hi bill, >It seems to me there are very shaky grounds for accepting that this >"structural logic" really exists. Of course there may be something to it, >but I can't understand building a whole political approach around it, which >seems to me is what has been done. would i build a whole political approach around it? yes and no. i would do (have done) what a rationalist critique would have us do: point to how it is not the case that if welfare were abolished, workers would be better off, that in fact the contrary is true; point to how the establishment of a certain competitiveness between workers and the unemployed is a precondition of the miserable economic state of both; etc. but i know, that time and again, this does not do the work i expect it to do - that is, the result i would expect it to have if i were a rationalist, or should i say, if politics were a matter of transparent communications. i also think it is important to see racism as one of the most important ways that liberalism can give an account of its failures to deliver on its promises: ie., a papering over of the contradictions between the promise and actuality of human rights by making certain groups genetically predisposed to being unable to attain a proper liberal subjectivity: ie., it is 'their fault'. but these ways of addressing racism only take for those who are relatively powerful, who do not attach themselves to racism as a way of recovering or explaining to themselves their own 'loss', their own lack of social power. nonethless, this still forms an important part of anti-racist practice. what it fails to do however - and such an approach has failed abysmally here - is to account for or talk to the ways in which racists enjoy their racism. that is, the ways in which racism has become (at least here) a somewhat festive event: the right-wing radio host writ large, if that makes sense. what i also do then is to reiterate the core of racism as a series of claims about enjoyment: 'asians' work too hard; aborigines don't work and get hand-out; 'asians' are taking 'our' jobs overseas because they don't know how to enjoy themselves; immigrants threaten 'our way of life', ie., 'our forms of enjoyment'; etc. these are internally contradictory (in the sense that the other can be accused of both not enjoying or enjoying too much, as zizek notes). what ties them together is that they are all perceived as threats to 'our enjoyement' or a way of defending 'our enjoyement'. >I thought Ken Hanley asked a series of very relevant questions about the >usefullness of the similar notion of the phallus, but they have not been >addressed. I have never tried to challenge and undermine racist attitudes >of fellow white workers by explaining it is because we fear castration. >Does this really work? Like, where? i don't know if it works becuase it is not a prominent part of anti-racist practice. i do know that to talk openly about racism as a form of enjoyment is to break with a moralising and enlightened approach which has consistently worked to deny the pertinence of desire within racism. these ways of appproaching the issure here have been taken as simply another attempt (usually figured as an attempt by 'the elites') to deny 'the ordinary bloke' their capacity for enjoyement - as another threat. they merely seek to affirm 'the ordinary bloke's' social impotence; which i would think is not how a marxist politics would wish to proceed. the issue i guess is not to talk about castration, since this in any case lends itself to all sorts of confusions (as it has here), but to take seriously desire as an important moment of politics and political identifications. i think racism is an urgent issue here in australia, and even if others here might not agree with the analysis, i think other australians can easily spot the connections between enjoyment, the experience of social impotence and racism in One Nation. One Nation does not hide this, it talks about it all the time; as does the Liberal-National govt. angela
