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Essays on Philosophy

Category: Prison

February 28, 2016

Stockholm Syndrome And Political Subjectivity

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Wikipedia, drawing on the work of Nils Bejerot, defines Stockholm  syndrome as follows:

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in abducted hostages, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger or risk in which they have been placed. The syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm, Sweden, in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28 in 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their victimizers, and even defended their captors after they were freed from their six-day ordeal. The term “Stockholm Syndrome” was coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery, and referred to the syndrome in a news broadcast.

In other words, Stockholm Syndrome is a response to a traumatic event wherein the subject forms a loyalty bond to the other that inflicts violence on it. This process also describes the constitution of political subjectivity through trauma—it is the logic of the social bond. The International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines trauma as:

an event of such violence and suddenness that it occasions an inflow of excitation sufficiently strong to defeat normally successful defense mechanisms; as a general rule trauma stuns the subject and, sooner or later, brings about a disorganization of the psychic economy.

As politics is always as much about reproduction as production, political subjectivity is perpetually reproduced by new trauma and by events which trigger the return of old trauma. As Freud put it in one of his models of the traumatic process:

traumatic effect came into play only…on the occasion of a second scene that served to reactualize the repressed memory of the earlier one.

These events must continue to occur, or political subjects will begin to break down. This recurrence is accomplished externally and internally. Consider a subject who is ticketed for parking illegally and later reminds him or herself not to park in that spot again: there is a chain of events which begins outside the subject and continues inside of it.

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February 24, 2016

Incomplete Thoughts on Privilege and Order     

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In order for privilege to continue to exist it requires the cooperation of those whose non-privileged status makes privilege possible.  Law is the chief means by which this marvelous and absurd co-operation is ensured in modern society.  Privilege is the modern equivalent of slave mastery.  One cannot be a master without at least one slave.  One person’s privilege is another’s disenfranchisement.  Privilege is non-corporeal inequality.  It shatters the very idea of human nature, if some are privileged, one cannot speak of one humanity, but a heterogeneous humanity of masters and slaves. What universality can there ever be if one group is exploited by another? How can herd and herdsmen be seen as one, or see each other as of the same species?

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February 13, 2016

Gangsters and Realism

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In politics there is one question. Do we want to do everything right or do we want to win? Do we want to be ‘correct’ or do we want to actually achieve the aim? This divides idealists and materialists, reformists and revolutionaries.

In society we have reform groups that need to be ‘correct’ in terms of the dominant significations (i.e. “law”) in order to achieve credibility, a place at the table etc. These groups get grants and support for their role as loyal opposition within domination.

We also have direct action groups which do not recognize these dominant significations. Among them, there are some which are most feared by the establishment. Following Onyx’s lead, we can look to the film Menace 2 Society, the character O-Dog, described as “America’s nightmare. Young, black, and just don’t give a fuck.”  We can also look to the film State Property where we see Beans and his crew working by direct action and showing the most intense contempt for the law. This culminates in Beans’ idea of how things ought to be, with his people shooting up the courtroom; in this act throwing physical force against symbolic power. That would have been gangsta.

Deleuze and Guattari held that Capitalism produces the schizo as its gravedigger. Let us think again about what this system is producing. It is producing the gangsta and the gang. Today we would have to write Capitalism and Gangstas. Placing this in a slightly different relation, perhaps we could see the gang as the contemporary form of the soviet–the effective form of working class organization. However we come to it, this is of the greatest importance for emancipation.

For too long we have allowed the law enforcement apparatus to code the phenomenon of gangsterism. Despite the systems efforts to mark and separate ‘workers’ and ‘criminals,’ the truth is plain. Most gangsters are working class people who take matters into their own hands, the legalism common to the system and the left is sickening, the gangsta’s rejection of this bullshit indicates an approach to emancipatory activity. The gang is the alternative to the party. This insight is nothing new. We can look to the “affinity group” which we find defined as a “street gang with an analysis.”

The prison is the most important institution of bourgeois society.  The gangs have discovered means of negating this form of social violence. Gangs have developed advanced underground cultures that make the left appear very naive. There is an incredibly inventive realism that we can find in criminal organizations. Knowledge of the strategies and tactics of law enforcement, the modes of exercise of power in society, the real map, requires a thorough knowledge of the underworld, the unmapped portions of the economy or social reality, the ‘there be dragons’ of state cartography. The victory of working people only occurs through a recognition of the community that demolishes the walls surrounding the ghetto, that storms the Prison Industry, the Bastille-function, that is the prime term of bourgeois power.   

The gangster is a worker with a gun without allegiance to the state. Dangerous. A gang is an armed working class organization. The genesis of gangs is from the system’s vain attempt to calculate superfluous lives. The system attempts to plan that certain people will not live, that certain social sectors will not be supported. The gangster rejects this and fights the system in order to live. Thus, everyday life becomes a sort of revolution in which the conditions of survival have been declared illegal and in order to live one must ignore and break the law.   

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June 26, 2012

Notes on Incarceration and Politics

The threat of arrest and detainment  is a major deterrent to political action in modern societies. The political moment is the moment in which this threat of arrest is displaced.  In that moment, affective disidentification with the law crystallizes from vague notions of reform or transgression[1] and people mobilize as a law unto themselves.

There is good reason for arrest and detention to be such a deterrent. First, the judicial/correctional system marks/criminalizes bodies in various ways. Second, the judicial correctional system’s objective conditions are magnified/amplified/mythologized/mystified in social discourses/practices of terror.

We must begin with gangs.  We can call them American soviets[2]–i.e. the spontaneous form of organization adopted by working class communities. Gangs are one example of organizations that have developed strategies for negating arrest and  incarceration as a deterrent to action They do this by having a network on both sides of the wall. In many cases, gangs begin by establishing hegemony within correctional facilities, and then their hegemony begins to spread to the outside world as converts are released.

Knowing that they are affiliated with an organization that can guarantee them security behind bars, these people are less inclined to fear incarceration: moreover, knowing that the organization values certain acts very highly, as indications of loyalty, intensity, courage and so on, adherents can anticipate gains in status based on performing illegal acts.  Thus, many are lead to a progressive disidentification with the law, both affective and cognitive.

Mark Twain’s famous novel, Huckleberry Finn offers us a very clear example of the arrival of a ‘political moment’ figured forth in the life of an individual.  Huck disidentifies with “god’s law” and in a sense his action becomes a law unto itself.

Likewise, the recent events in Athens, Greece give us a more straightforwardly political example.

From the other angle, namely the reactionary angle, we can see the emergence of the new right wing after the demise of post-war American liberalism as an example of a political moment.[3]

Overall, the political moment arises from an affective displacement. As Spinoza held, an affect can only be displaced by another stronger affect.[4]

[1] Cf. Pecheux/Theories of Discourse Disidentification vs. rebel vs. conformist

[2] Mike Davis preface to A World of Gangs xvi and preceding

[3] Suburban Warriors  Also Thomas frank and Naomi Klein

[4] Ethica IV (Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions)

Prop. 7. An emotion cannot be checked or destroyed except by a contrary emotion which is stronger than the emotion which is to be checked.

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