Healthy Culture: LifedanceLog: 2012

Saturday, March 3, 2012

On Individual-Personhood

{note: I've posted this blog on the partner blog to this (http://cointegrative.blogspot.com/), since it is mostly about the Identity-politics aspect of the theory of healthy culture. Lifedancelog is mostly about sharing the results of its experimental practice as well as related artifacts, but I am also posting this particular entry here because it helps explain the form that the posts on this blog will mostly take, which follow the logic of the table and discussion below. But more on that in the next entry--I-P}

So as I have written, healthy culture (which is a sort of "tentative universal") involves a definition of culture as comprising Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure. When a given culture is healthy (is healing), then the accent is on versions of these four things that privilege togetherness over apartness. An Identity-Politics of Togetherness for example would be an "Us and Us" identity politics rather than any of the current factional and alienating "identity-uniforms" based on race, class, gender, nationality, or even species.

So my Name I-P (Its really intended to be more of a generically egalitarian "title"--or "anti-title", ultimately replacing Mr, Mrs, Sir, etc...), means "Individual-Person" and Individual-Personhood is my suggestion for what would constitute a non-factional Identity-Politics consistent with the Cosmology, Ritual, and Infrastructure of a healthy culture. Identifying as an individual person probably sounds so self-evident as to be hardly necessary to mention, but of course I mean something very specific (though I think very defensible and non-arbitrary) by the term.

Individual (Inner Relationship)	Person (Outer Relationship)	Time Orientation
Mind	Citizen-of-the-World	Future
Heart	Neighbor	Past
Body	Family-Member	Present
Intuition	Soul	Eternity

The preceding table (which will probably appear in the same or more elaborate form through-out this blog, is supposed to more or less say it all (and so save me from a long explanation) but I think it will probably need at least a little elaboration. What follows then is the major part of an old post of mine explaining individual-personhood in the context of my decision to change my name and call myself I-P. There is much more to it than what I say below but it seems like as good an introduction as I am up to right now. more later of course:

I-P (Name-Change)

If anybody reads my profile they will know that I am trying to transcend factional Identity politics such as race and gender, religion, among other things. For a long time now I have been dissatisfied both with my birth names and with the ones i have chosen for myself since. If anyone goes to my lifedancelog.motime.com blog and scrolls down to the post entitled “a vision of names” they will read a story in which I asked “Spirit” for a new name and actually received 3. Unfortunately I haven't had inner consensus to use them openly, wanting to make the sharing of such a names a sort of mark of bonding between myself and others who have received names in a similar way.

I still don't have inner consensus (of mind, heart, body, and soul) to share my new names but I do have it, after another “Vision Dance” (the particular kind of ritual at which I received the names alluded to) to replace, where ever I can, the various faction-connoting names I have chosen for myself in the past.

I-P stands for “Individual-Person” and perhaps is more like a title such as “Mr” or “Mrs”, than an actual name. But as such it is a very different kind of title (almost an “anti-title) in that it affirms an identity and an Identity politics that Transcends race, gender, even species, together with any other kind of factional identification of Class or Profession or anything else. It is an identity politics that, among other things, affirms the paradoxical equality and primary togetherness of all Beings.

The “individual” part of individual personhood represents the “vertical”, “self-directed” aspect of the Identity; it relates roughly to ones own experience of ones self in terms of ones own “thinking (mind), Feeling(heart) , sensation( body), and intuition (“soul” in a certain sense) to use a somewhat Jungian vocabulary.

The “Person” part of individual-personhood relates to the “horizontal”, “Other-directed” aspect of Identity in terms of the generic archetypal “social roles” that I affirm to be inherent in anyones Existence at all. These roles (which also constitute four venues of social interaction) are four fold: Family-member (the Familial venue), Neighbor (the neighborly venue), Citizen-of-the-World (the Civil venue) and “Soul” (for lack of a better word, the Religious/Philosophical/Metaphysical venue).

These two identities (the individual and the personal) are related paradoxically in the same way that the vertical and horizontal of spacial orientation (and so the five directions) are related. This means that they are not really two separate identities at all but one five-fold identity. in a same way that horizontal “north, south, east, and west” (the 4 “horizontal” directions) imply and involve “up-and-down” (what I am calling the vertical 5th direction) of spacial orientation, so the “Personal” implies the “Individual” and visa versa, and fulling ones potential as one involves fulfilling it as the other at the same time. Of course having a been initiated by default into the one-sided, paradox and Life-denying logic and sensibility of the present and historical cultures of apartness, we all tend to take for granted and for real and experience of that corresponds to this alienation of inner and outer social existence and so must of us have fallen prey to political implications (basically war in one form or another) that proceed from such false dichotomy and false consciousness.

As an example of this, I want to go a little bit here into one of the effects sick culture has on Identity-politics in our modern version of the culture of apartness. This is that, since the kind of paradoxical togetherness involved in Individual-Personhood is (like paradox in general) hard to even understand in a sick culture let alone live out, what has happened in our politics is that an experience of ourselves that is essentially a paradoxical “both/and” sort of thing vis-a-vis the individual and the “community” (self and other), has been broken apart, dichotomised and so treated as if it were essentially “either/or”.

In our time the Capitalist side of such dichotomization is the ideological mythology about some one-sided and dissociated and atomized conception of “the individual” that is in almost complete denial of the relationships and responsibilities inherent in anyones existing at all (i.e. of what i am calling the four roles/ venues of “personhood”). Even internally (and not coincidentally) the capitalist idea of an “individual” is dissociated, since it involves the priviledging of the “Thinking function” (over feeling, sensing, intuiting) within the the whole of our subjective individual experience. This of course lead to endless alienation, anxiety, lonilness, competition, etc... and ultimate individual and collective suicide.

On the other hand, more traditional, “socialistic” or “communistic” (but equally one-sided) forms of Identity go to the opposite extreme in enslaving the real whole “Individual” to some equally distorted conception of “personal” (social) relationships and responsibilities. These can be anything from Kinship or Gender roles, to the roles of “citizens” (narrowly and nationalistically defined), to various career or employment roles, all of which inevitably demand that the “individual” suppress or distort aspects of their individuality to fit such factional and misconceived and one-sided identity-uniforms. Of course this, via in a way that is only superficially different, also leads to endless alienation, anxiety, loneliness, competition, etc... and ultimate individual and collective suicide.

Anyway, what it means to actually and fully live the paradoxical relatively “themless” identity politics an individual-person within the context of the assumptions of a healthy culture is some thing that I'd have no time to describe here even if I was not still in the process of learning this myself, but I do know and have time to say that “coming-out” as an “individual-person” involves an implicit and explicit renunciation of the kind of false solidarity that comes from the normal “us-and-them” way of bonding (that is of “us” bonding against “them”, whether the “thems” are other creatures, other genders, or other so-called “classes” of any kind. It also involves a conscious acceptance of the implicit responsibility of healthy coming-together, not only outwardly with others (as a responsible “Family-member”, “Neighbor”, “Citizen-of-the-World” and “Soul”) but also inwardly as an authentic Individual.

Of course I'm not likely to ever be permanently cured from “back-sliding” into old, alienated, ways of thinking and feeling, about myself and others since the habits of forty years cannot be expected to change overnight even when there are some new habits to exchange them for (as is the case here). My name change here is just an affirmation and reminder of my intention to go in this direction and of my commitment to it .

Finally, as I said, I currently regard “I-P” as a kind of “title”. If, in the future I do get inner consensus to share the three names I was given. Then I will formally adopt them and be “I-P so-and so”. For now, I will just be “I-P”.

PS,

There is some insight into all of this kind of factional identity politics from the song “uniforms” which is among my myspace blogs. So I quote the text of it here:

Uniforms
By I-P

You wear a uniform of a woman
You wear a uniform of a man
You wear a uniform of an employee
Or a Jew or a Mexican
You wear a uniform of a soldier boy
A uniform of a civilian too
And when you play the game of “me or them”
You wear a uniform of you!

Chorus: