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Originally Posted by roachboy
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.
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No, I gotcha on many of your points and I definately didn't think you making a facile reverse argument of his.
I also don't know how he conceptualizes what he was trying to convey...or how he got that data. Nonetheless, enthnographic and demographic data from at least the last 10 years are available showing that the people who actually act on certain fundamentalist ideoologies are not the poorest and most marginalized, but are coming from what used to be a middle class. Upon reflection, we ought not to be surprised (although I was when I read the data). I mean, if you and abaya and myself sat down over a beer, isn't it a fair statement that we would agree that the person most likely to feel the pain of marginalization and powerless is someone who previously thought he or she had some atual stake in the process?
I think here I'm going to have to go off to class but come back later with a couple of citations for you to peruse at your leiser. Because the inability of us to see eye to eye with one another is due to my inarticulate conveyance of the position I'm trying to relay. I best just leave it to the authors to explain and then perhaps pick it up thereafter.
But suffice to say, and Ustwo may just be quoting some comment I made a century ago, that his factoid is correct. But I'm unimpressed with his tendency to contextualize such factoids. And it shows in this kind of a discussion where a number of sociologists and an anthropologist would discuss the notion of material conditions as an impetus for change and behavior, and his retort is that ah but hese people are middle class, as if the middle class he refers to are happily milling around. Such statements don't seem to take into account what happens when the mills shut down. And they don't seem to recognize the effect the "West" has had in relation to those sectors and ways of life shutting down (and for more people than 'middle class' muslims).
I don't need to tell you that all of this is more complex than any of our comments do justice. I guess I just wanted to engage you in conversation
