AUT: re: fambly values and social deviance

[andrew robinson <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Apologies for the delay in responding, I've only just
found your post, Tom.

"This is real easy to say abstractly, until someone
rips off your bike
or something cause they gotta get a bag of dope, or
your partner snaps
and decides to get violent because they are stressed
about money, or
are drunk."

Yeah, well, experiences you're over-invested in cos
they're personal have a distorting effect on a lot of
people's political perspectives.  It's easy to support
redistribution of wealth, as long as it's someone else
being taxed.  It's easy to support laws, until you're
the one being prosecuted.  See Paul Treanor's
excellent essay, "How would you feel if Soviet troops
were overrunning YOUR Reich capital?" (the title
itself makes the point well, and the article is
excellent).
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/golden.rule.html

The phenomenology of everyday life is constructed
precisely to MAKE INVISIBLE the social origins of
social problems, so that blaming individuals becomes
easier.  This is one of the ways capitalism mystifies
itself and defends its continued existence.  To see
through this mystification is a necessary part of any
revolutionary becoming.

On more specific matters, see Dot Matrix's excellent
essay in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.  Dot
Matrix is an anarcha-feminist who has been involved in
victim support about issues such as domestic violence,
and who has reached conclusions hostile to the idea of
blaming individuals, as a result of experiences in
this field.

BTW I would also add here that many of the worst
social oppressions are of a kind which eludes normal
empathy entirely.  It is impossible to explain the
suffering of the psychologically different at the
hands of the normal, in terms empathetically
comprehensible to the normal, because the only
equivalence would be if the normal could imagine
themselves in a world where they are a psychological
minority and are not understood - which most of them
can't.  Now, if a personal-blame model is attached to
the suffering caused by the normal to the
psychologically different, it follows that the
psychologically different have a right to punish the
normal for the harm they cause, on a person by person
basis (and one could classify certain so-called
"rampages" as responses to normality on this kind of
level).  Is this something you are prepared to
concede?  If not, your model is normalist, because
only the reactions of the normal become a basis for
judgements leading to punishment (of both the normal
and the different), and this is simply a social
privileging of one particular group.

"What do you mean by "should be treated"?"

I mean, get rid of all the social apparatuses which
operate on the assumption that individuals cause
social problems, for instance by punishing
individuals.  Social responses should engage with
social circumstances and should be conflict-resolution
and problem-solving responses - not about punishing,
labelling, pathologising or otherwise targeting
individuals.  ("treated as..." means "explained and
responded to on the assumption that they are...")

"I do understand
what you are saying here, but I don't find it very
convincing."

Because you are letting "common sense" trump theory
and science.  The problem is that bourgeois reactions
are deeply structured into dominant libidinal models.
So people react on an unthinking, so-called
"intuitive" level in ways which accord with bourgeois
ideology.  Ideology as phantasy, one might say.  The
point is  precisely to rearticulate libidinal
reactions in line with (little-t) true propositions
about humanity and social problems, which also means,
to "unlearn" and resist the bourgeois reactions, the
"cops in our heads".

It SHOULD be convincing cos it is where all the
evidence from diverse fields of research is pointing -
everything from the fragmentation of authorial intent
in hermeneutics and deconstruction, to the
problematising of the idea of conscious "decisions" in
experimental psychology, and from the discovery of
unconscious motivation in psychoanalysis to the
revelation of socio-cultural variances in types and
rates of deviance in different societies (e.g. the
fact that theft is unknown in some societies, that
some involve no intra-social violence, etc., as well
as that some define theft as heroism rather than
crime, etc.).  But the problem is that there is an
unconscious fetishistic attachment on the part of most
people to an inaccurate model of psychological
motivation (the "responsible" individual, a unitary
whole, who "decides" to act and therefore should face
the "consequences").  This is true even of those who
know some of the evidence.  How often I hear from
"postmodernists" the typical Lacanian-fetishist
formula - "we know very well" (that there is no molar
self and no possibility of personal responsibility),
"but still we keep doing it..." (assuming in political
and social matters that such a unitary entity exists).

"Should
people simply have no responsibilities to each other
or to society?"

No, they shouldn't.  Not that this means people should
harm each other, or that people should not form
attachments to one another.  But articulations of
desire which rely on the social construction of a
desire to harm and the social construction of a
repression of this desire are not an effective way to
prevent people harming each other, and they have other
harmful effects also.  It is a sociological fact that
people having responsibilities to do, or not to do,
certain things is in fact a cause of the very acts
labelled "irresponsible", as is clear for instance
from Lemert's research on labelling and deviance
amplification across various cultures.  For instance,
stammering is widespread in cultures with high
expectations of speech performance and almost
nonexistent in cultures with no such expectations.

My point is that a revolutionary rearticulation of
desires would start with and interlink active desires,
in defiance of all reactive overcodings.  The point
would be so far as possible to construct a world where
the desires of different people intermingle in
mutually beneficial ways, though the possibility of a
collision of unconditional desires cannot be ruled out
on principle.  This takes away the empty satisfaction
of being able to condemn others, but it provides a
greater possibility of actually

"Does society exist for you?"

As a molar totality with a unitary existence, no, it
does not exist.  Not merely for me, but as a matter of
fact.  Nor does it exist for any Marxist worthy of the
name, since for Marx, society was above all a set of
RELATIONS (not a "thing"), and these relations were
conflictual.  Thus, while it is meaningful to talk of
"social meanings", "social relations" and "social
construction", it is not meaningful to talk of
"society", in the sense (for instance) of "society"
having "interests" or "needs", in the sense of "duties
to society", or in the sense of "society" deciding,
thinking, believing, mandating, etc.  To believe in
such a reified myth of "society" as molar totality is
to succumb to a bourgeois utopia of interpersonal
sameness and guaranteed meaning.

Of course, all this means there is a need for a very
resolute opposition to everyday myths of "common
sense" associated with anti-"crime" fanaticism and a
whole range of characterological and personological
fantasies about social action which have very deep
libidinal roots.  The need for such a critique of
common sense, and for a revolutionary becoming IN
EVERYDAY LIFE which severs these threads connecting
the masses to the existing system, is precisely what
separates my own approach to social change from those,
such as Tahir and Harald, who put their faith in the
existing working class and make excuses for its
reactionary attachments.



		
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