An old post I never wrote. related to one just below, and one earlier, and back. [the video is gone, or no longer public. The story is here]


To be born and raised in a community is not to have a choice: the world is what it is. We can go on to try to change the order of that world (which in fact is changing always), but "intentional" communities do more than that; they're founded in self-description, denying not only outside interference but outside interpretation, demanding acknowledgement for a world of their own making. At the lowest level it's simple fascism. "Israeli" is more of an invention than "Palestinian",  if less so than "Aryan", but the opinions of outsiders in both cases are claimed to mean nothing.

In fact those claims are merely cover. Any serious definition of fascism puts the lie to them. Self-love and self-hatred are inseparable, the first being merely an ideologized -armored- reinforcement of the basic need for self-respect. The difference between camp and kitsch is the difference between the fat bearded man in a tutu who expects you to laugh and the fat bearded man in a tutu who points the gun at your head and dares you to say he's not a ballerina. Fascism by definition is kitsch. And we're back to Freud

In a passage from one of the Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis Freud says that as the result of a successful treatment repression is replaced by 'a condemning judgment'. He doesn't explain the difference between the two. What's the difference between "I don't want to kill my father and sleep with my mother" and "I don't want to kill my father and sleep with my mother." Is the first, louder and more nervous? More declarative? More cocksure? I don't know but it's a question conceptualists can't answer.

Conceptualists don't/can't understand performance. They refuse to interpret, or they oppose it. The irony, as I've said again and again, of liberals mocking Scalia's originalism reading the past is their own originalism reading into the future. That written words "mean what they mean" and that I "mean what I say and say what I mean", and that I am "what I say I am", all make make the same argument. Scalia's Catholic anti-individualism and liberal individualism both stand against interpretation, which can only be the interpretation of others, in the present and future: the judgment of outsiders and the judgment of history.

The woman above wants her government to see her as she sees herself. Why does it matter so much to her? She stumbles over the admission that she was born female. Why is she fixated on binaries? Why does she take the government bureaucracy so seriously that she needs it's approval of her self-disgust?