The Denial Of Ambiguity

The denial of ambiguity and uncertainty by the psychologically rigid subject is precisely what allows for authoritarian personalities to arise. Since the psychologically rigid subject organizes her experiences in terms of rigid categories, she is incapable of dealing with people who do not necessarily fit the mold. The psychologically rigid person either denies that certain phenomena resist or are resistant to rigid categorization or they react hostilely towards whatever exception there is to the general rule: men are not allowed to behave in a way that is "feminine" and minorities cannot drift too far away from their designated social role to the authoritarian personality.8 Particular differences are uprooted from their historical, social …show more content…
This can be explained in the pre-enlightenment or "primitive" subjectivity that in many ways strongly resembled the original dyadic state that the infant had with the mother. Under this conception of subjectivity, the "external world" and the "subject" were not viewed as two perpetually inseparable entities, rather the dialectic between the two was far less distinct. The pre-enlightenment subjectivity operated on the matter that humanity, language and rationality were not fundamentally distinct and superior towards nature. Rather, the pre-enlightenment subject was in a state of bargaining with nature, in which particulars were not subsumed under the categories of universals. The subject, only now views itself as master to and distinct from nature only on this basis where the subject and object were more alike. The rigidification of the subject presupposes certain political and historical conditions that needed to exist before we could account the arising of the autonomous subject in addition to the familial carving …show more content…
The abstraction of universal human rights and equal opportunity and property tacitly reinforce the idea of a rational, impartial agent with intrinsic value, this occurs while the irrational, unconscious semiotic aspects are further denied and alienated from the conditions in which they arose. The semiotic and the symbolic characteristics of language are divided from each other under modernity because the semiotic, contingent and irrational is less adaptive at dealing with the threat of nature. Modernity imposes a universal sameness on nature, reducing all difference to a common detonator, with notable examples of this position being scientific reductionism and the different variations of psychiatry. While language once had the capacity of expressing the corporeal and particular aspect of embodiment, it has no become subservient to the abstract, universalizing principles. Under modernity, the specific corporeal and affective aspects of language disappear to be replaced with a language that merely deals with