Doctor Hilarius
8th May 2014, 01:45
So today I witnessed something at work that I felt highlighted some of the challenges that the left faces today.
A young woman walked around my place of employment listening to music rather loudly and dancing. This display of non-normative behavior (which even made me feel uncomfortable) drew stares of derision and condemnation.
As she went to leave, she took a couple drags from an electronic cigarette. Later, other employees claimed that she was "crazy" and "smoking crack".
A couple cops on their lunch break happened to walk in right after she left, and the management waived them down and showed them surveillance footage of the dancing women, which they watched for what must have been 30 minutes.
This experience taught me a lesson in what a "revolution" is, an eruption of subjective revolutionary will against the normalizing gaze. In many ways, this is how one can break from ideology; a seemingly "insane" action that is unpredicted by neoclassical economic models, acts that violate all so called "rational choice" models of human behavior.
A human being moving their limbs and hips in a certain way can summon police, and charges of insanity and drug use. Her actions defied interpretation by the grid of intelligibility that norms impose onto our everyday lives.
Unfortunately, it seems like the domain of "rational behavior" is narrowing. Now police are summoned when somebody dances.
Reminds me of the French revolutionary Anatole Atlas when he interrupts Lacan during a lecture in France. (on youtube as "Excerpt from Lacan Parle (1972).mp")
A young woman walked around my place of employment listening to music rather loudly and dancing. This display of non-normative behavior (which even made me feel uncomfortable) drew stares of derision and condemnation.
As she went to leave, she took a couple drags from an electronic cigarette. Later, other employees claimed that she was "crazy" and "smoking crack".
A couple cops on their lunch break happened to walk in right after she left, and the management waived them down and showed them surveillance footage of the dancing women, which they watched for what must have been 30 minutes.
This experience taught me a lesson in what a "revolution" is, an eruption of subjective revolutionary will against the normalizing gaze. In many ways, this is how one can break from ideology; a seemingly "insane" action that is unpredicted by neoclassical economic models, acts that violate all so called "rational choice" models of human behavior.
A human being moving their limbs and hips in a certain way can summon police, and charges of insanity and drug use. Her actions defied interpretation by the grid of intelligibility that norms impose onto our everyday lives.
Unfortunately, it seems like the domain of "rational behavior" is narrowing. Now police are summoned when somebody dances.
Reminds me of the French revolutionary Anatole Atlas when he interrupts Lacan during a lecture in France. (on youtube as "Excerpt from Lacan Parle (1972).mp")