All Shock, No Therapy

Peter van Heusden pvh at egenetics.com
Mon Jan 29 06:43:11 PST 2001


On Sun, Jan 28, 2001 at 06:46:26PM -0800, Chuck Grimes wrote: [snip]
>
> What occurs is a liberation of many different forms of subjugation.
> Not the least of them is the re-figuration and re-appropriation of
> skills upon which the worlds of mass produced media/communication and
> its comatose consumption are based. Essentially, the basis of society
> is repossessed through re-appropriating language and other symbolic
> forms of expression through which both psyche and society are
> configured.

If I follow you here, what's being talked about is a kind of ordering of social relations in a symbolic form - rather like the way we can talk about the commodity being a fetishised form of a social relation, we can talk about this 'hierarchical ordering of psyche' being a set of social relations inscribed upon ourselves in a fetishised form?

In a sense what you're talking about in this paragraph that I quoted sounds rather like what Harry Cleaver's description of the 'subversion of money as command' (http://csf.colorado.edu/pkt/authors/Cleaver.Harry/Subversion%20of%20Money-as-Command%20Jul92) - the basic argument being that the deployment of money is the deployment of a social relation which at the same time serves to ensure the continued productivity of human society, and also captures that productivity and recuperates it as part of capital. An important point, however, is that once deployed, it is precisely the 'universality' of money - its formal seperation from the hands of the capitalists which makes it dangerously able to slip out of its role of command. Here's Harry Cleaver:

At the same time, the imposition of money --like all the other

mechanisms of domination-- involved a constant risk: namely that the

working class might make use of it for its own purposes. By this I do not

mean simply the expenditure of money for the means of subsistence, that

purpose, per se, is fully consistent with the needs of capital as long as

it merely involves the reproduction of labor power. However, we need to

recognize that there is only a limited automaticity in this role of money.

The working class must spend its wage to reproduce itself and as long as

capital is able to continue to impose work, consumption will inevitably

reproduce labor power, at least to some degree. At the same time, workers

have also proven quite capable of using money for purposes antithetical to

such reproduction. Obvious cases are those where money has been used by

workers to finance their struggles against capital, from strike funds and

weapons to the periodical avoidance of work made possible by sufficiently

high money income.4 Beyond such negative subversion of money is the

use of money by workers to finance their own creative forms of

self-activity in which they pursue ways of being alternative to capital

--from innovations in traditional cultural activities to the development

of new forms of communist social patterns.5

Might this description similarly be applied to the symbolic realm?

On writing, the latest issue of the South African feminist mag, Agenda (http://www.agenda.org.za - content unfortunately not available online) is on the politics of writing, and it has a number of very interesting articles which explore the contradictory role of writing as liberation and also entrapment (within discourses learned too often from oppressors). The question of language as a difficult entry into the internal realm is, I think particularly complex in South Africa where language barriers are only the most obvious sign of the non-neutrality of how we come to express ourselves.

Anyway, thanks for giving me some food for thought - I'll end off here...

Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B



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