¿Que?
5th July 2010, 08:35
I am rather confused as to the meaning of a passage in The Coming Insurrection, in which the idea of "the social" comes into scrutiny and is heavily criticized. My confusion comes out of notion that what the Left seeks to ultimately achieve is social revolution.
There will be no social solution to the present situation. First, because the vague aggregate of social milieus, institutions, and individualized bubbles that is called, with a touch of antiphrasis, “society,” has no consistency. Second, because there’s no longer any language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not share a language. It took half a century of struggle around the Enlightenment to make the French Revolution possible, and a century of struggle around work to give birth to the fearsome “welfare state.” Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself. But there is nothing like that today. Europe is now a continent gone broke that shops secretly at discount stores and has to fly budget airlines if it wants to travel at all. No “problems” framed in social terms admit of a solution. The questions of “pensions,” of “job security,” of “young people” and their “violence” can only be held in suspense while the situation these words serve to cover up is continually policed for signs of further unrest. Nothing can make it an attractive prospect to wipe the asses of pensioners for minimum wage. Those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won’t teach them to love society. Cuts to their monthly pensions will undermine the desperate pleasure-seeking of hordes of retirees, making them stew and splutter about the refusal to work among an ever larger section of youth. And finally, no guaranteed income granted the day after a quasi-uprising will be able to lay the foundation of a new New Deal, a new pact, a new peace. The social feeling has already evaporated too much for that.
I can see that in some ways, it is referring to the idea of social problems, however this becomes a problem as soon as we set out to define what we mean by social problems. TCI, as I understand, rejects the common assumption of, for example, criminality, as an inherent problem, but where does that leave the "social."
In any case, I believe that this may be an attack on traditional social critique, which derives from academia, and which ultimately is the product of institutional forces that reinforce and reproduce the current system. If this is true, then "the social" is the language of elites, it reinforces the idea of change from above, and forces us to settle with amelioration.
But if we are not social beings, then what are we? I'm not totally understanding what they mean in this passage, and I would be more than happy to hear some opinions.
There will be no social solution to the present situation. First, because the vague aggregate of social milieus, institutions, and individualized bubbles that is called, with a touch of antiphrasis, “society,” has no consistency. Second, because there’s no longer any language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not share a language. It took half a century of struggle around the Enlightenment to make the French Revolution possible, and a century of struggle around work to give birth to the fearsome “welfare state.” Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself. But there is nothing like that today. Europe is now a continent gone broke that shops secretly at discount stores and has to fly budget airlines if it wants to travel at all. No “problems” framed in social terms admit of a solution. The questions of “pensions,” of “job security,” of “young people” and their “violence” can only be held in suspense while the situation these words serve to cover up is continually policed for signs of further unrest. Nothing can make it an attractive prospect to wipe the asses of pensioners for minimum wage. Those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won’t teach them to love society. Cuts to their monthly pensions will undermine the desperate pleasure-seeking of hordes of retirees, making them stew and splutter about the refusal to work among an ever larger section of youth. And finally, no guaranteed income granted the day after a quasi-uprising will be able to lay the foundation of a new New Deal, a new pact, a new peace. The social feeling has already evaporated too much for that.
I can see that in some ways, it is referring to the idea of social problems, however this becomes a problem as soon as we set out to define what we mean by social problems. TCI, as I understand, rejects the common assumption of, for example, criminality, as an inherent problem, but where does that leave the "social."
In any case, I believe that this may be an attack on traditional social critique, which derives from academia, and which ultimately is the product of institutional forces that reinforce and reproduce the current system. If this is true, then "the social" is the language of elites, it reinforces the idea of change from above, and forces us to settle with amelioration.
But if we are not social beings, then what are we? I'm not totally understanding what they mean in this passage, and I would be more than happy to hear some opinions.