The Labours of Love: Against the Workerisation of Sex

 

1.

Over the last couple of weeks to switch on the news would lead one to believe that half of Britain had gone out and "nonced" the other half. These kind of weeks are sadly becoming more common as operation Yewtree continues its bonfire of 70s pinups and more cases of gang abuse emerge from sleepy provincial towns. The far Left which has always had an ambiguous relationship with these issues has over the last year had to confront its own abuse scandal and engage in much soul searching. A curious contribution to this ongoing dialogue has come via the International Socialist Network (ISN), a group formed from those who fled the disintegration of the Socialist Workers Party. Mistress Magpie in the second of two articles makes the case for sex-work to be treated as any other kind of work. This intervention was elicited by the advertising of  an escorting position on the government run Universal Jobmatch site. The ad was later taken down after it was reported on by the Sunday Mirror. Magpie then popped up in the Guardian making a similar case for her role as a "professional dominatrix" continuing the theme that it is a culture of "capitalist moralism" that causes the stigmatisation of her trade in satisfying what are basic human needs.

While she identifies herself as a sex worker she is at pains to point out that she does not sell sex, only BDSM. As she says in the January piece:
“ I am well aware that as sex workers go, I am extremely lucky; I was raised an upper middle class Jew in Midwestern America and have a good education. Moved by nothing worse than a wish to be the author of my own life, I left an interesting office job and a blossoming career to pursue hedonism and kink. I am not trafficked or coerced, and my earnings, after tax, are enough to pay the bills. I’m also lucky to live in the south west of England, a region that is home to a vibrant kink scene. Living and working here, I’ve made friends who step into and out of sex work as casually as they might pick up a second job as a barista.”

The first and perhaps most obvious question to raise is whether such an esoteric and exceptional background is really an appropriate position to make generalisations about the realities of sex-work including those who have to sell sex more by necessity rather than a desire to be the authors of their own lives. Since her activities don't include intercourse but merely the laying on of hands (cuffs, or whips as well I suppose) would she not be better off making common cause with physiotherapists and masseuses? Perhaps the problem here is the governments own guidance which defines sex-work as anything involving "sexual stimulation"; a definition that hardly seems practicable and certainly not enough to rule out including masseuses and lord knows whatever imaginative simulative strategies Magpie's "kink" community might come up with. But in any case let us take it as given that the claim being made is that the sale of intercourse is work like any other. Given the recent arguments over government workfare programmes is such a conflation really desirable? Could we not imagine a situation where accepting such work becomes compulsory and linked to the provision of benefits? The only thing preventing this might be singling out this work as a special case that jobseekers are permitted to refuse. But that would hardly be consistent with treating the provision of sex as just another kind of work. Since the government seems to have no problems coercing jobseekers into the most unpleasant roles, often on minimum wage with no thought to the persons skills or ambitions I see no reason once the distinction is removed that sex-work would not be used in a similar way. The rosy picture of carnal entrepreneurialism that the author paints would surely not materialise for the majority of working people whose situation would no doubt be more precarious than those with the privilege to "step into and out of sex work as casually as they might pick up a second job as a barista".

Perhaps then I'm looking at this the wrong way. The point of the author's intervention has been to make a case against the moralism around different sexual lifestyles. The normalising of sex-work into work in general is then a possible strategy by which those lifestyles might themselves be drawn into the norm. By norm I mean simply that they would be less likely to be singled out for discrimination. I am dubious however about the claim that the mainstreaming of alternative sexual lifestyles would really have any effect on harassment particularly of women. As Magpie herself says "Sex work can certainly be full of harassment, stereotyping and objectification. Unfortunately, so can being a till clerk at Tesco." Here's another equivalence; life is full of harassment, why single out sex workers experiences as being particularly worse than any other, this is just moralism. Although in the August article she is more specific and seems to make a distinction  "I've worked in offices, kitchens and shops, and have encountered my share of sexism in the workplace. In my experience, none of these jobs can compare remotely to the barrage of sexist garbage I encounter daily when I do my job".

If it is the case that harassment, stereotyping and objectification are rife in the workplace, and indeed they are certainly rife in the mainstream use of sex in its white, heterosexual guise then why would normalising sex-work which by the author's estimation is the locus of even more abuse have a net positive effect on the experience of women and "sexual minorities"? Can we not imagine that normalising the idea that an exchange of cash entitles a person to the direct use of another person's body might serve to reinforce exploitation rather than combat it? It would only be a very vulgar Marxist who could fail to see the distinction between selling ones labour time and selling one's body. Choice, a deeply loaded term is the unstated presupposition behind Magpie's arguments. She is a person who clearly has a lot of choice; she could have done a regular job, indeed she had a blossoming career, but gave it up to provide services to the BDSM community. She is in short someone with power over her life, and, I expect, a fairly strong safety net to fall back on. What she fails to recognise is that despite what the neo-liberal rhetoric of choice would have you believe, the experience of work for the most poorest, for the young desperate for any chance of a job, and indeed for an increasing proportion of the middle class, is one of precariousness and distinct lack of choice.

Why then would the Guardian see fit to give time to these arguments? Why has sex as work become a viable equation despite the reality of work in post crash Britain? Perhaps the fact that sex-work appears “as a way to make ends meet", and a “way to avoid the degradation and harsh conditions of today’s zero-hours contracts wasteland” is not because young people have suddenly discovered a hitherto untapped world of freelance employment previously obscured by bourgeois moralism; but rather due to the desperate situation of a generation denied access to even the most menial positions in the regular economy, thrown on the scrapheap, and led into the waiting arms of the sex industry.

2.
There are I think broader issues raised by these three articles that deserve some attention. The question we should perhaps be asking is not what are the benefits of treating sex as work but rather what ensemble of conditions obtain such that sexual relations are increasingly being situated within a codified field of exchange? You might think that the good old Marxist criticism of relations between people becoming relations between things, and of the profanation and commodification of human experience might give the Mistress and her ISN supporters pause. But instead this basic component of the traditional Marxist ethos has entirely passed them by. Instead they seem content to endorse elements lifted straight from the neo-liberal mindset in the vague hope that it might improve the lot of a minority of sex workers, or at least render middle class fetishes (including those that deploy racial stereotypes, see here.) more socially acceptable.

Marx's view on the effects of the exchange relation are clear. In an early work critiquing James Mill's Elements of Political Economy he takes aim at the classical economic view of human nature as homo economicus, the rational self-interested actor for whom relations of exchange are a true realisation of social existence. As is well known Marx takes these relations not as natural or immutable but rather only one stage in a historical process of socio-economic development leading to an eventual reconciliation with humanity's true 'species being'. Indeed he argues such relations rather than bringing people into a true community serve to reinforce forms of sociality based on deception, mistrust and exploitation as each party is forced to alienate their private property for the benefit of receiving an equivalent amount (goods or money) for the satisfaction of a necessity or need. "Thus exchange or barter is the social species activity, the community, social commerce and integration of man within private property, and for that reason it is the external, alienated species activity. It appears as barter just because of this. By the same token it is the very antithesis of a social relationship" (Marx Early Writings, Penguin edition 1992, p267).

Now Marx wasn't talking here about sex-work but I think we can certainly see how the basic premise of bringing the satisfaction of needs into equivalence through exchange of private property might apply to it. The punter (for this is the correct term) exchanges money for the provision of services, services which before they were brought into the field of exchange had no exchange value at all. What price on a caress, a kiss, or any other act? But once these activities are brought into a market with others who also seek to exchange their services for money a basic price is soon established "by social configurations alien to the worker". Here we can I think see how Marx's idea about the alienation of our activity might apply to sex work. In the exchange relation my activity is given a value external to my determination by forces beyond my control. And my needs, insofar as they appear as having a certain monetary value compel me to sell my activity to a certain degree and according to another's demand. For sex-work this implies an even more alienated existence than Marx could imagine, for in this activity my own body appears as exchange value and the access I afford the punter for a certain length of time to perform particular acts appears as the condition for my continued survival. In a very literal sense I have self ownership only insofar as I sell myself as property. Both for the punter and the service provider (more on this term later), money as universal equivalent thus comes to represent the material reality of our most intimate human experiences. "Money represents a total indifference both to the nature of the material, to the specific nature of private property and the personality of the owner of private property". Activity that would otherwise occur in a relation of open, sensuous, albeit awkward interaction is now mediated thoroughly through the universal equivalent. "In money the unfettered dominion of the estranged thing over man becomes manifest" (Ibid p270).

We can see here how the codification of sexuality into neatly priced units plays into the hands of neo-liberal theories of human capital and entrepreneurial society . Monetize your hotness! is the clarion call I have heard from these quarters, and even sections nominally on the left. Take the references to sex-work out of Mistress Magpie's articles and they could well be a paean to the ethos of the modern entrepreneur, negotiating the world of precarious work and uncertain futures with a combination of pragmatism and pioneering spirit.

Her use of terms such as fetish and "kink" as if they were natural and immutable categories of human experience is similarly problematic. She appears oblivious to their legacy as products of late 19th and early 20th century psychopathology; the same psychopathology that is which while diagnosing the pervert and sexual deviant simultaneously served to raised other practices to the status of the norm. Liberalised under our regime of permissiveness these categories maintain their function of normalising, distinguishing, and ossifying sexual experiences into useful demarcations for professionals, experts and industries of all kinds. It is worth noting that the alternative status of some lifestyles which constitutes the need for niche service providers like the author are only sustained by the notion that there is a "vanilla" sex world against which it sets itself as "alternative". If the "moralistic" world of sexual relations were to be rendered inoperative and people able to negotiate their way more or less autonomously sans readymade notions of mainstream and alternative practices, then the Mistress may find herself out of a job.

Her arguments also exhibit a modern commonplace in conflating identity and lifestyle. To do or at least to desire a thing is to be a thing. That our desires and thus the identity that we are encouraged to take up may be open to external influence and coercion never occurs to the author. Despite the reams of literature on how capitalist consumer society functions through the excitation and manipulation of desires she talks about "kink" and BDSM as if they were imprinted on our DNA. Capitalism's drive to continual expansion elicits daily the production of new commodities and concomitant consumer subjectivities to buy them up. The increasing expansion of capitalism into supplying products aimed at our sexuality, from the alternative shops of Camden and Soho, to high street chains like Ann Summers, to say nothing of the trade done on the internet is testament to this fact. In all cases the advertising mantra is the same, that the market will supply you with tailor made satisfaction to your very singular and authentic desires. However, like anything at the frontline of consumerism the market does more to create rather than satisfy those desires. Capitalism never ceases to supply new product, new experiences, new potential subjectivities, and pass them off as "basic human needs". But here the author reveals another contradiction in her position. Despite her equating desire and identity she argues for a split between the subject of desire and the political subject.

" Your sexual desires need not reflect your politics, certainly not in a crude or unmediated way. You can be the most effective, learned, dedicated socialist and campaigner in the world, and get turned on by the idea of dominating someone, getting dominated, watching giant women step on helium balloons, etc. You can even have a violent rape fantasy, or be into getting humiliated and being called names that, outside a context of conscious, negotiated and ongoing consent, would be completely unacceptable."

Surely though if we are to believe that our desires represent an authentic truth of our identity, then the person paying to have their violent rape fantasy safely satisfied by experienced professionals like the Mistress is just as they appear, a potential rapist. The degree of double think then required to square the circle of a group that ostensibly owe their existence to resisting "rape culture" now excusing the existence and satisfaction of rape fantasy within a form of mutual exchange is staggering. Are we to understand then that if the SWP member accused of rape had instead just been found to be visiting sex workers for the satisfaction of his rape fantasies then his feminist credentials would have remained intact? Witness also the liberal commonplace that consent is sufficient to neutralise otherwise deleterious social ills. The logic of choice and consent is ruthlessly criticised by the left when it comes to the labour market. Why then in the case of sexual relations does it take on a virtuous character, especially when the author is arguing for subsuming sexual relations into work relations?

3.
In fact sex-work is already taking on many characteristics of the regular market economy. Websites like ukpunting.com offer a space for men to share experiences, rate women, and discuss the state of punting (the male use of prostitutes) in the UK and other countries. While sites such as Adultwork provide searchable listings for prostitutes which include rates, services offered and contact details as if you were looking for a plumber on Yell.com.  If you can bring yourself to wade through a few threads from the former you will notice that many of the patrons refer to "service providers" and discuss their transactions in a way one might talk about visiting any other independent trader. The attitudes however towards the women involved is more often than not totally contemptuous, bordering on the cruel. Variations on “I’ve paid my money, she should do what I want the stupid cunt” appear frequently as well as the general premise that only stupid poor girls end up in the business of selling their bodies, and as such deserve the treatment they get. Indeed it is the contractual aspect of the interaction that forms the background to much of the abusive rhetoric. The exchange of cash in contradiction to the old Lockean dictum on self-ownership is sufficient to form a claim over the person body and soul. From this perspective a demand for professionalism amounts to complying with all requests no matter how degrading; the customer is always right. In another form the proliferation of professional sugar daddy services further normalises the idea of women’s bodies as sources of "erotic capital" to sell to the highest bidder. Again it is the same entrepreneurial ideology that animates the justifications, sometimes offset with talk of funding education or other venerable work on the self.

None of this can be disengaged from the paradigm of sex as work presented by the pornographic industry and the continual inroads it is making into mainstream media. Only this week were members of that same ISN which published Mistress Magpie's writing promoting a guide to sexual ethics and consent (again!) written by porn performer Stoya in the New Statesman thus further re-enforcing the idea that the life of the professional provider of sexual services to the market is the appropriate model from which to formulate the norm for all humanity. All this taken together is sufficient to illustrate that the conditions for legitimating sex into the regular economy are multiple and ongoing, and that Magpie's intervention is only one rather late and isolated symptom of this more general trend.

Perhaps it is the Marxist left's fetishisation of organised labour as a panacea for all ills which is at fault here. Not from labour but through labour must sex workers be liberated! But I rather think that along with the more general trends in society mentioned above this strange combination of liberation and regulation which is animating the ever more clamorous discussions in some section of the left is a symptom of their own recent scandals. Perhaps the notion of a transparent, codified, and regulated form of sexual relations, subsumed into labour, and which like other forms of work might have the edge taken off by a bit of collective bargaining and proper HR procedures seems attractive to a group of activists stung by the effects of wild and unregulated sexual relations on their former parties. Perhaps also they suffer from being in the unenviable position of trying to oppose "moralism" while simultaneously trying to defend the position that people have obligations in their conduct towards each other in what should otherwise be private life. Could it thus be that in opposing the “moralists” they have aligned themselves unwittingly with some of the darkest forces of late capitalism, and in doing so abandoned resistance to the commodification of everyday life?

Let's finish by considering the picture of self authorship presented by Mistress Magpie. If in the field of exchange the product of my labour becomes an alien thing for anothers use, and in the paradigm of sex as work that same product is simultaneously myself as service provider and liberated sexual entrepreneur, producing myself in the act of selling myself, then the only result can be a thoroughly depleted subjectivity dissolved into the desires of others, or as Marx put it more precisely: "In the object I produce my labour can only become manifest as what it is. It cannot appear to be what it is not. It therefore becomes manifest only as the objective, sensuous, perceived and hence quite indubitable expression of my self-loss and my impotence". (Ibid p278)

Perhaps then "capitalist moralism" (another confabulated monster?) is less of a danger than the acceptance of capitalist permissiveness, even if it is motivated by a desire to reduce harm.

(Addendum)
As I write it turns out that the controversy generated by Magpie's articles has yielded a micro split from the above mentioned ISN with the author followed by her main supporter Richard Seymour and a few others picking up their ball (and chain) and going home. Quite possibly one of the most silly splits in the increasingly pantomime recent history of the British left. Reports are that they had planned to form a "platform" in order to argue their position on alternative sexual practices (including a defence of the above mentioned "race play") but turns out that their comrades had rather had their fill of the whole thing. No sects please we're British!

Some Reflections on the Opposition and Oppression

1.  We live at a time of great desperation for the opposition. I’m calling opposition what one might otherwise call “The Left”. I’m choosing to use this term as I think it better reflects the manifold currents and forms of revolt which exist today (in whatever protean or diminished form). By saying opposition (or those who oppose the status quo) I am demarcating my object by reference to the solidity of that which is opposed. The solidity or at least consistency of the Right being I think of far greater degree than the opposition. In this way it is at least possible to speak of a collection or set of forces without essentialising or creating false unities. This is all to the good as there is very little practical unity in the opposition and I see no virtue in covering over this fact with synthesizing theory.

Where might someone point to show a victory or even the signs of moderate progress? Is it even possible to show examples of the government’s program being hindered in any way? Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic, there was the reported delay in changes to disability living allowance and the victory for the campaign to save Lewisham hospital A+E. All in all though these appear to be only delays and minor set-backs in what continues to be a massive attack by neo-liberalism on working people and the welfare state. What’s more for every small local victory there seems to be a larger corresponding defeat. Witness the privatisation of Royal Mail with barely a shot fired; witness the slow dismantling of the NHS and its non-reporting by the BBC. And in recent weeks there’s been the Unite Union routed at Grangemouth and the end of ship building at Portsmouth.  Where is the opposition, and what is it doing?

At a time when you might expect alternative politics to be flourishing the traditional organised far left have gone from borderline irrelevance to total disarray. In truth the rise of so called horizontal and social media centred forms of organisation like Occupy, Anonymous, and UKuncut had already shown up the antiquated nature of the old revolutionary party model, attracting a layer of activists suspicious of central committees and prescribed cannons of revolutionary literature. These old groups could however still muster a decent demonstration or short lived united front campaign, and continued to recruit from the student body. This tenuous grip, however, has over the last year been almost completely relinquished though a number of splits and scandals centred on a series of rape allegations in the Socialist Workers Party. Although it was these allegations and their handling that was the occasional cause for the mass resignations which followed, the scandal also prompted wider criticism from within the movement of the Leninist party model and its relevance to contemporary struggles. Everything from feminism to attitudes towards social media and the integration of current “intersectionalist” forms of social criticism were now very publicly being discussed. All this against the background of an SWP leadership that seemed determined to go down with the ship.

Although the SWP is only one party (the largest on the far left though perhaps not for much longer) its continuing collapse has perhaps been more prominent than it otherwise would have been thanks to coverage by a group of social media activists and writers collectively monikered the “Twitterati” or “left commentariat”. I’ve made several references to these individuals before, in particular highlighting their role in the dissemination and operation of so called “privilege theory”. Beyond their interventions into the SWP crisis this group of journalists and some-time activists form a coherent group or faction within the opposition and have become something of a bête-noire for parts of the traditional left and other non-aligned movements fed up with their stream of liberal pseudo-radicalism. There is a whole counter-discourse to their online comments that seeks to challenge their preeminence and reveal the less than radical implications of their writing. I suppose I would count myself at least nominally in this latter group. Perhaps more disconcerting are the limited signs of an alliance between these individuals and some of the elements that split off from the SWP crisis. The taking up of privilege theory and a risible fixation on what one might call the politics of Miley Cyrus is indication enough of a lack of discernment amongst those involved and that there is very little worthwhile that might be salvaged from the splintering of the Leninist party. See this recent intersectionalist mash-up from Laurie Penny and the International Socialist Network’s Richard Seymour for more grist to this banal satanic mill.   

Keeping busy Penny has also broken new ground along with her commentariat buddy Owen Jones by appearing on Auntie’s flag ship political spectacle Question Time; thus making the leap to “official” opposition. Here I am fully in agreement with Russell Brand’s analysis the other week that participation in the mainstream political spectacle does little more than justify an irredeemably corrupt system. Although I note that Brand didn’t extend his criticism to establishment institutions like Question Time, appearing as he did on the show in June this year. If I was harsh I might say that Brand shares with Penny and the majority of the commentariat a propensity to never let principle get in the way of an opportunity for self-publicity. A recent defence of Jones and Brand along the lines that they are the people “most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the last few years” totally obscures the question as to how their interventions direct and mold that consciousness and whether they offer a genuine opportunity for collective organization or just tokenistic rhetoric easily absorbed by our well oiled parliamentary democratic machine. While I support the critique of identarianism and its liberal moralizers, replacing identity with personality will not lead us out of the “Vampires Castle”. If we can steel ourselves away from the simplistic enjoyment of having aspects of our politics aired in the enemy’s camp we might better be able to address these questions. I don’t wish to labour on these people for any longer than is necessary. It is sufficed to post this excellent summing up from a denizen of that den of inequity known as Urban75.

“The bottom line is if you subscribe to any materialist analysis of the world, you are going to spend your political life being accused of sexism and homophobia by Laurie Penny unless you renounce your 20th Century misguided notions of socialism you're the enemy. Anyone too stupid, too uneducated, too technologically illiterate to partake in the narrow and elitist discourse of intersectionalism either at university or on twitter is a rape apologist, misogynist, privilege keeping piece of shit to these people. That this means they can pour scorn and contempt and effectively write off millions of people, for being white, being male, being healthy, being thin, being [insert non-transferable privilege category], it means they can politically rationalise their deep-felt hatred for anything that's not in their tiny fucking bubble. And whilst they do this the left withers and dies, unable to win support from anyone outside this exclusive club, and the far-right wins the support of millions of alienated people all throughout Europe.”

2.  For all the talk of oppression and privilege (and there is little else besides talk), there is a remarkable lack of discussion on precisely what constitutes a thing or state of affairs as oppressive. If I’m short in stature (which I am) in a room full of people six foot plus I may well feel self-conscious but am I oppressed? How about the relationship between teacher and pupil, or father and child, both of which entail considerable disparities between the individuals involved. Generally one knows if one is actively being oppressed; it’s a feeling much like a sickness without a discernible cause. Its symptoms can range widely: depression, outbursts of rage both righteous and undirected, self-loathing, shame, fear and despondency; the effects can manifest physically too.  Sometimes though these feelings are not linked by the sufferer to an agent or structure responsible and are instead directed towards some perceived personal failure. The government wants us to think this way about people on benefits and the disabled and those who never manage to “get on”. People like this we are told are simply lazy or lack the requisite ambition or will to spend every waking minute selling themselves. Since they blanket the media and are enforced through policy these ideas begin to be internalised even by people who are most harmed by them. There begins the the cognitive dissonance and misrecognition that are the signatures of what Marxists call ideology.  Ideology, as Louis Althusser diagnosed in the 1960s isn’t simply an epistemic error. It is not the case that the subject perceives a social world and then misunderstands it; rather ideology is the frame or constitutive matrix of understanding through which the social world is viewed and into which we as subjects are “interpolated”. It is coextensive with any situated perspective and since it is not an error of reason it cannot be reasoned away. Thus construed, misrecognition, as we learn from Jacques Lacan is always first and foremost self-misrecognition, and since ideology is in effect “in” the subject, gives to the subject a place and ground for understanding,  it can never be totally eliminated and altering it is no small task. The effects of oppressive conditions on the ideational content of representations and their concomitant influence on conduct was known long before the advent of Marxian and psychoanalytic jargon. One of the most influential instances was Mary Wollstonecraft’s analysis of the effects on women of their subservience to men.

“It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection, which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish, and the men who can be gratified by the fawning fondness of spaniel-like affection, have not much delicacy, for love is not to be bought, in any sense of the words, its silken wings are instantly shrivelled up when anything beside a return in kind is sought. Yet whilst wealth enervates men; and women live, as it were, by their personal charms, how can we expect them to discharge those ennobling duties which equally require exertion and self-denial” (Wollstonecraft 1995 pg230)

These insights apply to the situation of women in the late 18^th century ideas inherited from the classical Republican tradition, a tradition which viewed liberty in a manner far removed from our own, even from those who today make most use of the term ‘oppression’. For Wollstonecraft and for the classical theorists of liberty what made power (any power) intolerable was not its mere existence but its arbitrariness. It was the unchecked, arbitrary power that men had over women that Wollstonecraft correctly diagnosed as putting them into a state analogous to slavery. Slavery is of course a state of domination in which even if you happen to be under the yoke of a mild mannered benevolent master you are still thoroughly dependent upon their grace and thus totally unfree. In such a state even if you are left unmolested your conduct, much like the conduct of the fawning women described by Wollstonecraft is affected. You won’t do anything to antagonise your master/husband; you will do or say whatever you can to keep him onside, and you certainly won’t speak out even if you feel you have just cause. We can easily imagine this transposed to political absolutism where bowing and scraping ministers of state tell the King only what he wants to hear for risk of reprisals. Under such relations of domination free-speaking (distinct from the formal right of free-speech) or speaking truth to power (Parrhesia as the Greeks called it) is extremely difficult and this in turn puts the fate of the polis itself into jeopardy. For if truth is foreclosed by fear and unchecked power corruption and barbarism naturally follow. The same goes for the possibility of individuals forming any freely assumed ethical disposition; insofar as such an ethos is dependent on a degree of autonomous will free from the fear of arbitrary interference we can say with Foucault that ‘the slave has no ethics’ (Foucault 1997 pg286).  

There are at least two important conclusions to draw from this: firstly, in distinction to the theory of negative liberty a person under a relation of domination does not actually have to be interfered with to be rendered unfree. The existence of arbitrary power over a person is sufficient. Thus you may work for a thoroughly generous and pleasant boss who you have never seen as much as raise his voice to anyone, but since in your workplace you have no grievance procedures or protection from being arbitrarily sacked, and there is no right to appeal or tribunals system in your country you are still very much in a relation of domination relative to him.  Secondly, since it is arbitrary relations of power and not power per-se that we are dealing with here, the notion of ‘oppression’ which we see being used so often needs qualification. Is the Niqab oppressive? Are high heeled shoes? I have seen both described as such. Since I think it is specifically relations of power we are talking about when we talk of social oppression it seems something of an abuse of language to describe any item of clothing as in-and-of-itself oppressive. As I elaborated in my previous post the political significance of the Niqab has been wildly interpreted by different parties; indication enough that rather than having any fixed meaning in-itself the multitude of meanings map onto the contours of a social antagonism that reveals the workings of power not just on the political but also the ethical landscape of our society. The example of high heeled shoes also calls out for an analysis along these lines and would no doubt yield a very different complex of power relations and normative imperatives compared to the Niqab. It is for this reason that subsuming both under an undifferentiated concept of gender oppression is highly unproductive, not least as it ignores the different ethical forms of subjectivity that are implicated in both cases.

It is this ethical side to power, how power affects the possibility of constituting ourselves as ethical beings which is often missing from discussions on oppression both in the intersectional and more conventionally Marxist camps. Wollstonecraft was acutely aware of the relationship between power and ethics and like the classical authors she studied saw the possibility of attaining virtue and the Good Life in being free from the sort of arbitrary power that women in her time were subjected to. In the modern era of neo-liberal individualism and freedom from all regulation whatsoever the notion of liberty that comes quickest to contemporary minds is best summed up by a gentleman from Iowa I encountered at the base of the Statue of Liberty last year. He told me liberty was “doing what you wanna do when you wanna do it”. We can laugh but in truth much of what neo-liberal society teaches us can be summed up by that pithy phrase. Freedom is freedom from the obligations and constraints that necessarily accompany life in a political community. From this perspective there is no room for the possibility that power might be enabling as well as constraining. The person of liberty is no longer the citizen of a properly constituted city but a paranoid loner holed up in an isolated farm house, gun under the pillow.

 3.  This kind of extreme libertarian thought is what animates the more conspiratorial wing of the opposition. Clowns like David Icke and Alex Jones (both of whom have received attention from the mainstream media in the last twelve months) are its most conspicuous adepts. But fellow travellers ranging from 9/11 truthers to full on reptilian New World Order lunatics can be found in or around pretty much all of the recent non-aligned movements from Occupy to Anonymous. Perhaps the most disheartening trend of the last few years has been the growth of this kind of conspiratorial analysis over more rationalist and socialist forms.  They are in effect the opposition that best mirrors our contemporary situation.  It is here that you can find most of the theoretical flux between overtly right wing positions like that of the US Republican Tea party and nominally more progressive forces like Anonymous. Both are likely to view power, whether in the form of the state or corporations as intolerable in and of itself, although the Tea Party do tend to focus on the former (by a bizarre twist of logic they tend to view the latter as an emanation of individual free enterprise even in the case of multinationals). The denuding and diminishing of communality implicit in this form of thought engenders  such “progressive” alternatives as the Free Man on the Land movement; a bizarre fantasy construct of legal theory where saying the right words in court or signing your name in capital letters will exempt you from taxation or paying for electricity.  For these people being compelled to contribute to a joint pot that might keep the street lights on or provide for universal healthcare and fire-fighters is tantamount to having ones kidneys removed. The legal mysticism that marks out the Freemen is the only unique part of a mind-set that is remarkably common in the US and increasingly prevalent here. Right across this spectrum of libertarian thought it is the simplistic view of power as purely a force of constraint which leads to their very similar and ultimately non-political form of politics; that is, a politics without political community, a politics of the wilderness.

The Republican (or neo-Roman) idea of liberty which has recently been given new impetus by the work of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit ¹ offers a way out of this deadlock. It offers activists a way of thinking about power in society that bypasses the liberal and libertarian dualism of freedom and constraint. It suggests that power whether in the form of a properly constituted state or in any of the multiple forms of collectivity can be used to enable individual liberty rather than hinder it. Labour laws, employment tribunals, legislation guaranteeing sick pay and restricting the ability of bosses to arbitrarily sack people are all ways in which power can be deployed in such a way as to free people from potentially dominating relations. Pettit has gone so far as to describe such a strategy as anti-power. Insofar as the power of the state is deployed against the power of employers to nullify to an extent some of their ability to dominate individuals this kind of relationship is antagonistic (on the distinction between antagonistic and agonistic relations see the final section here). The collective power of trade unions is supposed to work in a similar way. The limit I think to this theory is that while it views power in a more positive light it still views its nature as essentially restrictive, albeit in this case by restricting the arbitrary power of some groups in order to enable the liberty of others. Pettit’s work is also notable for his focus on the notion of deliberative democracy and the important role of public contestation of power in both its statist and private form. This nod to the classical humanist emphasis on civic participation is for me one of the most attractive features of the neo-Roman theory.  From the side of the subject however it holds onto the liberal notion of the self-constituting individual endowed with rights whose ability to realise the Good corresponds to the degree in which they can maintain those rights and free themselves from interference, in this case arbitrary interference.

To counter this limitation I think that Foucault’s work, and in particular his later writing on the relationship between power, ethics, and what he called technologies of the self, offer significant advantages over and attenuation of the neo-Roman theory. As we’ve already seen in the discussion of Wollstonecraft Foucault shares with the theorists of republican liberty the idea that freedom equals non-slavery, with special weight being given to the insight that conditions of slavery or domination negatively affect the ability of subjects to constitute themselves as ethical beings. The principle difference between him and more analytic theorists like Pettit is in his insistence that power is always already there, that one is never outside it, that there are no margins for those who break with the system to gambol in (Foucault 1980 pg141). Furthermore he proposed the provocative thesis that power was not solely restrictive but “generative”, i.e. that individual subjects were at least partially constituted through it rather than just oppressed by it.  He also departs from the liberal enlightenment tradition in his critical attitude to the supposed subject of Rights and sceptical approach towards the kind of juridical consensus based deliberation favoured by Pettit. He notes that the institutional and communicative practices of such a deliberative model while pertaining to a universal and neutral form of communicative discourse are themselves the result of numerous struggles and social conflicts, the facts of which when obscured tend to background differences in communicative idioms and privilege the viewpoint of dominant groups. Thus any consensus reached in this way cannot be the basis of a power relation, but, at best its instrument or result. In itself such procedures cannot guarantee our freedom from arbitrary power.

Foucault’s anti-humanist and more holistic approach also bears upon the relationship the subject has to themselves in the sense of not being a slave to ones appetites or desires. Freedom, or rather ‘practices of freedom’ have the form of being a type of self-mastery in conjunction with others so as to minimize relations of domination. Crucially though unlike the Marxian promise of disalienation under communism such resistance against domination does not hold the possibility of a revelation that would uncover a true or authentic subjectivity beyond the view of power. There is no return to itself in the uncovering of humanity’s species being, rather the subject is always first and foremost the subject of power. But that does not mean that we are mere docile bodies, thoroughly subjectivized by impersonal forces around us. While the subject is always in-and-of power it is also the resisting subject, the subject of contestation and counter-conduct who refuses a form of governance and seeks to test its limits, and in doing so opens up new possibilities of subjectivity and forms of life.

4. There is a distinction which Foucault mobilised late in his life between relations of power and states of domination which I think could be well deployed in the intersectional discussions on oppression. The latter are states of such utter subjection, where the disparity between the parties is so great that negotiation or contestation is negligible or absent. These states are closest to those which animated the classical Republicans and led to the comparisons with slavery. Relations of power on the other hand require a degree of freedom on the side of the subject in order to function, where the dynamic between the parties admits of a degree of fluidity and changeability. It is these kinds of relations that predominate in liberal society, which as the French philosopher argued, entails at its heart a productive / destructive relationship with freedom. As he precisely diagnosed: “Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats etcetera” (Foucault 2010 pg64). Thus it seems we have an admission from Foucault that freedom in the negative tradition, as non-interference, still has a place in his theory. A space of non-interference in which relations of power can be contested is a necessary condition for what he calls games of truth and practices of freedom to be conducted. As such: “liberation from states of domination is sometimes the political or historical condition for a practice of freedom” (Foucault 1997 pg283).

Within this hybrid theory of liberty and domination that is neither negative nor fully positive self-mastery is not so much a set of prescriptions identified with a teleological conception of the Good, the achievement of which would enable an individual to be considered free; but rather it is a constant technique or “care of the self” through which an individual gives themself the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination”(Foucault 1987 pg18). As highlighted by the Canadian philosopher James Tully, to contest a rule within a relation of power is not the prolegomenon to freedom but the practice of freedom, the enlightenment ethos itself (Tully 2009 pg127).

If we apply this idea to the sorts of “oppressive” relations held up in recent intersecionalist discussions, say physical attractiveness, we can see that it is difficult to construe the relationship between the relevant parties as being either a state of domination or in itself oppressive. Attractive people may have some advantages over people considered less attractive but that in no way means they have the ability to arbitrarily interfere with the lives of others. We could well consider the normative criteria of physical attractiveness arbitrary but the relation of power between those individuals and the rest of society is clearly not. Thus an appropriate approach to the disparity between those considered attractive and those who are not isn’t a kind of liberationist politics where the yoke of pretty people is to be overthrown. Rather, it is the more complex system of relationships that produce the arbitrary norms of physical form that should be tackled. This might involve contesting forms of cultural authority like the media and fashion industry that promote particular body images; struggles for recognition of different body forms in public life; and of course attacking the wider and all pervasive culture of commodification that runs through much of how we think about ourselves and our place in the world. A great deal of this is dependent on democratic forms of contestation and thus also implies the possibility of alliances with similar minded individuals and further struggles in other areas of social life to enable progress to be made². Crucially, activists engaged in these sorts of struggles should recognise them as just the sorts of games of truth and practices of freedom that Foucault theorised. They are struggles that take place within power rather than just against it. They are fought not in the name of an essential identity but instead towards the possibility of an autonomous subjectivity, capable of renewal, always critical, with the possibility of thinking and acting differently. Or again: such practices aim not at self-liberation but rather the possibility of, and care of the self, with all the ethical implications that follow.

Taking this all into account I hold that the concept of oppression in circulation in much of the opposition’s discourse is inadequate. Firstly it holds the false promise of a world “beyond oppression”, which I take to mean the deactivation of all power, and thus to be impossible. Secondly the current trend for movements against social “oppressions” of various kinds has led to the elevation of the identarian category of ‘subject who is being oppressed’ (always singular, always essential). To the familiar class, racial, and women’s oppression we have now a huge spectrum of persons (or ‘wheel of oppression’. You can find it on Google) vying for status as oppressed identities to the detriment of all forms of collective solidarity. From where amongst these atomised micro sects of the “oppressed” do we find the potential for new forms of communality?  As I have tried to show there is another story which mobilises a tradition of politics and theory that gives us a more differentiated and I think more productive approach to power and domination in modern society. It takes the classical Republican insights regarding the undesirability of relations of domination and how those relations can affect the ethical constitution of an individual or community; and utilising Michel Foucault’s work we can see how power in social life is multi-faceted, dispersed, and does not entail merely repression but through our interactions with it constitute the possibility of living any ethical life whatsoever.

Our current political situation is a confusing spectacle. As I alluded to at the beginning the solidity of the Right, of the forces that are ranged against the opposition, represents a better starting point for talking about resistance to the status quo than the increasingly beleaguered term The Left. As should be clear from the above discussion, to describe some currents within the opposition as socialist, Left, or even progressive is way off the mark. With this in mind I think the distinction I have tried to present between states of domination and relations of power represents a much better theoretical frame through which to understand the terrain of contemporary politics than the undifferentiated catch all of ‘oppression’ to which seemingly anyone can attach their banner. Moving away from this term and the concomitant gamut of oppressed identities would permit the opportunity for a renewed focus on thinking community along the lines of resistance to arbitrary power and the necessary forms of democratic organisation needed to contest power relations including forms of government. Such thinking would ground community (whether a community of activists, or otherwise) in terms that eschew essence or identity and which put autonomy, ethics, and the overturning of domination at the heart of politics.

Notes:

1 - See Pettit’s Republicanism: A theory of freedom and Government for detailed exposition of his political theory. Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism offers a concise genealogy of republican freedom.

2 – Whichever strategy is deployed I cannot see any justification for the sorts of terroristic moralising done by some purveyors of privilege theory. Are disparities between individuals in society significant? Very often. Are they morally significant? In most cases I cannot see how. The fact of someone being blessed with height or physical attractiveness, or even being born white or into a rich family is not in and of itself morally significant, and I cannot but loath the attitude that to be born into “privilege” of any kind is to be a priori morally culpable, no more than I am culpable for being born in London and not Mogadishu.

References:

Foucault, Michel 1980 – Power/Knowledge (London, Harvester Wheatsheaf)

Foucault, Michel 1987 - The Ethic of Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom: an Interview with Michel Foucault on 20 January 1984: in J.Bernauer and D.Rasmussen (eds), The Final Foucault (London, MIT Press)

Foucault, Michel 1997 – Ethics:Essential Works of Foucault Vol 1 (London Penguin Books)

Foucault, Michel 2010 – The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan)

Tully, James 2009 - Public Philosophy in a New Key: vol. 1, Democracy and Civic Freedom

(Cambridge University Press)

Wollstonecraft,Mary – A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)

Chris Petit / Mordant Music – The Museum of Loneliness (Review)

Chris Petit / Mordant Music – The Museum of Loneliness

Label: Test Centre 

Year: 2013

The fledgling field of Hauntology has by now more or less petered out as a potential source from which to draw political inspiration. Derrida’s gnomic, literary gymnastics in Specters of Marx generated some interest at the time, notably the symposium involving Fred Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Toni Negri, later published as Ghostly Demarcations. But it was several years after the fact - this time sponsored by Wire journalists Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, that it re-emerged as a predominantly aesthetic concept with which to appraise musical forms. A whole raft of artists subsequently found themselves being analysed in a most peculiar fashion. There was talk of ghosts of past political possibilities haunting present cultural forms, of non-nostalgic appropriation, of ontology as conjuration, and a profusion of talk on the political value of re-using public educational broadcasts from the 1970s. Artists as different as Burial, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, and the Ghost Box label were drawn into this admittedly minority form of writing as conferences were hastily organised and papers submitted. Predictably, when mediated through the apparatus of high brow music journalism, and subsequently re-filtered through networks of distributors, label promotional materials and countless appropriations by artists and commentators the concept now appears in a somewhat confused and ragged state.

Fortunately this LP, a collaboration between novelist and film maker Chris Petit and reluctant one time hauntological renegade Mordant Music has taken the best of what became the normative description for this music and improvised the rest, producing a dizzying fifty minute trip of text and textual interpretation that breathes new life into the genre. Petit’s themes signal his intent: The Museum of Loneliness acknowledges that the primary modern relation is with the screen, the digital screen as well as the psychological screen; he intones early on the second side. The basic framework may seem familiar; the mapping of cultural memory in the present, the exploding of conventional narrative, the relativisation of accepted idioms, all that might be subsumed under that loose signifier “post-modern”. Petit’s aesthetic  however includes a psychogeographer’s concern with place and an almost obsessive approach to the ephemera of cinema. For the most part though the record revolves around Petit reading of some of the more Ballardian passages from his novels Robinson, The Hard Shoulder, and The Passenger. Mordant Music in turn provides a suitably dystopic and disorientating collage of rhythms, distorted field recordings and warped electronics.

The opening fourteen minutes of side one are perhaps the most uncanny. Petit’s narrative drawn from Robinson tells a vaguely noirish story of moral decay set amid a tattered London Soho. His nasal and slightly sneering tone is well suited to describe with clinical detachment the sordid games of Robinson in his underground video suite. Petit the psychogeographer is given free rein in the climactic fantasy where amid the flood Soho “breaks free from the rest of the city and the smoke and fire; Robinson the dirty roamer of Oxford street gone from the rupture”. This section also introduces the first of the lists that appear on the record. The context is absent, leaving tantalisingly ambiguous the sources for the images that range from William Blake walking down Poland Street (shadowed by a dog) to the only person not laughing in an audience.  Is it a series of cuts from Robinson’s film? a piece of internal cinema? or a synthesis of both, thus deliberately blurring the borders between the digital and psychological screen. Other lists appear on the second side including one musing on what a museum of loneliness might actually be: museum as attitude; the museum of loneliness as a roving parasite; it is not funded by the CIA; it is most at home in the departure lounge; the museum of loneliness believes institutional thinking no longer reads the modern world. The third list which finishes the record harks back to Petit’s former calling as film editor for Time Out magazine and is made up of incidents, items and facts from the history of cinema. The music at this point provides an almost metronomic backdrop to the words which appear as equal parts liturgy and a series of options from an automated telephone exchange; Morricone’s music, Jane Birkin looking through a keyhole, Sue Lloyd to Michael Caine “do you always wear your glasses...

Chris Petit

Here and in the other lists I recall a line from Derrida’s book: “The spectral rumour now resonates, it invades everything: the spirit of the “sublime” and the spirit of “nostalgia” cross all borders” (pg169). Amongst the infinite multiplicity of possible narratives Petit highlights the glaring dead end of hauntology as a form of thought to escape the “eternal now”. The sheer indeterminacy of cultural memory, how it is impossible to distinguish a truly political yearning for past possibilities from a nostalgic appropriation from a mere recalling of minutia from the past, undermines the claim to privileging some forms of recollection over others. One of signatures of post-modernity (or hypermodernity as Petit names it at one point) is the relativity of historical appropriation. Ghost Box records might imagine an alternative 1970s, while Burial laments the death of rave culture, and The Caretaker renders ballroom records from the 20s into creeping miasmas of sound. In each of these cases there is a technique at work much of which can be located in Pierre Schaeffer’s work on the acousmatic object in the 1950s and 60s. The idea made palpable by the advent of disk cutting lathes and soon after magnetic audio tape is that small pieces of sound, be they voices, instrumental sound, or field recordings, could be abstracted from their source and relocated in dislocated form into new compositions. These days we call it sampling. This uncanny effect of dislocation is the basic sonic logic at work in Petit and Mordant Music’s record to which they augment with the literary themes of memory aphasia.

Similarly with the image comes a necessity for intervention, for as Petit says during the excursus on the meaning of the Museum: “with the image bank exploded it behove someone to begin reassembling.” But without any normative criteria with which to appraise the images and competing narratives , with the effacing of the subject to whom this task would fall, the resultant cultural and historical word soup provides little more than the option of a higher gear for contemporary spectacle. A necessity to act, to build a narrative without any solid ground to build on; this is perhaps one way to understand what Derrida means when (quoting Hamlet) he refers to the world as being out of joint.  And so as with Robinson the only thing that matters becomes the myth one makes for oneself. Petit’s record demonstrates the still existent aesthetic possibilities behind these ideas, but crucially it is at its most prescient when taking the post-modern hauntological condition itself as the material to be worked on; there is simply no escape, nothing beyond the spectacle.