Diversity
Where does Liberalisms fealty to diversity simply become a tool for Third Way-social democrat attempts to blunt the systems excesses? Where does the whole search for Unifying Values become another authoritarian exercise in creating "social stability"? These questions have popped up in the local discussion over forming a Social Center vs Community Center and have caused a lot of tension. I think the tension is necessary and productive but right now it is also difficult and in need of reflection.
A lot of us reflexively and uncritically accept the notion of diversity as it might apply to an emancipatory project, linking it to other universal ideals such as pluralism, tolerance and multiculturalism. At first glance it seems to flow naturally from an "equal rights" discourse and encourages the respect that true democracy would require. But does it demand respect for the racist point of view? Must we respect a diversity of economic classes or a diversity of positions in a paternalistic, authoritarian hierarchy?
Part of the confusion arises from the context of our present moment and it's dominant form of "common sense" (what I call the ambient atmosphere,hegemony) Here, power relations are so unequal that to grant the "capitalist point of view" equal space is in actuality to guarantee its hegemonic dominance. In Rawls' Theory of Justice, the prescriptive remedy to structural inequity is to warrant only those inequalities which are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged. Can the same prescription apply to the diversity of opinion? Pretending equality while espousing diversity can only lead to the "Flat Earth" fluidification of all positions, an anti-politics.if you will, which I think is just surrender disguised as liberalism. Only under the condition of equality can diversity have meaning much less effect. It is contingent and conditioned on this layering.
As for my reference to "true democracy", I also think it is necessary to understand that democracy, like psychoanalysis, is only fully possible in a society that would no longer need it. We want to try to construct our own hegemony based on different social relations but all the while realizing the antagonisms and tensions can never be fully "sutured", closed, resolved for ever.
We should have our own club (social center), they can have theirs, and everybody can meet at the Community Center or Public Library for debate.Keeping in mind "public" and "community" are also enclosed in the current hegemonic structure and are far from neutral. Zizek tells us to risk a Leap of Faith, faith in a lost cause, "Causes that,from within the space of skeptical wisdom, cannot but appear as crazy." The paralyzing fear of "totalitarian" fidelity to an emancipatory project is fear of losing ones cherished, particular identity.
Does it have to be a choice between these poles, stubborn attachment to our identity or a rootless universal cosmopolitanism? stay tuned.
posted by troutsky @ 10:15 AM
37 comments
37 Comments:
This comment has been removed by the author.
Your establishmentarianism overshadows your antidisestablishmentarianism, making Menken right when he asid “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
Applying diversity to various groups or various individuals makes all the difference, like making corporations people.
Yodood, i could not have said it better myself!!
"Menken right when he asid “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
Troutsky-
This is the problem with all politics (assuming for a moment that politics is a rather bovel affair, going back approximately 6,000 years ago.)
This was the problem with Lenin, Jefferson, Mao.. fill in the blank.
You ask:
"Where does the whole search for Unifying Values become another authoritarian exercise in creating "social stability"?
It is in the very nature of the search to seek stability, and control. When the unifying vision is complete... let no man try to put it asunder. Witness the USA, its founding, and its belief in its own righteousness; and dare anyone question it!
So we are stuck between the desire to rule (desire for power) and the infallible market.
Actually with the "infallible market" you get a lot of the worst of both so I just can't agree that we are completely powerless. We can tame some of it.
Trout, Check out Driftglass' Ayn Rand rantand my comment.
Ducky - you've heard of the sorcerer who let the genie out of the bottle, right. Welcome to the parade.
Certainly, the Fall of man in biblical terms can be viewed rightfully as myth. But, it is not entirely betond the pale that such 'myths' provide an inchoate view of human nature after a certain point in the development of human community. And of course we could argue for the fact that human life can be made better and more sane in this world we now inhabit. But, it is also the case that homo sapiens lived for almost 200,000 years without the corrosive effects of markets, politics and civilization.
I am not recommneding a return. I am only pointing out fact.
Can we tame the markets, the politics... Is 'tame' the right word? I ask you, what does a tame market look like? Does it look like tame humans... you know the ones who have killed billions of their own kind in the name of 'tameness'. The ones who have destroyed the environemtn and the landmass, and oceans upon which life depends?
It was the 'taming' of mankind... i.e., the civilizing of man, that led to the destruction of the earth and its creatures. Let us 'tame' the markets as we have tamed ourselves, and see if we can't blow the whole fucking thing up, once and for FUCKING ALL!!
Kultur
TAME!!!!
The world was more violent back in HG days. You need to really look at the lives of hunter gathers.
Your views are the product of wishful thinking. Sorry, but a Yanonami or a Comanche was more apt to die from his fellow humans than a resident of NYC.
Beak - like everyone else here, I could care less about your opinion on anything. You are obviously an illiterate kid whose views are based upon science fiction, with a psychopathology tied to your infantile attachment to your religion. Do yourself a favor; bend over and F yourself!
Kultur
You are a fraud and a charlatan. As far as your degrees they are likely from a rectal thermometer.
Kindly tell us how the super violent people like the Yanonami and the New Guinea tribesmen are more tame. You could also cite wonderful practices such as slavery, human sacrafice, placing old people on ice flows ( more humane than Gulags) and euthanasia.
What are your theories based on Mazzola commercials or cartoons.
You are a verbose simpleton who has
gotten by only due to the old Bolshevik network. Any basic scrutiny of your non ideas reveals
less factual content than an episode of Gumby.
Enlighten us about peaceful Yanonami and Comanche warrior societies. This is not to condemn either, but any claim that HG types
were peaceful Beatniks is false. Your nostalgic vision is Paradise never Was.
Sorry Kultur, but you have grown lazy and incompetent. Years of dealing with Maxist hacks and the occasional Anarchist circus freak has dulled your ability to respond. Outside of your little faculty gulag you are a stooge.
Yodood, help me here, "applying diversity" is positive, negative? What do you mean "apply"?
The only "urge" that Menken found to not be a "false front" was his own. That's why he was so full of advice.
As for the "going Galt" post, I "urge" folks to peel back one more layer. Is it really that the world is divided into bureaucratic "droids" and individuals? From the womb onward? Blowing up a building full of "droids" is pathetically Objective.
The most important thing Zinn taught was "you can't be neutral on a moving train".To not act is to be complicit in the status quo.
kultur, what about politics: a type of action whose objective is the transformation of a social relation which constructs a subject in a relationship of subordination.It is about transforming ,creating, and reproducing social relations and happened at the moment of intelligent self-reflection in humans?
I am saying the "unifying vision" can never be complete ( why Fascists always need the Jew) but it doesn't negate the radical democratic process or politics as a process ( which will never be fully realized!, hence, tension)
Ducky,kultur, This taming of the "animal spirits"( often equated with human nature) or feral self discourse makes me uneasy, it can be used in the service of so many things ( including Market ideology)
In terms of capitalism it sounds Keynesian, a bargain to save the system from it's "worst" impulses through imposition of the state but what is this "state"? It is falling apart in Europe and an object of scorn in the U.S.
Everybody: How about the liberal building of community with Beak involved? We the People? That is why I have no problem with him taking part in our online "community".He totally misunderstands kulturs theory without bothering to explore it, mis-understanding even it's most superficial aspects. His is a Black Book world of moral clarity.And he is my neighbor and fellow citizen.
Trout,
applying diversity to individuals means you allow an individual to hold seemingly self-contradictory views validating unique viewpoints. Applying diversity to groups conversely tends to lump all members under a stereotype, from bar denizens to football fans to national parties.
You realize you just attacked Menken instead of addressing the reality of his statement, right?
You are such a literal fuckwit sometimes — the building Roark blew up was empty of people or droids and was to make the same statement about inept elite mismanagement of self serving agendas as Driftglass' rant — oh, the irony, the irony.
Troutsky Commies and Anarchists need the Jew just as much as their fascist cousins. In fact if you were to ditch Trotsky for Il Duce this would be a step forward in your case.
I want to point out his comments about my religion are typical of the entrenched anti-semitism endemic in the Marxist gulags of higher ed. No doubt if I directed similar comments at a Muslim or any other traditional religion the usual hypocrites would be up in arms. So according to the good Mazzola Marxist people who take their religion seriously are infantile. A real Jew sees commies
in the same manner that a Black man
sees the KKK. Of course Commies will toss out a Kultur or a Renegade Testicle to try and play the house slave for their Bolshevik
masters. The fact is that Communism
is a religion and the second on follows it they are no longer Jews.
I understand the bong hit professor's insane musings. He is a product of the Harold Pinter school of stupidity. That is when deranged leftists talk their idiotic views are perceived as moronic by mainstream Americans.
I will go back to the comedic rant
about "John Wayne Obama". This seriously sounds like a rant from
a supporter of the Taliban after
multiple bong. Most of the time the Taliban can write better rants
than Kultur.
What commies and their kind have not deduced is that America is hostile to your kind. This is the
reason you need to form alliances
and conceal your identities. We are
a nation of individualists with our own traditions.
Commies did not predict that Obama's tin ear would create a backlash. The Tea Party movement is one you can not infiltrate or co-opt. If the economy does not improve the left will not have a prayer in any elections. No doubt
Obama will improve his numbers with
a speech. However, no jobs and a lousy economy will doom the left.
His problem is that he spends to much time with Bill Ayers types and not enough time in Walmart parking lots.
Troutsky
Sorry to say, but I think Sarah Palin and the "Tea Party" have stolen your revolutionary thunder. Have you seen her presentation at the Tea Party in TH; you are looking at the next president of the USA and the change America think it wanrts!
Yodood,
Do the Zapatistas prove Menken right? Do they seek to rule?....ahhh snap! You thought you were on to something...better luck next time....FUCKWIT!
Che Bob,
Menken said "… almost always …" you named an extremely unique instance as if proof of something.
UNZAP! right back at you, you literally matching fuckwit. He was not so absolute as you.
Che Bob
Yodood is right. Each and every time your kind takes power the people suffer. Even naive types like Owen knew the foul nature of Marx and his
minions.
Do all the people fleeing Hugo's crack den have nothing better to do
than tell identical lies? How many subsidized Theresienstadt tours have you taken. Have you registered as an agent of a hostile
foreign government?
All the words of Marx are mere power plays. The role of government is to regulate and provide essential services.
When are you going to defect to Cuba? Let us know when and where you intend to renounce your citizenship.
Kultur
The Tea Party people are peaceful
and law abiding. Beyond a few chants of Acorn Sucks ( they do )
they seek a positive return to our
traditional values. The election of
a tin eared type who hangs out with Communist terrorists and was a member of a Marxist racist church
for two decades stirred a dissent.
Crowd estimates were 300,000 people
attended the rally in DC with zero
arrests. The local law enforcement officers had zero problem with a friendly law abiding crowd that respects law enforcement officers.
Yodood, So your point is that applying diversity is only positive when done to individuals. The same thing applied to groups produces opposite effect. At the particular level it is good, at the general not good. I don't understand why this would be so.
Menken considered himself, the Zapatistas and whoever else is True and Good part of the "almost", making such aphorisms absurd. It's like Marx saying "capitalism is almost always an exploitive system".
It is so discouraging to STILL be debating Ayn Rand.Rather than "inept elite mismanagement" she believed in brutal exploitive Market Fundamentalism, a step in the exact wrong direction.
kultur, I am humbled by their ability to organize and mobilize folks.The trick now is to push her just as far to the right as is still viable and then turn her loose. Michelle can show her around the White House.
The reason I STILL bring up Ayn Rand to you is because the "brutal exploitive Market Fundamentalism" you insist she was the champion of was what Howard Roark saw as the reason his building was compromized into a monstrosity by just such inept management.
This is my last attempt at trying to show you the genuine values I see you throwing out by a blanket condemnation of individuals (by not allowing her the possibility to have diverse values to different people) and of groups (by saying she believed in brutal exploitation just because that's how Market Fundamentalism is being practiced in reality)
All ideals are perverted by someone, the human dynamic of orthodoxy versus heresy, eternal as long as there's rules.
Point of information for everyone. Marx called primitive communism, the communism of consumption. Based on sharing. That is different than the communism of production. That is modern socialism, based on development.
Under Beakerkin's logic, Jews who organized Kibbutzim in Israel, a socialist form of organization, were not Jews. The Kibbutz dwellers, were socialists and anarchists. It was a utopian experiment. Who questioned their Judaism? The Israeli Labor Party belongs to the Second International. It is there with the PSUV, FMLN and the Sandinistas.
The foundation of the Israeli economy was state subsidy. The industrialization came from state subsidies.
Under capitalism a country can be fascist, Bonapartist or democratic. A socialist state can be Bonapartist or democratic. That is politics, not religion. There is no Red Vatican.
Ren - you are trying to communicate with a true village idiot. You will receive a jackass reply.
But great points!!
Commies did not predict that Obama's tin ear would create a backlash. The Tea Party movement is one you can not infiltrate or co-opt. If the economy does not improve the left will not have a prayer in any elections. No doubt
Obama will improve his numbers with
a speech. However, no jobs and a lousy economy will doom the left.
It will hurt the Democrats. It will help the real left.
Most in Massachusetts, who voted against Obama, supported a public health plan. The state Republicans, created a healthcare plan to the left of Obama's.
His problem is that he spends to much time with Bill Ayers types and not enough time in Walmart parking lots.
Name one. Did you know he never met with supporters of UHC. Are you talking about insurance executives? I think you must be stealing the drugs, from people you arrest. Name a Bill Ayers type he talks to?
Obama is keeping his campaign promises, if you listened closely. He promised he'd invade Pakistan and get deeper into the Afghan quagmire.
Pretty interesting that the fee to the Tea Party convention was $500. Sarah Palin was payed $100,000 to speak. That sure is a grassroots movement.
Troutsky Commies and Anarchists need the Jew just as much as their fascist cousins.
There were only four fascist leaders, in all of history: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Pilsudski. They are not cousins. Your grandfather apparently fought alongside fascist Pilsudski.
The civil rights movement distinguished the ideas of racism called prejudice, from institutional racism. Are you saying Jews face job discrimination like the numbers of Afro Americans or Latinos? Last hired first fired? Jews have to take the jobs other Americans won't do? Can you name one law that is explicitly anti-Jewish?
What part of workers of the world unite don't you understand?
I admit it troutsky, I have not given up the idea that democratic socialism is the only step this culture is capable of at the moment and that's a ways off.
These tea party idiots see revolution as benign. I don't think so.
I'm looking for something that can be a wedge between state power (as opposed to governance) and the destruction caused by the profit crazed market.
It will hurt the Democrats. It will help the real left.
---------------
Quite possible, ren.
What scares me is throwing this back in the R's lap, having them screw the pooch and complain it was the D's fault and then throwing it back. Repeat ad infinitum while the populace gets the Full Ayn Rand.
The Kibbutz dwellers, were socialists and anarchists. It was a utopian experiment. Who questioned their Judaism? The Israeli Labor Party belongs to the Second International.
------------------------
Any response, Beak? I notice you never acknowledge the role of socialism in Israel's early history.
Ducky
The tea party represents an incipient revolution. It signals the breakdown in this bicameral system we have jokingly called democracy. It opens the way potentially for a genuine assault on the establishment if it should force the emergence of a real third party. And if it develops the rhetoric I think it will; it may force some real public displays of violence. The kind of "dialogue" produced would be revolutionary - I believe
... I also think it is necessary to understand that democracy, like psychoanalysis, is only fully possible in a society that would no longer need it.
Whooaa! Talk about leaps of faith! And who says anyone anywhere needs psychoanalysis - the Freudian kind, I presume?
Where does the whole search for Unifying Values become another authoritarian exercise in creating "social stability"?
Oddly enough, none other than those running dog lackeys of the bourgeois hegemony, our Founding Father, devoted a lot of thought to this. In fact, you could say it's central to their attempt to form a more open government, whatever you may think of it. It is certainly central to their committment to disestablismentarianism, i.e., the un-linking of church and state. After all, every church is a community that is convinced of its own rightness and maybe even superiority. As for other communities, Karl Marx was eloquent in denouncing the crushing weight of small town life, dominated by narrow social mores and limited experience of the world. Communitarianism has its dark side, even if they seem to be natural and organic.
Though I am not a fan of TJ, I think this was behind his dictum, "That government governs best that governs least." Shared values can be an oppressive form of government.
If you're looking for a golden bullet, forget it. The liberal "fealty to diversity" is simply a realistic recognition of an irresolvable tension in human affairs. You say it is "necessary and productive" but you seem to dream of its elimination in the future, perhaps when the proletariat becomes the dictator, always, of course, in line with the needs and wishes of itself. After all, how can a community do anything opposed to itself, especially if it takes care to continually purge itself..?
Kultur says:
The tea party represents an incipient revolution. It signals the breakdown in this bicameral system we have jokingly called democracy. It opens the way potentially for a genuine assault on the establishment if it should force the emergence of a real third party. And if it develops the rhetoric I think it will; it may force some real public displays of violence. The kind of "dialogue" produced would be revolutionary - I believe
Whooaa again!!
This sounds, word for word, like the sort of thing that some people said about the Nazis in their earlier days. Yep, revolution, but for what, and with what consequences?
I, personally, am not afraid, because I expect the T-party to fizzle out, but that's a different question.
Is Kultur hoping for some "real public displays of violence?" Would police shooting people count, or does it have to be mobs killing police? I know it's a namby-pamby bouggie hangup to dislike public violence (I prefer public displays of eroticism) but what is K hoping and dreaming of? The cataclysm that will bring it all tumbling down?
Yep, that would be just great...
@Ducky:
TOTALLY correct in assigning a MAJOR role to Socialism in the Zionist project, though not an exclusive driver. Some socialist were emphatically NOT Zionists, but many of them were no less attached to their Jewish culture.
What swinish arrogance on the part of our village idiot to tell us who can be a Jew or not. If anything smacks of anti-Semitism it is this...
Lichanos:
Actually... I don't want to be the first to break the news to you... but the revolution has already begun... and you are a player.
You, troutsky, me, Tea party-ers, social media bloggers, Sarah... everyone is working to undermine the current establishment, and revolutionary scents are in the air, and have been for almost 2 years. Actually, many of the votes for Obama were tired revolutionaries using their last 'political' hope for transformational change (a silent revolution).
But, the balloon is now full to bursting. The hot air will be let out and there will be massive displays of discontent within the country, sooner rather than later.
I do not pretend to have the 'objective' grounds to back this up; it is just in the air we now breathe. Maybe the earliest groundwork was laid with the 9/11 event. But the political and police conditions in this country are now forcing the people to voice and act on what they clearly see as totalitarianism. But, they never saw this before becuase the "Kool Aid" was strong... but now they see more clearly... through the terror alerts, the financial meltdown, the robber barons of wall street, the healthcare rip off, the Obama lies, the wars,,,
Lichanos
My only caveat is that the internet, the new covert tool of the hegemony, has undermined any will to public action. It gives revolutionaries the illusion of action, while comfortably ensconsed in their plush digs, watching the superbowl, smoking cigars (cigarettes or marijuana), drinking beer (vodka, whiskey, wine and eating cheetos (filet, wings or caviar).
Actually... I don't want to be the first to break the news to you... but the revolution has already begun... and you are a player.
Wow! Maybe I'm...somebody! Fifteen minutes of fame, maybe? And I'm really on a par with ...SARAH? Good thing the revolution won't be televised since I don't watch TV. I wouldn't want to miss myself otherwise.
I do not pretend to have the 'objective' grounds to back this up...
No problem, K-man. I'll just make a little note in my Outlook Calendar for two, three, say four years from now - "Check in with Kultur on Revolution" and we'll exchange emails on whether your prediction has been borne out.
I promise to admit if I'm wrong. It should be pretty clear one way or another...
love the sarcasm, Lichanos
...love the sarcasm, Lichanos
About the checking in by email a few years down the road, I'm dead serious. A little real-world experiment in confirmation along the lines of the Simon-Ehrlich wager...
Lichanos - remember my caveat above...
sandy@kulturcritic.com
Kultur:
I saw your caveat only after I posted my comment with proposal. It gives you a pretty big 'out,' I'd say. Big enough to sail a battleship through.
Lichanos
That is the nature of debate and argument based upon logic. If you can't find common ground just get out the battleships!
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