At 09:40 AM 12/17/2012, Lenin's Tomb wrote:
>On 17 Dec 2012, at 12:14, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
>
> > If you get a chance, read Columbine. If he was like Klebold and
> Harris - and it sounds like he probably was - he's a psychopath. The
> book does an excellent job of explaining who these people are, how little
> there is to explain or predict. Klebold and Harris weren't troubled
> outsiders, picked on by peers. They were mean, rotten kids, one of whom
> had repeated eliminationist fantasies in which their desire is for a
> world in which no one else exists. They don't like other people, they
> don't love them. They don't even understand them. They are manipulative
> and cold-blooded. They'd been planning to bomb Columbine high school for
> months, and had already been blowing up pipe bombs - were, in fact,
> arrested for it and seeing counselors.
> >
> > Fucked up family? little to do with anything in their case.
>
>I have my doubts about this type of explanation. First of all, while the
>reductionist explanations about dysfunctional families or peer bullying
>aren't satisfactory, this type of approach isn't remotely less
>reductionist. Second, if we're told the perpetrators had eliminationist
>fantasies, that one was suicidally depressive, the other a sadist, that
>they didn't really love or understand other people, then that is not an
>explanation so much as something that demands explanation.
>
>To call someone a 'psychopath' is as empty in this context as to call them
>'evil' (or 'mean, rotten' etc). We are usually offered a
>pseudo-scientific apparatus of 'checklists' and a terminology of
>deficiency (affective) and deviancy (social) to provide some spurious
>integrity to the concept. In the case of Klebold and Harris, the
>diagnosis is offered based on comparing journals to the checklists. So,
>Harris is found to be a psychopath because, among other things, he lies a
>lot to keep out of trouble (who the fuck doesn't when they're teenagers?),
>he has contempt for other people (sounds familiar), he isn't truly sorry
>for the petty crimes he has committed (well, neither are most teenagers,
>because the people who expect them to be sorry are obvious hypocrites and
>frauds), etc etc. The checklist approach cannot but remind one of
>Eddington's net: whatever it can't catch isn't a fish. The problem is
>that Cullen is a writer, not a psychoanalyst, and the experts he relies on!
> are - well, not hacks, but certainly people who have an extremely
> narrow and reductive frame of reference.
>
>Worse is the underlying politics of it. Because the concept of
>'psychopath' in the usual declination lacks any explanatory content, it
>ultimately has to refer to something else for its support - typically,
>some musings about the abnormal brain structure suffice here. This is the
>recrudescence of crude biological determinism. Hence, the complacent
>conclusion that there is 'little' to 'explain or predict'. There just are
>these weird brains out there, and sometimes they just, like, go off. And
>the political response entailed by this? Just lock em up. Lock up as
>many of them as possible. Eugenically iron them out of the race. Detect
>them early, confine them early. Sterilise them. All of this, until we
>can develop the technology to fix the brain structure.
>
>No. There is something to explain here.
>
>Such as: What role did the jocks, popular kids, minorities and others play
>in the killers' symbolic universe? What did the bullies, with their
>rigorous enforcement of masculinist norms, their so-called 'teasing', have
>in common with eg black students as far as this pair were concerned? No
>simple political reading would work here. If it was neo-fascism, they
>would just have annihilated the 'minority' students and functionaries
>deemed corrupt, and not anyone else. If it was pseudo-revolutionary,
>against the school authorities and dominant forces, they might have killed
>the popular students, the teachers, headteachers etc. and spared
>others. (One might add: if this was really about eliminationist
>fantasies, killing off the whole human race, etc., then any targeting at
>all which implicitly spares significant sections of the human race, is
>incomprehensible). Possibly what these targeted groups had in common was
>that they all were somehow seen as being complicit in symbolic!
> ally 'castrating' the pair - they all 'had' something, some enjoyment
> that Klebold and Harris were deprived of. They got some sort of 'special
> treatment' that they believed was at their expense, the cause of their
> denigration/castration. And of course, one can't just be a 'loser', one
> can't be denied enjoyment - this is prohibited. The whole of social life
> is at a symbolic level governed by a competitive struggle to secure that
> enjoyment, to be the 'winner'. And, despite its inherent impossibility,
> everyone has to be a 'winner'. So, the killers were not doing something
> completely ex nihilo: they were in a sense playing the game as it already
> existed.
>
>More generally, what did the perpetrators understand about their violence
>as an effective solution to their problems? Their masculinity and
>sexuality was questioned, for sure: this wasn't just paranoia, it was one
>of the reasons why they were 'teased'. This included violence but more
>importantly humiliation - pelting Klebold with tampons covered in ketchup,
>for example. And it's not exactly a secret in American society that
>masculinity is most directly regenerated through violence. Nor is it a
>secret that violence in the American imaginary has a socially useful,
>cleansing function. The rationale for the 'teasing' was just exactly
>this: if you want deviants, misfits and others to go away, you 'tease'
>them until they vanish. The killers were not rebelling against this so
>much as confirming their fidelity to it. Far from being carried out in
>cold indifference to society or other people, this crime looks as though
>it was passionately involved in and obedient to society's !
> codes and its symbolic authority. An excess of authority, and
> obedience, has a notable tendency to produce aggression in its subjects,
> which is often directed into sustaining the obedience itself. From this
> perspective, it was precisely in order to assert their conformity that
> Klebold and Harris engaged in mass murder.
>
>And indeed, their aspirations seem to have been perfectly
>conformist. Harris wanted to be a Marine. Klebold was passionately in
>love with another student in the period before the killing. They wanted
>to grow up, fly right, get the girl - but believed they were being
>obstructed. Even their petty criminality is not seen as a
>rebellion. Harris rants that this is supposed to be America, land of the
>free, and if he's free then he should be able to relieve a dumbshit of his
>possessions who just leaves them there for the asking. He adds "NATURAL
>SELECTION". He understands by American freedom the same thing that Newt
>Gingrich does: ruthless competition and social Darwinism.
>
>Likewise, why did the pair kill themselves at the end? In a naive way,
>one could say that Harris was deemed suicidally depressive and leave it at
>that (leaving aside the role of SSRIs). But his diagnosis as a psychopath
>would be no use here. Presumably, he can be retrospectively designated
>whatever factors from the checklist will help explain his behaviour - some
>factors indicate a low suicide risk, some a high suicide risk, so you can
>take your pick. Certainly, both Harris and Klebold's journals show
>self-hating thoughts coinciding with grandiose delusions. But this won't
>explain anything. Obviously, their decision to kill themselves at the end
>was part of the pact, a long-standing plan. And the decision to 'go
>postal' in the first place is almost always accompanied by a decision to
>die - it is one instance where an unconscious drive ('death drive')
>coincides with a conscious decision, and is carried through to the
>end. But one obvious answer to the question is impl!
> ied by Klebold in his basement tapes: "You've been giving us shit for
> years. You're fucking gonna pay for all the shit! We don't give a
> shit. Because we're gonna die doing it." It is a condition of being
> able to enact their obedience, to reclaim their masculinity, to stake a
> claim to their enjoyment as 'winners' - not just 'winners' but actually
> the ultimate, supreme winners, gods of the earth - that they be beyond
> capture or punishment, that there can be no way they can be symbolically
> denigrated again, no way their recovery of masculinity and enjoyment can
> be effaced.
>
>Then there are other things. If Klebold held delusional beliefs about
>himself as a god, then there's a psychotic structure that would need to be
>investigated and could only be pieced together through a careful reading
>of interviews, and the recorded words of the dead perpetrators. For
>example, Cullen asserts that Klebold worshipped the Nazis. What role
>might this have played in his delusions? What was it specifically about
>the Nazis and Hitler that he admired? It doesn't seem to have been the
>politics and ethics of national socialism, except inasmuch as some of the
>racist, conspiracy theory thematics might have given Klebold a context for
>his fantasies of losing out to minorities. On the other hand, it seems
>that he was educated in some of his family's Jewish traditions, and that
>to admire something so prohibited, so utterly evil, was the prerogative of
>someone genuinely 'godlike', someone beyond the slave morality of the
>ordinary herd.
>
>One could go on and on. The surface problem is that Dave Cullen is not
>interested in psychiatry or in criminology. He is just a writer who wants
>to be interesting, and has relied entirely on an FBI report, which in turn
>relies on some of the most reductionist criminology and psychiatry. This
>has given him the materiel with which to demolish flimsy straw 'myths' in
>what must seem a bracing manner. The underlying problem is that his
>sources have institutional reasons for preferring this type of
>analysis. The FBI doesn't really care about the social and psychoanalytic
>whys and hows, they just want a generic profile: a checklist if
>possible. They want to be refine their repertoire of profiles as much as
>possible, so that they can activate it in a given situation where there is
>a serial killer on the loose or what have you, and stand a better chance
>of capturing the culprit. But apart from all that, they don't give a shit
>about wider explanations. We on the Left should an!
> d usually do.
>
>
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