LENIN'S TOMB: March 2015

Thursday, March 26, 2015

The deadlock of identity essentialism posted by Richard Seymour

I have argued before that there's no way to bypass identity. Identities aren't necessarily politicised, and even where they are they exceed the political. But it's almost impossible to conceive of any realistic scenario in which a militant social movement arises where identities aren't involved in a complex way.

However, there is a problem with an Americanised kind of identity politics which, in my opinion, essentialises identity. And it seems as if the student movement is going to face this dilemma in its future organising. To wit, the NUS Women's Conference met yesterday and a number of things that happened, as reported in the press, are a bit alarming and worth thinking through.

Before I get to alarm bells, however, I want to start with something that is more possibly symptomatic than a significant problem in itself. That is:

"Some delegates are requesting that we move to jazz hands rather than clapping as it's triggering anxiety. Please be mindful!'"

If the term 'triggering' was being used appropriately here, it would mean that a series of delegates with PTSD triggers specifically related to clapping reported it to the organisers, who acted correctly - indeed, could perhaps have been more forceful. In fact, the students' explanation to the BBC made it clear that this was just a well-meaning attempt to create a more convivial environment for students who were more nervous about speaking, and who might feel put off by interruptions. And indeed, it is worth acknowledging the omnipresence of anxiety as a factor in public meetings. We can all be made anxious by others around us - their exuberance, their laughter, their voices, can be 'too much', particularly for those who are already vulnerable in one way or another. Yet, if I were a nervous young student, as I once was, I am not convinced that the practice of 'jazz hands' would resolve this problem. The 'up twinkle' and 'down twinkle' of approval and disapproval would be just as off-putting, maybe even more pressurising - particularly if I wanted to say something which I knew would be controversial and thus possibly incur lots of passive-aggressive 'down twinkling'. The reason it comes up at all, moreover, is because it relates to a specific tradition of democratic collectivism.

'Jazz hands' is the colloquial term for hand signals that originated in American Sign Language and were then popularised by the Occupy movement. The point of the hand signals, particularly up and down 'twinkling' (pray god, call it something else), is to help the meeting get a sense of whether it is reaching consensus: because consensus is the goal. Now, of course, that cannot be the goal in most political meetings, least of all the meetings of the NUS! Division and contention is the rule in such meetings, and a good thing too: not something to be avoided or suppressed. This conjunction of a misapplied medicalised jargon with a political technique for disciplining and controlling antagonism is an Americanism that is, more by osmosis than design, and often for the best reasons, working its way into the UK political landscape. Insofar as it is part of a medicalised discourse, it mobilises the illusion that one can create a risk-free, safe bubble in which the threat of anxiety can somehow be removed. Insofar as it is a deliberative procedure, it treats contention as a threat. The foundations of this being so threadbare, it is powerless as a norm to resist a right-wing backlash - or worse, an appropriation, as when the student right cynically invokes 'safe space' ideas to protect itself from criticism. So, whatever well-meaning measures are undertaken to make gatherings as inclusive as possible, we should just be careful of what we may be letting in through the back door.

To more substantial matters, the conference reached two major decisions which are on the face of it quite alarming. The first is to work to stop white gay men from appropriating black female culture. And the second is to stop cis men from 'cross-dressing' as a form of 'fancy dress'.

The first decision was based on the claim that white gay men 'appropriate' black female culture, often claiming to be a 'strong black woman' or have an 'inner black woman', or emulating mannerisms and speech patterns particular to groups of black people. The motion takes as its cue a piece in Time magazine by Sierra Mannie, entitled 'Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture'. It quotes the article: "you are not a black woman, and you do not get to claim either blackness or womanhood. It is not yours. It is not for you."

A note about this article. I think it's problematic in various ways, but it should be noted that it was originally written as a polemic for a school newspaper. And I have absolutely zero doubt that it was prompted by truly infuriating experiences of some people 'performing blackness' in a way that is totally racist. However, Time's decision to publish it with that title, which appears to implicate 'white gays' in toto, has to be analysed distinctly. It appears to be an exercise in clickbait, with the intended result of a flaming people and producing a series of back and forth articles along the lines of 'Dear black people, leave gays alone', 'Dear white gays, no you', and so on. It may appear from the slight hyperbole that I think this is funny: I actually find it depressing. It means that the debate has already been formed by a capitalist media strategy to mobilise a divisive, oppression Olympics politics that has nothing to do with advancing the interests of the oppressed, for the sake of eyeball attention. Nevertheless, there was plainly a sufficient basis for this motion in the lived experience of some delegates that they agreed that white gay men were using white male privilege to effect a raid on black female culture, and should stop. Conference agreed that NUS would work to stop this appropriation.

The second decision was to "issue a statement condemning the use of 'cross-dressing' as a mode of fancy dress", and to "encourage unions to ban clubs and societies from holding events which permit or encourage (cisgender) members to use cross-dressing as a mode of fancy dress". Here, I'm less aware of the context, but from various articles I gather that what is being referred to is cases where aggressive rugby club types have 'cross-dressed' in ways that are clearly about mocking and degrading women.

In each case, the discussions seem to have been prompted by something that is genuinely troublesome. And this isn't surprising. The experiences of class, race, gender, sexuality are complex and unstable and there will always be dilemmas about when something tips over from being potentially annoying into being outright racist or homophobic or misogynistic. For example, many of the responses to this debate on Twitter referred delegates to the documentary Paris is Burning, making the point that many of the tropes that are deemed offensive acts of racial appropriation originate from an underground drag multiculture. That, of itself, doesn't settle the vexed question of when these tropes end up being racist. Likewise, Helen Lewis's article for the New Statesman is a pretty good demonstration of just how arbitrary the notion of 'cross-dressing' is, and how gender is something that is performed, but that in itself still leaves us trying to work out where a form of 'cross-dressing' goes from being humdrum or a bit of fun, to being a kind of misogyny.

The thing that bothers me about the decisions of the NUS, however, is that in both cases there is an attempt to resolve these complexities through a kind of identity absolutism. The premise appears to be that there is an authentic identification rooted in a real, collective lived experience which is being purloined inauthentically by groups who, lacking that experience, do not have a legitimate claim to that identity. This actually goes against the grain of the current, growing common sense that race and gender are social constructs (whatever social construction is taken to mean) rather than being fixed essences; that balkanised cultures are impossible to sustain, and that hybridisation and fusion are the norm; that identities are not absolute, and are always exceeded by forms of difference - something that those fighting Islamophobia have been compelled to emphasise over and over. And I would say that this is the better side of the emergent common sense, the side that we should fight to keep.

More importantly, perhaps, I would observe that when people 'perform blackness' or 'perform womanhood' in a way that is racist or sexist, I think what they are doing is taking mannerisms, often exaggerated, caricatured and simplified into crude stereotypes, that might be particular to some black people, or some women, and make these characteristics stand in for blackness and womanhood. In short, they are performing a kind of essentialisation. This makes it all the more important not to concede this ground.

Finally, if the attempt is to create norms of anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic civility that are fought for on campuses, my concern is that going about it in this way will leave such norms unable to withstand a right-wing assault. I am not so much concerned about the far right provocations, which would involve racists mounting spurious claims that 'white culture' was being 'appropriated' in order to shit-stir, although that is something to look out for. Nor do I think there is much chance that the David Starkey line that 'the whites are becoming black' is going to get a foothold on campuses, although again one can never be too complacent. It is more that this style of politics can too easily be used to set off a carnival of recrimination and divisions: given that most identities are hybrids, there is potentially no end of accusations of 'appropriation'. The left's matchless capacity for fratricide would potentially be multiplied many times.

As is so often the case, I am pointing out problems, but I have no solutions.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Hope is precious: it must be rationed. posted by Richard Seymour

Hope is precious: it must be rationed...

Comrades. Some of you will have got wind of a project initiated by China Miéville (art editor), Rosie Warren (editor-in-chief), Jamie Allinson, Magpie Corvid, Charlotte Bence, myself (contributing editors), and others to launch a new magazine, called Salvage. We are finally ready to go, after much painstaking labour.

As the title and the appeal video suggests, we are out to 'salvage' what can be recovered from our post-left desert and help the patient work of reconstituting a habitable and, at long last, viable left.

We do so with the help of Benjamin Kunkel, Morgane Merteuill, Jordana Rosenberg, Alberto Toscano, Trish Kahle, Neil Davidson, Mark Bould, Joana Ramiro, Robert Knox, Laura Oldfield Ford, Pablo Mukherjee, Mary Robertson, Daniel Hartley, Gareth Brown, Nicholas Beuret, Kunle Weizman, Season Butler, Louis Bayman, Caitlin Doherty, Karen Mirza, Andrea Gibbons, Jen Izaakson, "and many more" to begin with.

We need more help. This cannot be done without money. And there is no point in doing it if it is just to become another forgettable left roundtable with formulaic concerns and answers, with a dull as dishwater aesthetic, and with a lifelessly 'worthy' approach to leftism. We need ten grand to start, and we're offering many fabulous trinkets and gifts in return for your donations.

Salvage for victory! Make this happen.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

On the guilt of the abused. posted by Richard Seymour

“The sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death”. - Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.

“From an analytic point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire”. - Lacan, Seminars, Book VII.

[TW for child abuse].

The reader will be asked to indulge me a little, give me the benefit of the doubt, and take my word for it that even I wasn’t masturbating violently at the age of three.

I had been admitted to hospital, for at least the second time, in 1981. I was bruised and underfed, with lacerations to my penis that required five stitches. I had been in the care of my birth mother and her partner at the time. Family lore recounts that, in order to explain the lacerations, it was claimed that I had pulled the protuberance until it tore. The doctors did not accept this explanation: the lacerations, they said, were such that could only have been caused by a razor sharp implement.

As a result, I was taken into the care of Lancaster County Council, before being transferred to the care of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. (Yes, the Right Honourable Humphrey Atkins had the immense privilege.) I was finally transferred to the care of my father and stepmother in 1984, who parented under the hapless eye of Social Services. And, at their request, Social Services temporarily withdrew their supervision in 1987, probably some time after I had been taken to ‘meet’ my birth mother in a forgettable encounter at a local social services field office.

How much can I trust in the integrity of this narrative? The fragments which I consider ‘memories’ from this period are phantasmagorical. For example, I seem to have a trace ‘memory’ of being held under water in the bath tub, but whether this recollection materialised after hearing of an actual event, or perhaps after a dream, I do not know. Nor, in this memory, is there any sense of distress or danger. How much of my memory necessarily segues into fantasy? I have no memory of having my penis attacked, or of having been thrown down the stairs, and yet at various points I have been informed by trusted sources that these things happened.

Memory is treacherous and, I would say, self-serving - or, less tendentiously, autopoietic. Through it, we construct meanings about ourselves that tell us who we are, and why we do what we do. Meanings which are, as far as possible given the source material, satisfactory in relation to our ego-ideal, what we like to think about ourselves. And then the ambiguity and uncertainty that is constitutive of memory in the first instance is obscured. The relationship of ‘facts’ to truth is never so vexed as when one attempts a rigorous inventory of the infinity of traces which experience leaves on the psyche.

The remainder of what I ‘know’ consists of my memories of second or third hand symbolisations of the experience several years later. There is also a documentary trace, a bureaucratic imprint, evidence accumulated over the years by the social services in Northern Ireland - medical reports, field notes, interviews, day books. This seems to promise something more objective - but then, one might ask, what are documents but yet more second or third hand symbolisations? What do they offer except an incomplete portion of a fragmentary record of guilt and shame and rationalisation and mistranslation and mistranscription and inaccuracy and official ideology?

These sources do not necessarily corroborate one another. The documents do not in every instance affirm what I already ‘knew’. And there are significant gaps in the story told by family and official sources, as there always are. It is in these gaps that fantasy takes its perilous hold. For all I know, none of this could have happened.

It is important for the purposes of this narrative that no motive, much less explanation, for the abuse has ever been offered, as far as I know. A man unloads his misery onto an infant, and you want to know why. At the most abstract level, one could invoke the ‘cinderella effect’ of which evolutionary psychologists speak, wherein jealous step parents are purportedly more likely to abuse. But while the existence of such a statistical effect seems plausible, the explanations offered by this school do not.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it is all fiction. Not because it is, but because I find it useful to start with this position and see what truths emerge. Regardless of what happened, the abuse acquired a symbolic efficacy. It became a founding truth of my life, for others and therefore also for me. Insofar as it exists today, it exists in language, in its symbolisation.

In analysis, over thirty years after the events recorded above, something stirred in my unconscious, like a rat in a cellar. A parapraxis led me to this: I was unconsciously guilty about the abuse. I reeled.

You may assume that I would have known perfectly well the truism that guilt is often associated with abuse. I did not, and we could allow for the possibility that this ‘not knowing’ was itself an artefact of repression. At any rate, the thought produced a surfeit of associations that suddenly couldn’t escape my lips fast enough. How long had I felt hunted, as if I was going to be ‘found out’? How many times had I been told as a child that I just ‘naturally look guilty’ even if I had done ‘nothing wrong’? How many recurring dreams in which the ‘terrible thing’ that I had done was at least concretised - say, as a murder - so that I could be hunted for a reason? The relative truth of these babblings from the couch is not very important: the mere fact of such a plentitude of significations indicates that a motherlode had been struck.

In these circumstances we are tempted to discount guilt, to shoo it away, or smother it in lachrymosity in the manner of Good Will Hunting, rather than asking the question: under what conditions could such guilt be intelligible?

When one reads of how ‘survivors’ - a term with which I, respectfully, will not have anything to do - have experienced guilt, quite often there is a specific incident or supposed failure in mind. ‘If only I hadn’t worn that nightie.’ ‘If only I hadn’t made a mess in the kitchen.’ ‘If only I had done my homework.’ Yet I am talking about something that supposedly happened to me when I was three years of age. The guilt has no anchor in a memorable incident, and it relates to a time when I could not conceivably hold myself responsible for anything that happened to me. That, to me, suggests that guilt has nothing to do with responsibility.

In the popular explanations for ‘survivor’s guilt’ which appear on websites, there is an unfortunate tendency to tangle up guilt, shame and responsibility, which must precisely be distinguished. We are told such things as: ‘people feel guilty about their abuse because they don’t want to accept the frightening conclusion that sometimes they are not in control of what happens to them’. What if the truth is the precise opposite? That we feel guilty because we do not think we have any say at all in what happens to us?

With guilt, there is an anxiety-producing expectation of punishment. Someone else is in charge of one’s life, one lives according to someone else’s rules, someone else’s desire, and that someone else is always on the brink of visiting a terrible punishment.

To deal with guilt, one can try to prove one’s innocence - collate all the evidence in the hope that one day you will take it all the way to the highest court of appeal, whatever that might be, and get the verdict reversed. We should make some space for the possibility that this is what I’m doing here. One can preemptively ‘punish’ oneself, constantly impede one’s own desires, self-sabotage, or injure oneself. One can do things that are certain to get one ‘caught’. “Paradoxical as it may sound,” Freud writes, “I must maintain that the sense of guilt was present before the misdeed, that it did not arise from it, but conversely—the misdeed arose from the sense of guilt.” Or one can ‘confess’ to things in the hope that by attaching the guilt to something, and submitting to punishment or expiation, the guilt will go away. In this sense, attaching guilt to a specific ‘offence’ like wearing the wrong nightie is a way of alleviating the anxiety caused by guilt, at least temporarily. If I know what I’m guilty of, I don’t have to keep expecting punishment.

This is why people are mistaken to think they can avoid guilt by dodging responsibility. When I was an adolescent, a man responsible for my care told me, as if continuing a conversation: “You know, I would never take wee boys to bed unless they asked me to.” The details and context of this almost charmingly hesitant ‘offer’ need not detain us here: suffice it to say, the fellow was disappointed. But I think this guilty little desire of his had bedevilled him for a while, and that in the manner of phrasing his ‘offer’, he was clearly trying to push the responsibility for it onto me. He could not take responsibility for his desire, not only because I was underage and in his care, but also because he was married, and because the desire was obviously homosexual and this was a conservative backwater of Northern Ireland. And yet, even if I could have taken responsibility for him, this would still only have exacerbated his guilt.

But what happens when guilt is repressed? Freud considers that Shakespeare’s version of Richard III is a neurotic. Deformed, unfinished, sent before his time into this breathing world, scarce half made-up. Unloved by his mother, with an absent father, rudely stamp’d and wanting love’s majesty. Like all neurotics, he has a lot to be resentful about. Life has cheated him, and he wants reparation - and, as he constantly tells us, he means to get it by any means necessary. This is what incites the complicity of the audience in his plight: we have all been born prematurely, all cheated by life, and wish we had Richard’s lack of scruple. But while he carries out his entertaining plots without apparent guilt, this can only be because he has repressed guilt. What is repressed according to psychoanalysis, however, is not affect but thoughts - in this case, self-critical thoughts. In Act 5, Scene 3, they finally bubble to the surface:

‘My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,

And every tongue brings in a several tale,

And every tale condemns me for a villain.

Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;

Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree;

All several sins, all used in each degree,

Throng to the bar, crying all, “Guilty! guilty!”

I shall despair.’

But if, as Freud has already argued, guilt was present before the misdeed, that indeed the misdeed arose from the guilt, of what is Richard III guilty? Of being deformed. Of being rudely stamp’d. Of all the things that he resents the world for. And this has no end. As long as you live, as long as you have a libido, you can fuel this resentment indefinitely. It is inexhaustible: nothing can satisfy it. By precisely the same token, nothing can satisfy the guilt.

According to Freud and Klein, guilt is a coinage of aggression and, at the most fundamental level, of aggressivity. What does that mean? Aggressivity is not just what we understand as aggression - you know, we must eat and, when the pantry is empty, we may as well tuck into our fellow beings. It is aggression toward the self. And when aggression is repressed, it returns as guilt. And what is that, but another, metastasising, shapeshifting attack on the self?

Freud and Klein use the language of ‘instincts’, and the struggle of vital life forces - death instinct versus Eros - to explain this phenomenon. (I am reminded that Freud's actual term was 'Trieb' meaning 'drive'.) But such metaphors, to be workable, obviously need to be detached from the biologism of the imagery. Lacan considered aggressivity to entail a splitting of the subject against the ego. The ego is formed through a series of imaginary identifications, beginning with the ‘mirror stage’ in which the child recognises its image and forms a narcissistic attachment to it. What is most riveting about the image is its cohesion and unity - a stark contrast to the fragmentary experience of pissing, shitting, throwing up, dribbling, crying, uncoordinated movements, giggling, hungering, eating, thirsting and drinking, which is the lot of any human infant. But the image the child falls for is too perfect. To live up to it is impossible. The subject hates it in the same moment as she develops a narcissistic identification with it, and wants to attack it. As we grow up, we form successive and more complex identifications with parental figures, schoolteachers, media personalities, and so on.

In the language of ‘instincts’, one would assume that the ego, by resisting the disintegration of the subject, resists the death drive. What if the truth is the reverse? What if the ego is on the side of death? That is, on the side of the mortification of the subject’s desire. I said that guilt implies that ‘someone else’ is in charge. In a sense, ‘someone else’ is in charge. The ego is modelled on what ‘someone else’ wants. You are born, and even before you can articulate the question, you want to know: why am I here? What did mum and dad want from me? And what attitude shall I take to their desire? The ego is always concerned with what others think, what is normal, what parents will approve of (or what will really wind them up), and so on. And the more energy is spent trying to live up to the often absurd standards of the ego, the stronger the guilt becomes.

Fundamentally, if one is guilty of anything, Lacan said, it is of ceding ground relative to one’s desire. At first, this idea was extremely opaque to me. But the more I spoke, the more I read, the more I asked ‘what am I really guilty of?’, the more acuminous this dictum became. For example, you can imagine my disappointment when I happened upon social worker reports describing me as “submissive”, and as doing what I’m told without thinking about it. In the same fashion, picture how dispirited I was to alight upon observations about my presenting “no disciplinary issues” to the staff of the children’s home in which I was placed at the age of fourteen. Of course, no one is ever “submissive” all the time, and such reports are not the whole truth. Yet, I can’t shake the suspicion that they tell a truth. That, as a boy I was so terrified of physical punishment that I lied about everything, including about what I really wanted. That, I put conformity with what I imagined my parents and others expected of me, ahead of my own wishes. That, I found a way to take satisfaction in not speaking, in not stating my desire, in not articulating. That, I don’t know whether and when I stopped doing this. That, I don’t know whether or when I really worked out what I want. That, the guilt is metastasising within me still.

Yet, guilt is a tremendous, cohesive agent. It holds you together when there seems to be no other logic to your actions. It binds couples, when they no longer have any other raison d’etre. It keeps families together, when they have nothing else in common. It makes the education system ‘work’, inasmuch as it secures a sullen, joyless compliance from students and teachers alike. It even makes work ‘work’, as you’ll know every time you phone in sick. The whole financial system depends on guilt. Zizek argued, for once entirely accurately and to the point, that part of Syriza’s demarche was to break with the guilt of indebted subaltern countries, and precisely to treat the debt as the politicised imposition that it is. And at a more molecular level, I think it would be quite difficult to understand the hold that the bankers have over us if we didn’t understand the guilt we have about our debts.

We need victims, survivors, subalterns, and so on, to be guilty. We have so much invested in it, individually, institutionally and socially. So many satisfactions. It is easy enough for me to ask whether we can live without it. The more politically salient question is whether we actually want to, a question I think it would be mistaken to try to answer too soon.

You will want to know why speak about this, or why speak now? For whom, and what? This is another of those questions to which I ‘don’t know’ the answer.

I can only say that I think there is a poetics of abuse that is associated with the ‘Tragic Lives’ genre which I find lamentable and politically reactionary, and which I wish to undercut. This is the style of self-display that wallows in misery and catharsis, and has little to do with any kind of solution.

That, there is a politics of abuse which too often shades into moral panic, and which leads us away from dealing with genuinely traumatic truths and into the blind alley of sacralising victimhood on the one hand, and arming lynch mobs with the self-righteousness to burn down the houses of ‘paedophiles’ on the other.

That, above all, the silence itself is illusory, and that I must embark on the process initiated here, of speaking. For what is not spoken still speaks.

And that fact is, in a very palpable way, killing me.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Solidarity is not co-optation posted by Richard Seymour

My excellent comrade Sofia Arias responds to a pernicious debate on the #MuslimLivesMatter issue:

Unfortunately, not everyone has embraced the emergence of #MuslimLivesMatter. Several Muslim anti-racist activists responded on social media by urging people not to use the hashtag, and to use #JusticeForMuslims instead. At least two articles summarized the logic of this argument--one at MuslimGirl.net by a contributor called Sabah, titled "Stop Using #MuslimLivesMatter," and another on the website of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative by Anas White, called "A Black Muslim Response To #MuslimLivesMatter."...