The Guilt of the Oppressed

I thought this post of Richard Seymour's was interesting for the less-stressed point he makes about the broader idea of the guilt of the oppressed, which he highlights as important not merely in patriarchal structures but also in capitalist ones.  I'm not sure I fully grasped his psychoanalytic analysis of guilt, but to the extent that I did it seems he may be talking about the ways in which our attempts to move on from the ways that we are oppressed and abused, to put on hold or forget our desire to get revenge for or cope meaningfully with or fully address our pain and suffering, actually lead us to feel guilty, not so much because of what we did, but because of what we can never do in the world as it is.  This is interesting because I have never been abused, but I did have this painful work experience in our capitalist economy last year.  And it is genuinely hard to grapple with questions of whether I was to blame for the ways it went wrong or whether the workplace was, even as obviously the ultimate answer has to be both.  Logically, there are lots of good reasons to assign greater culpability to the workplace, but it is certainly true that in our capitalist economy that doesn't really matter very much, and I had to move on.  Although thankfully now it is less powerful than it is used to be, it's certainly true that a lot of what I was experiencing for the past year was guilt, a very strong guilt that had a major effect on how I lived my life.  I find Richard Seymour's perspective on this, then, to be personally interesting - to provide a new way of looking at my experiences for the past year and to consider the role of capitalism in constructing my guilt.

This is a really appealing interview with Georgie Fruit (not Kevin Barnes, Georgie Fruit). Or, at least, it appeals to me. Georgie Fruit sounds suspiciously like Achewood (n.b., I do not read Achewood, but I know enough about it from my brother to be able to tell). I like what he has to say about Kevin. One assumes that Kevin was ventriloquizing Georgie Fruit again. . . . I would love to talk about myself from the perspective of another persona, but I don't feel like there's much room in my life to do that. A lot of artists whom I'm very drawn to have interests in Dissociative Identity Disorder (off the top of my head - Philip Dick, Jenna Moran, Tetsuya Takahashi, DWJ, and Kevin Barnes all seem to fit the bill). I'm always curious as to why, given that it's something that I find almost impossible to imagine for myself. I always feel pretty secure in my identity and selfhood - so I'm not sure why I love so much to read about the experiences of people who don't, why this, in particular, should be a theme that appeals to me so significantly.

Quick Question-I-Had-at-Work Post

It's kind of a commonplace of discussion about the history of Western thought that we have this religious/Platonic idea running throughout it that consciousness precedes the external world - an idea that has had many permutations of varying levels of interest. However, leaving aside the truth or falsehood of the concepts that consciousness in general precedes the external world or some form of Platonic/Wordsworthian barely-remembered reincarnation exists, surely our actual experience of our individual consciousness that we can actually remember tends to suggest that this one thing does, in fact, come after the external world. Like, there's this big world with a lot of stuff in it that seems to have been around for a while, and, while our experience of consciousness is obviously guided by various mental constraints that allow us to learn, surely every actual experience is new to the individual mind (and it's not like we have memories of some other experiences that are no longer happening to us). So why is the idea that consciousness comes first so prevalent? Does Freud talk about this?