[lbo-talk] bureaucrats with weapons

[Carrol Cox]

There is no doubt about it: the most universally under-rated text in
European literature is Mansfield Park. It dramatizes, in a way no critic up
to the last few decades has recognized, precisely the situation described in
shag's post. The heroine, Fanny Hill, has been sneered at, along with the
novel, because she lacks the 'brilliance' of  Elizabeth Bennet and is too
weak a character to be interesting. What all these critics have been unable
to see (and this includes such a fine critic as Edward Said, is that Fanny's
_apparent_ weakness is wholly a structural weakness: she is a woman with no
independent fortune: ergo, she is weak by definition, despite the fact that,
seeing past this structural weakness, she is almost the only strong
character in the novel. Henry James's wonderful novel, The Awkward Age, is a
sort of unintended footnote to Mansfield Park.

Carrol

P.S. For innocents on this list who might still think of Austen as a nice
polite English spinster, the anti-heroine of Mansfield Park is introduced to
us in a conversation in which she makes a punning reference to sodomy in the
British Navy -- which perhaps gives a hint why Austen's brothers, both
Admirals, destroyed such a large proportion of her corresponsence.

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of shag carpet bomb
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 8:07 AM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: [lbo-talk] bureaucrats with weapons

It's definitely worth reading the whole thing, but this part is
especially interesting given recent events:

<quote>

    A constant staple of 1950s American situation comedies, for
example, was jokes about the impossibility of understanding women.
The jokes  (always of course told by men) always represented
women's logic as fundamentally alien  and incomprehensible. One
never had the impression the women in question had any  trouble
understanding men. The reasons are obvious: women had no choice
but to  understand men; this was the heyday of a certain image of
the patriarchal family, and  women with no access to their own
income or resources had little choice but to spend a  great deal
of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was
going on.  Patriarchal families of this sort are, as generations
of feminists have emphasized, most  certainly forms of structural
violence; their norms are indeed sanctioned by threat of  physical
harm in endless subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And this kind of
rhetoric about  the mysteries of womankind appears to be a
perennial feature of them. Generations of  women
novelists-Virginia Woolf comes most immediately to mind-have also 
documented the other side of such arrangements: the constant
efforts women end up  having to expend in managing, maintaining,
and adjusting the egos of oblivious and selfimportant  men,
involving an continual work of imaginative identification or what
I've  called interpretive labor. This carries over on every level.
Women are always expected to  imagine what things look like from a
male point of view. Men are almost never expected  to reciprocate.
So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men
react to  the suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it
were an act of violence in itself. A  popular exercise among High
School creative writing teachers in America, for example,  is to
ask students to imagining they have been transformed, for a day,
into someone of the  opposite sex, and describe what that day
might be like. The results, apparently, are  uncannily uniform.
The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show
they  have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject.
Half of the boys usually refuse  to write the essay entirely.
Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception
what being a teenage girl might be like, and deeply resent having
to think about it.

.

    What I would like to argue is that situations created by
violence-particularly structural violence, by which I mean forms
of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by
the threat of physical harm-invariably tend to create the kinds of
willful blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic
procedures. To put it crudely: it is not so much that bureaucratic
procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to
produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid, but
rather, that are invariably ways of managing social situations
that are already stupid because they are founded on structural
violence.

.

    in contemporary industrialized democracies, the legitimate
administration  of violence is turned over to what is
euphemistically referred to as "law enforcement"- particularly, to
police officers, whose real role, as police sociologists have
repeatedly  demonstrated, has much less to do with enforcing
criminal law than with the scientific application of physical
force to aid in the resolution of administrative problems. Police 
are, essentially, bureaucrats with weapons.

"Beyond Power/Knowledge: An Exploration of power, ignorance and
stupidity"

http://libcom.org/files/20060525-Graeber.pdf

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