kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Feb 2000 11:41:57 -0500 Apsken at aol.com wrote:
>
> > Kenneth Mackendrick wrote,
> > > *Some* anti-racists derive enjoyment from calling out racism - anti-racism
> > > "from on high" as it were. . . . It's really important to
> > > be able to distinguish what drives an ideological position.
>
> > This is especially offensive, coming as it does from one who postures so
> > righteously that he feels no obligation to express a lick of solidarity for
> > those on the front lines of stuggle against racism, or its victims, but
> > instead spins absurd programs for them from the safety of his (very aloof,
> > very safe, very white) tower "on high."
>
> Sigh. Are you saying that all ideologies escape the snare of reproducing
> themselves? or are you saying that I should just shut my face in this
> particular instance?
>
> As for solidarity, you have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. We're just
> talking here, tossing around ideas and strategies, comparing notes.
Ken M's quoting of Ken L stops just before the sentence which expresses the core of the latter's criticicm:
Ken Lawrence: "In fact, it is not important to distinguish what "drives" one's allies in struggle, except in the overall base-and-superstructure meaning, since, after all, it is in the superstructure, where ideology takes precedence over the forces and relations of production, that the actual battles occur. . . ."
Ken M responds by defending his own motivation -- when the point is that motivation is either irrelevant or secondary. Ken L's principle: "It's really important to be able to distinguish what drives an ideological position" is precisely the position that (according to many, including I think Zizek) can lead to the death camps. It is incidentally also closely related to one of the main arguments of the prosecution in the Sacco-Vanzetti case -- the defendants, the prosecution argued, showed "consciousness of guilt."
A tendency to read minds (in the frame of more or less religious princples) is not a necessary and invariable feature of psychologistic thinking, but it is all too common a feature. Super-Leninists like to quote Lenin as holding a position such as this (very faint shadings of difference can foreshadow very large differences -- I forget the exact quote or its source). Mind-reading is also evident in the posts in this thread which, though they phrase it differently and will claim I am misunderstanding them or lying, in effect say that it is dangerous to oppose political criminals (fascists or racists or misogynists or gaybashers) because it may make them worse.
Carrol
P.S. Psychologizing (beginning with Zizek's own article and underlined if anything in the posts of his defenders) has obscurred the whole issue of our response to Haider. In a world which has seen such an upsurge in humanitarian bombing and related phenomena, those of us in the U.S. or in the NATO nations must be cautious as to how we criticize political forces in smaller nations. On the other hand, Austria is part of the inner core of imperialism, so . . . . In any case that debate or discussion cannot be carried out in a context in which people argue whether calling fascists names might possibly attract people to fascism. That is almost obscene. It is a near cousin, perhaps even identical twin, to the warning given to civil-rights fighters in the '60s that they must be moderate or they will "turn people off."