On 8/13/06, Doyle Saylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I don't know if Sandwichman is being funny or not.
Sandwichman is always seriously funny.
Psychological transference is one of those profoundly un-rooted terms to describe the problem.
People aren't always acutely aware of the source of any particular emotion and the tendency is to hang it on some readily available hook. Sometimes it may even be distressing to acknowledge the actual source, so transference is a kind of defence against ego-threatening knowledge. How is it "unrooted" to point that out?
Well the obvious answer to me is how much can we automate emotion knowledge?
Now that, Doyle, is what I would call "un-rooted". We might be able to automate emotion symbols but how does one "automate knowledge"?
The hypertrophy word below seems to represent how capitalism is pretty much indifferent to the emotional effects of job insecurity. Or actually craves that insecurity in order to control workers.
I would say the latter rather than the former but all the better to generate a type of insecurity that remains unnameable.
At the same time Sandwichman doesn't seem to offer clarity about the problem but jargon.
jargon: - a fetish is the substitution of an object for a relationship... - transference is the assignment of the source of emotions to an inapproriate source... - hypertrophy is when something grows too large for healthy functioning... So, to clarify, the Sandwichman says that the GOP line substitutes an anachronistic and romanticized image of family for the real relationships, which are threatened not by gay marriage but by economic precariousness. That precariousness, in turn, is generated by precisely the structural shift from manufacturing to finance that is upheld in mainstream conventional wisdom as the foundation of a new prosperity -- as the supposed creator of value. (I would argue that a little credit is a good thing, a remedy; too much is a poison. See Derrida's discussion of Plato's pharmakon). So, to return to the money subject line, might not family "values" be understood as a way to conceal the source of anxiety about "value" creation and deflect it in a direction that both intensifies the insecurity and prevents an effective response to it?
> Holy cow! I wonder to what extent the GOP fetish about "preserving the > traditional family" might be explained as a psychological transference > of anxiety about the hypertrophy of finance and deline of > manufacturing in the US political economy.
-- Sandwichman
