>Yo, Ange, take heart. at least you're not an objectively racist
anti-marxist.<
heavens to betsy, now that would be a blow. but i suspect the initial formulation (that of "an objectively racist marxist") is, as charles has been astute enough to note, a by-word for 'non-leninist marxist'.
> You can have self-determination, as long as your "self" fits my
determination. In other words, an anti-nationalist defense of nationalism,
not to say a racist anti-racism.<
yes.
a question, on corporatism, i guess related: is it standard in the US for political groupings to pick and choose who to define as the real leadership of, say, blacks or women? does clinton do this for instance?
this is routine here: with both the ALP and the Liberals, but here the whole process has been formalised to such an extent that with every change in govt, a different set of groups are financed (by govt) through things like, say, the the Equal Opp Commission, to 'represent' women's interests 'to' the govt of the day. cosy. of course, this also means that those 'representative' organisations spend much time excluding and shaping their nominal constituencies, of which there are hundreds of variously loathsome instances. and, of course, various sects play their own little games over this, but usually it amounts to an aspiration to their own leadership resulting in the proliferation of empty shells of what used to be vibrant organisations. lots of self-appointed vanguards claiming representational trophies and few, if any, followers.
but is it this tightly organised through financing in the US, or does it tend more toward the rhetorical?
as an aside to the discussions on butler as well as perhaps baudrillard: i think that butler's preoccupation with the master-slave dialectic, the politics of recognition, has much to do with these kinds of processes, where the dialectic of representation begins to look like a vicious circle with no outside; as well as baudrillard's claim that the dialectic has no outside, no real grounding, is sheer simulacrum. what they neglect of course is the extent to which this goes hand in hand with a constant process of excluding, not to mention, criminalising, various constituencies in order for the representational feedback loops to be loops. which also means that they're not loops -- the whole game is about making them into such, social machines of the kind that systems theory dreams about.
though butler, as distinct from baudy, evinces a deep sense of mourning that this is how it is:
"power no longer acts unilaterally on its subject. Rather, the subject is produced, paradoxically, through the withdrawal fo power, its dissimulation and fabulation of the psyche as speaking topos. Social power vanishes, becomes the object lost, or social power makes vanish, effecting a mandatory set of losses. Thus, it effects a melancholia that reproduces power as the psychic voice of judgement addressed to (turned upon) oneself, thus modelling reflexively on subjection. ...The power imposed on us is the power that animates one's emergence, and there appears to be no escaping this ambivalence. ...there is no ambivalence without loss as the verdict of sociality..." (PLOP, 198)
Angela _________