Re: migrane apologies times 2 (fwd)

--- andre gunder frank writes ...
>Some traffic laws are bad, but some are also better than
>none. How about trying to improve the ones we got?

or how about getting out of the car, leaving it in a ditch somewhere and
denying the dromomania of modern life by walking?  People bump into each
other in the street sometimes too, but its usually not as bad as crashing a
car.  My point: get rid of NATO.  Would a return to walking be an insult to
the pride (read ambition) of modern man, or remind us that we live not in
our vehicles, but in our bodies?  Would getting rid of NATO open up the
world to all kinds of terror, or would it remind us that it might be better
to live with insecurity than with the violence associated with the pursuit
of security--itself a strange desire (a society, a world of automatons,
stripped of will, desire, instinct).  Do not courts and councils partake of
the same rationality as generals and commanders; in other words, strategies
of domination, coercive, fascistic tactics?  We can dress it up as "law",
but all the lies, procedures, truth-acts, won't hide the basic fact, which
is: no one has a claim to anything in this world.
   It should be that discourse--certainty, safety, dominion, security
(which includes, by the way, capitalism and all of its violence)--which we
should aim to expose, to uncover.  The judge talks of justice, but doesn't
he mean vengeance?  The negotiator talks of conciliation, but doesn't he
mean compliance?  Everyone talks of democracy, but don't they mean
certainty?  Surely there is some other way.  And if we must live in a
Hobbesian war against all (though God knows how many brave thinkers have
set themselves against this most universally assumed assumption), can't we
melt down the guns and decide things with wrestling contests?  Where is the
absurd which might have some chance of highlighting how little truth there
is in truth?  How is it that we have become incarcerated in our own lives?
I always wondered why the human race has been thus far so unimaginative to
come up with other options as to how to live; or put another way--how we
are so blind to power and its operation in the choices we make, and our
actions.  Is all this still worth thinking about?  Have we not lost so much
ground to the transnational capital/State class that we cannot think of
such things?  We must continue, but let's--if only for a few
moments--expand the horizon a little.
   What would happen if we didn't reform, but got rid of these infernal
institutions?  What would happen if we aimed to see power in all of its
operations?

naively yours,
______________________________________________
Ian R. Douglas  |  Watson Institute for International Studies
Brown University, Box 1831, Providence, RI  02912  USA

tel: 401 863-2420     fax: 401 863-2192

"I shut my eyes in order to see." - Paul Gaugin

http://www.powerfoundation.org