roachboy

on the op: the article's interpretation of this killing is odd--decontextualized presentation of infotainment, curious rhetorical choices, etc. it kinda set up what has happened thus far here.

if you look at the op as just telling a story--and in a sense, that all it does--and telling that story in a very particular way--you can work pretty easily out what is happening both in it and in this thread. we live in fucked up times. one characteristic of these times is an obvious convergence between the discourse of "terrorism" and the paranoia of neofascist politics.

it's because these are such curious times that it pays to do react to information at a remove so you can wonder about the extent to which responses to the story are built into the story itself and so require no particular thinking--or to enable you to consider the extent to which the way a story is written pitches you into associations shaped by ideological memes.

this is gonna be a bit long.
tant pis.

the narrative is a variant of tragedy.

a) it involves a clash between rationalities, between mutually exclusive rule sets.
b) this clash generates a killing, which enacts the conflict between mutually exclusive rules sets
c) this sets into motion another conflict, a legal one, in the context of a meaning is ascribed to the killing.
as a conflict (c) repeats (a) except it 1. can be seen as itself resolving the question of which law/norms obtain and so resolves the conflict by imposing a meaning particular to one rule set onto an action carried out in terms of another.

this is how the orestia works, it is how this story works.

this kind of conflict does not mark a distinction between inside and outside a "culture" simply because you can find them everywhere--family vs. wider community, norms of inclusion/exlcusion as over against contextual norms (which community identity is primary in a situation where more than one is at play). and such conflicts arise continuously, in various forms. and these conflicts are often undecidable on their own terms. and the legal decision is often arbitrary.

the idea that a "culture" presupposes a unified or coherent single set of social rules is ludicrous. running with this idea puts you into untenable positions--like you can start pretending that such conflicts indicate the collapse of "western civilization" as if without these Others there'd be no crime, no-one would die and everything would be hunky dory. if you state this directly, the appeal goes out of it simply because stated directly, its removal from the world that other people know about, the retreat into fantasy, is obvious.

but such fiction---rooted in the implications of the word "culture" and not in reality--the idea that a "culture" is a unified or even coherent single formation --this is the stuff neofascist dreams are made of.

in principle--that is in the abstract--such conflicts can be taken as posing problems of limitations: limits of legal authority, limits of legitimacy--but (referring to an earlier paragraph here--->) if these problems are raised at the level of (a) then they are resolved at the level of (c).

this conflict between rationalities unfolds in an environment that is legally circumscribed----so the conflict between rule sets falls under the legal definitions of actions----so the outcome of this clash is murder, in this case.

but you can imagine other conflicts between rationalities that would lead a court to sanction what would otherwise be understood as murder.
war for example.

anyway two mutually exclusive sets of claims play out across the body (living and dead) of the victim. after the fact, the act is subjected to a judgment. that judgment defines the act around legal criteria and there we are.


one of the reasons tragic conflict has its power is that it generally unfolds (in the stories) during a period of political crisis. that "western civilization" is experiencing such a crisis is projection, and more stuff from which neo-fascist dreams are made. this simply because the notion of "western civilization" is even more ridiculous than that of "culture" if you think about it. where is it? where does it stop and start? who is inside and who outside? how would you determine that? who determines that?

this is another level of appeal of contemporary neo-fascism: it purports to resolve this question of "western civilization" by redefining it around the new and improved "same/other" distinction: if the new and improved Other is muslim then "we" are judeo-christian (but contemporary neo-fascism is pretty good at erasing the judeo- part)--the work of the binary is obvious. it is tedious to rehearse it all again. because believers in such political nonsense are looking for essence, in these transient inside/outside distinctions they find essence, so there is usually no sense that "western civlization" is nothing more than an abstraction that is shaped by a series of stupid oppositions on this order. they want "western civlization" to be a thing, like a toaster or a rock. so the category is not about being descriptively coherent--it is therapeutic.


back to the op: the decision on the part of the author of the op article to call this an "honor killing" is bizarre. she could have called it any number of other things, which would have been equally applicable, and this thread would not be happening as it has been.

"honor killing" obviously echoes other associations--the logic of feud as over against the logic of modern law----and because the story is set in italy and the english-language press does not devote a while lot of space to providing any detailed news about italy, the associations operate at the level of caricature--and so "honor killing" resonates with the mafia and so to a criminal conspiracy that functions as a double of state power in certain areas.

so it brings two associations without even thinking too much about it:
outmoded/anachronistic community norms, and horizontal criminal conspiracy.
this sounds like my favortie cartoon--"The Terrrorist"

and from here, we are off to the races--literally in some of the posts above.

people want to discuss this in ethical terms, but there is no attempt to do that in a serious way. to do that, you would need to actually consider the conflict itself and you simply do not have the information necessary about the family involved, who these folk are, where they are, what their situations were, what relations obtained between their assumptions concerning--say--marriage (as a flashpoint conflict between family/community norms and the norms of the ambient community--standard stuff, really). but without this information, there is no possibility of thinking about this killing as posing anything like a coherent ethical problem. folk above are using simplistic projections instead--so you dont know how it is possible that such an action could be undertaken--in what framework is might have seemed reasonable to do--but you make one up and pretend that on the basis of your projection, you can pose an ethical bind. you arent. the thing that makes ethics complicated is that you have to consider people acting in ways that they understand to be justified. the problem comes in considering this process of justification. if you frame an action as simply "primitive" or "abberant" you evacuate the ethical problem and substitute a simplistic spectator's judgment. which is not in itself a problem---it is an opinion--but dont pretend that you are resolving any grand ethical issue through it. you havent even set one up.

one of the aspects of this that makes it actually tragic is that the killing was undoubtedly an act taken en extremis. people do not generally kill their daughters as a matter of course. the people involved in this horrible situation are human beings. if you want to play the game of making "ethical" judgments, then you have to risk trying to understand the complexity of the situation. again, the problem really is in the sense of justification more than it is in the act that followed from it. the problem that ethics can get to are about bounded rationalities and their relation to wider social norms...but saying "this is bad" based on no substantial information doesn't do that. again, it doesnt even start to do that.

i am not justifying the killing, by the way.
i just think much of the response to the op has been facile.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite