Re: [microsound] Anger/Sitting On Our Hands

[Store <store@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--------------040705050301090405030205
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Mark Ragsdale schrieb:

>Anger is the political sentiment par excellence.  Anger concerns the 
>  
>
>>inadmissible, the intolerable, and a refusal, a resistance that casts 
>>itself from the first beond all it can reasonably accomplish--to mark 
>>forth the possible ways of a new negotiation with what is reasonable, 
>>but also the ways of an untractable vigilance.  Without anger, 
>>politics is accomodation and influence peddling, and to write of 
>>politics without anger is to traffic with the seductions of 
>>writing."--Jean-Luc Nancy
>>    
>>
>
>Help us when our politicians feel they should have more to be angry about. I suppose politicians are feigning anger when they take the floor. Do they not already peddle influence in the name of justice? Do they not already compromise our environment in the name of *material* progress. Do they not harbor anger when taking out of the two sides of their confused aristocratic tongues. 
>
what you are talking about concerning the politicians is NOT anger, 
imho, but plain lust for power. Anger is a feeling of the oppressed, a 
feeling that the counterparty doesn't need, as political leaders/the 
represantants of power need cold and planful reason - i.e. the golden 
calf of humanism - to cement the supremacy. Politicians getting angry 
mostly  show us the rare face of human beings dealing with the issues of 
inequity - or the show us the manipulative power of playing with 
emotions, the propagandistic values perfectioned by the fascist regime 
of Hitler-Germany. What made this power so horrendous was the cool 
calculation behind all the destruction, not blind anger...  

>To quote the Dalai lama- "anger is never productive unless you are angry about having anger".  
>  
>
Yes, the Dalai Lama may be right if "production" means creation. 
Included in this sentence (or at least the reason why this quote has 
been made here) seems to be the presumption that destruction can't lead 
to something good. I think if you go a step further you have to admit, 
that every evolution is joined with the decay of older structures and 
that something new only can be built on the ground of something 
destroyed. (the musical idea behind "Einstürzende Neubauten", collapsing 
new buildings - by the way  - (and to get less off topic)).  In this 
way, destruction is also a kind of "production", and production in a 
postmodern sense means just that - the modulation of a current situation 
into a follow-up situation by putting in energy.
    As an unjoined mass, lead by many different needs, feelings and 
interests, will never be able to steer its powers to a clear target, its 
only vector will be set by an emotional common sense or by a same enemy 
and by using this vector it will - in the eyes of history - always just 
clean the field of the past  and create a wide-open space, a vacuum that 
mostly gets filled by new more organised powers. These powers will then 
be represented once more by the eminent lack of emotionality and a 
highly organised structure that stabilizes their power - not by anger, 
but by rationality.
    We see - the Dalai Lama may be a smart guy, but religion often leads 
away from reality and sets people on a path of pure belief, justified by 
such nebulous entities as "wisdom".
    I rather prefer analysis. This will not lead to a change - not at 
all, as it just describes, what happens, but this description is then 
again just another part of the consolidation process of a system, a 
justification of the inevitable historical truth.
 I am - like anyone else - afraid of processes of destabilization, but I 
guess most of us on the list somehow define themselves as "left" or 
system-critical and would applaud a profound social turnaround - or step 
up or whatever. That turnaround will definitely not be caused by us, not 
by people with a home-computer and a good job and a certain prosperity, 
it will not come along a reformatory path and not by the system itself. 
(The capitalist structures are  NOT pro-human.  They are built on 
concepts of exploitation of all possible resources, mind, work and 
nature. These structures eat up all energies just to convert them into 
more system-immanent dispositives) .
   I sometimes feel as if I'm in the "Matrix" and maybe - as lots of us 
do - that explains a bit of the enormous success of that movie. It's 
warm and cosy and good in here, and a change means to drop out in an 
unsafe and unpredictable world. That is why anger and violence makes us 
so afraid though it's a good and clean and natural feeling/reaction to 
unjust things. (Moreover, we've been said to be wrong too many times 
when we felt that way. We're like pigeons in a skinner box, petted too 
many times when behaving peaceful. Petting feels comfortable. Freedom is 
something different but hell, who needs it when we have such good 
movies, music and ideas that gives us a rebellic feeling when sitting on 
our hands... )

--------------040705050301090405030205--

------------------------------