Re: <nettime> re: As Above, [So Below] - Critical Art Ensemble

[rachel greene <rachel@rhizome.com>]

"Needless to say, the non-separation of capitalism and cristianity
continues to  be an effective method of social control. I can't help but
think that  strategic separations (sexuality from reproduction, mother
from father, foetus  from mother) go hand in hand quite nicely with the
market's  disproportional  emphasis on the need to achieve total
physical separateness and psychlogical  individuality (the "freedom" of
being separated from everyone else requires  that you spend more).
Divide and conquer? And then there's that other scary  combo (in NA
anyway) of puritanism and pop psychology waging war on  "dependency",
emotional and otherwise, and the invention of both "addictions"  and
"12-step programs". But that's another can of worms. As a closing
question/thought, as much as we are seeing the material reality of these
 strategic separations, perhaps what we don't we know about their
consequences  is what we should be paying more attention to."

Saludos,
Susie Ramsay
+++

Susie, this war against "dependency" is waged quite explicitly in a book
by Christopher Lasch called "The Culture of Narcissism." Lasch's reading
is that American culture, and by this he means a culture born of cowboy
and frontier mentalities, has been supplanted if not eradicated by the
influence of psychoanalysis and feminism in the collective. The brave, the
"proactive," the pioneers -- they have been replaced by the feminized
and victimized. Lasch argues that Americans are bonding with our Mommys
too much -- what the country needs is to cut the regressive emotional
rhetoric -- and to find a more rigid and ego-boundried... superego.

"Fusion," either on a cultural level ( as in Lasch's analysis (pun
intended) of America ), or a scientific one (Mother and foetus), is
persistently threatening -- as you mention -- and it persistently ends
up blaming the Mother.


In the sun [son]
in the son [sun]
I feel as one.
in the sun
i'm married [Maryed]
buried..."
- kurt cobain

Rachel Greene
Editor
RHIZOME INTERNET

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