Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Get out of New Jersey while you still can

roachboy · 12-23-2007, 08:55 AM

ustwo--a debating tip--you aren't going to be in a position to call anyone on anything if your main tactic is to declare, before anything else, that you didn't read the post.

your case is not helped when you provide a totally incoherent flea=circus bit about c. wright mills.

knowing now that occasional agreement on something is a vague possibility, and that neither of our heads will explode if it happens...

==========================

there is a (methodo)logical problem with host's post above, but it mostly has to do with simply not explaining the linkage between the claim that the u.s. is an oligarchy, the militarization of police forces, the expansion of the notion of subversive speech, the "prison-industrial complex"----and procedural irregularities involving the meaning of implied consent in new jersey.

there is a way you could do it---say that a dimension of conservative tactics of social mobilization is the creation of a series of Enemies that operate at different social registers. these Enemies are drunk drivers, people who kidnap children, "terrorists" and other political adversaries....which are grouped as "social deviants", threats to the phantom integrity of the body politic of the Us--because the principle function of designating an Enemy is to designate a community that is threatened by this Enemy, which you do at the same time.

but this would require voyaging through the climate of social hysteria, its origins, its functions and uses. so on the one hand, you could connect stuff like "america's most wanted" the burgeoning hysteria of the 1980s-90s concerning children (remember all those milk cartons with images of lost children printed on the sides?)......to stuff like the construction of drunk drivers as bearers of chaos and potential death....to something of the notion of "terrorism" in that all are random threats, all are abstract threats, nothing to be done really...political dissent, processed through right revisionist pseudo-history of the vietnam period gets turned into another Persecuting Adversary, an Outside Element geared around Creating Danger and Disorder Amongst/Within the Right-Thinking Community of Perecuted Petit Bourgeois Types.

you'd have to track the fashioning and migration of these memes across differing registers of cultural production, show the linkages between, say, the image of the Phantom Other Who Waits to Steal Your Child, the clamp-down on dui as an expression of social deviance (and not as an expression of the workings of a kind of social safety valve generated in part by a paranoia-as-politics approach to solidarity building)---the migration of these memes from the stream of ordinary debris into elements of political narrative by way of any number of conservative institutions whose function was (still is?) to provide the illusion of constant updating of the Ideological Product that is populist conservatism...and the effects of this migration/reframing.

so you could maybe show a relation between the rise of fear of the "Abstract Figure Who May or May Not Exist But Who Will Maybe Kidnap Your Children If He Does Exist so you Better Watch Out" and the creation of a consituency willing and able to vote for Order uber alles and who cam maybe rationalize away this committment to order uber alles on the grounds of self-defense.

but you'd have to show how this process worked.

you can't simply say "there are procedural irregularities that test the limits of implied consent happening in new jersey" and then say "c. wright mills outlined a description of the united states as an oligarchy" then string together a series of features of the world the right has made and leave it at that.

this because without such work, you imply a conspiracy of some kind that in fact runs the show within which we live---you say "power elite" and then point to a sequence of more recent factors and don't fill in the middle term, and you say, basically, that nameless elements within this elite determine what is seen and how it is seen politically/media-wise.

i dont buy it, simply because the dominant economic class in the states is deeply divided, is not working with an understanding of its own class interests. so you have factions within the dominant economic class that align with the far right, and others that align with the moderate right (which includes most of the democrat "front-runners" of the moment)...
and i dont buy it because assuming such a conspiracy exists bypasses the need to think about the looser-less formalized circuitry of ideological adjustment that the conservatives had fashioned and which worked quite well until the overwhelming foulness of the bush administration effective junked the machinery....for now anyway....

a cynical fellow might be inclined to think that the origin of this Persecuting Other that conservative politics feeds on is the figure of the Poor or Dispossessed, which would be the imaginary cypher filled in my the consequences of neoliberal economic and social policies, which at one time "expressed itself" through political dissent from the left (as an imaginary construction)....so you can maybe connect conservative revisionist narratives of the vietnam period to the figure of Political Opposition as Persecution to the series of other Persecuting Others that have been floated into the hysteria mill of american "culture" since the reagan period.

but you'd have to make this kind of argument, it seems to me.

o yeah--and i wouldn't count on much agreement from the right about mill's basic idea. just as it is possible to shear off consideration of the poor from the ideological mill, only to have them resurfacing in displaced form as a Persecuting Other, so it is possible to have the actually existing class fractions that back and which stand to benefit from conservtive politics be sheared off, only to reappear in as the Happy Face Other of the Entrepreneur, Hero of Markets, Genius of Linguistics, Conqueror of Happiness and Friend of the Children, the Embodiment of Rationality in Chaotic Times.

12-23-2007, 08:55 AM	#64 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	ustwo--a debating tip--you aren't going to be in a position to call anyone on anything if your main tactic is to declare, before anything else, that you didn't read the post. your case is not helped when you provide a totally incoherent flea=circus bit about c. wright mills. knowing now that occasional agreement on something is a vague possibility, and that neither of our heads will explode if it happens... ========================== there is a (methodo)logical problem with host's post above, but it mostly has to do with simply not explaining the linkage between the claim that the u.s. is an oligarchy, the militarization of police forces, the expansion of the notion of subversive speech, the "prison-industrial complex"----and procedural irregularities involving the meaning of implied consent in new jersey. there is a way you could do it---say that a dimension of conservative tactics of social mobilization is the creation of a series of Enemies that operate at different social registers. these Enemies are drunk drivers, people who kidnap children, "terrorists" and other political adversaries....which are grouped as "social deviants", threats to the phantom integrity of the body politic of the Us--because the principle function of designating an Enemy is to designate a community that is threatened by this Enemy, which you do at the same time. but this would require voyaging through the climate of social hysteria, its origins, its functions and uses. so on the one hand, you could connect stuff like "america's most wanted" the burgeoning hysteria of the 1980s-90s concerning children (remember all those milk cartons with images of lost children printed on the sides?)......to stuff like the construction of drunk drivers as bearers of chaos and potential death....to something of the notion of "terrorism" in that all are random threats, all are abstract threats, nothing to be done really...political dissent, processed through right revisionist pseudo-history of the vietnam period gets turned into another Persecuting Adversary, an Outside Element geared around Creating Danger and Disorder Amongst/Within the Right-Thinking Community of Perecuted Petit Bourgeois Types. you'd have to track the fashioning and migration of these memes across differing registers of cultural production, show the linkages between, say, the image of the Phantom Other Who Waits to Steal Your Child, the clamp-down on dui as an expression of social deviance (and not as an expression of the workings of a kind of social safety valve generated in part by a paranoia-as-politics approach to solidarity building)---the migration of these memes from the stream of ordinary debris into elements of political narrative by way of any number of conservative institutions whose function was (still is?) to provide the illusion of constant updating of the Ideological Product that is populist conservatism...and the effects of this migration/reframing. so you could maybe show a relation between the rise of fear of the "Abstract Figure Who May or May Not Exist But Who Will Maybe Kidnap Your Children If He Does Exist so you Better Watch Out" and the creation of a consituency willing and able to vote for Order uber alles and who cam maybe rationalize away this committment to order uber alles on the grounds of self-defense. but you'd have to show how this process worked. you can't simply say "there are procedural irregularities that test the limits of implied consent happening in new jersey" and then say "c. wright mills outlined a description of the united states as an oligarchy" then string together a series of features of the world the right has made and leave it at that. this because without such work, you imply a conspiracy of some kind that in fact runs the show within which we live---you say "power elite" and then point to a sequence of more recent factors and don't fill in the middle term, and you say, basically, that nameless elements within this elite determine what is seen and how it is seen politically/media-wise. i dont buy it, simply because the dominant economic class in the states is deeply divided, is not working with an understanding of its own class interests. so you have factions within the dominant economic class that align with the far right, and others that align with the moderate right (which includes most of the democrat "front-runners" of the moment)... and i dont buy it because assuming such a conspiracy exists bypasses the need to think about the looser-less formalized circuitry of ideological adjustment that the conservatives had fashioned and which worked quite well until the overwhelming foulness of the bush administration effective junked the machinery....for now anyway.... a cynical fellow might be inclined to think that the origin of this Persecuting Other that conservative politics feeds on is the figure of the Poor or Dispossessed, which would be the imaginary cypher filled in my the consequences of neoliberal economic and social policies, which at one time "expressed itself" through political dissent from the left (as an imaginary construction)....so you can maybe connect conservative revisionist narratives of the vietnam period to the figure of Political Opposition as Persecution to the series of other Persecuting Others that have been floated into the hysteria mill of american "culture" since the reagan period. but you'd have to make this kind of argument, it seems to me. o yeah--and i wouldn't count on much agreement from the right about mill's basic idea. just as it is possible to shear off consideration of the poor from the ideological mill, only to have them resurfacing in displaced form as a Persecuting Other, so it is possible to have the actually existing class fractions that back and which stand to benefit from conservtive politics be sheared off, only to reappear in as the Happy Face Other of the Entrepreneur, Hero of Markets, Genius of Linguistics, Conqueror of Happiness and Friend of the Children, the Embodiment of Rationality in Chaotic Times. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite