Liberal politics and the theatrical aesthetics of the ancien régime

When white liberals feel guilt about their relative privilege, it is thought that this makes them more useful to the political causes they believe in, but actually it makes them less so.

The truth of this is in fact a truism, that hardly needs to be demonstrated. Simply, one can choose to make use of the fact that some people have relative privilege either (a) by making their manner of existence a kind of original sin (from which they cannot be absolved), or (b) by treating privileges as potentialities that consist of talents and skills, and asking how they can be made use of in a way that benefits the causes one believes in.

The contrary view does not just lead to a politics based on the not implausible idea that a part of justice is redistribution. It also renders the inequality in the distribution of certain goods and potentialities an essentially symbolic one. It has real effects, and they are those of redistribution achieved on moral grounds, and in a way that mobilizes and leverages our society's democratic tendencies so as mainly to sustain constant moralizing attacks on individual persons.

It is commonly thought that politics is a matter of competition between parties normally seeking to maximize their own power, or that it involves unequal possession of power such that some 'have' and wield it as, essentially, a weapon, against those who, in being power's 'have-nots', are its passive objects, and thus 'oppressed'.

It is interesting to look at the history of literary aesthetics in this regard. The theater play was well-suited to feudal or patriarchal ideas of forms of domination that can be contested, as we find in some of the oldest plays, those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The novel surely was the epic of bourgeois liberty and interiority, but it also enabled a shift in focus away from character towards ways of seeing, feeling, speaking, and thinking, that can be problematized without depending either on an oppositional politics, or a reflective interiority. The novel does not need a central acting and perceiving subject, and its successor genre, the cinema, occupies the position of a more clearly shared subjectivity.

The filmmaker Raul Ruiz, in his Poetics of Cinema, criticizes what he calls 'central conflict theory'. This is a feature of the dominant Hollywood aesthetics. The concept is directly political. The philosopher Jacques Rancière argues that after the French Revolution, the aesthetic 'regime' shifted from a representational one suited to the theater of modern classicism (Racine, Shakespeare) to one of problematizing (and 'distributing') forms of the sensible. The novel and cinema do that, as theater generally does not; mise-en-scène in theater is far more minimal and essentially secondary, and experience takes place in a space and time that are continuous, located in a single 'world', which the audience and performers are equally part of.

Our liberals are always criticizing the last vestiges of the aristocracy that in this country we never even had. This is why people suppose that the 'badness' of the actual social world must amount or be due to the 'oppression' by those who 'have' of those who 'have not'. This set of metaphors produces gratuitous conflict, not always in the places where it would be most useful. Crime and violence are more common among the oppressed, and this problem is addressed by state violence in the form of police, and the 'soft' policing of doctors, social workers, teachers, and others. We are addicted to conflict. That is, we are addicted to thinking of politics as good and evil (liberty or justice vs. tyranny), when in fact, it is your friends, and yourself, you should want to criticize; it is the things we like and enjoy or desire that we should want to criticize, more perhaps than the things that are already presented to us as to be liked or hated. The form of criticism here advocated also has the advantage that it requires, as war and policing do not, thinking. Thinking of a kind that business strategy, and policing and war, do not involve.