Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 08:41:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] re: Resist social cleansing!


Thanks, David, for the encouragement.  You seem to
have understood straight away what I'm trying to do,
and what the stakes are in this issue.

It still surprises me how often people take "victory
to the anti-social" to imply "siding with" some
specific social group.  I have made very clear in the
essay itself that this is not what I meant, but that
in relation to the categories of social and
anti-social, it's important always to be on the
subversive side and not the impositional-conformist
side.  Recall, for instance, the parallel with the
slogan "victory to the intifada", which is equally
justified even if rightists always respond that you
must support "the terrorists" if you use this slogan. 
This does not preclude denouncing the drugs trade as a
capitalist industry like any other, or opposing rape
as an imposition of misogyny.  But the nature of the
opposition and the responses changes with this
reinscription of opposition to these specific
practices within a "minoritarian" politics.

I don't "settle for" the dichotomy between social and
anti-social, as Shawn puts it.  Clearly the call to
"politicise anti-sociality" makes of it something
which it was not before; it does not remain the other
of the original binary.  But at the same time, a
transcendence or deconstruction of the binary must
come from the excluded side, because the excluding
side excludes also anything outside of the binary as
part of the outside.

What is the choice here?  There is a war being waged
by the forces of the included - what I term social
cleansing.  In this war, we can support the social or
the anti-social, or waver between the two (and to sit
on the fence between oppressor and oppressed is to
support the oppressor).  "Victory to the pro-social"
would mean two things.  Firstly it would mean a
genocide against the anti-social, or at least a
constant escalating logic of exclusion and violence. 
And secondly, it is an impossible demand, because the
war against the anti-social is a war of everyone and
no-one, against everyone and no-one.  It produces its
own "repressed" and so cannot be won.

The alternative is to side, however critically and
tendentially, with the "anti-social".  And "victory to
the anti-social" means the destruction of the
social/anti-social binary itself.

Fred's play, which reminds me of Derrida, certainly
has a place in strategies of resistance, but it's hard
to see how it can combat the initiatives of the war
against the anti-social.  It would seem that the
crusaders against anti-sociality would oppose such
hybridity as a dangerous space where anti-sociality is
at least present in dialogue with sociality - perhaps
you would be labelled as one of the liberal do-gooders
by the anti-"crime" bigots for instance.  So this kind
of thing has an important role in small communities
and in dealing with personal issues, but it doesn't
really amount to a strategy which can politically
challenge the totalitarian discourse of the
exclusionary world.

And now, back to the "real world"...

"Don't you feel weird talking about "what crack
dealers represent...in this larger sense," as if the
actual effects of the drug trade are just a
distraction from understanding a passage in Stirner?
The reduction of
"the neighbors" to "the commonalty" or the "protestant
bourgeoisie" is a slick little bit of dehumanizing
rhetoric - " (Shawn)

Shawn and I are already arguing similar issues on two
other lists, so I'll keep it brief here.  This
fallback on the concrete is actually mythical or
pseudo-concrete, because the experiences of the
"anti-social" are as real as those of the
"neighbours".  What is really dehumanising is the
choice to give voice ONLY to the "neighbours" - which
is to deny voice entirely to the "anti-social".  And
in fact, you invoke your own generic abstraction
implicitly, by implying that this one-sidedness is
justified.  Yet, a refusal of "victory to the
anti-social" implicitly embraces the exclusionary
discourse of the included, and their "right" to use
such discourse - hence, their dehumanising of the
"anti-social".  A route beyond dehumanisation can
therefore not come from the included, but only from
the excluded, the "anti-social".

"And with our eyes on the "larger" concern of
"fixedness," can we feel any sympathy for the
neighbors, show any solidarity, engage in any form
of mutual aid" (Shawn)

Well, does your one-sided approach allow you any
sympathy, any solidarity, any mutual aid for the
"anti-social"?  At best you do what you accuse me of,
but from the other side.  And at worst, you do so
without any possibility of overcoming the binary; you
reinforce the included in their bigotry by refusing to
oppose the modalities of their oppressive discourse.

Is it possible to oppose specific crack dealers
without using oppressive discourse?  Maybe it is, but
only if their capitalistic approach is what is
targeted, and not their deviance from an in-group's
"norms".  And to the extent that the "neighbours"
insist on sticking with a reactionary approach, there
can be no question of someone interested in
emancipation supporting them, any more than those who
try to defend white workers' wages by supporting
apartheid in the workplace, or the oppressed
Sudetenlanders who turned to Hitler.  Or to take
another example, Guattari identifies positively with
the label "pervert".  One shouldn't oppose child
abusers for being "perverts", but only for engaging in
oppressive social relations, which are also part of a
pattern including very much "normal" practices (such
as compulsory schooling and parental discipline), of
which sexual abuse is an extreme manifestation.

Deleuze and representation by the way is a very
interesting issue, and part of what I'm invoking,
since the labelling of others as criminals,
anti-social etc. is very much representational, in the
same way as race-stereotyping etc.  Representation has
a specific meaning narrower than simply talking about
something... Perhaps it would be easier to discuss
Barthesian myths.  A myth is a second-order
signification which is projected into a first-order
sign so that it carries a second meaning (so that, for
instance, a black soldier saluting the French flag is
not merely a specific image emerging out of concrete
circumstances, but rather, embodies the unity of the
French empire).  The idea of the "anti-social" is
similarly a projection of this kind, because the acts
labelled "anti-social" and the actors who engage in
such acts are analysed without reference to their own
discourses and structures of meaning.  The act is
taken out of this context and has a meaning projected
into it from the outside.  So the appeal to the
"concreteness" of their experiences, to this or that
instance of real suffering, or to some real problem or
other, is already to miss the point.  For such
concrete instances are already mobilised in the form
of a myth, the moment the meanings associated with the
"anti-social" are read into them.  But since myths are
(in Barthes's words) "received rather than read",
because their operation is connotative and
unconscious, the ideological meanings are
"experienced" as if they are part of the first-order
"sign", or the experience or reality which is
signified.

And every pro-social discourse which labels others as
criminal or anti-social relies on this kind of myth,
which is why an emancipatory discourse - which, to
follow Shawn's language, is a discourse which gives
voice to the concrete - must first of all be pitted
against this discourse.

I would establish a rough (though not strict)
equivalence between Barthes's concept of myth,
Deleuze's concept of representation, Korzybski's
concept of intension, and maybe also some of the less
dogmatic uses of the term "essentialism" (such as Iris
Marion Young's definition).  The other of these
concepts is (for Barthes) an open or "writerly" kind
of writing and reading, (for Korzybski) extensional or
expansive empiricism, (for Deleuze) univocity and
singularity of something akin to the Stirnerian unique
but defined at the level of desire.


		
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