I suppose this is always worth saying: I should state clearly that I admire Franklin every which way: as a thinker, as a musician and as a poet, and especially as a decent person. I would like to have him on my side in any struggle. I have no hesitations about any of these things. I simply disagree with his analysis, strongly. And insofar as that analysis risks taking on not the particularities of his insight but the generalities of a certain convention of thought I find worth disputing, dispute it I will, with every passion I can muster.
I recall, during the O.J. Simpson trial, a rather jaw-dropping discourse between Alan Dershowitz and Elaine Scarry (not Catherine MacKinnon, as previously posted; correction courtesy my mom). Dershowitz produced a lengthy series of statistics toward the legal formulation of "reasonable doubt"; the numbers demonstrated quite clearly that a very small, tremendously small percentage of women who were battered by their husbands were actually killed by them.
At which point Scarry inquired, "How many were killed by someone else?" As it says in that book by Led Zep's road manager, end of anecdote.
I would invoke a similar line of reasoning in response to Franklins' clustered critiques of the riot-as-politics (though I also think that his urge to psychologize the events, and remove them endlessly into some realm of family dynamics, shows the horizons of the current line of political critique pretty clearly: these aren't political events, because I won't think about them politically). It is absolutely true that a very small, tremendously small percentage of riots have led to larger insurrectionary events conducted by citizens against their state.
How many were precipitated by something else?
[I trust this question won't be flattered by the sophistry of noting that big events have multiple causes, a consideration as self-evident as it is nugatory]
Posted by jane at November 14, 2005 08:41 AM | TrackBack