the problem: thread began with claims about contemporary fascism/nazism. i was rejecting the reduction of fascism to nazism in those discussions; i think it a bad idea.
>well that may be the case, but that is not what I'm doing. in fact the
>fantasy of harmony is specifically related to the relation of racism to
>capitalism as by-definition s highly antagonistic social form (Zizek)
>as is >the ethnicisation of nations specifically a product of the
formation of a
>national bourgeoisie through the French revolution, where for the first time,
>the nation is attached to a people defined as 'the French people' (Balibar).
all been said before by other scholars. sorry ange but i's writing about the ideology of the american dream in low income home buying programs right now. all my shopping and posting hours are spent on that research. ain't got time for the Zizek Inc., the latest stars strutting their stuff at Academix-A-Go-Go. besides i'm running low on fivers to stick in their g-strings. Zizek Ltd just doesn't do much for me!
i started reading Zizek Ltd. however, i often dozed off and when i awoke to raid the fridge for a midnight snack i kept tripping over a lump in the darkness. turned out i was stumbling over the massacred body of Durkheim. when i turned on the light but what did appear? dead Daddy D sporting Lacan's clothes which magically brought him to life, though no one noticed he was dead b/c they were dazzled by the threads. but hey what!? not even a classy pair o' threads, but something Lacan once donated to the Good Will. as it turns outs, Zizek snagged those threads while slumming in a consignment shop in Gay Paris. i kept pinching myself but it wasn't a dream. it was a nightmare. end of Zizek Ltd reading blitz.
entertainment interlude over, back to reg. programming:
>wishy-washy because it is not a neat typology?
no! why is an historical sociological approach that demands nuanced attentiveness to the subtle intricacies of racialization a typology?
aristotle's cool an' all--but i'm thinking more weber and the movement between ideal-types and attentiveness to the complexity, messiness (minus the methodological individualism o' course).
>and yes, all forms of the
>modern nation-state are racist. they have a racist presupposition that may
>or may not be the emphatic way of defining citizenship at certain
>times, but it invariably returns to such definitions, esp in times of crisis
>(hence the importance of the harmony-antagonism thesis).
yup. 'zactly what i've been saying in my posts--assuming this must be obvious to anyone speaking to this issue. but again, you don't need Zizek Ltd or Balibar for this. oh yeah, you bet, i enjoy beating a dead horse.
>I'm not
>particularly interested in typologies, since they'll always be blurry at the
>margins of each definition,
so? everything is blurry at the edges
>and can lead to debating the definition of each
>category over and above generating a critique and analysis.
well huh.
firstly, i'm not using typologies. secondly, i'm doing historical sociology, asking about various manifestations and why they differ. driven by theory, not by mindless description. it a way of seeing that illuminates some things deemed theoretically important, while ignoring others. now, you can say this is descriptive typification, but i think not. you do quite the same when you put on your sporty Zizek Ltd sunglasses!
>I'm not sure which fascist regimes *today* we would be talking about. but I
>would say that the expansion of borders is only a specific moment, as are the
>claims to regaining the integrity of a nation's borders (where integrity is
>described in ethnicist or racial terms), as is the claim that the nation's
>borders are under threat (internally and externally).
got no argument from me about this.
>of course it is about
>territory, but about the territorialisation of identify, in all of the above
>ways. would that make a regime fascist? no. but it would make it racist.
yeah. but we've already agreed that by def. the nation-state is racist and deploy the above to some degree or another. the question is, to what degree, why and how so? why and when do these regimes resort to violent racism, genocide, terror, etc. what are the conditions that lead to this? why is a group seen as expendable. it's not just concern w/ the gen'l process of racialization, but also to ask why certain groups are deemed threatening.
>I haven't reified it. (race, the process of racialization)
apologies. i was reading you as doing that be/c of classism exchange and b/c of the way this thread started. you did seem to want to racialize poor whites, white working class. i have a problem with that for reasons i stated.
surely you
>would not see racism as that which emanates out of the characteristics of
>those who are the objects of racist discourse and violence? this is simply
>my point.
no. bothers me that you would even type this given all my digit-flapping about capitalism! not to mention the fwd which makes it pretty clear that i see cap and nat'sm as partners in crime. btw, what about that fwd you mentioned, i didn't see it? but once nationalism is accomplished* [see note] and largely taken-for-granted, i think diff. processes kick in and so i'm not comfortable calling the oppression of glbts or stereotyping the white working class racism.
however, sometimes the only way to figure out how the dominant race defines itself is to ask what it deems threatening. in other words, sometimes we can best find out what is normal by asking what is seen as transgressive. [freud comes to mind here, eh? as does schutz, garfinkle, decerteau, and even damn durk! etc] sometimes the dominant assumptions are *so* taken-for-granted that they are difficult *to see* and can only be seen by looking at the transgressive, the marked, etc. when this approach proceeds by embedding this in a macro-level analysis this is *NOT* attributing racism to the characteristics defined as transgressive. it is unfortunate that i have to explain this.
>I'm unclear on where you're going or trying to go. or what you mean by
>aporia here. in any case, aporias are something to be treasured and
>explored, not papered over, at times. the aporia itself, like the exception
>from the definition, might well be the place of explanation. but then, I'm
>an Adorno fan...
well ange, lovely, i've always liked cul-de-sacs, but i don't think i want to build my house on one! i enjoy analysis and critique and even generating theoretical explanations for why things are the way the are. but i wanna put one foot in front of the other too. aporia=no way out, lacking path out, too many paths out and no criteria to choose at least a few among them as more likely than others to lead us out.
btw, that's one of my big probs. with Zizek Ltd. can't type about it now but will try someday.
> I think Balibar's approach is highly persuasive and
>highly complex. what are you uncomfortable with about his arguments?
i've read only what little you 'n' doug posted. zat's it. i was hopin' you'd splain me that one. but you know, ltd time so i understand but i'm in passive learner mode. lazy i am.
>but on 'othering': isn't this too formalistic? don't you empty this of its
>substantive elements and run the risk of treating it almost as an
>anthropological (in the sense that the euros understand this) idea, as
>something from 'human nature'?
first, tell me something. what do you call what Zizek Inc are up to?
if you call it human *being*, in marxist sense, then i'll say yes. othering is in some sense inevitable. the question is, how can we create a society in which that doesn't translate into the impoverishment, violent abuse of, exploitation, oppression of those others? i don't think, though, that we ought to even try to get rid of boundaries. in fact, i don't think we can. i don't think you can create a world in which we don't lay out some general principles that say, "this is what it means to belong to this community" doing so necessarily creates boundaries, but not necessarily rigid, impermeable ones! in fact, boundaries are never impermeable for while all forms of solidarity necessarily produce boundaries they also produce transgression. and when you stop and think about it, Zizek Ltd aren't saying a whole lot different given the socio-psychoanalytic model upon which they build their theory.
>and, to repeat, I'm not at all sure why you think it's at all important to
>define fascism as not-always racism, which I think is quite a different
>matter to defining it as only-racism.
because of the insistence that anyone in the US who sports a swastika or hurls racial epithets or reads mein kampf is a fascist and thus a racist, violently so, & intent on murdering people of color. and if this same person once planned to murder a lot of white people, then of course he was a fascist because fascism and mass murder always go together.
>to repeat: I think you are setting
>yourself up for collapsing the difference between the two claims by thinking
>it's necessary to have a typology in the first place.
tis only because you think that ideal type analysis & historical soc is rigid and doesn't wallow in the messy. i think if you read my posts you'll see that i'm trying to get at more historicized, nuanced understanding of fascism as taking on different faces of oppression for a variety of reasons that i think we can and should examine: what kind of racism is already operating and how so? what kind of cap. crises are evident? territorial expansion? how is the 'master race' defining who belongs? in what sense are the racialized groups dispensable [e.g, indigenous peoples who resist being disciplined to the cash nexus]? etc.
kelley (*no i'm not saying that nationalism ever stops being accomplished, achieved. i am saying much of the assumes b/c so taken-for-granted that they're never questioned--hegemony here--and so effort doesn't have to expended in quite the same ways. furthermore, the globalization of capitalism is now in direct conflict with modern nation-state nationalism and this is something we need to attend to wrt fascism)
“touch yourself and you will know that i exist.” ~luce irigaray