Re: <nettime> Marion von Osten: email interview with Brian Holmes

[monica ross <notebook@justfornow.net>]

>In my opinion, that's a form of repression, operating in language - minor
>with respect to the domination operating on bonded labor, but still
>humiliating. That so much conventional silence be imposed on the
>"professions" of speech and gesture is to my mind and senses, absurd.
>
agree with brian's statement above, but would add that this 'conventional
silence' also operates to repress the faculties of being able to hear the
vaster silences of inequality critically even when they are represented- so
that the implications of their integration into the social fabric /ethics
and psyche is structurally inhibited, even if spoken, at the point of
reception.   it is as if representing them, making them known, also begins
to partake in a logic of  normalising these inequalities. -in becoming
informed about them we can find ourselves as much  in a process of becoming
socially habituated to an inevitable status quo of injustice than in one
which rejects it?
the tragedy which befell the chinese cockle workers a few weeks ago was a
calamity whose logic would once have triggered widespread industrial action
and protest. Instead it was news of a group situated outside an
interpendent economic and social chain, remote, illegal, even insidious.
This dis-connection discloses its synthesis with a conventionalised silence
about the divided status, political disenfranchisement and normalised
alienation of many 'legitimate' workers in the uk.
monica



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