an hypothesis: don’t do it

28Oct10

“Some people believe that the worst excesses of institutional and structural discrimination in Scotland have either been removed, or at the least are gradually being eroded.

For example, the law now prohibits discrimination on the basis of age, disability, gender, race, religion and sexual- orientation (although not, it should be noted, class or poverty).”

-NHS, 2010. ‘Bridging the gap’

Well, he’s [someone ranting about hearing voices on the street] going to be sectioned fairly soon. Whereas if someone stands on the street saying it’s all the fault of the Muslims or the Jews or whatever, he probably won’t be. I mean, some new bit of legislation might lead him to the nearest magistrates court. But in general, one can hold extremely deranged ideas – someone like Le Pen, I think, does – without the men in white coats arriving on the scene.

-JG Ballard

I wonder what the function of the law actually is here. If it is acknowledged, and it is, that despite the presence of the laws prohibiting reactionary, discriminatory beliefs these beliefs persist, even increase, then what does this say about the law? As with Foucault, we can easily say that the law does not solely operate according to the logic of repression. Yet, it is not so easy to say that the specificity of the agency of the law- unlike that of the broader term ‘power’- is productive. Racism is not repressed by the law and nor is it produced by the law. At least, not obviously. Maybe it is simply that the law operates as a valve system. Openly acknowledging the inegality of corrosive political opinion they nonetheless do nothing to prevent them. The two find their level of function in entirely different domains.

Interestingly, from the perspective of pathologisation- and irregardless of whether pathologisation is correct or incorrect- we should note that other illegal practices fall into the psychiatric gamut whereas these ones do not. The drunk becomes the alcoholic. The alienated youth becomes the avatar of anti-social behaviour. Both are open to psychiatric intervention that ultimately seeks to ‘cure’ them back into normalcy. The racist is not. There is no compulsory cognitive behavioural correction for the maladaptive and irrationality of the misogynist. I am not suggesting there should be, merely that while the law works to say “this is not allowed”, psychiatry can be deployed to go deeper: a social cancer becomes a psychiatric cancer which can be cured. Is it perhaps that the social does not want to recodify its social evils as psychopathologies? It does not want to cure them. That perhaps, we don’t want to cure them.

A dangerous idea then: the law operates not as pure repression, neither as pure production. The law is rather like the concept of ethical consumerism. The law is what allows us to continue in our evils. How is it that the criticism of war or state sponsored terrorism makes no impact? How can murder be illegal and yet states continue to be the world’s most rampant murderers? The answer would begin to take shape: it is because murder is illegal that killing can and must continue. Perhaps there is a libidinal element in this? It is in this way that we can also make sense of the anarchist/libertarian slogan that so baffled Virilio in his  Desert Screen:

It is forbidden to forbid.

The anarchist hasn’t conflated moral objects with real objects, such as is Virilio’s understanding of the problem. It isn’t that the anarchist believes that once moral and legal obstructions are removed desire can flow freely, as if these objects were as roadblocks dividing the smooth flow of a motorway from itself. Rather the anarchist has expertly realised that ‘it is forbidden to forbid’ is the precisely the real that lurks in every specific legal articulation. Every ‘no you cannot’ is secretly, although unconsciously obviously, an injunction to continue. The postmodern injunction to ‘Enjoy!’ is exactly the truth of the law all along. But it is a truth that the law instantiates.

If this makes any sense then perhaps it can be summed up by abusing/paraphrasing Baudrillard’s famous statement on the simulacra

‘The law is never that which prohibits the criminal- it is the law which conceals that there is no law. The criminal is true”

Of course, the rule of law does have its beneficial effects. It is, by and large, far safer to walk the streets in Dundee (where I live) than it is in city where there is no rule of law; of course Britain functions more smoothly and offers far more benefits to the majority of it’s citizens than do failed or failing states. But this is simply to repeat of law what Marx always said of capitalism- we ought not to be opposed to a system that has improved things, rather we should seek to liberate it’s limits. One contemporary response to this is the idea of accelerationism which, to be crudely, means pushing capitalism to the point of it’s own exhaustion. In our motorway metaphor, we ought to drive the car to the point that it’s engine gives out, to the point where capitalist realism explodes.

There is something similar about the law here, something about the law as it operates today (it may not always have been so). There is an essential perversity that all of its warnings are insitements. A simultaneity where each articulation has a warped grammatical stress: “don’t do it”.

Why do people join the police force..or better yet become community support officers? A sense of civic duty? The presence of an anachronisitic heroism in their personal psychology? The libidinal intercourse of ‘giving something back’ to the social? It could well be all of these things. But at the same time, I suspect it is also because of a disavowed psychopathological impulse. This is not so simple as to say that these people are ‘little Hitlers’ or that they join up for the promise of violence, control, the thrill of yeilding power, that at root they are looking for a fight. Such a criticism belonged to the ultraleftism of Camatte in the 1970s; all organisations are essentially gangs.

Rather police officers and community support officers, these are the people who intuitively resonante with the law as I have hyperbolically outlined it, but also with the comfort that the rule of law brings. They want to enforce the law so that they ensure they are free to indulge in the law’s truth. Agamben once pointed out to anarchists (I forget where) that it is the policeman who routinely breaks the law and that this suspension is what allows the law’s enforcement. ‘Police brutality’, while genuinely horrific in many cases and rightly deserving of strong challenge, is really only a bad thing from the perspective of the police because it lets slip that the police is brutality. But a brutality that regulates our relative safety. A psychopathological drive that can’t be admitted. In this sense, each individual police officer is a decent human being who wants to ‘serve and protect’ and at the same time a psychopath. 

Perhaps it is even possible to understand the production of terrorism in this way. We demand terrorists, or at least we make perfect use of them by, as with all else in postfordist societies, out-sourcing our psychopathology. Again, in one respect anti-terrorist groups spend all their time ensuring our safety, often curtailing our freedoms and doing unjustifiable violence onto those social groups who they consider might be terrorists (Islamophobia and the killing of Charles de Menendes might be prime examples).

At the same time what is their job? It is to spend their time in a fantasyscape of violence and death, turning their imaginative capacities towards conjuring up various new methods of mass murder, generating paranoic logics and disseminating them so brilliantly as to produce a generation whose bodies are traversed by panic. Expert art appreciators turned artists in a cruel and, to their minds, necessary aesthetic war. As former President Bush said ‘they never stop thinking up ways of harming our country and neither do we”; this wasn’t an idiotic Bushism but the moment of the return of the repressed.

Here I’ll detach a quick disclaimer…all of this is utterly speculative. It may not even be consistent. It has certainly circled outward from what was meant to be a quick note on discrimination. If there is something of a logic in all this then it may even be a resultant of that same paranoic insistence I’m trying to describe, ultimately being nothing but the production of my own anxieties.

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Tags: anarchist, anxiety, Baudrillard, desire, discrimination, JG Ballard, law, legality, libidinal, misogyny, murder, racism, virilio, women