Note from my underground

“The interesting thing about meaningful discourse in American social life is that it does not exist. This is related to the fact that indeed “everything is political,” which is another way of saying that statements that have a meaning are by nature controversial, and if what is said must be agreeable, then you are talking only to enjoy company and not because your manner of being in the world is that of curious people who value what is interesting over what is merely comfortable.

I take it that the fact that it took me so long to realize this is because my middle class upbringing left me a bit unrecognizing of the way things are with our society and its institutions, such that being mistreated would always surprise me, though the experience was frequent enough to leave me full of enough bad memories to nourish spiteful sentiments of the kind that would trouble anyone who thinks one is guilty for ugly feelings because they must be inclinations to crime for which you have only yourself to blame. Eventually, I would console myself with the recognition that the important thing morally speaking is only what you do.

Social life in America is a set of support groups just as all meaningful activity outside school or work is in a voluntary association that is a sports team or something like, a little corporation or, like your classroom, a game that models corporate office or sales shop life and prepares you for it. Talk is very important in American social life. Young men and women share, feelings for girls, various fetish objects, abstractions, collector’s objects, little obsessions for guys. Beyond sharing there are also opinions. Now opinions are not argued, but they are declared. The unstated rule is always that yours had better be the right ones. This happens in social settings maybe after the likes are shared. What movie or band do you like? Don’t tell us what you think, but give us a vote. When it comes to opinions, they are not argued for, but declared, because everyone knows already what is in and out, so the point of this game is to like a political idea that the others also like; otherwise, you’ll be called out. To what may this be compared, if not the organization that calls out offenders to the social norms in terms of what may and may not be said, and here too this is never up for discussion because the boss or leader of the moment always knows. So what you say, if it does not open up a line of discussion others want to join, is called out (Zap!), meaning you are. What determines this is the corporation as model of social life, which is to say capitalism, which is ‘democratic’ only in the sense that often, especially in America, team players call each other out. Expecting that everyone play the game with the team by the understood rules, which is the most important thing to know perhaps in getting along with Americans, along with their constant need for affirmation and flattery (dissent in American can you punched or worse: a rule there must be, never speak truth to power or a word askew to a neighbor, they won’t like it, and if someone doesn’t like what you say or do, that can be bad news indeed and very fast), people police each other. That’s how we are democratic. Not because people get together to argue about problems and work out carefully some solution by struggling with the matter; that only happened in political groups, like in the 60s. Now everyone works together as if they were a family, and of course the boss is mom or dad. If the group members are of a similar recognizable social sort (e.g., all female) then it’s de rigueur to engage in a bit of false condemnation of men, who are all bad, the better to coalesce under the bright warm aegis of the little pseudo-convent. Now with the statements people make, all such statements being treated as order-words (the speaker may hope for this), the point is not to engage in a meaningful debate (here it is useful to note that the American Congress does not have such debates either, unlike the British parliament: politicians in Congress make statements posturing for the media, constituents, and donors, and otherwise what substitutes for principled debate is the rhetorical attacks of rival prosecutors, and the deal-making, since America is a business society that belongs to private property, government is a business, and the subjects, who may be workers, are suspected of the liability to disobey. Consequently, in American social life generally saying anything to anyone else is usually pointless. Even friendships can be like this since Americans have difficulty distinguishing the stranger and the respect due them from the intimate, whom they always expect really wants, personally, what they are selling, in all innocence, just as the questions people ask you, which a thoughtful person might recognize as skeptical with a hint of hostility (but you can never say this in America), are asked for motives that may not be asked about. America is a society in which power relations are everywhere present and disavowed. That is why and how Americans are such idiots and at the same time (hardly a contradiction) so wonderfully nice (always meaning they need you to be). Thus I constantly remind myself at parties and in public places, with every acquaintance I strike up that seems so delightful at first glance, of my motto, to shut up, be patient and listen, remembering that I will soon be back at home where I can freely think and write.

I would have to learn to be cool. Cool doesn’t mean things don’t bother you, it means you aren’t reactive in such a way that you would likely be blamed for being the messenger of what you register as annoying, which very possibly you are right to consider it to be. Cool does mean you don’t cultivate a hatred of those whose behavior you find loathsome. That sounds contradictory, but it is not if we allow that it is necessary and good to judge people’s behavior as well as the general state of things. Much in our Protestant Christian culture denies this; it strikes me as a concerted effort to promote and police good feelings so that everyone can go on pretending to be happy whether they are or not, since social injustice is a matter for policy, politicians, and opinions to which all good citizens are (privately, thus meaninglessly) entitled, but being unpleasant is intolerable and warrants exclusion from the company scene every time. Since I was a brat, I am learning to be cool. Does that mean I accord everyone respect? I know that is demanded. My answer, unfortunately, is no.

Let me note what this has meant for me in terms of the liberal politics of (policing attitudes apparently about) race and gender, by which I mean, perhaps only, those persons exercising or claimiing some kind of authority and power, often that they are wielding as enforcers in some institution whose bosses welcome their pride in their identity, as if that were what is at stake, when it certainly isn’t, not that much for them, and not at all for you,. So I expect liberals to accuse me of racism, sexism, and all the rest, while they basically mistreat me as the slaves they are determined to prove they no longer are. And I do understand.

This means I expect be hated by the authorities at the top representing capital, the state, the institution in question, and rebels on the streets of every neighborhood. I will be victim of pogroms since I look, apparently, like a rich white Jew who owns everything, and punishments, since the bosses, whatever they are, will take me to be a dirty rebellious slave.

There is one group of persons who claim to be on the left who I have found unremittingly hostile to my thinking this way, though in a way and for a reason that are false. This is easily proven by pointing out that if you reread the above remarks and ask if they might have been written by a woman, you are, if you are honest with yourself, to answer yes. And this applies for any possible identity you can attribute to the author of the text, confronted as you are solely with the text, which exists independently of the accompanying embodied person of its factual (as distinct from implied) author and all and any circumstances pertaining to said person. This is a fact that is routinely denied in our liberal culture, because it is empirical and positivist, sophistical and relativistic, implicitly oriented towards the world of public affairs as represented and defined by the mass media, and always aims to counterattack, while feigning disinterested neutrality, as in the infamous ‘university discourse’, making everything trivial and irrelevant because psychological, so that all substantive claims are undermined, the listener may realize with a smile, by the mere fact that all meaningful statements must be either mere opinions or exaggerations, since anything like mathematical precision is the province of snobbish and hypocritical fools, who are undoubtedly assholes, almost always men, and, feminists all know, may be presumed to be closet rapists, at least in our dreams. Or intolerant pedants who must really be Nazis if like me they have (conspicuously non-Jewish) German names.

In reply to which I observe that feminism as we knew it (I remember the 1980s) is always articulated as an intolerant discourse of policing that merely assumes that men are always looking to transgressively violate women’s property right. For, you say, now liberated, those who were once slaves to masters are now masters of themselves, and in their place, you had better obey, boy, or else it’s curtains for you. That sounds like a joke. When I was a student it was not a joke. I mentioned this to female professors and graduate students, and they all seemed incapable of understanding this simple point. I learned that whatever shit happens to me doesn’t matter to them. That’s because liberals are false leftists, and in this way: they believe that one demographical (and voting and nonprofit sector donating) bloc is oppressed, and they refuse to listen to anything you say once they see you as countering their narrative. American feminists are a nightmare I am proud to say I share with many respected female persons whom I am perfectly content not to awaken by reminding us all that it was perfectly absurd, those days we remember, when you had to pretend to have only good feelings all the way down towards each and every actual and possible member of every class of persons designated as such. Dream: I went to the party where they staged the revolution, almost everyone I met there introduced themselves by an additional name appended to their familial cognomen designating their demographical category. And I remembered that Nancy, Susan, Becky, and Sarah all of them are Women, this is their flag hat t-shirt proper name and career portfolio to boot and of course I had better show, ahem, Respect. And in this dream I showed respect to Mr. Black and Ms. Hispandex and all the rest. I respected, I mean, yes sir, Respected, them all, or so it seemed. I went around the room. This revolution also had a guillotine (no kings! - the feminist caucus later split over whether this applied to female monarchs as well, the Americans slow to grasp their English counterparts’ reasons for not sharing their enthuasiasm, but then again Americans are enthusiastic about anything they want to believe in, vote for, buy or sell) but I am not sure what it changed other than what people called themselves and how they talked at the party.

Before I left, I ran into the lady who runs the company I was working for. She said, I read what you wrote recently. It’s smart. But you’re talking in an accent, which I guess is British. Since I think you are American, I expect you to be American. Otherwise you are not authentic.

Oh the importance of being authentic. You can guess I divide readers and possible friends between those who think you must be true to the way you “naturally” are and those who do not, and also that I find it unamusing that the possibility of some amount of gender divide on this question, which I think is real enough, indicates some enforceable obligation; it does not. Of course she did not want me working for her organization. She seemed to be quite personally offended. And I thought, as I ambled down the empty street, another female boss with her self-righteous outrage. I then dreamt I passed a march where some young men and women were carrying a red flag and chanting against a war and a factory closing, where many of them were working. The crowd eventually thinned, and two women were left, dressed in business suits. They wearing t-shirts that said, “We are the revolution! Power to women!” One of them had a red flag in her hand that a comrade had passed her, and she glanced briefly at it and threw it away. I watched as they eventually turned into some building and walked up the stairs. They glided easily past a faux glass ceiling. I woke up and it took me a minute to figure out what city I was in. The boss accused me of being theatrical. I understood that to mean I had better place myself utterly at their disposal. The boss added, “You must understand the importance of being and recognizing where you are. You seem distracted, like you’re not really here. Do you even know what day it is? Look at me!”

I noticed photos of her husband and kids on the table. So she’s authentic, I thought. I confess I had the distraught reflection that she’d almost be willing to take great risks to prove it. It must be real important, and nice I guess, to be able to insist so on being who you truly are.

I don’t hate women, he insisted. Work and language are neutral to me, impersonal. I admit to tending to dislike working with people who seem to dislike me. Yes, I find that to have been many people, and no, I do not believe this fact or possibility inculpates me. As for you giving me orders, is that what social equality is? Every class of persons is such that its members are entitled to give others commands, and enforce obedience to their persons, compliance with a set of rules and expectations they may give voice to, and, especially whenever their ‘person’, or yours and your relationship to theirs, can be imagined by them as brought into play, their private property right?

Feminism never made any sense outside the revolts of subjected persons, and the only relevant classes are such. Gender is not that. The claims were exaggerated. And fascism is false leftism, it always starts as such, appropriating demands attributable to revolts of the oppressed and using them to create entitled empowerment for the designated ascendant set of persons.

Marxism erred this way when it mistook the logic of capital for the personal rule of aristocracies, which was possible because the two overlapped enough they could be identified, and were. Feminism itself has no adequate critical grasp of the logic of capitalism or bureaucracy, and cannot, as race and anti-colonial theories cannot, because it is logically and structurally possible for any type of person to rule or be ruled, the structuration of this changes, and no form of identity politics is able to fully recognize this. This is how so much of the left-liberalism of the post-1968 era fed the path to fascism. The conservative-liberal quarrel that results is merely an argument within the capitalist class. The identity-political left always overstates particular histories with their narratives, resulting in blindness to the ways members of the groups so ‘justified by identity’, as we might say in a take on a Reformation-era debate on ‘salvation’ in Christianity, can easily wind up serving oppression. The other problem with every political social movement is that it assumes a closure of history, which opens onto an unknown future, by a theory that empowers a new state formation. That produces dogmatism. The feminists I remember from the 1970s were a new elite of bosses, armed with their own supposedly progressive ideology. Some of their claims and gains were wonderful achievements, but I look, with Walter Benjamin, for the barbaric and ugly downside in civilization. The dirt. The ladies I met were very clean. I don’t think many of them ever worked in a factory. They might have been rightly disgusted with authoritarian fathers (and mothers?); so was I, and they helped bring to widespread attention how awful it is when men think they own their female partners. That some former slaves acting as masters are right to resent that slavery they knew, I well understand.

Perpetrators who once were or might be victims? Aren’t they hypocrites? No, that is everybody. No one may attack anything if everything is personal, which means dissent is hypocrisy, which means you should just shut the fuck up. Victims who might be guilty, who could be perpetrators themselves? Fascism needs to desperately claim innocence and so for the other to be guilty. I prefer the leftism that proceeds not from a set of truths about what is just so much as a set of questions in the realm and refusals and opposition in that of practice. To be against the capitalism we have does not require having a reliable image and map of what we expect will replace it. Mistakes will be made, some awful; we will judge them as we must and continue to oppose what we know is unacceptable. When you oppose what someone else is doing, you are not obligated to have an authorizing ticket that entitles you to act. “I don’t like it” ought to be enough. What most of us don’t like is suffering that could have been avoided, one’s own or someone else’s. That is motivating, the purpose of idle talk is to keep people from doing anything. If you have an enemy and they are smart, they will want to do that.”