paul, altho i agree that nazis shouldn't be censored, i am troubled by the
turn this discussion is taking. i suspect that it's my problem - i'm
having trouble thinking past the old binary opposition of "the
philosophical" vs. "the political", or maybe "the discursive" vs. "the
material". i'll do some thinking aloud and i'd welcome any help.
On Wed, 14 May 1997, Big Brother wrote:
> first, a breif exerpt from alfred fortin's 'notes on a terrorist
> text':
> 'the language of antiterrorism is by now a well-established an
> rehearsed refrain, one frequently heard in the voices that make up
> American political culture. This should worry us since, to a
> certain extent, the penetration of that discourse into our ordinary
> language is a measure of the increasing militarization of our common
> life. The greater the ease with which we invoke the
> terrorist-as-enemy in our shock over the violence surrounding us,
> the more this refrain stands as witness to the internalisation that
> readies us for counterviolence. The more comfortable the language of
> antiterrorism is to us, the more familiar the terrorist figure who
> haunts us, the more entrenched that seizure of our political
> imagination becomes.'
i guess my problem here is the assumption that "counterviolence" is
implicitly bad. is all violence implicitly bad? i can see how it would
be if one cuts a conversation short by shooting one's interlocutor, but
can't violence sometimes enable conversation, or force it to happen? and
can't historical violence enrich, complicate, challenge, create revolution
within, a historical discourse?
i also worry about the labelling of this "antiterrorist
discourse" as "militarization" - how is this different from "it's
dangerous for you to say that it's dangerous for the nazis to say what
they're saying?" i'd agree whole-heartedly that discursive violence in
the form of censorship is a dangerous way to go that might only fan
flames. but what i'm anxious about is that fortin's quote seems to
imply that "antiterrorist discourse" means more than just censorship -
must we embrace all our enemies as if they were our friends? or are
we still allowed to use "anti-terrorist" or "anti-racist" or "anti-sexist"
discursive strategies? b/c if we're not allowed to do that, then we're
forced to discount the historical, material circumstances within which
those violences occur, and treat all violent offenders as being equally
bad, and so equally punishable. if this is a paranoid reading of fortin
or of you, then please let me know, b/c it's so hard to judge tone
sometimes.
> John Ransom wrote:
> > what's to keep others from trying to silence socialists and
> > Islamic fundamentalists? But I think this is a logical dead end.
> > In fact, *nothing* keeps others from trying to silence socialists
> > and Islamic fundamentalists. Let them try. They will lose.
>
> who will lose? who will try? who are the ones we decide to exile
> with our forced censorship? what political commitments do we
> re-entrench when we justify so called 'limited' discursive violence
> against the nebulous 'others', this time, with 'white' faces?
again, i guess it's the deconstructive tone that bothers me here -
i get the sense of someone trying to plough farmland with a tea spoon,
or harvest rice with chopsticks. labeling it "limited discursive
violence" admittedly makes it sounds pretty bad, but what if i labeled
it "strategic discursive action" instead? would that still be bad?
is strategy inherently impure? if so, then what is *not* impure? an
academic discussion over the internet? parlor talk over the clinking
of tea spoons? what kind of peace does the unending series of questions
enable, and what kinds of unacknowledged historical violence might that
peace erase, or distract our attention from? in other words, instead
of asking "who are the ones we exile" i might ask "who are the ones
who are being asked to turn the other cheek, and what will that
turning of the other cheek accomplish in the long run?"
> 'Media portrayals and official condemnations of terrorism reinforce
> the dominant strategic dicourse to the extent that they assume
> current constructions of the terrorist figure. This simplistic
> picturing of political actors likewise spawns an impoverished and
> fragmented understanding of their political struggles, an
> understanding easily enlisted into the ideological service of those
> who would deny us the making of critical distinctions about complex
> political phenomenon.'
i understand that "simplistic picturing" can lead to an unjust dismissal
of the Other's "political struggles" - i think in the case of the
neo-nazi's, for example, if we simplify them according to race (as they
would ask to be simplified) then we join them in overlooking their class
issues (this is just a guess but i assume that unlike someone like charles
murray, the really radical neo-nazi folks are often working class, which
is why they fail to understand how redundant the term "white power"
sounds). but again, if we change "official condemnations of terrorism" to
something else like "official condemnations of racism/sexism", does that
mean that, say, anti-sexism has no place in "enlightened feminism"? or
that anti-racism has no place in "enlightened multiculturalism"? what,
for example, happens to affirmative action?
sig http://pages.nyu.edu/~scs7891