no one likes a poser

The word manifest manners arose out of Vizenor’s experience with educators at Park Rapids High School in northern Minnesota. It describes a curious kind of racialist way of approaching native people (students at first) with a deference toward supposed cultural or genetic truths about them kept in mind. The term grew to encapsulate the cultural phenomenon within the colonized Americas of creating a simulated double other to continue to be colonized, racialized; the practice allows the presence of native people to be ignored in favor of the absence of indians.
Truly, this knowledge about native people is the opposite of the intelligent observation it claims to be. Vizenor’s central conceit about racialism is that it is ignorant, that our similarities as human beings far outweigh our differences, and that this framework for othering continues to victimize and scandalize native people by establishing baseline ignorance as common knowledge. All persons, not just native persons, are complex beings without precedent, and the cult of assigning individuality over personhood makes them individuals within a broader racial category, thus limiting their complexity.
Manifest manners, coming from double roots meaning “hand,” is a means to control the discourse and the minds of native people and colonizing people. This control is asserted through both highly violent and aggressive means as well as more passive means, the literature of dominance and other beliefs.
Manifest also bears the double meaning which points toward the shadows of racialism. In the practice of chattel slavery, a ship’s manifest might log the cargo of human objects for sale. In this way, Vizenor links his concept to the subconscious knowledge of these colonial practices.
The word mediations here is reclaimed from anthropology, and also a bit French. It’s use implies that mere translation of words in stories does not encircle the cultural heritage of a people, nor does it constitute the comprehensive catalog of beliefs it was once claimed to be.
A mediation can also be read as the opposite of an immediacy. This thrusts a reader further down the critical path. We are bringing in Hegel and Kant with this interpretation.
Hilarity ensues. Vizenor the humorist.
It seems that the etymology for name does not trace back to anything but other words which recursively refer to their own translation as name. Whereas many words are made from words that mean other things, name appears to have self-reference. Name comes from nomen, which means name. Vizenor uses the word a lot. It seems important that to Vizenor a name is so much more than the state designation of contemporary individual personhood. The system wouldn’t exist without an ability to control us by our names. It is a profound mystery, a life which doesn’t catalog us for the purposes of tracking and control. In one sense, we are legitimized by our names. Academics, artists, writers, we would be unrecognizable one thinks, without this precious commodity to build our identity upon. Vizenor explains that this isn’t what a name is, at least, not in the tribal real. Names are stories: therefore, names are not beliefs.
Natural roots in the word for born. Reason roots in a word which is translated as a slew of synonyms. Each synonym has the value of being an action taken in the mind. The mind is not necessarily relegated to the brain, however, and some global word cousins – such as the Old Church Slavonic: raditi – mean to care for.
A natural reason might easily include being born to care for this world; it might easily include caring for what is born here as well. In no way should natural reason be interpreted as a set of beliefs. Natural reason might indicate a framework which exceeds all forms of dominance, closure, and mere causality.
I had nicknames growing up that I didn’t feel good about. I couldn’t understand or abide the humor of my peers. When I was in my twenties, my peers called me ‘wookie’ behind my back, and eventually to my face. It was fitting for the moment. No one in our group was more prone to violence, roaring, or smelling like an animal. Nicknames and stories do change, I’m grateful for that. They are not beliefs.
Nostalgia is a booming marketplace of corrupt ideas and used emotions. Nostalgia is a belief in something intangible about the past. It strips all the imagic meaning, humor and irony from a story and repackages it as a comforting belief that in the past there is something to long for. Nostalgia is a sickness which contemporary culture indulges in. One of the more interesting facets of nostalgia is that it does not necessarily attach to a real referent, an actual past. People and cultures are nostalgic for simulations of models that never existed.
Whereas the individual is a unit, separate from any other whole, the person is contextual, irretrievable from their relations. I became a different person when I got sober and started spending time with new people. This isn’t the extent of Vizenor’s meaning, but it is identifiable in my experience. The individual is a simulation. No individuals exist on this planet.
No one likes a poser. A poser is someone who believes they can extract value from the beliefs of others, as opposed to living in story.