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roachboy · 02-06-2006, 08:28 AM

i would like to point out something rather depressing--and dangerous if this thread represents anything like an index of how folk are thinking about this extended donnybrook over the cartoons.

this is not so much about the positions one could take relative to the cartoons/reactions as it is about recurring structural features of the reactions here to the protests triggered by the cartoons.

on the controversy itself, none of it surprises in principle (in fact it does a bit)--i only wish that the cartoons had been smarter so that debate over questions of free speech vs. racism could be played out on better grounds.

what is clear is that these cartoons have been instrumentalized by all sides: the various demos over the weekend in particular are obviously motivated by a wide range of broad political agendas that are understood to dovetail with reaction to this matter: that regimes like syria, for example, leans heavily on the discourse of the "infidel" to prop itself up is evident. same with iran. same with the saudis. the mirror image of this operates in western contexts, however---in the states, the bush administration has trafficked in the same type of racist nonsense dressed up in elements drawn from religious discourse since 9/11/2001--in europe, you have a longer-term mobilization on parallel grounds undertaken by neofascist organizations (the relation between european neofascism and mainstream republican ideology is interesting...and it is no surprise that american conservatives "deal with it" by refusing to look)--the problem is the racist content itself--but more so that it is not socially marked as racist, and so operates as a prefabricated discursive structure that folk can adopt in particular situations. this adoption triggers a repetition of the central features of the discourse, which results in racist interpretations--regardless of the personal committments of those who adopt it.

in 2006, it is quite easy to avoid antisemitism because one knows that it is bad. it has been coded as bad--the sorry experience of the 20th century demonstrated its dangers by pushing the reaction to a very old discourse within euro-christianity to its horrifying conclusions. but apparently this coding of antisemtism as bad applies only to its surface features: when it comes to the type of argument, operating in a different context, aimed at another group, the problem is not evident.

in many of the posts above, you find an image of "radical islam" or "jihadists" which function as a stand-in for islam as a whole.
this signifier in turn defines muslims as the enemy within and without, powerless and all powerful, distant and an immediate threat...it is the signifiers around which reactionary notions of community have been posited: if the Enemy is muslim and, in the main, brown, then it follows that the community threatened is also defined on religious and racial lines.
so the "them" is some hallucinatory image of militant fundamentalists that stands in for anything like coherent thinking about a religion that encompasses about 20% of the earth's population.
and the "us" by default is white and christian.
the conflict is then religious war.
the triggers are double: in particular "random" acts of violence; in general fear of "invasion" of the "us".

in the states, the first is dominant--in western europe, amongst those influenced by neofascist discourse directly or indirectly the second is dominant (the scope of that discourse is much wider than is the support for neofascist organizations--try to think of how chirac's law banning the wearing of the veil in schools could have been promulgated except in this kind of discursive context--an action that "protects" the secualr french state from invasion by the muslim hoardes....)

in ths states,a reductive and basically racist image of islam has been central to the bush administration's policies and marketing of those policies since it was handed what can only be seen as the gift of 9/11/2001. the central operational trope is obviously the "terrorist"--a fiction the content of which is filled in via television imagery (decontextualized, arbitrary images of violence) and fleshed out via the vast range of mediocrities who dominate conservative punditry--from the "respectable" version (huntington's "clash of civilizations" model) to the inane (the ann coulter school of thinking religious warfare)----this signifier has been central to the bush administration's marketing of itself and its republican supporters to the public--vote kerry and die, remember?---its logic is repeated endlessly, drifting in and out of "news" as the set of framing conceits around footage, for example, surfacing as a central line of demarcation between far right and everyone else, in speeches by dick cheney during the last campaign in particular...

you get the entire range of possibilities recycled above in this thread---it is a "respectable" form of racism, pre-articulated and available that folk can reproduce explicitly (pace ustwo or the lovely "diaperheads" crack above) or implicitly). and it operates despite superficial denials.

it is racist, but we dont call it that so...well....we dont have to exercise circumspection.
this is how it has traditionally worked, folks: racist pseudo-explanations knit themselves into the "common sense" of people who experience anxieties about a range of factors (economic stability, social position in a changing world, "the war on terror" particularly in the way the bushpeople stage it--that is as unmotivated politically, as a conflcit between good (white christians) and evil (brown muslims) etc. etc. etc.). it functions to shape projections based in these anxieties onto others in the world. it is an example of the usage of racism as a kind of collective therapy, a way of avoding political dimensions, of displacing it onto a different register.

it is most strange to see folk who i do not imagine to be racist as human beings using this kind of logic to unfold fundamentally offensive interpretations of this controversy over the cartoons. if you want to defend press freedom against these protests, then there is no need to move from that into projections about the "enemy"--but since there is no social sanction that accompanies this move, folk do it.

so it follows that, apparently, racism that is not coded as such is ok.

02-06-2006, 08:28 AM	#106 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i would like to point out something rather depressing--and dangerous if this thread represents anything like an index of how folk are thinking about this extended donnybrook over the cartoons. this is not so much about the positions one could take relative to the cartoons/reactions as it is about recurring structural features of the reactions here to the protests triggered by the cartoons. on the controversy itself, none of it surprises in principle (in fact it does a bit)--i only wish that the cartoons had been smarter so that debate over questions of free speech vs. racism could be played out on better grounds. what is clear is that these cartoons have been instrumentalized by all sides: the various demos over the weekend in particular are obviously motivated by a wide range of broad political agendas that are understood to dovetail with reaction to this matter: that regimes like syria, for example, leans heavily on the discourse of the "infidel" to prop itself up is evident. same with iran. same with the saudis. the mirror image of this operates in western contexts, however---in the states, the bush administration has trafficked in the same type of racist nonsense dressed up in elements drawn from religious discourse since 9/11/2001--in europe, you have a longer-term mobilization on parallel grounds undertaken by neofascist organizations (the relation between european neofascism and mainstream republican ideology is interesting...and it is no surprise that american conservatives "deal with it" by refusing to look)--the problem is the racist content itself--but more so that it is not socially marked as racist, and so operates as a prefabricated discursive structure that folk can adopt in particular situations. this adoption triggers a repetition of the central features of the discourse, which results in racist interpretations--regardless of the personal committments of those who adopt it. in 2006, it is quite easy to avoid antisemitism because one knows that it is bad. it has been coded as bad--the sorry experience of the 20th century demonstrated its dangers by pushing the reaction to a very old discourse within euro-christianity to its horrifying conclusions. but apparently this coding of antisemtism as bad applies only to its surface features: when it comes to the type of argument, operating in a different context, aimed at another group, the problem is not evident. in many of the posts above, you find an image of "radical islam" or "jihadists" which function as a stand-in for islam as a whole. this signifier in turn defines muslims as the enemy within and without, powerless and all powerful, distant and an immediate threat...it is the signifiers around which reactionary notions of community have been posited: if the Enemy is muslim and, in the main, brown, then it follows that the community threatened is also defined on religious and racial lines. so the "them" is some hallucinatory image of militant fundamentalists that stands in for anything like coherent thinking about a religion that encompasses about 20% of the earth's population. and the "us" by default is white and christian. the conflict is then religious war. the triggers are double: in particular "random" acts of violence; in general fear of "invasion" of the "us". in the states, the first is dominant--in western europe, amongst those influenced by neofascist discourse directly or indirectly the second is dominant (the scope of that discourse is much wider than is the support for neofascist organizations--try to think of how chirac's law banning the wearing of the veil in schools could have been promulgated except in this kind of discursive context--an action that "protects" the secualr french state from invasion by the muslim hoardes....) in ths states,a reductive and basically racist image of islam has been central to the bush administration's policies and marketing of those policies since it was handed what can only be seen as the gift of 9/11/2001. the central operational trope is obviously the "terrorist"--a fiction the content of which is filled in via television imagery (decontextualized, arbitrary images of violence) and fleshed out via the vast range of mediocrities who dominate conservative punditry--from the "respectable" version (huntington's "clash of civilizations" model) to the inane (the ann coulter school of thinking religious warfare)----this signifier has been central to the bush administration's marketing of itself and its republican supporters to the public--vote kerry and die, remember?---its logic is repeated endlessly, drifting in and out of "news" as the set of framing conceits around footage, for example, surfacing as a central line of demarcation between far right and everyone else, in speeches by dick cheney during the last campaign in particular... you get the entire range of possibilities recycled above in this thread---it is a "respectable" form of racism, pre-articulated and available that folk can reproduce explicitly (pace ustwo or the lovely "diaperheads" crack above) or implicitly). and it operates despite superficial denials. it is racist, but we dont call it that so...well....we dont have to exercise circumspection. this is how it has traditionally worked, folks: racist pseudo-explanations knit themselves into the "common sense" of people who experience anxieties about a range of factors (economic stability, social position in a changing world, "the war on terror" particularly in the way the bushpeople stage it--that is as unmotivated politically, as a conflcit between good (white christians) and evil (brown muslims) etc. etc. etc.). it functions to shape projections based in these anxieties onto others in the world. it is an example of the usage of racism as a kind of collective therapy, a way of avoding political dimensions, of displacing it onto a different register. it is most strange to see folk who i do not imagine to be racist as human beings using this kind of logic to unfold fundamentally offensive interpretations of this controversy over the cartoons. if you want to defend press freedom against these protests, then there is no need to move from that into projections about the "enemy"--but since there is no social sanction that accompanies this move, folk do it. so it follows that, apparently, racism that is not coded as such is ok. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 02-06-2006 at 08:32 AM..