>I don't confuse my abstractions with actual people, so I don't write
>posts in which I create mythical subjects who can, as mythical
>actual people, directly fit into abstractions. And I don't confuse
>actual people with abstractions, which you do all the time.
I thought this all came up in the context of trying to understand the massive lack of interest in politics so widely displayed today. Lacking any reagents, as The Man said, we've got to deploy some abstractions. You sound to me like some Foucaultian micropolitician - citing only specific people at specific moments in specific struggles - or some Lyotardian pronouncing the Master Narrative dead. So we can't have any theory of how social forces shape individual consciousness and behavior, because to theorize this beyond the level of the specific individual is "abstract." Of course it's abstract. Thought requires a certain level of abstraction. Language requires a certain level of abstraction. Can we not speak of The Fork, but only specific forks?
>Those who have had real and continuing experience in actually
>"reaching" people, in mobilizing "actual people" in "actual
>struggles," *know* that the problems which are involved
>in that activity cannot be theorized independently from ongoing
>engagement in a particular struggle involving particular people
>at a particular time in a particular place.
Oh come now. Union organizers learn nothing generalizable by the experience of organizing workers? You develop theories out of practice, practice out of theories - each shaping the other.
>I knew damn well that people didn't get much thrill out of
>singing freedom songs before they even had any developed
>and shared idea of why they were there
Sounds like a theory to me.
>Now you really don't have to consult Lacan to know that sitting
>together eating donuts and chatting is better than standing
>around in the dark watching four or five strangers do a bad
>job of singing freedom songs.
Nor do you need advanced musical training. I don't know what bearing Lacan has on this observation, but I guess you just had to bring him in.
>The worries about the RCP are relevant here too. What explains
>their relative success in the Mumia Defense effort?
Relative success? How's that? They've driven people away, and Mumia is in pretty dire shape. What's failure by your standard.
>You organize struggles and relate to people within those struggles
>through the methods of relating that you have learned through
>decades (or in some cases only weeks) of practice and experience.
>It's simple. This has never been a problem, and never will be.
Now you're sounding like Ross Perot: "It's just that simple." If it was so fucking simple why is the left in such dire shape?
>The other day you were sneering at someone who invoked
>the importance of activists. Now you are sneering at the analysis
>of abstract forces and dynamics. Make up your mind.
It's because I love Billy Idol so much, and want to be able to sneer like he does.
>Have you read anything Yoshie and I have posted. Our objections
>are that the kind of discussion you want IS NOT INDIVIDUALISTIC
>ENOUGH. We have argued that the responses of actual people, taken
>one at a time, *cannot be theorized* -- that theory is always too
>abstract. That if you want to relate to actual people you have to
>become at home in contingency -- and that psychologism brutally
>interferes with the necessary respect for the contingent, the
>particular, the actual. If you think of politics through the
>perceptions of a professor or a journalist or a politician (in
>electoral politics) you simply cannot see that the process of
>reaching people is a function of concrete struggles, not of
>abstract psychological or rhetorical or pedagogical or
>public-relations theory.
The bourgeoisie has actually done quite well with public relations "theory." All without leafleting or sitting around in meetings in airless church basements.
Doug