In the back garden we have a stone fireplace with little stools around it, a fire pit really. Having no idea where to get firewood at a good price, and this being Hungary one should be able to find some, I asked the question on my military/ex-pat community's Facebook page, and Hugo said that there was good cheap wood at the Home Depot down the street, easy peasy. "Home sweet home," he said.
What Hugo is experiencing is the expansion of self that comes with familiarity, belonging, with not being the other.
In a moment when we're turning our attention to the needs of capital and away from the needs of humans, I think this is a good point on which to meditate -- because we are all other-marginal-instrumental from the point of view of capital as we experience it for now.
I'm an Anglo, a Celt, a white chick, so I don't look like a person who can't speak Hungarian. Nothing marks me other until I and a Hungarian try to have even a simple conversation like, "Thanks," and "You're welcome, here's your change." It's the clause"here's your change" that screws up my face and causes either an indulgent smile or a closure of expression.
So, the contraction of self that comes with being other doesn't have anything to do with being spotted, as does the contraction that comes with being othered racially. It's in my head. I know I'm lost and confused and a bit of an interloper and asking people to work harder than they otherwise would have to just to help me buy flour (of which there are 6 or 7 types and grades, bread being serious business in Europe). I feel contracted with confusion and humility and a whole aura of apollogetics. I do not fit, am capable of making a huge social mistake at any moment just by doing what comes naturally (by which I mean culturally) to me. I am marginal.
(Don't worry, I'm having a lovely time in my ex-pat adventure, it's just that there's this layer too, this sharpening of my awareness of this phenomenon coming to me thanks to being way outside my comfort zone, as people say.)
What this feeling reminds me of is those moments in being a woman when I feel endangered or just really alienated in very male spaces or in a world that still runs itself on their worst logics and wants no room for me other than as slut or wife-mom--no room for girl or professor or CEO. In that world I can be smart, but I had better be prettier than I am smart in order to get away with it. And if I'm too pretty, I can be fired for distracting the men from their work.
Which, by the way, masculine zeitgeist, would you just make up your damn mind?
Muslims in America and Europe, Roma in Europe, Hispanics and Latinos in America, immigrants of all stripes feel this, this contraction of self that comes with being other. Blacks in America can tell you long, interesting, heartbreaking, hilarious, and very detailed stories about this contraction. So can GBLT people. As other you have two roles: instrument or threat.
And the thing about that contraction is that the attempt to expand the self and relax into one's cultural space can happen like any other very energetic expansion -- it can become explosion. That is its natural-cultural form. It can be peaceful, it can be loving and gentle and insistent, but that is very hard work, as all the non-violent social movements demonstrate in their discipline.
The students and professors in the UK have just very actually learned what it feels like to be other of capital. That there have been little explosions in otherwise weeks and weeks and weeks of peaceful and very creative demonstrations is no surprise. There's money. It's just that 80% of current budgets for the humanities will be cut, and student tuition will triple all at once to $14,000 USD. There's money. Just not for education in meaning.
And not knowing how to mean, or what something means, or how to engage with the meanings that surround you, that are created by science-math-business and are very technical -- that is the contraction of self that comes with being other.
Welcome to the world of women, of non-whites in white nations, of immigrants, of fungible workers. It is not a comfy fit, being human in a wholly technical world. You'll see.
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