“In Wang’s theory, a network like Facebook, which enforces real name registration and consists of a person’s friends and family from time immemorial, encourages bounded use. It’s like the small town you never left, the grammar school class you couldn’t pass out of, the first dead-end job. It’s a network mired in past and present, and by its nature it enforces a limited sense of identity and expression. By contrast, something like Tumblr encourages unbounded use. It allows you to experiment and play. It’s the big city, and each new tumblelog you create is like a new bar or neighborhood where you can try on a new self and see how it fits. In one instant you can be a pug lover, reblogging the best animated GIFs of the flat-faced dogs. In the next, you can dive deep into the Go Pro snowboarding community and post snaps from your latest run. Hence Wang’s notion of the elastic self. Like rubber bands, when we step into Tumblr we can stretch and reshape ourselves into different configurations. Each new hat we try on stretches the rubber band just a little bit further, and over time it might evolve into a new configuration. This allows for remarkable opportunities to explore different potentials of self and self-expression.”
—The Social Ties That UnbindFeminist Anthropology
indiana.eduA brief but fascinating history of feminist anthropologies, theory and intellectual history.
“This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.”
—Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990)
because stunningly timely
“The most intimate reactions of human beings have become so entirely reified, even to themselves, that the idea of anything peculiar to them survives only in extreme abstraction: personality means hardly anything more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.”
—Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Culture Industry as Deception, 1944“ Let's suspend our misgivings about democracy long enough to consider whether, if it were an effective means for people to share power over their lives, it could be compatible with capitalism. In a democracy, an informed citizenry is supposed to vote according to their enlightened self-interest-but who controls the flow of information under capitalism if not wealthy executives? They can't help but skew their coverage according to their class interests, and you can hardly blame them-the newspapers and networks that didn't flinch at alienating corporate advertisers were run out of business long ago by competitors with fewer scruples. Likewise, voting means choosing between options, according to which possibilities seem most desirable-but who sets the options, who establishes what is considered possible, who constructs desire itself but the wealthy patriarchs of the political establishment and their nephews in advertising and public relations firms? In the United States, the two-party system has reduced politics to choosing the lesser of two identical evils, both of which answer to their funders before anyone else. Sure, the parties differ over exactly how much to repress personal freedoms or spend on bombs-but do we ever get to vote on who controls "public" spaces such as shopping malls, or whether workers are entitled to the full product of their labor, or any other question that could seriously change the way we live? In such a state of affairs, the essential function of the democratic process is to limit the appearance of what is possible to the narrow spectrum debated by candidates for office. This demoralizes dissidents and contributes to the general impression that they are impotent utopians-when nothing is more utopian than trusting representatives from the owning class to redress the grievances caused by their own dominance, and nothing more impotent than accepting their political system as the only possible political system. Ultimately, the most transparent democratic political process will always be trumped by economic matters such as property ownership. Even if we could convene everyone, capitalists and convicts alike, in one vast general assembly, what would prevent the same dynamics that rule the marketplace from spilling over into that sacred space? So long as resources are unevenly distributed, the rich can always buy others' votes: either literally, or by promising a piece of the pie, or else by means of propaganda and intimidation. Intimidation may be oblique-"Those radicals want to take away your hard-earned property"or as overt as the bloody gang wars that accompanied electoral campaigns in nineteenth century America. Thus, even at best, democracy can only serve its purported purpose if it occurs among those who explicitly oppose capitalism and foreswear its prizes-and in those circles, consensus makes a lot more sense than majority rule.”
—Expect Resistance; CrimethInc (2007); pg 77“Therefore sociology treats as identical all the biological individuals who, being a product of the same objective conditions, are the supporters of the same habitus: social class, understood as a system of objective determinations, but be brought into relation not with the individual or with the ‘class’ as a population, but with the class habitus, the system of dispositions (partially) common to all products of the same structures.”
—Pierre Bourdieu
From Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977
“Man never thinks of himself without thinking of the Other; he views the world under the sign of duality which is not in the first place sexual in character. But being different from man, who sets himself up as the Sane, it is naturally to the category of the Other that woman is consigned; the Other includes women.”
—Simone de Beauvoir
“[Lefebvre, Foucault, and Berger] clearly rotate their arguments around the realization that it is now space more than time that hides things from us, that the demystification of spatiality and its veiled instrumentality of power is the key to making practical, political, and theoretical sense of the contemporary era.”
—Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989)Mimetic Desire and the Scapegoat Mechanism
auticulture.wordpress.com
“Negative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis and the new nation [the US] certainly did… . The downside … is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are, in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real.” —Morris Berman, A Question of Values
There is a little-known French philosopher called René Girard who has been quietly working away at a social theory that, if correct, has the potential to overturn everything we think we know about ourselves and the world we live in. In outlining his theory of mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry, and what he calls “the scapegoat mechanism,” Gerard argues persuasively how sacrificial violence is the dark secret underpinning all human cultures. The scapegoat mechanism is the means by which a group transfers its collective hostility onto a single victim, discharging it and returning the group to unity. As I’ve tried to outline above, America’s and other dominant groups’ penchant for scapegoating is hardly a secret; but Girard repositions it from being a cultural artifact to being the cultural artifact.
The problem which scapegoating solves is what Girard terms mimesis: an unconscious form of imitation that invariably leads to competition. Girard describes desire as the most virulent “mimetic pathogen.” This idea was simply stated, as long ago as 1651, in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.” We can see this easily enough at the microcosmic level. If two people share an affinity for each other, they make friends and share their common interests. The problem, Girard writes, is that this very affinity will eventually lead them to desire the same thing and end up as rivals. Two best friends fall for the same woman; the affinity quickly turns to antipathy and they end up murdering each other to prove whose desire is stronger. An even more common example is when two children are playing with toys: one picks up a toy and instantly the other wants to play with it. A previously harmonious arrangement quickly dissolves into anger and tears. Mimesis is like an endless dance of unconscious imitation in which people find themselves desiring things because they are desired by someone else. “Keeping up with the Joneses”: mimetic desire aroused not by the object itself but by the desire of others for the object. Competition becomes its own end, and the object of desire becomes irrelevant as previously civil neighbors become consumed by rivalry. They are now locked into a “negative identity” in which each needs the other in order to feel real. This idea is popular in movies, such as “cop hunts killer” doppelganger narratives, and in comic book characters like Batman and the Joker — opposite sides of a single coin, strengthening and justifying each other through opposition. It is also seen everywhere we look, only not quite so starkly drawn.
Girard’s theory extends this model to encompass (and explain) entire societies. It argues that, without the release provided by sacrificial violence, mimetic desire leads inevitably to mimetic rivalry and will finally culminate in mimetic violence. Humans are so highly imitative that, without the scapegoat mechanism, violent outbreaks within any social group will spread like wildfire and decimate the whole group. If two people desire the same thing, their desire will soon spread to a third, a fourth, and so on. Once the object is forgotten, mimetic rivalry snowballs into widespread antagonism. The final stage of the crisis is when the antagonists no longer imitate each other’s desires for an object, but each other’s antagonism. Think of Rwanda.
