G'day Angela, You write: >a brief citation from zizek (who's very casting as a postmodernist, >when he is not, and when all proofs of him not being a postmodernist >fail to make a dent on this particular fantasy, should at least make >us pause about what is at stake in these little crusades...): Who called Zizek a pomo? That said, I'm with Lou Proyecht on this (hope he doesn't mind - I'm sure it's only for a little while, Lou). We're chucking out Marx where Marx actually has plenty to offer - and replacing that line of thinking with an awful lot of conjecture that just doesn't wash, imho. >"To the racist, the 'other' is either a workaholic stealing our jobs >or an idler living on our labour, and it is quite amuusing to notice >the haste with which one passes from reproaching the other with a >refusal to work to reproaching him for the theft of work. The basic >paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccesible to the >other and at the same time threatened by him. According to Freud, the >same paradox defines the experience of castration, which within the >subject's psychic economy, appears as something that 'really cannot >happen', but we are nonetheless horrified by its prospect. ... What >we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the >traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from >us." from Tarrying with the Negative (203). The first bit has a bit of authority about it, but I fail to see why we need to make the Freudian link - talk of the phallus and some metaphorical fear of castration only ever (a) takes away the spotlight from the real issue, and (b) does not even serve the function a metaphor should - ie offering a seemingly unrelated phenomenonm to suggest a new or clearer way of seeing the object. The phallic/castration stuff transforms what's important rather than sheds light on it, imho, and at the cost of comprehensibility, too. >the issue then is not that the fear of castration is what causes the >racism (as pop-psych accounts have it), but that racism works because >it echoes the structural logic of this 'fear of castration', which is >what transforms something from an error or simple prejudice to >ideology and the desire/enjoyment which ideology requires in order to >continue to work 'without and against proof'. the fear of the 'mass >production of black kids' is i think clearly a fear of the other's >enjoyment - all that fucking going on, which is simultaneously held as >the denial of the white blue collar worker's own enjoyment, own >desires. On the other hand, an occasional return to Marx might be therapeutic - just so's we don't forget why we're all here. The big fella says we invent systems of comprehending the world that makes sense of, and may thus naturalise, our particular mode of suffering. All we want out of our ideology is that it be coherent - and as it has to be coherent with what's going on, it is effectively both enabled *and constrained* by our economic reality. Whether racism or sexism is part of that system is neither here nor there - where-ever market relations predominate there is, by definition, alienation happening. We all wear that. Whomsoever has the clout to soften the blow may do so by trying to divert it towards others - isms tend to ensue. If the isms du jour is/are racism and/or sexism, the thing on channels like this is not to waste time on concocting metaphors. The thing is to do what Marx did - the thing Lacan said Freud got from Marx in fact (something you once told me). Treat racism and sexism as symptoms. And treat transformatiuons within them as symptoms. Core societies treat their annointed others differently than they used to, I reckon (even if we're in a bit of a hole at the moment on both counts, it is hard to see the 14-inch girdle or the whip making a widespread comeback - we despise and persecute a little more subtly than that now, simply 'coz people won't wear obviousness in these things anymore). Anyway, the most important thing about this is that it all points at transformations in our economic reality. Slavery, and consequently the form of racism it engendered, ran up against a brick wall, accumulation-wise. Sure, slavery went out a lot more quickly than did the ism it produced. But the ism is dying - it's lost its material foundation. Sexual/gender oppression has changed because (a) it had the same sort of shortcomings as slavery, and (b) because the role of the proletarian has changed - women are worth more to our economy on the shop-floor now than ever, because capitalism wants different sorts of labour from its human factors now than it used to - sorts at which women are at least the equal of men. And, of course, capitalism must keep commodifying if it is to keep accumulating - women can't be doing all that uncommodified stuff forever; it robs capital of opportunities! And waged women make better consumers, too. And during these transitions, white boys have to get used to these 'others' on turf they thought was theirs - the isms change shape accordingly. As a perceived assault on their identity. But that identity can't last - it too no longer has roots in the mode of production. 'The phallus' was an expression of a materiality long past. Even economism is changing! The privateer-economists (the Mt Pelerin types) got capitalists into sectors where they needed to get, as their profit projections in old sectors were falling. Today we get a sniff of the problems that ensue, and economists are forced reluctantly to reexamine their conclusions. It'll take a fair while before they get to their assumptions (although Stiglitz and even Thurow and Krugman have gotten tantalisingly close of late), but the process has started. As the big fella said, we tend to address only the problems our economic reality allows us to identify. Er, if all that sounds patronisingly simplistic, it's only 'coz I'm simply simple (ie. not patronisingly so). I just wanted to remind the more sanguine posties here of stuff they know but could easily forget to factor into their thinking - like Foucault and Baudrillard came to forget it. Your friendly vulgar leftie, Rob.
