On the administrative state of capitalism
The dominance of psychology in the American mind reflects its uses in practices of management. This advanced in the twentieth with the administrative state.
The administration is not the legal state, the state whose power rests on law, which may also provide, as through constitutions, limitations on its exercise. The legal state is rational because law is. The rationality of law is above all that of culpability (in criminal cases) and liability (in civil ones). The unity of these two is easy to see: and in fact the civil uses of law may have a priority over the criminal ones that is indicated by the latter's use of the metaphor or payment (the criminal must "pay," and the sentence, which basically subjects a body to a time that is endured in pain and boredom as this body is its object, thought expressed in a thought, that can have the brief form of the statement, a "sentence," for judges and jurors that "understand" the law and "observe" it as religious Jews do the commandments, which normally are not necessarily applied, but are studied). The rationality of the law is the use of evidence and argument in a proceeding, to find out who must pay and how much.
There is a curious advantage of being accused of a crime or tort, and so being mentioned and addressed (an accusation is a kind of interpellation; their combining is expressed in the Prophet Nathan's statement to King David, ""You are that man!" (Guilty like the man in the allegorical story). The privilege of the accused is to be capable of a defense. You are "innocent until proven guilty."
In literature, Kafka names the moment in which the legal state has revealed itself as nothing more than the administrative state declaring its presence in empty affirmations. In the Trial, guilt is accusation and a defense does not exculpate. It is therefore in Kafka's writings that we begin to see that the modern state founded on law must be surpassed; the principle of law as determining the management of a social body (or person) must be abandoned.
But the administrative state is its prolongation and it makes an obscenity out of the very idea of an accusation or imputation of guilt (or liability). Debt begins to be universal, and at the same time to lose all reason.
In philosophy, Levinas is the name of the thinker who affirms universal debt as the basis of love, recognition, and the service of God.
The clearest sign of the perversity of the present prevailing understanding of morality is the mania that psychotherapists have had for persuading people that they are under no negative judgment but only an affirmative opportunity, and at the very moments when these people are identifying what you have done that is wrong, or a mistake. "Sin" in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin was identified by terms meaning "error," as in "missing the mark." You are in error, but don't fee badly. It's not a criticism, don't take it personally, it's not an accusation, etc. Which precisely means that you are in the wrong but should not feel any of guilt's self-negation, for it's not against you, but for you, we're here to help you get what you need or really want. And we know what you want. So you are in the wrong, but it's not "you" in the wrong, and you are not subject to a negative judgment.
Which means you cannot defend yourself, not that you cannot be punished, though doubtless it will be called treatment and not punishment, though it is a sanction all the same.
It is a dogma of American psychotherapy.
Convergent as a trend with this de-culpabilization has been the profound tendency in American society in particular to move towards maternal models of authority, away from paternal, "patriarchal" ones, which are themselves imputed as oppressive and alienation. This has been a broad trend in Jewish and Protestant theology, among other places. (One example is liberal rabbi Michael Lerner’s book Jewish Renewal, which argues the importance of compassion for all criminals, from Cain on, because they had real frustrations and suffered. He never says this, but consideration of the claim renders obvious that Lerner’s tacit argument is that God needs to be thought of more as mother than father).
But the shift cannot be understood merely as one from normative masculinity to normative femininity or maternity, though that may be involved. The reason is that there is no masculinity or femininity as such, but only particular ways in which gender norms can be elaborated and given content beyond their merely referencing one or other gender. But if such a shift does appear involve, we can suspect that the ideas of the feminine and maternal that are put forth as new norms are not true alternatives to what they are said to counter or replace.
The hegemony of administrative authority is still mostly challengeable by means of the old legal norms, but the problem is that their employment is is normally expensive and in general is exceptional. Democratic norms exist in the society and with strong appearance, but as they require both rationality, which most citizens lack the aptitude for, and equality, which administrative organizations exclude as their dependence on the application of written directives by professionals exercising judgment renders them dependent on hierarchy.
Universities are places where administrative authority enjoys an almost complete triumph. This can be seen in a couple of ways. First, students , who attend the school because they are seeking a credential to get a professional job, which will also enable them to replay their student loans, are often very eager to [make complaints that are always presumed true when made, against others who have supposedly infringed their right not to be offended as specially protected members of minority groups, In all of this implicit is the existence of a very powerful university bureaucracy that will respond administratively, and not legally, or democratically, to these complaints. Secondly, those accused in these processes have little or no right of due process, and in fact no one seems to much expect them to be able to defend themselves. When I was at Berkeley in the 80s, there was a student government, powerful enough to own a large student union building on the main plaza. They nominally had a role of defending accused students, butt hey told me their defendants almost never win, because they are guilty! Imagine a defense attorney who said this! In fact, they were prepared only to offer people counsel on how to understand the system. There would then be a kind of examining magistrate, such as exists in Europe countries, who is a combination of supposedly impartial fact-finder and prosecutor. And this becomes very clear, because this person is highly prejudiced toward this person's guilt, as that is what he is looking to determine.
The administrative state is not an alternative to the legal state but a development within it. The American society and legal system offer an interesting form of the development, because tone meaning of the common law system is that people are not sinners because of a sin, the extent of which measures and limits their sinfulness; rather, they must be guilty of some sin or other if they are sinners, and they are sinners if they so seem because those judging them do not like them. That personal fight with a partner, friend, or roommate who seemed mainly interested not in solving any problem but assassinating your character, this is a possibility built into our system of justice. It helps to make sense of the idea that anybody can be guilty. and also explains the folk hatred that is frequently addressed to people found guilty of any wrongdoing. In this, the criminal is condemned much as in the medieval Christian world a sinner could be damned. Salvation and damnation did not, and could not, apply to individual acts, but only to persons. An administrative judge or any jury will think that every personal attribute of yours that they notice, if it fits a theory of how you are a criminal, then it will be used for that, and basically the system at least always has this liability, that people will be found guilty because they have a distinctive personality.
In an administrative system, a normatively judged particular personality is a mental illness. This system has an advantage over legal ones that it enjoys at the price of eliminating crime altogether and with it defense, or guilt and with it innocence, since in a world without guilt no one would be innocent, there simply would be no sanctionable behavior or wrongdoing. The advantage is that the judgment of sanctions for individuals deemed abnormal or simply judgable and subject to this power, is able to be carried out entirely by professionals according to their judgement. Law itself is finished in this system, where observing the law, like a religious Jew might the laws of the Talmud, will not help you. You are denied that autonomy because judged by means that are not accessible to you, as they are not part of universal understanding but only that of experts.
Every regime in the last century in any advanced industrial society was of this type, including the most murderous among them, where certain of these tendencies were especially pronounced.
The United States has administrative governance since at least the Progressive Era and Woodrow Wilson. In fact, “progressive” is a good name for today’s “liberals,” who do not much believe in liberty, but want government to promote their values, which are thought better, and therefore “progressive.” Similar talk includes that of being “enlightened” or having a “consciousness” or thinking that is “higher” or further advanced. Linear notions of historical time as progress have disappeared from philosophy, but not American politics. Progressives are especially interested in advancing the causes of minority and minoritarian groups (the latter includes women), and they want to do so using the coercive and police powers of the existing state apparatus, which do not in principle much trouble them. Those of Marxist bent may be drawn to Leninism for this reason as much as social democracy, but not the more anarchistic strains in the historical socialist and communist movements.
(It is in principle true that the recent movement opposing police violence and mass incarceration on the grounds that they are heavily impact African-Americans and therefore are unfair to them does in principle constitute a possible point of contradiction within the progressive ideology).
What will it be when we are finally beyond such normativity? We must advance from norm without retreating to law. We should suspect all forms of ideological critique, for what they promise to bring us under cover of what they repudiated. If we refuse the thought of law and norm, what remains, that of the good? It does have the advantage of clearly not referring to something given, whereas norms and laws tend to be formulated as representing something. Norms ofter represent the actual to those considering the possible: the way things must be is the way they are.
The task of the citizen is to think in public with other citizens.
This is made only more difficult when citizens style themselves as guardians of each other's morality, often caring most about whether or not some group of people is insulted. Citizens should care about the good of their community and care as little as possible about who is admired or disdained. We should cultivate the art of both defending our own views and listening to those of others. Many people think a debate is a contest, and they listen out of courtesy, but not curiosity. A society in which democratic discussion has degenerated into fights is one in which people behave aggressively because they are afraid of losing. It must be they fear being found guilty, while believing that that is really only a matter of be strong and winning or weak and losing. In other words, they both believe in a system of justice involving imputations of wrong and are convinced that that justice is only a contest in the strong prevail over the weak, and not the suit of the just over that of the unjust. This is a society that pretends to operate by principles of justice that only thinly disguise efforts to win and dominate or succeed and get what one wants. This society is far indeed from being without government, as it devotes immense resources to the management of people. Forms of governance that lack any credible connection to forms of justice: the name for this is capitalism.