roachboy

dk--i was aware that once the post shifted into the mall scenario that it crept up into my particular world.
i ran with it because i got kinda interested in how the distancing from violence repeats itself inside the scenario i had in mind.
so i went with it, despite the fact that the language became polemical as i did so, because i decided to do a little recursive exercise with the post.

the bottom line statement in your last post is :

"violence is real"

and the problem with that statement is at least two-fold:

violence is no more or less real than non-violence.

your category "real" is strange, because at bottom it means "what i choose to privilege when i project an idea of the world for myself"

it's entirely inside the loop my last post was trying to talk about.
what you attribute the status "real" to is an aesthetic matter.
you dont see it because you use the category of "reality" in a one-dimensional way--you act as though it is not problematic, that it is given in the way you take you chair to be or your hand to be. reality is an object, then. i think that view is----to be charitable---naive.

but you invoke it, as a thing, and act as though it gets you out of a circuit of projections, when the fact of the matter is that your use of "real" is what protects your circuit of projections.

you also seem to have missed this:

which was the point of the entire post.



what we are involved with in this kind of thread, then, is the exchange of mutually exclusive imaginary constructs.
you see the real as something primitive, linked to instinct that you imagine by-pass all social controls.
i imagine human beings as capable of self-limitation in a meaningful way, enough so i can entertain the hope that we, collectively, can control these primitive instincts.

neither is more "real" than the other.

but riddle me this: you write on a computer, linked via a telecommunications infrastructure to a nebulous space of packet exchange called the net. if violence was all that was real, how would go explain that we are communicating in this format at all? are we making it up, what we are doing?

you engage in debates on a messageboard, and in those debates you try to persuade people of your positions using arguments. if violence is all that is real, why do you bother?

not only that, but you have a normative vision of how we should organize society that you see as possible and preferable to what exists. that means you HAVE TO have some faith in the deliberative capacities of human collectives to organize themselves--and to change that organization--which means that you cannot actually understand reality as a thing, you have to see it as something that human beings make and remake collectively, and that you HAVE TO attach some importance to deliberation as a process.

you argue for constitutional fundamentalism in many contexts--the core of the 18th century american experryment was collective deliberation at the local level. you seem to find something valuable in a vision of small-scale direct democratic types of self-organization--but if the "real" is some hobbesian space of endless civil war, then your belief in democracy is a delusion--because it does not can not and will no ever change anything fundamental. because we, as human beings, are slaves to our drives.

i dont know why you would find that a compelling view, particularly since it works against everything you write, here and elsewhere, about democracy, about the constitution, about the possibilities that you see for some libertarian alternate future--none of it means shit if you really think that we are condemned to simply repeat patterns imposed on us by our primitive drives.

if your conception of what is "real" is accurate, we would still be in caves. we would only be capable of that. anything else would be unreal, dreaming.
so we could not possibly be comunicating, now, in this medium.
and maybe we aren't.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite