The illusion of choice, the choice of illusion

john eden

male pale and stale
Also, on the breaking of family ties as a precondition for communism, I think that the point is that being engaged in struggle changes the way that people relate to each other. You can see this quite clearly in the spanish civil war and even in the 85etc miner's strike - traditional male/female roles changed and the way that people related to each other in family units also changed.

So perhaps you do need people questioning the assumptions right now, but you also need to give people time and space to get used to wacky ideas - to create situations in which they evolve.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Yes, that's absolutely right. Atm, within the ideological framework, alternatives to the Family are not lived and therefore are unthinkable, are not thinkable and are therefore not liveable. But when other structures become thinkable they become liveable, and when they are lived they become thinkable, and so on, in a virtuous circle. The tricky thing is how you move from within the ideological structure where nothing is possible to outside it, when everything is. I think that this breach is what Badiou means by an 'event'.

Fiction (esp those called 'science fiction' and 'Horror') is obv also crucial in generating alternatives to ideology's impossibilism.
 
O

Omaar

Guest
Kids

I don't have any kids myself, but the thought occurs to me that to have children would make it even more difficult to resist ideology, or do anything to act against capitalism. Advertising targeted at children really freaks me out, and I'm certain a lot of parents' desire to avoid the 'nag factor' and to get 'the best for their children' is what prevents reistance to capital from developing beyond a certain point. Fear of hurt being inflicted upon family or progeny (aside - i think that might be an ongoing trope in action movies?) is a more powerful controller than fear of hurt to oneself (ususally).

Back to the original post - Choice under capitalism generally means consumer choice, no?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Omaar said:
I don't have any kids myself, but the thought occurs to me that to have children would make it even more difficult to resist ideology, or do anything to act against capitalism. Advertising targeted at children really freaks me out, and I'm certain a lot of parents' desire to avoid the 'nag factor' and to get 'the best for their children' is what prevents reistance to capital from developing beyond a certain point. Fear of hurt being inflicted upon family or progeny (aside - i think that might be an ongoing trope in action movies?) is a more powerful controller than fear of hurt to oneself (ususally).

I think having kids makes it harder in some ways and "easier" in others. People are less likely to put their liberty at risk if they have dependents, so causing trouble may be a no-no. Similarly, people have less time to spend on projects beyond their immediate needs. Activism is traditionally the preserve of childless twenty-somethings.

Plus, as you say, you're bombarded with all sorts of shit you have to deal with - advertising, paranoia inducing media, the whole tamale. Trying to buy a 3 year old girl a bike which isn't flimsy and pink is pretty much impossible, for example - whereas boys have all sorts of cool stuff.

On the other hand, having kids does draw some aspects of capitalism into sharp focus and people may have more rather than less empathy with suffering kids elsewhere. There is a lot of community activism dominated by mothers/fathers - like protests against phone masts, incinerators, etc or of course community facilities like nurseries being closed down. This is maybe not what people would call "anti-capitalism" in the summit-hopping sense of the word but it is little bits of micro-resistance like that which I think will lead onto greater things...

Omaar said:
Back to the original post - Choice under capitalism generally means consumer choice, no?

Partly - you also get to "choose" who exploits you in the form of voting for governments and applying for jobs.
 

jenks

thread death
all i can say is that having kids re-politicised me - i am sure it came out of a desire to protect them and protest about the state of things. again maybe i am just too solipsistic but it makes it harder to buy things made by kids in another part of the world when you have some of your own at home - i am not vaunting child-having over not having, just aware that it has made a difference to me.
also this idea that all the political parties want us to breed - surely the point of govt sponsored creches and paternity leave is not about asking us to breed more but making sure we stay at work, that as many of us as possible are 'supporting' the capital state - we have no excuse to stay at home and look after our kids if the state provides - isn't that the reasoning?? surely from a govt point of view kids are a drain on resources - they must (no evidence but a feeling) be one of the most expensive in terms of health care spending, and what about the cost of educating them?
finally, the nuclear family, how many people actually grow up in one? i would suggest very few, what with, solo parents, shift work, extended afmilies and such like. maybe the nuclear family is a myth?
finally can i say how much i have enjoyed this thread - i think mr. k punk is right when he says that what has happened is that ideas ahve become so deeply embedded in our discourse taht we no longer recognise them as ideaologies but 'common sense' - strangely a phrase used by howard this weekend for his immigration policy. i can't say i agree with you, kpunk but at least you got me thinking
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Thanks Jenks... that surely is why this kind of space need not be about idle chit chat...

Surely, as the two Johns show on this thread, there is no intrinsic reason why having kids should have a political effect one way or another. Sadly, though, kids are often used as an excuse for political quietism - i.e. at our place, it is said by some that I can afford to take the positions I do because I don't have children and 'responsibilities' --- as if somehow the only responsibilities that REALLY count are those which involve the privatized Family.

That's why the injunction to breed is not opposed to the injunction to stay at work - far from it, the two imperatives form a mutually reinforcing positive feedback cycle. Getting people to have kids is the most powerful ideological lever kapitalism has to keep ppl enslaved to its idiot teleology. 'Providing for your dependents' is a much more acceptable motive for keeping ppl on the treadmill of ceaseless kapital reproduction than is 'making money for myself'; Kapital is nothing if not resourceful, and it can rely upon certain biological defaults for support here.
 

turtles

in the sea
marriage?

Just wondering where marriage fits in to all this family talk. Surely marriage is the keystone in the modern nuclear family? "Get married and have kids" has always been the rule. But that's thing, marriage has been hugely important for millenia and accross many different cultures. While I agree that the modern nuclear family is rather arbitrary in its construction, the whole marriage deal certainly seems to imply the mom-dad-child thing that is the basis for the modern family. I would love to read a history of child-rearing through the ages, because I'm really not all the knowledgable about it, but nevertheless it looks to me like the nuclear family certainly has a long line of precedants.

"Family" as a concept has always been a big thing: "who is the child of who" has always been really important in pretty much any culture. Coupled with the injunction to marry (for life!), it seems like the nuclear family is something that many cultures have been kind of aiming at for a while.

This is not some bullshit teleological argument for the nuclear family or anything. I agree with your essential point k-punk about the need to explore other possibilities. I'm just questioning your claim that the nuclear family is some totally different and new thing that kinda came out of left field. it was the ancient greeks that came up with Oedipus after all.

Also re: capatilism and families. Surely all the recent furor over same-sex marriages can be seen at least partly in light of the fact that gay couples don't have kids (adoption & artificial insemination, of course, are ignored). I'm particularly fond of the Conservative party leader here in Canada arguing agains same-sex marriage by claiming that it will promote polygamy.
 
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johneffay

Well-known member
bipedaldave said:
But that's thing, marriage has been hugely important for millenia and accross many different cultures. While I agree that the modern nuclear family is rather arbitrary in its construction, the whole marriage deal certainly seems to imply the mom-dad-child thing that is the basis for the modern family.

But in many cultures marriage is not about setting up the mom-dad-child thing, rather it is about the binding of relationships between extended families or the addition of a member to an extended family. Hence the idea of marrying into a family.

Supposedly, the reason that the 'modern' family is nuclear is that economic pressures meant that when people become adults and marry, they move away from their parents in order to find work.
 

fldsfslmn

excremental futurism
k-punk said:
You are kind of proving my point that the family HAS clearly become an unthought presupposition, a 'fact of life'. But this is at an ideological, not an empirical level. It is worth noting that the Oedipal (nuclear) family (mummy-daddy-me) is a VERY new phenomenon, historically speaking. Even during the 20C most children were reared in what were in effect extended family groupings.

In bourgeois terms, the nuclear family is indeed a VERY new phenomenon, but not only because of the predominance (necessity?) of extended family groupings prior to the 20th century. The actual rearing of children, until recently, was largely accomplished by nursemaids, tutors, and assorted others of the servant class.

bipedaldave said:
"Family" as a concept has always been a big thing: "who is the child of who" has always been really important in pretty much any culture. Coupled with the injunction to marry (for life!), it seems like the nuclear family is something that many cultures have been kind of aiming at for a while.

The concept of lineage seems to exist in tandem with "the dread of incest." e.g. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE'S MY COUSIN! OH SHIT!"

bipedaldave said:
Also re: capatilism and families. Surely all the recent furor over same-sex marriages can be seen at least partly in light of the fact that gay couples don't have kids (adoption & artificial insemination, of course, are ignored). I'm particularly fond of the Conservative party leader here in Canada arguing agains same-sex marriage by claiming that it will promote polygamy.

Right. Gay couples probably wouldn't need to buy as many products. Beyond simply the "child product industry," the slight and largely meaningless gradations that delineate "his and hers" generally ensure much more consumption.

Along this line, it's interesting to observe the curious relationship between "equal rights" and the entrance into the consumer sphere of various groups. I'm not sure how far I want to go with this -- the thought that "the market" (which, I think, we are always guilty of anthropomorphizing) at one point thought, "hey, white males are pretty much buying everything they can, I've gotta' open up some new opportunities" is kind of ludicrous.

johneffay said:
Supposedly, the reason that the 'modern' family is nuclear is that economic pressures meant that when people become adults and marry, they move away from their parents in order to find work.

I think this is a pattern of dispersement that likely predates the very idea of an "economic pressure."
 

turtles

in the sea
johneffay said:
But in many cultures marriage is not about setting up the mom-dad-child thing, rather it is about the binding of relationships between extended families or the addition of a member to an extended family. Hence the idea of marrying into a family.
Point taken. But nevertheless, isn't having a child, an heir to fully merge the two families, still quite important? The binding is just that much stronger when it's made permanent into the next generation. I'd be willing to bet that being married but not having kids has always been frowned upon, regardless of context.

Supposedly, the reason that the 'modern' family is nuclear is that economic pressures meant that when people become adults and marry, they move away from their parents in order to find work.
Ah. You know i honestly had never thought of it specifically in that way? My own upbringing being quite different, having a very close and active extended family (both physically and emotionally)...another blind spot found...

But even so, is that really all we're talking about here? I mean I don't think many people would really be against the idea of families having closer relations with their extended family and not being so isolated. Actually sounds pretty "family values"-ish to me. When K-punk's telling us (via christ) to hate our mothers and fathers, i rather suspect he thinks we should also be hating our aunts and uncles for similar reasons.
 

johneffay

Well-known member
fldsfslmn said:
I think this is a pattern of dispersement that likely predates the very idea of an "economic pressure."

Not in the UK it didn't. Prior to the driving of people off the land and into industrialised centres, there was very little internal migration. People didn't grow up and leave the village, they simply married a neighbour and stayed put. In actual fact, this pattern was still prevalent after the industrial revolution in many areas: Think of the pit villages. Social mobility was very unusual.

In fact, this sort of of thing still hasn't died out completely. When I lived in the South West, I knew people who had never been out of the county they were born in. I've also seen factories which have employed numerous generations of the same family; including three generations simultaneously.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
It's interesting to bring Anti-Oedipus in here; after all, the question D/G repeatedly pose there is: to what extent is Oedipus universal? Their answer: only to the extent that capitalism is. Only in capitalism can all bonds of alliance and filiation be reduced to mummy-daddy-me. This structure, like capitalism itself, has thus haunted all social formations as their 'virtual limit'. Oedipus is the 'simulacra'-avatar of 'the Thing, the unnameable, the total decoding of all flows' - what they are warding off, what their complex systems of totems, taboos, prohibitions and injunctions have unconsciously been designed to block. So only now, in capitalism, does it look as if it 'has always been about Oedipus'. The truth is almost the reverse: it has always been about AVOIDING Oedipus. And Oedipus: Oedipus is about avoiding schizophrenia. It is the Oed-I-pod defence system that maintains the structural-consensual illusion that capitalism is under human control.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
fldsfslmn said:
Right. Gay couples probably wouldn't need to buy as many products. Beyond simply the "child product industry," the slight and largely meaningless gradations that delineate "his and hers" generally ensure much more consumption.

hahahaha! this just made me bust out laughing in front of everyone in my office. i'm not being facetious here at all - are we seriously supposed to believe that gay people spend less than straight couples; that their consumption is somehow lessened by the fact that they are both the same sex? do you *know* any gay people? gay men especially are among the most profligate consumers i have *ever* encountered.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Dave's right --- the 'pink pound' is something economists have discussed for a while now; ppl who DON'T have kids obv have more not less disposable income....

As for Oedipus being an ancient Greek myth, I've dealt with this above. Point is that what Oedipus is for us is something very different for what it was to the Ancient Greeks.
 

fldsfslmn

excremental futurism
stelfox said:
hahahaha! this just made me bust out laughing in front of everyone in my office. i'm not being facetious here at all - are we seriously supposed to believe that gay people spend less than straight couples; that their consumption is somehow lessened by the fact that they are both the same sex? do you *know* any gay people? gay men especially are among the most profligate consumers i have *ever* encountered.

I know you're not merely offering a stereotype since you're limiting it to gay men you have encountered, but your statement sounds as funny to me as mine did to you. I don't think that's the case all across the board, and certainly the gay people I know (which, admittedly, isn't a lot) aren't any more profligate in their consumption than anyone else. I think one's economic status is the true determinant of consumption. Whether gay men would have more disposable income than straight men due to lack of children is also suspicious (I don't know many people with children, period). What about the rapid career advancement of a "good heterosexual nuclear family man." Sure he's got kids, but he'll probably suffer less discrimination in the workplace.

What I meant, and admittedly I'm not sure about this, is that increased acceptance of the gay couple means that they must therefore be constituted as a nucleus for the targetting of products (in the sense that family restaurants, family television, family board games, etc. all exist to be targetted at the nuclear heterosexual family). Each interpersonal relationship constitutes the basis of an extra level of economic exchange (on a simplified level, the phenomenon of Valentine's Day and other assorted gift-giving rituals are a reasonable example), and so far pretty much every relationship has been covered, with all consumers neatly slotted into their appropriate categories. To me this presents the issue of how is the gay couple constituted as subject of capitalism? Maybe the example I brought up (the idea that his'n'hers stuff sells way more products) was wrong, I'm sure his'n'his or hers'n'hers (or some other illusory way of stratifying consumers) works just as well from a product-design standpoint. But something is still nagging at me about the relationship between same-sex marriage and economics.
 

luka

Well-known member
'As for Oedipus being an ancient Greek myth, I've dealt with this above. Point is that what Oedipus is for us is something very different for what it was to the Ancient Greeks.'

hence flippantly...
 

mexican

Banned
it was great the way stelfox burst out laughing wasn't it? The gay thing. k punk is right about what dave says, and he's very astute about the pink pound (the only reason the economy is strong is because of our mobile phone bills!). But there are serious points here too, about whether or not to breed. I say I agree with K Punk not breeding certainly, but I'd let everyone else make up their own minds.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/the_economy/142998.stm 'Because of family circumstances (or more precisely lack thereof) the gay community tends to have much more disposable income to spend.'

http://www.scottishmediamonitor.com/features2.cfm?ID=9 'The acronym ad men like using for gays is DINKYS: (Double Income: No Kids).'

Of course there is no gay 'community' (the production of 'communities' by power, ah that's another subject I think)...

Surely it's evident BOTH that the Family is a major ideological configuration in capitalism AND that homosexuality is no threat whatsoever to capital. On the contrary, in fact. A concentration on sexuality - with people rolling up to define themselves by their sexual practices, completely ignoring Foucault's message in History of Sexuality 1 - has been a major theme of the last two decades of conservatism.
 

Loki

Well-known member
k-punk said:
Surely it's evident BOTH that the Family is a major ideological configuration in capitalism AND that homosexuality is no threat whatsoever to capital. On the contrary, in fact. A concentration on sexuality - with people rolling up to define themselves by their sexual practices, completely ignoring Foucault's message in History of Sexuality 1 - has been a major theme of the last two decades of conservatism.

I think you're right, K, that both the family and homosexuality pose no threat but the question remains, what <em>is</em> the threat? individually, it may be possible to develop a belief system / ideology that opposes fundamental capitalist concerns but collectively, as soon as people stand behind a particular ideological framework, capitalism has the capacity to use that identification as a means for commodification... hence revolutionary Che trails are now packaged as holidays for supplement readers, punk became a brand, cyber-punk became an way of selling shiny clothes / club nights etc...

which leaves us with... well, i guess that's the issue... we are forced into the acceptance of the <em>best possible</em> rather than the ultimate (you're right when you say that the idea of something beyond the family has died a death - perhaps because of the likes of RD Laing et al preaching about the darkside of the family whilst maintaining a neat family unit themselves - which is really saying nothing more than "they just don't know how to do it properly, a rhetoric employed by almost all non-neurotic parents")

Jack Dee (paraphrased) "Your 3 year old may be reading Chaucer but mine is spreading their own faeces aorund the room"

in addition, i get the creeping feeling that we dissolve the (perhaps illusory) nuclear unit only to replace it with a wider, perhaps even national, identity where the 'other' is defined in broaderbut no less destructive sweeps...

Maybe i'm missing something. Hope so.


I
 
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