From: "Orion Anderson" <libraryofsocialscience-AT-earthlink.net> To: <nietzsche-AT-driftline.org> Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 16:59:10 -0400 Subject: [Nietzsche] Psychogeography: The Human Body Becomes a Body Politic LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE NEWSLETTER PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY: The Human Body Becomes a Body Politic Howard F. Stein The study of psychogeography begins with the assumption that reality is not neutral; not simply "there" for the seeing. The scope of psychogeography is the unconscious construction of the social and physical world. Men and women fashion the world out of the substance of their psyches from the experience of their bodies; they project psychic contents outward onto the social and physical world, and act as though what is projected is in fact an attribute of the other or outer. What we attribute (verb) to the world we subsequently take to be an attribute (noun) of the world. Fantasies about the body are transmuted into descriptions of one's own group, other groups, into shapes and features of the world. Projected outward, the fate of the body becomes the fate of the world. Read the entire paper: Howard F. Stein: <http://www.psych-culture.com/docs/stein_psychogeography.html> "THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY UPON THE CONDUCT OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: Clinical and Metapsychological Considerations" Psychogeography begins with the vicissitudes of selfhood in a human body and proceeds outward to encompass the world. The issue of boundaries takes us to the heart of psychogeography. Symbolic group-boundaries have the quality of dreamlike condensations. Through boundaries we express anxiety over body integrity or cohesion versus disorganization, maleness versus femaleness, pleasure versus unpleasure, animateness versus inanimateness, security versus danger, symbiosis versus emotional separation (representational differentiation). How these all are resolved finds ultimate expression in the delineation of inside from outside: what and who are to be included in the group, and what and who are to be excluded from it. Publications on the human body and the body politic: <http://ideologies.mechapower.com/docs/scarry1.htm> THE BODY IN PAIN: The Making & Unmaking of the World (excerpts from Elaine Scarry's book) <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elibraryofsocialscience/gi.htm> "GENOCIDE AS IMMUNOLOGY: The Psychosomatic Source of Culture" <http://www.psych-culture.com/docs/rk-hb.html> "HITLER'S BODY AND THE BODY POLITIC" <http://www.psych-culture.com/docs/rk-nations.html> "NATIONS ARE BODIES" <http://www.psych-culture.com/docs/rk-nationsimmortal.html> "NATIONS ARE IMMORTAL BODIES" We animate other peoples and places with aspects of ourselves. Often more literally than figuratively, nations become mother- and fatherlands and fusions of the two. We speak of a "family" of nations or of mankind. Enemies become "cancers" which threaten to invade or corrupt the "body" politic. People experience the integrity of the body as coextensive with the integrity of group (e.g., national) boundaries. Intergroup conflict is frequently sexualized in terms of intercourse, sodomy, and rape. Social and physical space comes to symbolize unconscious process: that is, what is inside is unwittingly played outside ourselves on the stage of nature and society. Humans live out their fantasies on the stage of reality. People perceive and act toward other people, groups, and the phenomenal world as though these were extensions of one's own body, parts of the body, one's parental figures or parts of their bodies, and family members and relationships. What philosophers call the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is heir to the unconscious allocation of the inner world to the outer. Please convey comments, commentaries and reflections to: oanderson-AT-libraryofsocialscience.com Psychogeography is a study of (a) the role of unconscious factors in the perception of natural and social reality, and (b) the consequences of that perception, i.e., how attributes of the psyche, once projected onto the world, become the basis for action in the world. In psychogeographic exploration, one studies how geography, maps, and perceived characteristics of one's own group and other groups become targets, containers, and outlets for fantasy. One's personal boundaries come to be felt as coextensive with and bound up with the fate of the geopolitical boundaries of one's group. Aggression is mobilized in defense of the self (Rochlin, 1973), in the service of keeping a sense of goodness and completeness and safety inside, repudiating in oneself disavowed parts and impulses, putting these disavowed aspects into the enemy, intensifying them in the enemy, engaging them through the enemy, combating them in the enemy, and restoring what the enemy is seen to have taken away. A framework of psychic primacy inverts or reverses the traditionally accepted causal sequence according to which outer historical events, geological features, intergroup conflicts, and other aspects of social and physical "space" simply impress themselves upon the mind and are internalized. Rather, the dialogue between inner and outer is based upon the search by the psyche for what Freud (1900) referred to as an "identity of perceptions" whereby the outer serves as a cathected vehicle for the inner. The shared fantasy about one's own group and about others is thus not merely "like" (analogous in certain ways to) dream work, but is dream work of a very specific sort: one that supplements, continues, perceptually corroborates, and supersedes-in the sense of making acceptable for entry into consciousness (and memory)-individual nocturnal dreaming (see La Barre, 1966, 1975). If we must awaken from our slumbers, culture, in its dereistic and maladaptive aspect, is a way we are able to keep asleep while having to be awake. _______________________________________________ List address: nietzsche-AT-driftline.org Admin interface: http://lists.driftline.org/listinfo.cgi/nietzsche-driftline.org
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