>i started reading Zizek Ltd. however, i often dozed off ...
ahh, well. so he's not your poison. but a durkheimian he isn't, I think. what makes you think he is?
>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).
well, you waver between insisting on ideal types and attention to nuances. you can't have both: ideal types are not attentive to complexity and concrete contradictions, they are classification machines.
>firstly, i'm not using typologies.
hang on, it's you who keeps saying you want to come up with ideal types. you want to come up with a definition of the essence of fascism which is different to that of nazism, which is different to that of racism, which is different to that of other forms of oppression. this has been a constant in your arguments in this thread. I'm arguing that it can't be done, nor should it. there are deep historical and psychic connections between fascism and nazism, just like there are deep historical connections between racism and homophobia and sexism. I know you wouldn't disagree with the latter, but you seem to abhor fuzzy or expansive definitions of, say, racism for reasons that I don't fully understand, but you do this by saying they are too wishy-washy or expansive and it would be better to establish some ideal types (typologies).
>quite the same when you put on your sporty Zizek Ltd sunglasses!
heh. I have many other glasses besides, some look better on me than others, some I wear for special occasions. up to this point, I was wearing my frankfurter shades: I have a serious physical reaction to Weber. it comes from my years of being in sociology...
>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.
you would have to look at concrete instances I guess.
>you did seem to want to racialize poor
>whites, white working class. I have a problem with that for reasons i
>stated.
I've been arguing that poor whites have been racialised, both in the nineteenth and (very late) twentieth centuries; I've not once argued they are a 'race'.
>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.
likewise. but theory is only capable of showing us and exploring the gaps. it can't lead us out of them. we have a finite intellect, not an infinite one; thinking otherwise is at best utopianism (in the sense Marx writes of it) and at worst managerialism (in the sense Adorno writes of that). which isn't to say I don't like theory, far from it, I'm just quite specific about what I think it can and can't (shouldn't be made to) do.
>btw, that's one of my big probs. with Zizek Ltd.
Zizek takes this from Marx. maybe we should talk about this with reference to Marx and others in marxism who do (or don't do) this?
>>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?
Zizek (I can't speak for his friends, I haven't read that much) regards the structure of this as strictly homologous to that of capital, the reign of capital. the form that this othering takes, and the substantive elements of it, are directly related to capitalism, and often very specific social formations, such as Yugoslavia.
>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.
well, someone who hurls racist epithets is racist. but, for me, and given recent experiences in australia, the important argument would be to insist that those who don swastikas are not in fact the most dangerous, and that anti-fa actions here have had the discernible effect of rendering actual forms of racism invisible, or at least continue to be invisible to those who are not subjected to them. the Anglo left can think it is _doing something_, when in fact it is irrelevant and complicit in this process.
>tis only because you think that ideal type analysis & historical soc is
>rigid and doesn't wallow in the messy.
I do. and not necessarily because of what you're doing here, but because I don't much like Weber...
>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.
big project, but there are ways into it that don't begin with defining racism as epiphenomenal to a definition of nazism or fascism. I'll send you an essay by bologna which might interest you.
>(*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)
I don't agree that nationalism is in direct conflict with globalisation. I would say that nationalism has emerged as the privileged form of opposition to globalisation (in the ex-yu, Russia, here, s.e Asia..., but this isn't the same thing. this might be an interesting take to pursue: you say that nationalism has achieved hegemony in the US, and this might well be because the US was a global power. there are quite different resonances for nationalism in Malaysia (say) and that of the US.
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au