquiring a sense of authorization--authorization to dissent, authorization to think otherwise, authorization to make meaning--in this, there is a link to how baraka talks about the blues, which he sees in parallel terms--as a space in which folk who were oppressed (economically, socially--as a function of a basically racist context) and who had internalized that oppression began to break out of it--partially, within a limited space, but still to break out of it.
how does this argument work? the definitions of african-american, from the outset, were imposed from the outside. among the corrolates of this general definition were a series of others--inferiority of intellect as a function of racist understandings based on superficial characteristics like the color of one's skin---from this the assumption that meanings were by definition imposed by "civilized" white people---the disposition that would follow from this--to function "legitimately" is to conform to these definitions, to accept their assumptions, to perform them yourself--that is, to function "legitimately" is to imitate the values of the dominant order. for baraka, the blues represents a break with this imitation and the beginning of patterns of meaning production that originate within this community that had previously been defined in wholly negative terms. he tries to connect this to subsequent musics---jazz in particular---the active taking over of existing forms and the remaking of them (think of bop's relation to the pop music of the time, for example).
there are problems with baraka's argument in some ways if you take it too literally as a history of these musics, particularly when you get to the ways in whcih he routes his argument through class.
but the center of it is evident--the blues was of a piece with a sense of authorization to engage actively in the production of music--and by extension meanings--that were not simply imitations of the existing/dominant order.
to shift this back onto psychological grounds, and to move it back into the context of this thread: to be able to make an intellectual space for yourself that is not a simple imitation of what you have been exposed to--particularly as a kid--requires that you feel that you are worthy of doing it. that what you think is worth thinking, that what you say worth saying and worth listening to, that your thinking matters. if you do not find that sense handed to you from outside, then you create a sense that enables you. that is what i think jinnkai is talking about, across this image of "superiority"---
i remember this phase--and i am sure that most others who have posted here went through something like it and remember it as well. that it does not function over a longer run seems evident to folk who have passed through this phase as well--whence the embarrassment it can cause, and from that the tendency to pretend it never happened.
it will probably transform, in time, into a range of other ways of thinking--i think it has to because even if you reject everything about the world as you have been trained through childhood to see it at one point, the fact of the matter is that that world does not go away and that, sooner or later you have to function within it. you adapt, and in adapting you decide (explicitly or implicitly) what you are willing to give away, what you are willing to alter, what you are willing to fight for or against---and what you have to take on, what you need to make part of yourself, how you have to adapt to get by,and what you are willing to allow those adaptations to come to mean for you.
and so this sense of superiority breaks down, shifts into other modes of thinking and acting, goes away or does not. with any luck, it mostly shifts into something that hurts less to maintain (in every sense) which is a sense of authorization to make meanings for yourself. and that can be enough to enable you to keep going in this fucked up world.
and it is fucked up.
you can give away everything and no-one cares--no-one asks you to do it, no=one is waiting for a response, no-one even realizes that a requirement like that has been posed. people just go about their lives..they make the world around them seem ok because they have little choice. but what that adaptation means for you is highly variable. this is true for everyone. you make your peace with where you land, who you become, and you rationalize how you got there. whence the tendency to treat statements like jinnkai's with a kind of embarrassment driven sanctimoniousness--which i see over and over in posts above.
i see it as a marker of the particular space he occupies right now. he expect--if my experience serves for anything--that it will morph into other dispositons. maybe it will go away. who knows? thing is that you cant tell anyone who is in that place that what they feel and how they think is stupid or wrong---they have to figure that out for themselves, on their own terms, in their own time.
it's one of the strange things about getting older---what you forget, what you suppress about the wobbliness of the path that took you there.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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