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This essay is a lightly edited version of a much older essay which I had written with the intent of submitting to a one-time publisher but was rejected. It's a bit rough, and personally not 100% representative of the analysis which I have been engaging with more recently, however I like the essay too much to not publicise it somewhere.
I have split this essay into four parts as spacehey seems to be disallowing me from posting the entire essay in full, I presume because of some character limit I am unaware of.
Now that every continent has been conquered and every countryside explored, nothing is more precious than passages to new worlds. Mass-manufactured faiths are haunted by a thousand dreams of escape—and fancy weaves better wings for flighty youth than pragmatism ever fashioned our forbearers.
As revolutionaries, of course we are fighting for our daydreams! When we cannot stomach another hour of this, we side with those moments we surprise ourselves, flashes in which anything feels possible, peak experiences that may last only instants—and therefore with every inhibited impulse, forbidden pleasure, unexpected dream, all the stifled songs which, unleashed, could create an upheaval like no one has ever seen. And when the dust settles afterwards, we will side with them again.
[…]
But beware—left untried, fantasies can become vampires draining the life out of their hosts; they may one day serve others, but they can only contribute to the subjection of those who never dare attempt them. (1)
- Crimethinc
Authority is presupposed upon the capacity for violence; due to this, it manifests this violence routinely, active in policy and stochastically in individual life. For a society which places positive moral regard on the inaction or enabling of violence, specifically that which is enacted via authority, this is the conclusion of the formula: Violence upholds the system, thus, violence is pervasive and normative. An example of such an attitude can be found in the authoritarian rhetoric of the sophist Thrasymachus (as told in Plato’s Republic), first describing the universality of power through strength:
And the different forms of government make laws democratical, aritocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several interests; and these laws, which made by them for their own interest, are the justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them they punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust. And that is what is mean when I say that in all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger. (2)
And second, outlining the universal authenticity of this strength:
No artist or sage or ruler errs at the time when he is what his name implies; though he is commonly said to err, and I adopted the common mode of speaking. But to be perfectly accurate, since you are such a lover of accuracy, we should say that the ruler, in so far as he is the ruler, is unerring, and, being unerring, always commands that which is for his own interest; and the subject is required to execute his commands; and therefore, as I said at first and now repeat, justice is the interest of the strong. (3)
While Plato recounted these polemics with the aim of showing their ultimate inconsistency, for much of our recent history this line of reasoning was not uncommon. Past Greece, it was consolidated in the cesarian fantasies of their Roman conquerors; past Rome it remultiplied in the divine right of kings; and so on. The relatively recent advent of liberalism, the bourgeoise revolutions in Europe and the Americas, have made the older premise of self-justifying power unpalatable. While the contemporary democratic state may scoff at the premise of ego-power as articulated by Thrasymachus, the present global order of dominance was not founded by a refutation of violent power, it is its direct successor; and the eminent violence remains.
It is for this reason that liberal republics would superimpose the brutality, despotism, and slavery (for which they mythologized their revolutions against), upon vast swaths of the non-European world. Even in the age of “decolonization” this violence has not ended, domestically, nor abroad; simply it has moved away from the hands of state or policy and has been firmly thrust into the arms of tragic circumstance.
In present liberal-democratic society, violence is organized within a division of Justice and Tragedy; my own neologisms.
We have seen the recipients of justified violence everywhere: criminals and villains, foreign combatants and enemies of the state, spies, and alien monsters. To repress them is normative, to contain them is necessary, to kill them is permissible. Such characters are the ideal recipients of the states echoing violence, to most-all loyal adherents, there is barely enough humanity in such designations to warrant concern.
Tragedy, on the other hand, is not simply mistaken violence, it serves a purpose as well. It is the civilian casualties, the victims of famine, fearful migrants, and conscripted soldiers. Such peoples are officially the utmost concern of the powers that be, in fact, most-all of society is taught that it is proper to be at their assistance. Their origin of this tragedy, however, is not a conversation to be had. As such, they are the endless fodder for the ruling state’s boundless morality.
At our present stage, power may gleefully indulge at the violence it condones, and shed tears at that which it martyrs; altogether the ambient producer of both. This is our limited horizon. It is those who must suffer for their villainy, and those who must suffer for their fate.
The binary between the earlier exaltation of violence, and its contemporary rationalization, is an effective tautology of Foucault’s dichotomy of sovereign power and disciplinary power. Within sovereign power, power is its own justification, and its own actor, a sovereign can kill and reward, but present themselves as the sole material actor of those consequences. For disciplinary power, one is conditioned by means of (relatively secular) categorization and psychological conditioning, to believe in the ultimate reality of power beyond its actor.
Sovereign power is effectively a limited horizon in an early phase: casting an upward limit to allowed reality. While the disciplinary power is far more developed: casting the upward limit of possible reality. Here we see, the primary development of liberalism has been an alteration to the justification of violence. In preliberal society violence was keenly the service of ego, now, the powers-that-be commit violence under the performance of a reluctant pragmatism. That is, the liberal state justifies its violence by means of artificially elevating it above the preview of its own control. To deny power is no longer a question of substantial courage, but of substantial social deconstruction as well.
While liberalisms complicity in the growth of this model is center stage, we on the left cannot portend to be an idle observer to this. For much as liberal states have consistently justified their violence through the villains and martyrs of the quest towards true civilization, so too have the revolutionary states of the past century justified their emanating violence in the language of disciplinary power. It was Stalin who would honor himself “the faithful servant of Lenin”, and who, at the height of his political butchery of the soviet system, claimed to be nothing but the conduit of historical necessity. Such a sense of limited horizon developed from the violence of the late soviet system as well.
Hypernormalization was a concept conceived by the Russian anthropologist Alexsei Yurchak in his book Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More.(4) He discussed the ultimate failures of the soviet system to construct the utopian world promised at the forefront of the twentieth century, and how this had led the party elites to retreat to an artificial vision of the world. This vision promised a tranquilized socialist system, one in which sterile rituals of political adherence became commonplace, and authentic hope in any real solutions to the human condition had been long abandoned. This hopelessness had rendered even the concept of confronting or overturning the political apparatus appear meaningless, as, in spite of the glaring failures of the Soviet government, there was nonetheless no functional alternative.
Journalist and documentarian Adam Curtis would produce an eponymous film (5), detailing the development of hypernormalization within contemporary liberal society. Curtis portrays the capitulation of the existing political order to a managerial class, one which fails to offer positive or alternative visions of the future, but rather only serves to predict and prevent future disaster. This shift is not simply the product of corruption, but rather, one of fear, as the existing political apparatus has lost all confidence in its capacity to construct new futures without disaster.
Through this comparison it was shown that an identical phenomenon occurred in both the former communist world, and the present liberal one, and that irrespective of ideology it has had a corrosive effect on the ability of society at large to believe in anything. Making the present system, not an affirmed ideological reality, but a naturally assumed condition.
The anthropologist David Graeber would articulate a similar concept in his critical analysis of contemporary bureaucracy, in The Utopia of Rules, he would write:
What “the public,” “the workforce,” “the electorate,” “consumers,” and “the population” all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, are profoundly alienating. Voting booths, television screens, office cubicles, hospitals, the ritual that surrounds them—one might say these are the very machinery of alienation. They are the instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered. Insurrectionary movements are moments when bureaucratic apparatus is neutralized. Doing so always seems to have the effect of throwing horizons of possibility wide open, which is only to be expected if one of the main this that the apparatus normally does is to enforce extremely limited horizons. (6)
Unlike the old systems of power which rested on supreme mandates, Graeber insists here that it is the very systems of spontaneous and normative life which reinforce the limited horizon. This further mingles with Foucault’s model of disciplinary power, as it is that which appears to need no justification whatsoever, which justifies the continued existence of the status-quo. The conclusions of both Curtis’s superposition of hypernormalization upon American political culture, and Graeber’s analysis of bureaucratization, each act in parallel with what Mark Fisher famously conceptualized in Capitalist Realism: that the systems of the present age maintain themselves through the strict mythology of their utmost necessity, and that no alternative could possibly exist.
What is common in the model of hypernormalization, of bureaucratization, of capitalist realism, and of the comparably rougher analysis provided earlier in this text, is an internal assurance of inevitability, it is not enough that power be the product of violence, it must be the product of something far higher; a necessity preached by the acolytes of realism, as an overpowering and metaphysically enforced truth. These assumptions, though amply critiqued in all the presented sources, are nonetheless widespread among the public, it is common consensus to believe, in a variety of fashions, that the workings of society and power as they are, should remain as they are. Even those who dare criticism of the status quo often fall to the conclusion that it needs only refinement, or rather, reinforcement.
This limited horizon, however, does not end with the innards of our ruling liberalism, it has impressed itself the psychopathy of its peers as well.
The reactionary right, while materially subjugated under the comparably larger yoke of Capital, is unaffected on a practical level, as they simply need ignore the pretext of justification, and the perpetuation of violence is of no concern to them; in fact, it is even a cause of their celebration. For the revolutionary left however, the effects have been devastating.
As of now, especially among the new wave of leftism, born of post-millennium disorientation, it is impossible to go untouched by a creeping malignance. Our wondrous futures may as well be ancient myths. Lustful for forgone epochs, the mainstream left has become more and more its own brand of conservatism; less farcical, but equally tragic. While a century ago we rallied to the prophets of a coming epoch, the self-assumed revolutionary is now more and more a necromancer, playing witchcraft with the pastiche of dead or dying systems.
That is, seeing the limited horizon of liberalism, we have rescinded backwards, poring over the traces of past footsteps in lieu of diligent advance. It appears that many have internalized quite succinctly, that there is nothing to be found in the future but future Capital, and that freedom can be found only in a communist-conservatism. The limitations of an inexcusable status quo have induced nostalgic historical romanticism in even the most progressive. It is not surprise that such a backwards looking left has only managed to competitively ornamentalize historic figures. Every idolized figure is a mortal body, every idolized state is entropic, all idols will eventually fail to serve the interests of the worshipers, and by confining our gaze to our mythological canon, by allowing that past to shape what we understand as the available politics, we are putting our faith in dead bodies and crumpled revolutions.
(1)https://archive.org/details/ExpectResistance/page/n15/mode/2up
(2)https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm
(3)Ibid
(5)https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation
(6)https://files.libcom.org/files/David_Graeber-The_Utopia_of_Rules_On_Technology_St.pdf
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