diastole

I've always thought of myself as an observer rather than one observed, and upon watching a video of myself performing CPR on a (deceptively-named) "lifelike dummy", watching the focus shift to my hands, my shoes, my face, I began to understand that we are constantly beheld by a panoply of gazes, each determining, subjectively, our personhood through an ideological and gendered lens.

What are the politics of seeing? That I determine the cultural quotient, emotional capacity, or even the slightest paucity of weird sociopathic shit from a visual run-down of a person seems to unmask and describe the judgmental subjectivity of every knowledge claim I make about him or her. "She's friendly but she's the sort of person who posts pictures of her semi-naked boyfriend on Facebook."; "These are my good friends but they like bands like Nickelback"; "She looks in-bred." etc. etc. And on an exponentially greater scale, "The laxity of our immigration policies is an issue"; "The immorality of this group of marginal people renders them the Sodom and Gomorrah of our times"; "The massive devastation of these cities by the flooding is yet another sign of the end times"; "We need to groom dynamic youths to expand our economy."

To disregard the fundamental subjectivity of our utterances and claims, and even to insist on our soi disant objective truth, is to me an abhorrent vulgarity that epitomizes the ugliness of humanity. This ugliness is located where there is a privileging of one truth over another, or cultivating a condescending attitude towards anything that threatens a paradigm. Granted, there are several things in our collective consciousness that are categorically wrong, like genocide or torture, but to spring attacks motivated by a defensive need to hold on to bases of power, to "stability", is pretty dubious. Unless we actively seek to be reasonably accommodating, acknowledge that epistemological humility is not intellectual apathy, and love the humanity of Other People, it's quite likely that nothing about the status quo is going to change. 

I know I love to bask in my own ridiculousity, but there are things that we shouldn't feel uncool being passionate about. I guess it's a culmination of many events that have led to these recent, suckily structured and largely unoriginal thoughts. But writing is still quite the liberating experience that people describe, and that I remember, it to be.