Power or Liberation (Part Three)

Part One
Part Two

Power or Liberation (Part Three)

"...Computerized clinic
For superior cynics
Who dance to a synthetic band

In their own image
Their world is fashioned ---
No wonder they don't understand..."

Neil Peart (Rush), "Natural Science," from Permanent Waves

A few days back I wrote The Temptation Towards Punitive Asceticism, wherein I argued that opposition to power contains within it the seeds of new forms of power, especially within a set of persons perhaps best described as revolutionary ascetics, people who combine a withdrawal from the bad behaviors of others ("the sins of the world") with a desire to prevent future harm with punishment.

Responding to that premise ASP (Blog of a Sane Person) and Ethan of 6th or 7th, each offered a timely, considered and well stated critique.

Sane Person wrote:

"...I don't think freedom can exist without repression. In order to ensure everyone has freedom, we must also repress the impulses of those (of us) who would do things that limit or impinge on other people's freedom. Our freedom is necessarily shaped by the community which we are a part of, it is shaped by the constraints that are placed upon us, which are meant to ensure freedom for all and not just for those who might be superior or more powerful in some respect. So I don't think freedom can exist without some form or some quantity of repression. The question then becomes what is repressed, how much freedom is allowed and what possible consequences can result in excessive freedom or in too much repression..."

She proceeded to outline the suppression of pro-Nazi organizations and sentiment, in her native Croatia, where the local adopters of fascism had set themselves upon a program of genocide and consolidation.

Ethan, following that, wrote:

"...Particularly in reference to the part of this discussion that ASP points out, I have to say that deep down I'm always kind of secretly ambivalent about "the individual" and individual liberty. It certainly sounds appealing, but I fear that focusing on it too heavily interferes with thinking about humanity--and the world, and the universe--as a totality.

I tend, or maybe the more accurate verb is "try," to subscribe to a David Bohmian view of all-as-one, and as a result I'm tempted sometimes to think that subsuming the self to the totality is the way to go. Of course, that way lies the potential for fascism..."

Having spent several days trying to work my thoughts around these replies, I realized that I'd already begun to fashion the outline of a previously intended essay, which now took shape in a form colored by those thoughtful responses.

Driving my youngest to the physician, seeking treatment for an eye infection, I had one of those supra-immediate flashes of insight, where a problem resolves itself into a simple grammatical expression. One eye on the road, a blind hand scrambling for a pen, and the scrap of paper earlier co-opted as a bookmark, I lucked upon a red light, furiously scribbling:

"Capitalists can plan for what they will do. Resisters plan for what they refuse, for what they will not allow, for what they want to prevent."

I have struggled of late to understand why so many resistance movements, at the hint of insurrection or success, devolve so surely into totalizing and repressive attempts at the creation of a social perfection. I think, following the insight above, that we must look to our epistemology, specifically the episteme of justice.

Which of course, entrenched in the ambivalence of thought, leads to any number of new questions.

How do we know how to identify justice? How do we know what it looks like, in the actions of others? How do we know that we enact it? How do we identify just consequences, and unjust ones? What of the ramifications of our choices which we cannot so neatly codify?

I don't agree with Sane Person, and I find myself resolutely uncomfortable with Ethan's "subsuming the self," admitting as he does that down that way seems the temptation to fascism.

So what, then?

When Sane Person argues for repression, she creates the conditions of a new power arrangement which, at some point, some one or many will themselves form in groups, against. Questioning her argument, I also had to question my own premises. I have, to this point, operated on the assumption of a basic unit, the person. Short of collective and shared consciousness, each person remains a "heterotropy," a unit of action and awareness which can, past a certain point of physiological development, remain fundamentally isolated from all others and still exist, still know itself alone in the difference it demonstrates by changing its environment, its own self in relation to that environment, its own memory.

Comparatively, Sane Person's premise seems to rest on "isotropy," that of a common moral, human identity, where an existential and authoritative standard can and does provide (even if unstated in logic or symbol) a manner by which people can judge conduct.

As I argued earlier, I reject the reality, or the accessibility, of such a standard:

"...Coming at this another way, to have "right and wrong" you also have to have a perfect standard by which to judge what events and people fall on one side, and what events and people fall on the other. Picture that standard as a membrane, a division which sorts the myriad events and choices of any persons, or set of persons, in any place, during any time, into one of two categories. For the standard to work, it has to fulfill an absolute, unchanging, irreversible, untouchable and perfect function. It cannot fall to persons to decide it. If people have a hand in deciding the standard of right and wrong, it no longer works as a standard.

But, for any person to know that a particular example of conduct falls into one of the two categories, that standard must also remain intelligible, accessible and communicable within the contingent events of human action. People must have the capacity to decide their choices according to that standard, communicate them and then follow through. They must retain the capacity to interpret it, and apply it to changing times, or it becomes first opaque, and then inapplicable.

A standard of right and wrong, to work as a standard, must embody in each and every person, at each and every point in human space and time, both rigid perfection (to identify right and wrong, while excluding personal bias) and fluid contingency (that people might choose their conduct, and conform to it).

An imperfect perfection. A black whiteness.

A chimaera..."

Rendering that as briefly as possible, I mean to suggest that we cannot know absolutely if an action conforms perfectly to arbitrary categories, such as right, wrong, just or unjust. We can intimate. We can guess, but we cannot do so with a defensible certainty, because the categories themselves we cannot treat as perfect.

I believe Ethan recognizes this, since he moves immediately from subsumation to doubts about the consequences of it. If we subsume ourselves, we trust that the totality to which we adhere cannot do wrong, cannot embody injustice, or we trust ourselves to it knowing that this new creation exceeds us, and can still do wrong to others.

Assuming that people can come together in absolutely just associations depends first, I believe, upon the assumption of an absolute standard which persons can create, discover and most importantly, reveal to any and all others without the intrusion of human error.

Further, it assumes that people can create error-free organizations of shared effort, in the first place, towards which they can devote themselves in the abolition of known existing harm and error.

Understanding this, I think, might provide a lens through which we can see the tendency of resistance and revolution to transform, in the process of formation and coming into some authority, into repression.

Marx understood (and without falling prey to the mysticism of Heraclitus, Hegel and Engels) that opposition shapes all parties involved within its agonic field of contest. When he conceived of his materialist dialectic (and we must separate this from the idiocy of Lenin, Trotsky and New Left economic-astrologers, who took Hegel's Hermetic mysticism and made something worse of it), Marx provided a deft analysis of how contradictions shape the parties bound by them. A class of people suppressed in their creative capacity and serving the interests of others develop a shared experience, because they share similar material constraints upon their actions. They develop those conditions, then, in opposition to and because of the people who rule over them.

When a capitalist does such and such, deriving the majority of his own authority from the exploitation of those who labor for him, or suffer such consequences which reduce their alternatives (even to the point of death), he does not need take into consideration the possibility of error, because he does not have to. His enjoyment of life, his power, provides its own justification. The capitalist (like the aristocrat, the high priest and the ritual king before him) can plan for what he does, because he does not have to worry his own field of operation.

Those who labor beneath him, on the contrary, do not and cannot come to conceive of their lives as independent of his power, unless they never become aware of the immediacy of that authority. Some people, we can see, never arrive at the point of resistance.

But, those who do resist do so because they at some point understand themselves as subjected, because their conditions themselves provide them with a discernible contradiction. They conceive of their condition in opposition, in contest, in agonic resistance to those who deprive them of the fullness of life.

In other words, their resistance takes its very shape from the crucible of experience, from their subservience. They conceive of their existences as a wrong, and as an opposition to that wrongness.

Shaped by the authority used against them, by the power faction which need not question itself because its own power provides justification, the oppressed instead begin with a rejection. Their first response, "No!" Without that refusal, even only in the mind - no resistance.

This rejection establishes the ones with power as wrongdoers, as people who commit acts which themselves result in the suffering of others.

Herein lies the problem, I believe. The moral component which allows a woman to reject the pornographer, the abusive spouse, the culture of patriarchy; the moral recognition of one's own suffering at the hands of another which compels a man to develop a practice of resistance, even revolution, becomes through its repetition a standard which he treats as absolute, as a permanent justification.

Instead of understanding normalcy and the conditions of everyday life as an uncertainty, the rebel seeks by her resistance the permanent resolution of a problem. The problem of her own condition. In rejecting a conformity to a platform of experience determined by others, some who cry, "No!" into the heat of their own internal silences fashion a new identity which depends not only on the resolution of the problem presented by living as another's instrument, but which sets itself a teleology, an expansion of personal suffering outward, encompassing the scope of everyone else's existence - a drive towards a goal where no one can ever again use another, torture another, dominate another.

A goal which, it seems, rests on a the acceptance of a perfect justice, a perfect balancing of accounts, an appropriation not only of misbegotten goods, but also of moral value. No longer simply identifying the feeling of "I" as a perspective one has alone, this sort of rebel divides others into competing categories, surrounding himself with impostor selves and real persons, symbols of rightness, and symbols of wrongness.

Instead of experiencing her selfhood as a temporary community of incidences, as a series of leaps from platform to platform, as a process of unfolding, as a "movable feast" of alterable continuity, the absolutist rebel fixes herself into the confines of a single personality which must prevent harm, which must punish.

In this, the absolutist becomes like his oppressor, not as a victim freed or a prisoner escaped, but as a hostile instrument, one which still belongs to its owner but has turned against it. As he commodifies his needs and desires within a hostile marketplace of emotions and identity, the absolutist gives up liberation in favor of judgment.

In the same way that a consumer reduces her own awareness, boiling down identity to an artificially stabilized sense of self bound by the acquisition of one's own needs in the form of commodities, the absolutist shaves away experiences which no longer conforms to his needs, which now mimic commodities in the form of semi-permanent consumable possessions of justice, revenge and punishment - ones which he must replace, upon consuming them.

A person must fix the wanting self, accepting identity as a trap, or as a high banked river which ceases to flow if it loses its edges. This artificial fixity (whether encultured in consumers, propagandized as doctrine and education, or developed as a method of rejecting one's own condition) does not abolish the needs or wants around which it organizes.

It cannot abolish those needs - as the satisfaction of revenge, or the purchase of diapers - because it no longer has any shape, function or form without them. It depends upon a permanent series of needs.

Take a person, now, who has transformed her rejection of injustice into a search for permanent resolution. Not satisfied with escaping the direct experience of another's oppression, or with recreating new and separate conditions of greater liberty, responsibility and mutuality, this rebel develops a standard of judgment that depends upon the treatment of justice as the satisfaction of relatively enduring needs. Justice as the acquisition of a commodity, often in the form of revenge and punishment.

Such a person must consume the punishment of others, or he cannot retain his fixed experience of self in any coherence. This person must see the world as a stage of adversaries, and enemies, who he can judge against a standard of truth and error which rarely - if ever - brooks opposition, because it fixes his own identity and satisfies the understandable urge to avoid conditions he can no longer accept.

So long as she can judge, and therefore punish, her identity feels complete. She feels satiated. What began as a rejection of oppression becomes its satisfaction, as she represses others. Since she conceives as justice as a consumer understands commodities, as a means to complete needs, she can no longer trust or accept it.

And he finds himself a power, against whom others seek liberation...