roachboy

this is not intended as a provocation. please do not take it as such.
i found something oddly disappointing in the degeneration of that thread and am doing this simply to pose questions--what we are doing here, why we are doing it, where we understand ourselves to be?

i was thinking about what happened in that thread last night between strange films and bursts of apartmental packing--it is interesting to note the extent to which all of us, regardless of political position, found ourselves playing roles in a performance there, one that started by trying to relativize the category "terrorist" and ended up a space of considerable pissiness and the almost total absence of interaction. standing on opposite sides of a huge fence, throwing shit at each other, is not interaction. well, it is a form of interaction...a debased and ridiculous form.



from time to time, pan and others post stuff that laments our collective inability to get along...that thread, ugly as it was, gave an interesting perspective on that.

is there in fact any meaningful possibility for debate about structuring categories like "terrorism" (--structuring in the curious discusirve universe of bushworld at least)?

is it necessarily the case that when this central signifiers come up for debate that things start with argument and degnerate into bizarre pissing matches over ancillary issues?

how did the context in which all of us function come to this?

if we lived in a democracy, we would be practiced in debating fundamental questions.
if we lived in a democracy, we would be able to distinguish appeals to the emotions from questions of principle and questions of fact.
if we lived in a democracy, we would understand the danger of arguments that appeal exclusively to the emotions, more or less for the same grounds that plato outlined--this type of argument bypasses deliberation, bypasses thinking----this type of argument is inevitably simplifying and simplistic--this type of argument is dangerous in a democratic context because it can lead to polity to fuck up, and if a democratic polity fucks up, there is nothing and no-one to save it---except itself

if we lived in a democratic context, we would accept uncertainty, accept the provisional--we would understand ourselves as collectively making decisions that had actual consequences--we would understand the need--the fundamental need--for accurate information because without it coherent debate is hopeless.
in this context--which is shot through with uncertainty at almost every level, the fact of uncertainty is something to be feared, to be avoided.
there is nothing--and i mean nothing--more profoundly undemocratic than these features short of an explicitly authoritarian regime--but even there, the features of debate amongst the people would not be much worse than they are here--there would simply be an official acknowledgement of the fact of the matter, and a different set of modes of governance based on that conclusion.

but from the point of view of actual power residing with the people, exercized through deliberation, the difference between where we are and an authoritarian regime would be mostly one of style.

we have arrived at a place where all information is understood as suspect.
we have arrived at a place where all political committments are understood as matters of religious faith.
we have arrived at a place where the basis for the actions of the polity might be rational---or might not be rational--and the people, with whom power is supposed to rest--have no way of knowing.

debate has become a matter of recycling a priori convictions, of not listening, of not offering coherent counter arguments, not taking seriously either the subject matter, the idea of debate or people who engage in debate. it is a cartoon, a weak shell of debate, a joke. maybe we do it, this debate thing in a degenrate environment, so that we can keep some hope alive that this space is a choice and that others are possible---and that while we work for this other space to bring it about we try to continue operating in this one as if it provided a kind of practice for what might follow, a potentially democratic space. maybe we do it out of vanity.

what is worst about this is that we do it to ourselves. we accept this climate, we accept the degradation of information, the transformations in the nature of political committment--we accept all of it, even if within that we debate particular policies or actions. by accepting this degenerate climate, we engage in a long, tedious ritual of political self-immolation that we perform in 3-d life and that we perform here. we no longer know how to act when basic questions come up for debate--a form of interaction that we no longer value, that we confuse with a mode of argument that one most often sees happening between domestic partners in a long term relationship who have come to detest everything about each other.

the point is not that we operate in a climate that see you and me as a management problem that is addressed by attempts to organize/structure opinoin--it is that we accept it--and worse still reproduce it--we reproduce our own disempowerment, we are our own disempowerment, we simply havent reached a level of courage adequate to enable us to say it.

but sometimes our actions say as much for us.

we have choices: we do not have to treat ourselves this way. we do not have to treat debate as though it was nothing other than a variant of a circle jerk, a reinforcement device, a space across which one's vanity is stroked because you deploy arguments without any idea that they could possibly be wrong.

this applies to myself as well as everyone else.

the terrorism thread, and others like it, are simple indices of the extent to which we seem to have come to enjoy our own disempowerment. we like it. maybe we need it. we substitute rotating in little circles for questions of substance. we all do it. and again, we do it to ourselves. it is not good.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite