Part 2
Putnam and Mumby were here describing the prevailing business culture of the
post-industrial West during the mid-1980s/early-1990s: a culture that, as they observed it, was premised upon the understanding of an axiomatic, antithetical division
between emotionality and rationality. Emotions within the ethos they portray were
characteristically regarded as a pollutant to clear-headed decision-making: something that needed to be ‚checked‛ on entry to the workplace, linked only to the
expressive arenas of life: to leisure, to pleasure, to personal life.
Elena: This happens everywhere: men as much as women are expected to leave their feminine- emotional self out of life. Why does it surprise us that we’ve become feelingless creatures without compassion and produce kill teams in 22 year old boys?
Leaving emotions out of the cult was certainly a condition that anyone who failed at would be asked to leave. Is that not the case in the military? Now in corporations, industries and all public life. This is a symptom of the illness of our times but it is also a cause. It is a vicious circle in which the more we practice it the more ill we become and the more those who do allow for their emotional life to manifest are shunned, rejected and neglected.
These extremes of macho status quo (for what else are they but the idolization of authoritarian patriarchal society) are as harmful to men as they are to women: they are harmful to all human beings as much as Nature. This inability to ‘consider’ anything but the individualistic, monistic, egotistic present in men as much as women of today is an expression of the inability to perceive, conceive or actualize consciousness of the whole: The integrity of the individual human being that is not one but two for without both men and women, there would be no future, the family, the social, the nation and the human being in its totality. ___________________
Most importantly,
emotions were seen to be a deviation from intelligence.
At the time of their writing, Putnam and Mumby’s analysis arguably had a degree of
accuracy as a depiction of many, but by no means all, sectors of the neo-liberalist
workplace that had been successively fostered by the market-driven policies of
Reaganomics in the United States, and Thatcherism within Great Britain. The zeitgeist of this era was perhaps most famously encapsulated in the words of Gordon
Gecko, the character played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street: ‚Greed
is good.‛ The phrase became something of a corporate mantra meaning, variously,
‚Don’t be ashamed of your desire for wealth‛; ‚The market above everything else‛;
‚Don’t let feelings get in the way, think only of profit and accumulation‛; ‚Don’t get
emotional”’; or that other oft-cited justification, ‚This is not personal, it’s business.‛
Elena: But we need to go back so far to understand that frame of mind. Women have been seriously shunned since they were burnt as witches at the stake. That actualized a terror that has remained latent ever since in the consciousness or unconsciousness of women as much as men. But in our generations of television, the hero of every film is exactly as depicted above: “Be professional: don’t let feelings get in the way”. It is not only: be professional, make money, it is that to BE PROFESSIONAL implies that the feeling realm has been totally extinguished. What is important here is that it touches the realm of Identity, sovereignty and for people to be accepted in the hierarchies within the status quo, they have to show in their behavior that they are willing to play by the status quo’s rules and they do that by dressing, talking and acting towards themselves and particularly towards others in completely specific ways. If they don’t show these ‘traits’ they are not ‘hired’. They remain outside the work force and the hierarchy of society, in practical terms, they become Agamben’s homo sacer without having ever had the chance to even participate.
It should not surprise us that human beings are, like Nature, interdependent on each other. That we do not have the consciousness of that reality is shocking. That we grow up and are ‘brought’ up in such a way that the self-centeredness of most individuals acts against their own self as much as the rest is what needs to be studied carefully. Are we so self-centered in childhood? Are we NATURALLY meant to be that self-centered because it is fitting to our instinctive nature? Is that egotistic individualism that so strongly characterizes our times the full affirmation of the human ‘animal’? Is it ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ as a stage of development? If we were animals, wouldn’t it be clear to us that we need each other to survive? Would we not behave like a herd protecting our kind? Isn’t our classicism, racism, nationalism and all forms of separating our selves from others and getting together with the ‘chosen ones’ that belong to our particular group, herd behavior? Is that not what is understood as unconscious ‘mass behavior’?
In childhood we do not feel separated from the rest but float in an integrity of life. As we are ‘educated’ into the status quo, we begin to disintegrate into the accepted and unaccepted by our particular status quo. We are programmed to be ‘this’ or ‘that’ and what is interesting about that is that we are ‘trained’ to incarnate the values, thoughts and behavior of ‘our times’. To ‘grow up’ means that we adopt our personal response to that ‘training’ but to be able to participate in the status quo we must have accepted its ‘forms’. It is important for us to begin understanding the power of forms. People are not ordered to wear uniforms without a meaning. Those who make them wear uniforms know that that will have an impact in their psychological make up, that the uniform with give a particular quality to the status in society that they represent. This school’s uniform will characterize those pupils as belonging to an specific social class. The uniform in the military is a million times more important than the individual wearing it. The soldier is supposed to reveal in his uniform the integrity of his self but in our society the soldier’s self matters only as much as he or she is willing to kill others and give their lives up to protect the status quo of their particular nation no matter how inhuman they are made to become.
The forms within which people live have a structural force that sculpts their inner psychology. What IS outside of our selves, molds our inner as much as outer self in as much as we abide by the force of being one with the whole. Young people are so easily molded into the military or any other institution, because in their essence impulse, the inclination to be in harmony with the whole is powerful. The real problem is that in as much as young people are TOO young to discriminate between what is acting against the whole as much as against themselves in inhuman enterprises, they fail to stand up and protect others and themselves and end up as the main instruments of deployment that utterly inhuman status quos are being acted out in almost every sphere of the world today. It is not that the military or the police are fascists, it’s that fascism is living itself out in every single individual in as much as everyone is willing to impose their authority on others who we consider in an inferior position to our selves. We are all living out a hierarchic sovereignty in which we act out our superiority towards others. We struggle to put others down so as to float above, mostly because we are ourselves so tremendously depressed in a world that values nobody. Even the rich and powerful are not valued as human beings. Without money or power they would become as indifferent to everyone else as everyone else and THAT is the tragedy: that we have our sense of values totally misplaced in everything but the human being itself.
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