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On 12/01/2011 16:58, James Holstun wrote: > By recognizing the reality of mental illness, one is not “paying > tribute to the neoliberal cult of individual responsibility.” It’s > just a basic materialist observation that mental illness is a real > thing, apart from ideology, which occurs in particular ideological > contexts. If you don’t leave actual mental illness there as a possibility, > you’re heading off into early Foucault or Deleuze-and-Guattari land, > with contradictory claims that mental illness is an effect of discourse, > or some primal revolutionary phenomenon outside of all discourse. But there is no dispute that mental illness really exists, or even that Jared Lee Loughner probably suffered from some form of it. No one, certainly not I, has suggested that mental illness is an effect of discourse. Nor did I say that to recognise the reality of mental illness is to succumb to neoliberal ideology. The Foucault-Deleuze-Guatarri bogeyman is a sock puppet of your own manufacture. If you recall - and I direct you to the passage from which you quoted - what I said was that to foreclose analysis of wider social and political contexts and reduce the issue to one lone nut, was to pay tribute to "the neoliberal cult of individual responsibility". This is exactly what Louis Proyect, with whom you say you agree, has done here. > Nor is it “psychologizing” mass murder to say that some instances > of it have immediate political motivations and consequences, and > some do not. Yet again, this is not what was at issue. The context in which I mentioned psychologism was the reduction of reactionary political paranoia to a specimen of pathology, its subtraction from the political field. I understand Jared Lee Loughner's outlook to have included a certain kind of right-wing conspiracism. Allow that some of the reports about his views on federalist laws, fiat currencies, abortion, the New World Order and mind control at least suggest this. That being the case, the rush to dismiss all these elements of Loughner's purview is unseemly, and does risk collapsing into psychologism - even if it is motivated in the first instance by an exaggerated fear of being coopted by the Democrats. > Nor is it “medicalizing” the problem to talk about the collapse of mental > health services in the US in general, Arizona in particular If you'll recall, you said that the "reasons why" were "material" rather than "ideological". Your elaboration of those "reasons why" touched on the issues of weapons, and mental health services. This seemed to be you offering an explanation for "why" the murders and attempted assassination took place. So while I accept that the provision of medical services is relevant, what I described as 'medicalizing' the problem was the attempt to explain what happened basically in terms of the man's mental distress, and the failure of the state to adequately care for him. In truth, I also think the dichotomy of 'material' vs 'ideological' is more than a little problematic for a marxist perspective - as if ideology is anything other than a material process in its own right. Which is to say that the your reasoning in this case relies on a dualism that I don't believe you really cleave to. > I think Michael Moore got it wrong in Bowling > for Columbine. Canada may have similar levels of gun ownership—primarily long > guns, > not including assault rifles—but it does not allow deranged people to buy > and conceal pistols, particular not Glock 19s with extended clips (30+ shots): I'm not entirely convinced that this is a telling rebuttal. Allowing that this makes a real difference (and hence I support gun controls), it would still seem that if a person was so motivated, s/he could get hold of a gun sufficient to kill many people. I think the truth is that the US has more people who are motivated to kill than most other societies. > We still don’t have a very good idea of how political Loughner’s > motivation was: his video of the American flag burning in the desert doesn’t > seem very Tea Partyish to me, for one thing. Perhaps. This is not a straightforward case. There are, however, signs that Loughner was influenced by reactionary ideology, and the rush to declare consideration of the political context out of bounds is coming from the Right. Unfortunately, this baton is being picked up by some on the Left for not-very-good reasons. My agenda here is to keep the case open, and to keep the wider issues in view, because it is wholly plausible that the barbarism of the American Right would create the enabling context for murders like this to take place. And they should be answerable for that. > But that’s not the same thing as saying all killers are motivated primarily > by ideology, whether Loughner or Colin Ferguson. Does anyone literally argue that all killers are motivated primarily by ideology? > Your articulation of these killings with the neoliberal agenda makes > perfect sense,but your belief that, somehow, this might sound the death knell > for the Tea > Party makes none. Please allow us some pessimism of the memory over here. If you insist. But, in that case, why do you believe it matters what the Left says? Why shouldn't the Left speculate about the political barbarism that might have facilitated these murders, given how little difference it makes to anything? Or, by a similar reasoning, why not at least try to hold the Right accountable for its behaviour? What have you got to lose exactly? Well: > I anticipate a result more like that following the Oklahoma City > bombing, which produced the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of > 1996, an > important coercive step on the way to the Patriot Act, which is being used > right now to prosecute peace and Palestine activists in the upper Midwest If this is on the cards, then on the strength of the foregoing it is certainly on the cards whether you resist it or not. But if you were to resist such a logic, I fail to see how it would held to prophylactically strip the issue of any political significance, which is what has happened on this list in this case. -- *Richard Seymour* Writer, blogger and PhD candidate Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer) Book 1: http://www.versobooks.com/books/307-the-liberal-defence-of-murder Book 2: http://www.zero-books.net/obookssite/book/detail/1107/The-Meaning-of-David-Cameron ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
