Ken asked and answered: >> And doesn't the press play up every case where there is a rip-off >> of the welfare system? The workers are a victim of selective reporting but the >> psychology involved doesn't seem particularly complex... valis replied: >And what about the racist component? Most of the working class is white, >and in the face of statistics goes on believing with surly resentment >that welfare is basically the mass-production of fatherless black kids. >"The end of welfare as we know it" addressed this image with a knowing >wink, and we don't yet know how easily the stake may be removed from >its wily heart. sure ken, the press do play this up all the time. but asking why certain kinds of propaganda work whilst others don't is really more important than simply declaring this to be propaganda. valis notes the racism involved. 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...): "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 wthin 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 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. angela
