Immediacy, violence, political speech, and subjectivity: The American anomaly

In America, people generally believe that criticism is personal attack - or assault. Disagreement is either inconsequential, in which case it only indicates the position of the other as outside whatever you are involved with and so must affirm, or, if it is recognized as a true challenge, to something of consequence, which can only be a power relationship that he maintains and wants to defend, to the addressee, then it is coded as "violence." "Violence" in America means: consequential disagreement. Of course, real violence is a possibility in such cases, and sometimes happens; most often, if the disagreement occurs in an institutional context, the violence that will be activated is that of defenders of positions of power within it, against the misfitting speaker.

Much of our identity politics -- race, gender, sexuality -- are mapped onto this, in ways that benefit those with power in the institutions, and ultimately capital. Everyone understands that these things are recognizable markers of actual or potential social oppression.

Therefore, if you appear apt to disobey someone's orders, and they are an enforcer or manager of some kind, or have professional authority, and are black or female, or perhaps of some other minoritarian identity, they have been prepared by social discourses and with the full concurrence of their company bosses (why shouldn't they concur in this, since it suits their interests) to call you racist, sexist, etc. It's a cheap shot, and it's actually a lie -- but most people will believe it.

The broader phenomena is to some extent unique in America; at least it is more extreme and more common here. The function of parrhesia - the political character of candid speech - is rare in America, and very dangerous.

A fascist-leaning politics will readily convert the fact, experience, or recognition of being oppressed into a reaction, whose purpose is to assert power by reasserting domination coded as repudiation of it.

Unfortunately for all those who find seductive or take for granted the idea that the more oppressed are less likely to wield oppression, the truth is nearer the opposite of this. And this is not of course grounds for simply hating those who wield repressive, punitive power, even with the mobilization of sadistic affects. There is certainly no direct correlation between the ethical and political valence of what people do and the extent to which they are oppressed or low on the totem pole of status. The truth is closer to the opposite: often people higher up, with more education, seem nicer and more tolerant. They usually are separated from the effects of their own decisions and from the more barbaric practices of the institutions of which they are part. The judge or the prosecutor doesn't spend a lot of time in the prisons to which he sends people; the sentence the judge pronounces expresses a relationship between persons and the ideas articulated, but in that expression the material weight of the consequences can be theorized or stated but is not felt, it is not experienced. The same is true of psychiatrists and the hospital wards to which they often consign people: they spend very little time there. The people on the front line that workers, students, poor people who are clients at welfare offices, patients, prisoners, etc. encounter are the ones who will be called upon to exercise physically the coercive force or violence. That force and violence exist essentially only as an idea in the largely linguistic practices of the professionals. That helps to keep their middle-class worlds easygoing, nice, and polite enough that the people who live and work in them can go on as they do and go home and sleep at night. The class divisions in society are manifest partly as degrees of acquaintance with and reliance on brutality, at bottom, versus civility, at the top. It would be a mistaken concession to this very system of distribution of values and affects to moralize the behaviors involved and the people engaging in them or engaged by them, the ones affected. Such a moralism would only express a material fact, and is purely reactive, which makes it not inventive. And this is a sociological reason (there are logical and ethical ones as well) why politics must be distinguished from morality given the way in which its apparent relevance (its appearance and its relevance) is distributed. There is an economy of morality in a class society.

This also is evidence, among others, that the class divisions of our society do not yield or indicate a dualistic politics of class war. There is a class war, organized by capitalism and the capitalist class, against the class of people who are labor power. Labor power constitutes a class not just workers as such (working) but also consumers and debtors, as well as the unemployed, and more or less everyone in the roles of the capitalist economy other than that of profiting. It also does not matter for this that some people participate in both, as with worker stock plans, or union representative sitting on corporate boards, or simply complying with management in the no-strike pledges that now make most labor unions company unions, except for their ability to defy the labor contract and go on strike. There is a division between capital and the activity of those who produce it. But this does not guarantee or constitute the existence of a political subjectivity that can be valorized in some kind of moral terms. Which old-fashioned union politics tends to do.

The state may not seem care too much about what you do as you “mind your own business,” though they watch us all in order to be able to arrest (stop), interrupt, or separate persons who can be held responsible from activities that threaten the order they rule over. That order is capitalism and its production of value and profit, and its subjections and control of people. What you cannot do is disobey.

If you do, the reaction is immediate, and violent, on the part of the state and whoever is assigned to exercise its functions. They know that, and don't really think about it; there is no need to. Their behavior is like that of a part of a machine, much as is the soldier's. If they are security guards or the like (such as hospital nurses, who are effectively also that), they very likely are former soldiers. They have been trained. Little thinking is involved. They could refuse their role, but that would probably only begin to seem possible if there were some kind of mass revolutionary movement.

In a society such as ours, where so many professionals and managers are largely engaged in the social control of other people, a measure of decency and the solidarity we call humanity is the extent of one’s willingness, at the risk of cognitive dissonance or even displeasing superiors or beyond found to have broken rules, by resisting doing their job as expected of them. The principle associated with the doctor’s Hippocratic Oath, to “first, do no harm,” is one that everyone tasked with policing the behavior of or giving orders to others beneath them, or to a subjected clientele, should always have in mind. This is a radical orientation in a society so much given to policing people, in so many ways (including how many people treat their children, and the extent of fears that they will succumb to some accident or risk, in a “risk society.” For ours is a society where vast numbers of employees are tasked at least in some part with the management or social control of other people in the populace of those who are also workers or labor and capital-generating power (consumers, renters, and debtors). . Most censorship is self-censorship, most policing self-policing, as people follow their common good sense about what feels comfortable to do and not do.

People are encouraged to identify with the role they are paid to work as. That is why if you hesitate noticeably, even for an instant, with a security guard giving you an order, or implying one, you may get almost instant violence in response. This is done as an unthinking reaction, but the thought that legitimates it is consistent with the person’s experience: they are trained and conditioned to believe that refusal to obey the orders they are giving on behalf of the organization, and whatever interests is serves (this scarcely matters in the instance) is opposition to them, a threat. That’s also one reason why cops so readily kill people. They are trained in the notion that the people they go out prepared to dominate with overwhelming capacity or use of violent force, are actually a threat to them personally.

One reason there is no such movement is that opposition has been largely in terms of race, and in a different way, gender (#MeToo was not a movement against the system that empowers as managers men whose jobs may lend themselves to the violence of sexual predators, it was only a movement against those men who engage in such violence -- attacked morally, just as priests who abuse children have been).

The reactions should be interrupted. People should stop and question what they believe, what they are doing or apt to do. That is part of the utility of art that asks us to think, as good art does, instead of just appealing to existing affects and their organization by narrative and other rhetorical systems so that they appeal to a sense of the obvious, to the common sense of what we already know, which is ideology.

One thing that is unfortunate is that more attention has not been given to the role of feminism in creating forms of subjectivity less reliant on power and more at ease with vulnerability, with the ambiguous interactions and subtleties of negotiation they can involve, as discussed in Katherine Angel’s recent book, Tomorrow the Sex Will Be Good Again. And similarly, in racial integration through cultural interactions rather than affirmations of a seemingly inevitable separatism, which can seem like people defending themselves from within trenches.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that our society's system of governance, including the hegemonic ideologies, is organized to suppress a truly left wing revolt (against capitalism) that does not even exist, exactly. Its potential is apparently greatly feared. That is an interesting fact. It may even be a hopeful one.

The United States has always been remarkable politically for its barbarism. This is manifest partly as an immediacy that short circuits any possible discussion. Whenever real power is challenged, then there is not impassioned discussion, just an immediate reaction on the part of whoever is able or authorized to implement repression. This is typically immediate. Nothing needs to be said, or even thought, at least not beforehand. If anything is said, it will be legitimating, but taken as obvious.

It is partly for this reason that some thinkers in considering race and other things have argued that America is essentially fascist. It is selectively fascist, in ways that are visible from some points of view and more or less not at all from others. To most of the middle class, this could only be revealed in exposés that are scandalizing. It is curious that we have a police state apparatus that is more totalizing than any in history -- though not in its violence, perhaps its most redeeming factor -- more than the East German STASI or anything else. The difference is that in those societies it was so obvious that everyone knew it. And that is one reason those societies failed and were overthrown, with external pressures and encouragements, but largely by their own citizens. .