roachboy

the basic rule of news coverage is:
if it bleeds it leads.
given the choice between footage of a bruning building and that of a panel of moderates holding a news conference to denounce violence, which do you think would get more play?

you react to the play of images, powerclown. and not to what is happening in any more complex sense.

given that most reactions to this cartoon farce are predicated on the play of images and arbitrarily cut-up "context" the question of interpretation becomes central--whence the outline of what deleuze would probably call a "machine" for processing factoids i tried to outline in no. 106, and its centrality/importance.

smooth:
nice to run into you here as well.
the argument i was making against ustwo is basically one of sociological profile of these "fundamentalist" groups that constitute the signified (referent?) that organizes the notion of "terrorist"....the trick in the post against ustwo's characterization of "terrorist" as "middle class" was that it was directed mostly against his absurd claim to universal knowledge about class background of this phantom he refers to as "terrorism"--all that was required was to juxtapose a vast body of work that argues precisely the opposite, and that based on various types of close research on communities (mostly in french banlieux and north africa, particularly morocco and egypt) that show--clearly, obviously--the intertwining of economic position, social and political marginality and generational factors in the populations that identify as being part of these various "fundamentalist" groups.

i wasn't making a reverse variant of ustwo's claims. if it came across that way, then it was a function of my not being adequately clear.

what i was saying links to post 106 in that assumptions about the class position from which draw the various small groups that constitute the curious, multiple phemomena that are lumped together as "fundamentalism" (the quiescent--like a popsicle--version of "terrorist" in the parlance of our times)---are elements of an ideologicl image of the "terrorist" and/or "fundamentalist" that is false empirically (in that there are different vectors of tension that play into different patterns of engagement in different places)

given this, the assertion that all "terrorists" are somehow "middle class" seems to me to lean on some strange ideological distortions---the claim reflects an image constructed without the slightest concern with who these folk are empirically and why they do what they do---rather, this image is an aspect of the selling of reactionary responses to the threat posed by the image itself to a credulous media audience--the function of it seems to be to set up an immediate identification between the audience and agents responsible for particular actions--that "they" are somehow also "us"---which positions the signified "terrorist" precisely in a space of the enemy within and without, all powerful and powerless, a kind of persecuting double--and from this follows a logic of unlimited war--no enemy less likely to be stopped by security measures than the double of those who put them in place----no-one more clever at trapping you than yourself---no-one more dangerous than your personal evil twin---no fear more total than that of self-erasure---reaction to an image predicated so thoroughly on setting up identiciation as a preliminary step toward structuring a particular delinieation of that which is Other is support for any and all responses, no matter how violent, not matter how self-defeating.

it is a logic of hysteria.

another way: given the following:
if it bleeds it leads (basic media select criterion for determining newsworthiness)
and
the route chosen by the bush administration since 9/11 (at the levels of ideology and policy)
on their own
it is pretty obvious that the image of islam presented in the american mass media is at best fragmentary.

because of the political context, people seem to be particularly compelled to assemble these fragments into something that passes as a coherent image of islam.
almost all the links between fragments are rooted in dispositions that are, here as elswhere, funnelled through particular ideological filters--discourse--which stages both meanings (the content attributed to particular signifiers) and posits a logic for combination (the derivation of broader implications from assemblages of signifiers)
post 106 argued that this filter is evident, highly structured--it is also racist through and through---but it is not socially coded as racist, and so appears neutral (if you dont think about it at all, which it appears that folk often dont) and because it appears neutral, it is available for appropriation--and the features of this filter reproduce themselves in the interpretations of folk who use it--in ways that cross political positions that operate on other grounds, it seems---and so the conclusions it makes available to folk are as the filter itself is--that is racist through and through.

the post against ustwo was about the other side, the lack of correspondence between the elements within this filter/framework and the empirical world.

this one tries to connect the two.

i gotta go.



o yes: there are few eternal mysteries in this fallen world: why kenny g has a career in music is one of them.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite