Michel Valentin
Foreign Lang. and Lit.
UM
Paul Dixon
Critical Theory
UM
(Editor's Note: In this insightful article, Valentin and Dixon provide a common postmodern theoretical basis for why institutions cannot reform themselves therefore why the legalistic repression of oppressive hate-speech contributes to general oppression, why traditional moralizing ethics courses which do not deal with the representational mechanisms of oppression are bound to fail and what you should do about all of this.--William Plank, Contributing Editor)
I speak therefore I am / but I cannot be found wherever I think I am.
"It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak."/1/
This article addresses an ongoing debate, itself the result of trends in academic discourse, within the broader context of a progressive deculturation/reculturation process, along pop- and consumerist-diffusion networks, in a media and tele-information based culture.
The desire to formulate a "hate speech" restrictive code, which would regulate student behavior codes on university campuses, betrays many disquieting and ominous implications. There is a general consensus at all levels of the university community (student, faculty, administration) against unacceptable behavior, which includes "hate speech" as both undesirable and/or unacceptable. Not only does the definition of "hate speech" encounter problems of semantics and legality, but as to the means of limiting its effects, opinions differ for good reasons. Some would like to ban it from campus by making it illegal.
The "hate speech crisis" points to a rupture within the traditional academic nexus which used to consolidate, at least at the level of intellectual reflection, things as diverse as "the crisis of consciousness," "theoretical consciousness," and the pragmatics of "practical action." That is to say, the creation-formation of future social forces, which used to be a by-product of the teaching goal of U.S. universities/2/ (from the sixties to the late seventies), is witnessing a weakening of its capacity for political struggle. It is as if certain forms of "heterogeneity," which in any event always exceed a normative system such as the one characterizing an institution of higher learning,/3/ have now exceeded the very possibility of being "ingested" by the university, to say nothing of its old assumed abilities at "digestion." If hate speech is becoming an increasingly urgent issue and a more prevalent problem on American campuses, it would seem that the American student population must include growing numbers of vociferous and bigoted young people.
Through complacency, indifference, impotency, dictates of "wisdom," or even in some cases, tacit, latent complicity, many institutions have tended to ignore the problem. But then the university community has always had the tendency to see itself as a stable, tradition-bound, timeless, self-contained sphere: an island of greens upon which the passage of time was only to be marked by the melody of tradition-honored chimes (a la Cambridge or Big Ben); something which only admits of being "revolutionized" by the introduction of computerized "timed-backup." Caught up in this dream of itself, we can assume the university was easily caught off-guard.
In its traditional form--the form still controlling its self-image along with its popular image--the university became the epitome of a mode of Western thought and society, drawn largely from the Enlightenment and thus emphasizing "reason" and/or "rationality."/4/
It invented disciplines such as the Humanities, Literature, Sciences, etc., in order to cope with the transmission of a system of values which it deemed proper and vital to its survival. This corpus became the canon, a heritage to cherish and embellish. A network of "old boys" (mixed with a few "old girls") made sure that "things stayed under control" and were debated according to Robert's Rules of Order. Thus it set out to insure that a gentleman's agreement type of rationale and consensus would preside over and control oppositional thinking and prevail over passion, unreason, superstition, and certainly over any "gross" or "common" behavior or thinking. We might say that it was concerned to make sure that the pendulum would not lean too much to Foucault's side. This meant that the classicist conception of humanities had to be given the upper hand or, at the very least in more recent times, share the power with such new rivals as the contemporary business, law, and medical schools (where the real power lies and which receive the lion's share of the bounty).
However, within such a context, the balance was upset by a number of factors. At the ideological level, postmodernism, the "invasion" of continental and postmodern tools of thinking as well as the modernist reaction to techno-culture, has unsettled the "established order." But that order has been factually destabilized by a government (federal and/or local) either unwilling or too slow to adapt to the new conditions of the market created by a surge in the demand for higher education and the pressure brought about by new types of students and/or non-Western/non-W.A.S.P. students. Competition being fierce for admissions, privileges, grants, scholarships, tenure, etc., the gentleman's agreement does not seem to hold any longer in many instances. Time and time again, this "patterned rationality," betraying a radical lack of vision, has nurtured a deep resentment which has popped up unannounced, dressed in "un-civilized," "unorthodox," "uncultured" attires, and whose power of attraction is apparently inversely proportional to relative degrees of sophistication, elaboration, and abstraction. The reactions of ethnocentrism to what it perceives as a threat to its "integrity" and survival are then all the more upsetting, the more violent, precipitated, and unthought/unthoughtful are the responses it seems to engender. "Hate-speech pronouncements" are just such examples. The institution used to dismiss them as "mere excesses" or "gross behavior." But the appearance of "hate speech" on the agenda of academic debate, rather than merely "its appearance" at the level of those who practice it, would seem to indicate that old problems are now coming to a head. The universities can no longer ignore or marginalize the encounter with the "unwanted." Yet the typical response seems to index the "olde desire": a desire both to designate or single-out excesses and to exclude them. In any case, the dominant desire is not one of directly addressing this complex issue.
However, if a need is presently felt by people on both the right and the left of the political spectrum to make "the Law" more explicit and stronger in this field of "acceptable behavior," it is safe to assume that something is going on somewhere. Perhaps it is felt that the safety and integrity of particular groups of people, students, women, minorities, etc., are being threatened. We must surmise, then, that the legal process and the consensual sphere, which normally homogenize human relations, are either not working any longer or that these processes have been preempted by another more powerful process, which silences or disrupts the first one. Consequently, the resort to the repressive apparatus of law appears on the surface quite logical. But at the level of a university, this seems to be little more than admittance of failure on the part of educators, who then would turn to the law and add to it another item, making the "super-ego" of that university stronger and more aggressive by extending the scope of law and thus of enforcement.
But just as the language in the above paragraph would indicate, the universities seem to be running along in accordance with principles of Freudian psychology. However, these self-same principles have, in the course of subsequent theory, been altered beyond their generally understood meanings. So it would be advisable to look again at what is entailed here, looking a bit further than "general consciousness" of the academic sort is given to looking.
According to Freud, any civilization (and its discontents) can be defined by tenets which activate the demands for order, beauty, and cleanliness. These three basic requirements, governing the exchange between the self and the community, prop up civil society by constituting its ideology. Morality and/or ethical behavior are the result of the three basic requirements and of the encoding of their modalities. As such, these codes produce "desirable behavior"--everything from socially acceptable behavior to politically correct behavior--and thereby institute accepted, shared, and consensual values based on behavioral commands and categorical imperatives. The enforcement of these values is often co-extensive with the concept and territory of "The Institution." This can be illustrated (in a positive way) by, for instance, the example of a female student who may have just gotten out of a physically abusive marriage and consequently considers the campus as an "island of security." But this "sense of security" can also yield strange paranoid-type effects, such as would be exemplified by a professor's statement disowning "the decisions made by the others out there," where the hand is always pointing off campus. It can also be illustrated (in a negative manner) by the fact that such an institution is based on a bureaucratic tradition, which has the tendency to laminate what resists its specific social and cultural patterns of integration and manipulation, tending in such a way to homogenize "behavioral utterances."
But at another level, a linguistic level, we could say that our behavior, which shows itself as well in "behavioral utterances," is governed by linguistic laws, such as those of metonymy and metaphor. These figures of discourse and speech, which inform the various cultural and ideological codes, regulate and position our "behavioral utterances" within what Jacques Lacan called the Symbolic. The Symbolic can then be analyzed on the basis of a given language, but is considerably more than any particular language. It is more a matter of the very possibility of language. And in this context, the Symbolic operates by substituting values for meaning in the play of our desires. In the context of the present problem one could say that respect for the other is supposed to be transmitted by the gradual imposition/seduction/co-optation of allegedly universal moral categories, i.e., "humanist" and humanitarian values, through the educational process. But this process operates at the level of the Symbolic, if it operates at all. And today it does not seem to be operating, or at least does not seem to be operating in the "right way." Too much Imaginary has slipped in, and the mediating instances, through which the Symbolic operates, have become fuzzy (such as the "name-of-the-father," for instance). But why is this the case and how is one to understand why this is the case?
The movements of post-structuralism (based on theories of semiotics and the notions of "desire"), deconstructionism, and even structuralism itself (based on Saussurean linguistics) are readings which can be considered the direct (post-)modernist reactions to technoculture. As such they "invade," by exploding the boundaries, the categories, and tightly compartmentalized genres of academic disciplines. In spite of what the "conservatives" or "supporters of the status quo" claim, these theoretical movements are not only based on the reading of books./5/
The notion of text is not limited to the Book. As such, the answer of the Institution is feminist, (multi)cultural, and post-colonial studies, etc. Consequently these theoretical tools can be used to address the problematics of the configurations of subjectivity and discourses of power and alienation produced directly or indirectly (reactively or at a secondary level) by post-modern societies' modalities of de-culturation/a-culturation/re-culturation. The re-culturation is achieved along primary, semiotic lines actualized by pop- and consumerist culture--privileging the Imaginary. These theoretical tools can help us formalize non-repressive tactics of non-passivity to the "hate-speech crisis" through a reading of figures of speech such as the ones described by Jacques Lacan:
Hieroglyphics of hysteria, blazons of phobia, labyrinths of the Zwangneuroses--charms of impotence, enigmas of inhibition, oracles of anxiety-talking arms of characters, seals of self-punishment, disguises of perversion--these are the hermetic elements that our exegesis resolves, the equivocations that our invocation dissolves, the artifices that our dialectic absolves, in a deliverance of the imprisoned meaning, from the revelation of the palimpsest to the given word of the mystery and to the pardon of speech./6/
Things have become confused and confusing. To repeat the words of the poet, it seems more and more that "Foul is fair and fair is foul."/7/ Among many other things, postmodernism has befuddled the issues which used to be more clear cut, hence divided, and consequently less divisive. It is as if modern technology, mass consumption, consumer society, e.g./i.e., the entire framework of post-industrial capitalism, had been conspiring to blur distinctions between body and language, right and left, and, of course, right and wrong, good and bad. In any event it is clear that codes of behavior and patterns of permissable speech are in fluxes, along with societal forms. And even though there is nothing new about transition and transformation itself, there is something new here. Recent events, both national and international, are accelerating the process of transition and altering the conditions under which all such transition has been traditionally understood in the post-Enlightenment world. All stable divisions are collapsing, save perhaps the distinction between the oppressed and systems of oppression. And the effects of the new interface between "old division" and new patterns of transformation are readily apparent in the problem of "hate speech." Is "speech" "action" or does it still obey the system of legal differences established by the "liberal" political code? Is "the body" only a "representation" and "a word"? In relation to "hate speech," postmodernism, with its blending of ethics and aesthetics, with its cult of the representating image, has the tendency to de-politicize and make things less clear cut. Through its uncanny reliance on metonymy, it has the same effect, at a certain level to reify that was once a matter of the psychomatic and ideographic notion of "blood," that which used (and was used) to blur the distinctions between culture and race, class struggle and racism, etc. The key notion of postmodernism, just as it is a principal form of modernity itself, is the collusion between image, word, and representation. Our world is becoming more and more a matter of images. Our senses, our perception, thus the perspective we get from the world, this entire complex is becoming more and more mediated by and through images. Moreover, this mediation is becoming a primary instance replacing all reference to the world outside, to the world of images and objects, which we had taken for granted and which our senses and perceptions had grown accustomed to considering everlasting, permanent--always there, if for whatever strange reason, we were to fall into doubt. The modalities of expression of various codes are becoming, if not infinite, at least plural. As Nietzsche once wrote, "God is dead," i.e., the transcendental signified is no longer. Yet the narcissistic relation of self to this multiplicity of encoded reality has not yet changed. We need a new noetics. The world out there used to be what it was all about. Indeed, to make it appear more real, even science and technology did their best to accustom us, to make us believe in their reality; and this especially since we (humans, our modern society) have an impact on them: i.e., "we" drive cars in this reality, "we" send rockets and satellites to other planets, etc. Surely then both "they" and "we" must be real, and real in the forms used to move in and transform this "reality." But again there is a problem--the problem of representations which increasingly cite only other representations.
Jean Baudrillard, who came to speak at the University of Montana in 1989--the University which is the springboard for this article, having just held a number of talks on "hate speech"--informed those listening that something "tremendous" was going on, that the world we used to take for granted was disappearing (at least on our screens of representation) and was being replaced by a simulated entity, a non-referential dimension, which then comes increasingly to refer to itself and which uses the "real world," the "world out there," as a mere pretext, or as a subtext of increasingly little importance. Cinema, video images and texts, t.v., computer assisted images, etc., are all inventing images which are not a re-presentation of something outside, something in the "real world." They are performative, not "constative." These postmodern representations only keep outlines of such a world and use them as a mere fractal dimension, as an operator of affects; and this, only because nature, the "real terrestrial world," still seems to move us on an affective register. (This, too, however, could presumably be changed--thus we might eventually or even now be more moved by simulations than by some older system of "the real" deemed nostalgic.) So a hyper-reality is being discovered. And this process of substitution and simulation is going on without our direct knowledge, without our being totally aware of it. We do not fully understand the implications of it, of where all this is going to lead us. To come to the crux of the matter, especially as this concerns "hate speech," this transformation puts tremendous pressures on all of us, re-working the inter-subjective positions along what the French sociologist calls new "tribal lines"; and it does so at all levels. So we may now ask a pertinent question: What is happening to violence and the symbolic expressions of violence in a world tainted with hyperreality and governed by a new form of tribalism?
These postmodern changes mean that we have to define what we used to take for granted, what used to be necessary and used to work more or less regularly, or that which used to encounter or promote a consensus, even if this consensus only meant opinions battling along political lines and the like. In history, or at least the history of politics, laws were expressions of these debates and these struggles for power. But it stands to reason in the present context that they no longer have the same "representative" force (whether one is on the right of the political spectrum or the left). It is true that in postmodern times, with the breakdown of the great explanatory systems (-isms, etc.) and the dismantling of the traditional superego and the old cultural institutions, things seem more permissible. Consumer society and postmodern capitalism have liberated affects which used to be bound. And this works in such a way and in all directions (positively and negatively) that panic may ensue. This also provokes heightened suffering for many people, since this liberation is not free. It has a price. As Donna Harraway explains, a complex network of a tele-informatics of domination ensues from this liberation of affects. Fields of flux, liberated by anti-Oedipal movements and reactions (unwinding of the Oedipal law, the law of restriction and prohibition), are polarizing things in an often unwarranted, unwanted way. The liberation of affects effected by postmodern capitalism (not a result of a liberation of "desire," which cannot be fully or fundamentally liberated) has opened the legendary Pandora's box. According to Juliet Flower MacCannell,
We know that, for Lacan, the traditional versions of what the symbolic order offers--its ideological forms, as "morality," "religion," "culture," "civilisation," "Oedipus," have played out, exhausted their traditional power of incentive. We live, we are told, in a post-religious, amoral world, and Oedipus is waning. Even our sense of living in a world of "laws" seems threatened less by the themes of pity than of terror. If the Symbol is to continue to dominate the other modes, it clearly must now create new ideological forms for maintaining and perpetuating its dominance./8/
In the case of speech, we then note that things which no one dared to say aloud twenty years ago (except for marginalized fascist groups) are now in a certain perverse way "chic", "cool." It seems that it has become all right to express one's rage (imaginary or real), in the terms one chooses. At the same time, the most aberrant associations, associations by mere contiguity (without any classical logical ordering), seem often to furnish a ready-made, easily used explanation or legitimation for some position. Cynicism, narcissism, and an abrupt sense of having been left out, help fuel an intense insecurity. The marginalizing power of that which is simultaneously the major subsumptive force in the contemporary world, namely the capital system, is operating in ways to increase such insecurity. The American melting-pot is apparently not working as it used to (it actually worked along W.A.S.P. defined lines of integration) and its parameters of integration are shifting. And to make things worse, one cannot doubt that the Republican party policy in the U.S. has paralyzed the federal government. It has been unable and/or unwilling to lessen the inequalities resulting from the modalities governing the fast-paced entry of American society into the twenty-first century. And we know that this century has already begun. So whereas one of its societal forms is multi-culturalism, what we find is that all over the country there is a "red-neck revival." In Europe, we also see a resurgence of harsh and brutal nationalism accompanied by violence, as if the old demons had been re-awakened in their hardened coffins./9/ The violence which accompanies this diffuses itself along the molar lines/10/ of the social body, re-activating symbols, syndromes, and dormant symptoms. So again in the United States, vociferous and violent minorities among the "silent majority" took it upon themselves to "express" the latent "fears and unease" of this "silent majority." This new outburst of violent "identificatory practices" (both at the level of speech and the level of physical actions) is then also accompanied by disinterest and the disinvestment of masses of people in the political sphere. One movement is perhaps partly explained by the other. This may be the reason why we have to contend with the following at the University of Montana:
the campus literally responded with silence last spring, when a gay freshman was trapped in his dorm room for 90 minutes while students shouted epithets. ([Missoula, Montana] The Missoulian, 21 Feb. 1993)
In the light of the above, we have to question ourselves about the validity of such parameters as body, physical violence, speech, discourse, etc. Do these words, which used to represent tangible, concrete things inscribed in blood, sweat, and tears, still stand with the same power and signification? If they do, how? If not, how have things changed? If postmodern reality is pre-empting the world of its physicality, of its "real," tangible, concrete dimension, replacing this with a simulated dimension, then it would seem to follow that body and language are all replaced by a new, non-mimetic structure. This new structure forms a continuum within which the body and speech are but two variables among many parameters and indexes. That is to say that they function simply as events, neither one having priority. And this means that they could be more or less interchangeable. Hence, old bodily effects (physical actions) could be absorbed by new simulated affects (a complex interplay of language and emotions). For instance, we see millions of kids watching t.v. cartoons without notifying or indexing a direct, provable correlation between the representation of violence and the actualization of violence against humans or animals. By the same token, and in spite of all the rhetoric of the right and certain feminist groups, no direct quantifiable correlations can ever be established between sex-crimes and pornography, except by means of statistical simulations (which may act as stimulations.) In fact, it has been proven that in certain countries, the liberalization of "pornography" has diminished the rate of sex-crimes (Denmark, Sweden, etc.). Here, however, we do not take up the greater issue of the total effect on women. It is here only necessary to point out that the affective register can be saturated in a new way, without necessarily producing the same things at the level of physical effects, scenarios played out on bodies, etc. But this then leads to disquieting questions: If postmodern hyper-reality is "real," then what is not? What has become of suffering in postmodern reality? Do acts of transgression and defiance have the same symbolic power they used to have?
In the case of "hate speech" this is a bit more complex, since we deal with representations of course, but also with "real" or actual people. The Other which was already excluded from the self, is here lost a second time through the hate-speech phenomenon, since it comes back as a "figure of hatred" which the perpetrator of "hate speech" conjures up. The self is waging a war on reality (and it rages all the more when the self then encounters its own impotence by way of barring the Other from the self's own existence) by mimetically surrendering itself to its fears. That is to say, those perpetrating "hate-speech acts" do not deal with their own representations of the Other (which may have been mediated by the screen), but they apply these representations directly, projecting them, onto the Other in person (these sexual, religious, or ethnic others called "minorities"). This translates into the fact that the suffering (violation, brutalization, etc.) of the Other is not simulated, but happens in "real" time, since the Other is a "real" Other, a person of flesh and blood. Thus we see that the whole referent has not shifted dimension. This could mean that verbal hate speech is neither more nor less brutal than physical harassment or intimidation. Which would be to say that in the complex transactions and interactions between form and concept, form has a heightened responsibility, especially when the world has the tendency to become formal.
This entire state of affairs then translates into the principal problem for the analysis of "hate speech": namely, there is no longer any difference between the body and its representation. Roland Barthes wrote/11/ that metonymic violence often juxtaposes, in the same syntagm, heterogenous fragments belonging to spheres of language ordinarily separated by the socio-moral taboos (this seems to be the case in horror movies). He also wrote that the way to horror is metonymy, which he saw as an instrument more terrible than torture. Thus the direct juxtaposition of "differences," normally requiring systems of mediation, is a mode of psychological torture. Sartre is often quoted (badly) as saying that hell is represented by the others and what they say about you. But again we see that crossing a line or violating a framework of mediation--in this case, mediation which holds in abeyance the direct encounter with a world of statements "about oneself by others"--would constitute an encounter with "pain" or "hell." But in all of this the body is the topos of a nexus. For it is bodily position which would constitute the possibility of such metonymic situations. "Hate speech" would not even be an issue, if the speech in question were not somehow "uttered" in the bodily presence of the person to whom it is addressed, either in person or as merely the stand-in for all such persons. And for it to operate with full force in other contexts, such as "hate mail," the recipient of the mail must assume that there is no longer any guarantee that the forces which pushed the person behind the mail into anonymity will continue indefinitely to keep that person "at a distance." In any case, we see here that the Symbolic (language) and the Real (which escapes language) inscribe themselves on the body through metonymy. Psychological functions are thus juxtaposed to one another, rub up against one another, and seem to interpenetrate one another in the space of a person's body and on the basis of bodily presence and bodily proximity or juxtaposition to a threat. For again, it is just as obvious that if one did not have a body, one would hardly be capable of being threatened by speech alone. What could one say to Aristotle's theos of thought thinking itself as thinking, to psychologically terrorize or threaten it? But returning to normal human conditions, it would now appear that henceforth "hate speech" would be as detrimental as "physical harassment," since these two would be co-extensive. Textual analysis and the theoretical pronouncements that the adepts of postmodern criticism favor--and we certainly count ourselves here--all seem to point in the same direction and index towards the same conclusion; and this, even though what is left of our "common sense" seems to point to a still existing separation between body and mind, speech and physical action. So now one wonders what is left of the idea of sublimation. Isn't it better to deal with aggression on an oral level, through verbal expression of hatred, than by turning to a physical manifestation of this same hatred? It must be easier for the dominant power bloc (in which many liberals and feminists groups are included) to contain verbal aggression than for them to take on its physical manifestations.
Without going into the theoretics which would allow us to delineate a distancing between the two, if such a distancing is indeed necessary, we still argue that the conclusion reached by some of the panelists of the "hate-speech issue" at the University of Montana is not a productive one. In other words we do not agree that to the continuum formed or promoted, in the postmodern mode, by "hate speech" and "physical harassment," we should answer by establishing the same continuum on the side of the law. First, for the reason that the legal system, as it exists, does not and cannot reflect postmodern "fluctuating reality." Its premises would have to be changed. Secondly, the fight against suffering cannot be furthered by inflicting more suffering: i.e., the extension of the legal speech and of its repressive arms. We are not denying that such a suffering exists under the form of brutalization and physical aggressions, as we all know, personally or by proxy (empathy, etc.). What we question, however, is the rate of increase in the field of physical aggression and the practicality of using legal aggression as a countermeasure. In other words, does the increase in the rate of violence on this campus and in this community, or on campuses generally and in our culture, justify a hardening of the legal system, and the recourse to new, more powerful, more inclusive legal speech? If not, then what are the motives behind those who are pushing to criminalize "hate speech" and make it punishable by law? Who is pushing for a drive towards more order, by re-enforcing the Symbolic, the Oedipal law?--And this, especially when we know that a whole battery of laws already exists which name assault and battery. The example of the "non-use" of the law in the case of the terrorization of a gay male on campus by some dorm members, last year, does not mean that the laws do not apply. And if supplemental laws are passed, making "hate speech" a crime, what effect would this have on the campus and the community, besides re-affirming our solidarity with the victims and making us feel good? As two supporters, wanting to ban "hate speech," expressed it:
The university should "express its abhorrence" of the conduct, and side with the victims because it attacks members of "marginal" groups such as gays, women and Jews. (The Missoulian, 21 Feb. 1993)/12/
But is the re-enforcement of repressive laws (prescribing dos and don'ts, framing excess) the best way to show "abhorrence of an act"? Does the re-enforcement of such laws make the campus safer? Does it promote a deescalation of violence? Would the suppression of the oral signifier of "hate" be reified into a hardening of its signified counterpart, or is the contrary the case, and are we only dealing with questions of metonymy at the level of signifiers? If so, then let us say so openly. Or perhaps we are confronted here with mere signifying issues of ontology, such as those produced by questions such as "can I deconstruct the master's house using his own tools?" or "can one beat the phallus (its laws) using the phallus, thus beating it at its own game?"
"Hate speech" is the result, thus the product, of repression; but, at the same time, the expression of repression as "hate speech" is facilitated by a lowering of the affects of repression, of the effective responses of the repressive system. But even if, through the oldest resort to "means of instituting fear," one could drive "hate speech" underground, would one, in doing this, have stopped a motion to the sudden irruption of physical violence, when the "underground" suddenly appeared in "the underground parking lot" or just when "the police were not around"? Consequently can repression, the banning of "hate speech," be used against repression itself, where the end-product of repression is now, among other things, "hate speech"?
The answer to postmodern "disorder" and the relatively "new" re-emergence of a discourse of hatred does not necessarily pass through a recourse to new laws and new modes of control.
University professors seem often to develop a "priest" or "nun" syndrome, a "petit(e) bourgeois" moralism. It is true that the moralization of the self implies the training of the O/other. It is also no less true that victims have to be protected, especially when the brunt of this violence falls upon "minorities," the non-heterosexuals, non-whites and/or non-Christians. But there is a way around this ethical problem translated into the mundane terms of "morality." The signifier "morality" used to be one of the key words of the traditional political right and it seems that it has been taken up by many feminist and environmental groups. This, however, is a standard co-optive process. It is the kind of process by means of which a repressive system makes everybody, especially those who oppose it, subject to becoming more "like it." What is needed is not a re-enforcing of the repressive apparatus, which would only re-enforce systems of power and profit, or create feudal local centers of power dominated by administrators and/or campus intellectuals, using legal power to extend the prestige of their territory and the partisanship of their approaches to human problems. Expressing one's abhorrence of such violent behavior does not have to be translated into more laws. An active stand against violence and especially racial and sexual violence, i.e., a demand for less violence, does not mean that more legal control has to be enacted. The equation which is being made between less violence, more censorship, more legal control is one which borders on syllogicity, especially when there is already a legal structure to "criminalize" actions perpetrated on grounds of racism, sexism, etc. The suppression of the signifier "violence" is not going to translate itself magically into the disappearance of the signified "violence"--especially when postmodernism can be characterized by the sliding of signifiers and metonymic chains. The expression of violence would merely translate down the signifying chain.
What is needed is a "re-politicization" of people after decades of depoliticization due to the destabilizing effect of consumption society and increased competition. Bigoted behavior and its translation into violent, physical acts (from intimidation to harassment) is generally the result of ignorance and fear. Misconceptions and prejudices have become embedded in many minds which do not know better. This means that as far as we are concerned, here at this institution called the University of Montana, we have not done an adequate job. And it is certainly the case that this can be extended to the culture at large and its educational establishment, especially the "universities." Humanitarians, socialists, professors of higher learning and the like, scientists, administrators, humanists, leftists, religious people (meaning non-fundamentalists), feminists, etc., have not done all that they could have done in order to "enlighten" minds. Lacan, among others, has shown us that the university is also guilty of perpetrating the same mystification of ideological discourse that belongs to any and every other institutional setting. Professors have not been able to give themselves the power and means to spread out knowledge and make it meaningful to many students. They have only reached the few, the brave, who are already converted. Their classroom behavior has often been tamed and they have streamlined their modes of influence, as if obsessed by the possible repercussions of these modes of influence. Their fear that student evaluations could and would be used against them by Departmental Chairs, Departmental Evaluation Committees, by the University Administration, by the whole repressive apparatus of quantification of performance and accomplishments, their desire for popularity (the star syndrome) and for "groupies" as proof of effectiveness and territory of influence, all this explains partly why professors have not done the necessary job which could translate positively in the actual world. Informed by ratings, they often have "minimized" the power of the didactic parallels they could draw between the "real world" and the structural models with which they deal in the classroom. In the same way that t.v. sitcom producers first obey the dictates of Nielsen ratings and Madison Avenue, professors, for fear of losing their jobs, have gone along with the stream, trying to make the least possible waves. If, in some cases, they have attempted to do so by blending theory and practice, a praxis informed by life and a textual approach informed by sexual politics and socio-criticism (as in the case of certain feminist approaches), they have all too often done so in such a partisan way that their messages and practices, if helping people in the immediate, did not project in the long run and reach out to the larger segments of the population (both general and student).
Further, and especially true at the university, a lack of sophisticated political analysis, a "romantic reluctance" to take into account the other, even the "dummies," has resulted in a defensive increase of the parcelling and partializing of the students' "body politic," which so many professors claim to address. Professors have alienated large segments of potential political allies. The humanists have locked themselves into an onanism of the mind, cut from reality and from the representation of violence in modernity. To the challenges offered by postmodern problems they have answered with a discourse stressing elitism and a return to "ancient values." Others are practicing the "community credo" on a satisfying mini-scale which helps to prolong the myth of the university as the "ivory tower," an island unto its own. This is illustrated by the "Last Best Place" myth--a myth particularly powerful at the University of Montana. The religious people have hardened themselves into beatifying practices of infantile moral chanting and denouncing. The left has given up, and has even stopped licking its wounds. Most people have retreated into private spheres and have foreclosed their ability to stand up and be counted--some call it sloth, others indifference and an utter sense of impotency.
The interior support for these tendencies has then been supplied at both the departmental and administrative levels of the universities. Department after department has witnessed the departure or ousting of their most radical members on grounds of technicality, and/or for reasons of personal likes and dislikes. The radical people (often the most interesting, energetic, and promising) have stopped paying attention to those very details which ensure survival in areas and times of increased competition, fear and pitilessness. Their hands tied by ridiculous budgets, administrators have been more than willing to play a crooked game (one in which they keep cards under the table). It seems that everybody has given up. And all of this is orchestrated to the drum beats of demoralizing, de-financialising, and functional cost compression in the background.
Yet as history shows us, when times of complacency, discouragement, and weariness are further conjugated with periods of heightened complexity, one has often the tendency to resort to "the Law," the stick, the "hardened phallus," and this for the most generous of reasons on the surface--such as the honorable, justifiable desire to protect the victims from the victimizers. Still, even when recognizing this, there are others who think that they must not be duped by the political right and that for a change, the law must be bent, used and forced to serve the interests of the have-nots and/or victims. But here they call for the use of the same laws which have been designed to protect property and the people of property; all of which means somehow that censorship is all right if it censors evil. But censorship never censors evil. Such is a delusion born out of a reification of one's own sense of disempowerment and the result of one's seduction by the institution, its modes of operation, and one's relative sense and place of power. And thus we see that forces combine here to empower the Right while co-opting further what remains of the Left. And it should be well-noted that it has always been the Left, the oppressed and those fighting oppression, who have been co-optable. Christianity became "Rome," the Protestants became "the capital order" of the British Empire, the American Empire, the New World Order. Socialism and communism were co-opted and turned into fascism.
This desire to censor for the good of victims means a re-emergence of the "priest's syndrome," but, a re-emergence in a post-fascist world, which is postmodern in a split context. And that side of the context that is most apparent, in that it is most powerful, is not simply a matter of "hyperreality," but of "hyperreal fascism." Thus we see that since one cannot politicize, one tries to use the old moral paradigms, invented or at least carefully kept alive by the Right, to enact a thought-police type of approach. But the treachery of the context is such that Left does appear Right and is always in danger of co-optation by the Right. Statements such as
If we continue to ask our (minority, gay, and female) students to educate the community by the example of their own brutalization, we've got the issue all wrong. (The Missoulian, 21 Feb. 1993)
or the assertion that the identification of free speech with hate speech is a "neo-conservative, rightwing, Reagan Agenda" are confusing the issue even more by appealing to guilt feelings, thus producing the view that here one has no choice but to use the very powers of the "neo-conservative, right-wing, Reagan Agenda." It is as if to insinuate that one would de facto side with the victimizers or the political Right if one did not go along with the "hate-speech ban." This borders on character assassination and "intellectual terrorism." Nobody has asked anybody anything, while everyone is being swayed by a highly integrated repressive system, unresponsive in virtually every way to anything which would move against it at the "institutional level."
If "hate speech" has to be censored, it is then for the reason that some professors feel totally overwhelmed by the situation. But which situation? Where is the proliferation of "hate speech" on many campuses which would justify such an approach? The example of the case of the gay student (at the University of Montana) harassed by other students is not the best example, since it only shows that the case has been legally mishandled. And the hypothetical case quoted by a Law Professor of the University of Montana, that a student who was angry over a grade could fire a shot in his professor's front window, be arrested and released on bail within hours, and "the next day, the student's sitting in the front row of your class and you can't keep that student out of your class, based on the existing student conduct code" (The Missoulian, Feb 21) is totally ludicrous and demagogic. Of course any victimizer can be released on bail; this is one of the few counter-oppressive aspects of the law. Only the older orders of fascist regimes prohibit such a release. Besides the probability of such an event is so small that its use as a meaningful example is intellectually suspect and makes one question the motives of the one who utters it. In fact some students (male and female) do react with anger, hateful and irrational behavior (in evaluations, anonymous phone calls, etc.). And why not? Violence is everywhere. The violence of the grade is but the expression of a more subtle network of contradictions and oppressions. How naive to think that students should only react to a bad grade with reason, restraint and humor, or good work. But is this a reason for policing and censoring behavior? Danger lurks everywhere. Using the same type of example as a token, one would put a police(wo)man in front of every window of every office and store. And one notes this is precisely the governing desire, thus the desire being created today, a "desire" being carefully orchestrated into existence by the government itself. We will of course be left with the "desire," but no more real protection.
So again in the case of "hate speech" we see that the Left, or what is left of it at the universities, is acting towards the Right on the premise: "if you cannot change them, at least join their debate and by doing so, hope to educate them, and to modify the terms in such a way as to make them palatable for your own political agenda." But, again, there are laws against harassment and intimidation. At the University of Montana, as at most universities in America, there is even a student behavior code pinpointing what is permissible and what is not. By the way, there are no such codes in existence in most European universities, and this does not translate into more violence than on American campuses. "Hate speech" or its "gentrified form" is more and more coming out in the open, as in the case of David Duke in Louisiana. And Duke has been defeated at the polls. By the same logic and token, these "expressions" of "hate speech," which can be dealt with (here at the U. of M.) within the existing legal parameters if their formal expressions become physically or mentally dangerous, will more and more come out in the open; and if this "hatred" manifests itself as a speech form, it will be dismissed and ridiculed. Thus we should at least he able to use what is left of our "political systems" together with what is left of our "political consciousness" to combat the problem in ways which do not further the empowerment of the thoroughly repressive cultural system.
Systems of excess, excess organized as systems, are of course dangerous. Especially when what George Bataille has named the "accursed share"--la part maudite--(the symbolic exchange with/of death) has been preempted by the ways things have changed. This accursed share (a certain understanding of what Artaud used to call the theatre of cruelty) used to be taken care of and modulated by religious systems, codified systems of sacrifices and scape-goating./13/
Paradoxically, hate speech must be expressed openly, so one can deal with it, map it, frame and rebuke it. If this process is forced underground, the signified, the fear and the hate, will remain intact in the absence of its exorcism. Which means that the signifying chain at the level of its expression will not be able to do its job (discourse taking on "hate speech"). Since hate speech thrives on the persistence of what it indirectly addresses, while indirectly expressing the fears of a threatened self, the University has to recast the problems which hate-speech is supposed to address by analyzing what forms, structures, and functions operate within the representations perceived as threatening and judged as "unacceptable" by the hate-speech utterer. This could be the task of courses on ethics and ethical behavior, courses now constantly praised by the "yuppies/new age" (or "old age") liberals and the revamped traditional right. Instead of filling the heart of the curriculum of these courses to the core with virtue (notwithstanding the threat of a possible affective melt-down) by constantly moralizing and addressing the issue of corruption under the self-righteous banner of slogans such as "more responsibility for ethical behavior," "ethics for professionals," or "humanities are ethical," etc., let us address the fears operative both in "hate speech" and its "moralizing opponents," and de-construct them, showing students, "hate speech mongerers" and those seduced by such forms of discourse, what is going on. Let's not censor anything. Let's deal with everything. We should help our students to look at the world and politicize themselves and thus become socially aware individuals.
If we carefully use the best which postmodern theory can give, namely insight into the working structures of the dominant culture, the interface between institutional structure and the psychic mechanisms of desire and repression, we can formulate a valuable addition to the analysis of current cultural trends. But no theory can ground action. Indeed, the desire for such a ground, the legitimating desire, leads constantly to the construction of edifices of oppressive power. What one may then note in the above analysis, as if a flaw--namely the shift to the need for a political response, which response is in no way simply "postmodern"--is in fact not a flaw. For the need to determine fully the political in advance, regularize it and restrict it to the current patterns of a non-political culture that parades its wares as if it were the instance of "politics" on earth, is virtually guaranteed to reproduce what already exists in an even more extreme form, thus to produce the further death of the political and the intensification of the "climatic depression" which produces "hate speech."
It becomes increasingly apparent in the above analysis that the ruling ideology of the culture, a classical-liberal ideology, is completely unable to deal with the results of the very oppressive-repressive structures which the culture using this ideology supports and furthers. What is detrimental here is, however, not a matter of an ideology per se, but rather the very fact that the ideology is now one and the same as the culture itself. This is in fact the very cornerstone of postmodern theory, the social groundwork that goes with the analysis of representation. For what others thought to be separate and separable, and perhaps once were more separate and separable, such as "ideology" and "institutional systems of power"--thus one more version of the old distinctions between "ideal" and "real"--are here shown to be inseparable and inseparable at levels where the "real" has actually overtaken and outstripped the old realms of the "ideal," by means of the quite "ideal" factors moving at the middle of the "real." The institutional world, placed into hyperdrive by the expansion of the modern mediator par excellence, symbolic capital--that which is, in fact, displacing even language as its protoform--is saturated with the effects of that self-same capital system, effects which gather together an entire history of the development of repressive institutions: station, government, caste, ownership, wealth, property. And if that system is oppressive, there is no "free institutional space" which will serve automatically to countervene, thus "move against," the resultant modes of oppression. Every recourse to instituted and institutional means, as now constituted, will, in effect, simply duplicate and intensify the order of oppression, whence repression.
It is for this reason that virtually any people who can think today, that is, "think" beyond the paradigms drummed into their heads by the habituating process of general inculturation--conditions such as those detailed earlier for the universities--find all recourse to existing techniques of instituting "law and order" virtually worthless.
Indeed, from the first recognized instance of a culture which instituted something counter-institutional in its own right, thus from the very origins of the so-called "western" culture in the Greek world of antiquity, at least a partially political world, people who thought in opposition to the given trends of such a "culture," have recognized that no system of "law," and especially no retributive system of punishment under the law, could ever effect on its own the necessary conditions for making anything better. And many have since recognized that such a system of "law and order" could only produce something worse. The demand, which entered the world along with its first political break from mythologically legitimated, feudally organized systems, remains the demand now--the demand is still the same--it is the demand for education. To say that this cannot be, is simply to say that "what is" is all there is and all that is possible.
What is then so interesting here is that from this so-called first--the place to which the classicists return in pursuit of "virtue"--the very need to institutionalize education has deformed all attempts at education. The very context of the institution is thus a context of oppression and replication of dominant cultural patterns of power. The first notable act of the first notable "Academy" was to throw out, or drive away, and hence no doubt to deform psychologically, the most notable critical thinker it had helped to produce, Aristotle. The postmodern critique must therefore become a critique of institutional education itself./14/ The "hate-speech issue" merely brings this greater issue to the fore. For if there is ever to be even an ongoing mode of solution to the extensive problems that now beset all cultures and the world at large, that mode of solution will have to involve the production of the counter-institutional institution, and this at both a governmental and an educational level. The culture must become self-critical in more than a merely atomized individualized manner. So a context must be created in which self-reflection operates without the convenient procedures of self-obfuscation as regards the presence within itself as institutional framework of the very patterns that are creating the problems which this institutional world supposedly seeks to address.
We have here no secure models, we have only insight into all the models that have failed. But of those failed models, the greatest by far is not simply an "educational model," at least not as such models are currently understood. It is rather the model of the highly peculiar appearance of what first cracked, and later came to define, in various subsumed ways, the center of the very culture which is now producing all problems on a new scale. And this was the first appearance of the anti-institutional institutional presence--the political mode of life itself. Before this, there was no theory but the self-legitimating structure of the mythological-feudal world. This "model" we then have in a two-fold sense, if we bother to look. For we have both an ancient and a modern version of "political existence." From the Greek political world comes our theoretical framework; from the reappearance of the political in modernity comes our grasp of the relation between theory and practice, as well as the mergers of theory and practice which have progressively empowered, for the first time, a "world civilization." And for this reason, we still need to call on and recall something of this political force to deal with the current situation.
The tension of the present work is therefore the tension at the center of the culture in which we live. Institutions constitute the framework for the production and maintenance of both the ideology and the fact of power. Institutional contexts reinforce the systems of oppression, whence repression. The present non-political state of the State that claims a political mode of life, that claims it has always already understood the political, while having done little more than add a host of late-Roman "imperial," medieval "courtly," and modern "civil" determinants to the meaning of the word--"polite society" and "the police," "sovereignty," meaning everyone subject to The Sovereign and The Law (Jean Bodin's 16th masterpiece of Roman reinvention/15/)--that state of the State is here reflected in the sheer ideological pronouncements of the protectors of "civic order" at the universities. For "civic order" read "civil society"; for "civil society" read "improved system of oppression." Even in the best light cast upon it to date, this was recognized by Hegel as the unethical moment of ethical life./16/ The protectors of "our morals" want to protect the most immoral system of "morality imposition" ever generated. And they do this in the light of, but apparently while ignoring it, the most extensive challenges and criticisms ever launched at any mode or system of human existence.
We can, of course, retreat like all others into the outmoded dialectical assumption that only the system can change itself. We can, and most will, seek refuge from the extreme brutality of the culture in which we live. We can do anything, because of course, "we," unlike everyone else who ever had an important thought on such topics as "justice," and "virtue," view ourselves as radically "free." But our freedom is a ruse, just as our ideology of freedom is nothing save the means to the empowerment to the nth degree, of another means gone to end in itself--money, the old means, the mediator, now operative as end in itself. How much freedom is too much? How much money is too much? And here one quickly comes to see that the deep-seated ideological presupposition of so many who would oppose "hate speech" is itself related to the central term which seems always to come into use in the description of all contemporary institutional contexts--Power. The ideology of freedom goes hand in hand with the culture built on and around money, while, much like "spiritual freedom," money is "nothing real in itself." The two together index the "system of power." For, again, how much power is then or ever too much? So, again, how many oppressive laws will ever be too many oppressive laws?
Rather than retreating into our ideology, thus empowering further the institutions of power, we can and should move against just this ideology and its system of control. In this, one must hold in mind, not the ideological ruses, but the recognitions which dethrone the ideology and clear space for political thought and modes of interaction. The only real freedom, in this the hyperreal or any other world, is bodily freedom. The only real freedom to think is the freedom bought at the cost of opposing all organized and organizing systems of power, even if no one can never escape from the web of institutional patterns of existence. And, of course, one will have to oppose these in such manner that bodily existence is threatened. For whether it is a matter of opposing a product of repression, such as the one engaged in "hate speech," or that which produces the repressed, the institutional contexts themselves, one is always at risk. But the more fundamental control here is now the institutional control. For in opposing this, one is likely to find oneself or oneself and one's family, out "on the street" with the person of "hate speech." Still the only place to learn to think adequately, thus critically, about this other field of freedom today seems to be the university./17/ And the only pattern of existence which can oppose such a system is a "political pattern", which, however, is not to say that what "we" possess are new political modes of existence, either in the present state-forms or in the present structure of the universities.
The further oppression of the results of oppression will not lead us to anything but more oppression and even more deranged repressive responses. The desire to have somebody else "do the dirty work" will only lead to a further empowerment of an already monstrously powerful apparatus of oppression. Call on the Law and one calls on Rome, while it was Rome that destroyed the ancient political world, and did so before the "old barbarians" came to town. Call on one's ideological "freedom" and one calls on the centerpiece of one of the most oppressive world religions in history, Christianity, thus on the very place of the invention of the "thought-police" and the principal inheritor of the death of the ancient political order. Call on anything and everything one wants, without calling on oneself and others in the context of the orders of analysis which help explain such phenomena as "hate speech," and one has given away from the first the only tools that one has to oppose with. If people at universities want to stop "hate speech," then they must first recognize that they "hate it." Always the first step is the recognition of oneself in the Other, not "the Other" but simply "another"--no exit from the cultural web of instituted systems of oppressive power, no simple oppositional schema. And from this first step people can then move to seek out among themselves that very cultural context that produces all such need for such hatred. With this in mind people can then go to work with their minds and their voices to do something about "hate speech" in the context of others who hate it as much as themselves. And while engaged in such as this, it is also long past time to try to politicize the university, the faculty, not just the students--which is to say, take the power back from the state, the regents, the administrators, the department heads, and from anything and everybody who rules by virtue of a monoform, self-replicating system, rather than by reasoned argument among those who should rule and be ruled only by themselves.
We add the latter, just to remind the reader ("notre semblable, notre frère et soeur") of what "political existence" entails, in this, the postmodern, or any other world. One should at least remember what one does not possess, in order to produce some new version of it. If we are "damned to simulation," as a new version of being "damned to freedom," then let us simulate something worth simulating for a change and seek a freedom which does not damn us to mere servitude and reaction in being damned to it. And we suggest further, that one must produce and/or simulate this where one is and in the context of what one is doing; that is, in this case, at the university, rather than on some other planet, in some other place. Without this, there will be no answer to "hate speech," except that answer which has produced it.
Notes
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (New York: Norton, 1977), 165.[Back]
Alain Touraine, La Société Post-lndustrielle (Paris: Denoël, 1969).[Back]
To have an idea as to how this system works, one can look at the paradigms of Western civilization as laid out by Dean Kagan of Yale University. They structure the University as institution and streamline it according to a unified whole, obeying a W.A.S.P unary, founding set of principles, worthy of the notion of patrimony as established by the Heritage Foundation:
...a system of laws and beliefs that shaped the establishment of the country, a system developed within the context of Western civilization..., American culture derives chiefly from the experience of Western civilization, and especially from England, whose language and institutions are the most copious springs from which it draws its life.... But most important, do not fail to learn the great traditions that are the special gifts of that Western civilization which is the main foundation of our university and our country. Do not let our separate heritages draw us apart and build walls between us, but use them to enrich the whole. In that way they may join with our common heritage to teach us, to bring us together as friends, to unite us into a single people seeking common goals, to make a reality of the ideal inherent in the motto e pluribus unum." (An Address to the Class of 1994, Yale University)[Back]
As the implications of Dean Kagan's discourse show, language privileged as a tool of reference (here a cultural reference) and closure onto an Ur-meaning--the meaning of the origins, of faithfulness to founding principles--represents the "discourse of the master": "Language seen as tool for reference takes on all its meanings in the discourse of the master for the master" (Lacan and the Subject of Language, edited by Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher [New York: Routledge, 1991], 25). Dean Kagan chooses and closes referentiality onto mastery; i.e., he acts and speaks as the possessor (-defensor) of the law and the truth as referentiality in/of language. Branching up onto this discourse of mastery, there is the discourse of the university which delineates the norm or to use Lacan's words the "nor(m)ale." "This is an identity position which can be occupied by a man or a woman who seeks to identify with difference where difference delineates the one who knows, the possessor of the law. The one who identifies with a position outside the law of man, whether male or female, occupies the position of 'not all,' the one who recognizes the lie in knowledge" (Idem 54.)[Back]
"Grasping the linguistic dimension of injustice only scratches the surface of the social, economic, and political environments that influence language and culture and link them to the material world. If you can't deconstruct American social structures, the linguistic left seems to hope, you can deconstruct Moby Dick and pretend it's the same thing" (Stephen Watts [Department of History, U of Missouri at Columbia], Point of View: Academe's Leftists Are Something of a Fraud, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 April 1992. Notwithstanding the fact that more blatantly horrifying frauds (if one wants to play the role of the naive truth-seeker) exist and live well, in the territory of academe, Professor Watts's critique flows from a "Midwestern populism," and is based on the repetition of the hierarchical dichotomy infrastructure/superstructure, the problematics of which do not answer the way things are and are not in our techno-culture today. In fact postmodernism has displaced this old binary structure (product of the 19th century understanding of the relations between production, language, art, and ideology) in the same way as deconstruction has shifted the import(ance) of its reflexions, from the signified to the signifier (at all levels of production, from effects to affects). Postmodernism is the theory of the re-working of the mode of production through the mode of information, thus allowing us to analyze the effects of media discourse in/about the humanities.[Back]
Lacan, Ecrits (New York: Norton, 1977), 69, 70.[Back]
Shakespeare, Macbeth.[Back]
Juliet Flower MacCannell, Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), 125.[Back]
See the studies of the relationships between soccer, stadiums, hate speech, and violence. Alain Ehrenberg, La Culte de la Performance (Paris: Calmann-Levy, Paris, 1991); Norbert Elias, Quest for Excitement, Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Riccardo Grozio, Catenaccio e contropiede. Materiali e immaginari del football italiano (Rome: A Pelicani, 1990); "Les hooligans ou Ia passion d'être égal," Esprit, September 1985; Patrick Mignon,"Supporters et hooligans en Grande-Bretagne," XXe siecle, April-June 1993; Miguel Cancio, Sociologia de la violencia en el futbol (Saint-Jacques de Compostelle: Fundacion universitaria de cultura, 1990); etc.[Back]
See Gilles Deleuze's Thousand Plateaus.[Back]
In Sade, Fourier, Loyola.[Back]
One wonders why other religious denominations are not also mentioned, although tremendous violence has been done against their expressions. Sectoral thinking often yields diverse forms of "hate speech." As for contemporary expressions of anti-semitism, for instance, and like any other racial "hate speech," it can take on any forms from more or less benign forms of classical "plaisanterie" ("cuteness") or small-time individual teasing (tike the "dumb-blonde jokes," "Polish jokes," and the like), to the projective fear of miscegenation through the identification of the Other (as Jew), to "absolute horror" or to the identification of the rule of Capital with that of the "International Jew." Many socio-psychologico-ideological strands must be tied together before the abstract image of the "Jew," in the mind of the bigoted person, will turn into an effective Manichean myth of the Universal Other (racial enemy over and above cultural or sociological one) and revive the "old dormant demons."[Back]
See the work of René Girard.[Back]
Compare with Jacques Derrida's Grammatology--see Gregory Ulmer's Applied Grammatology: Post(e) Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).[Back]
See Jean Bodin, Methodology for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1969), "sovereignty," 172ff. Here it's also worth considering the concepts of "magistracy" and "the citizen" that prefigure this.[Back]
The realm of "civil society" (die bürgerliche Gesellschaft) was located by Hegel at the "middle" of his system of ethical life or Sittlichkeit, in his Philosophy of Right or Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse (1821). The entire realm of Sittlichkeit is a matter of "institutional existence." "Civil Society," here conceived as the field of economic activity, was thus the "negative moment" mediating between the private familial world and the world of governmental state power. In every real sense it negated the positive basis of morality while simultaneously reconstructing it, and was thus the unethical moment in ethical life. For Hegel this could be viewed (and could still be used later by Marx) as a means to expanding the network of human relations by moving beyond the field of the isolated, atomized individuals who sought refuge in the "private world." The refuge might be there, but so also was the world which produced the mode of the withdrawal and the necessity which compelled one constantly to reemerge from just such a private world. It was then meant to be constrained on the other side by the new state forms which it had helped to create. Obviously, as Marx was to note while working over the Hegelian system, this realm of "civil society" was not to be constrained in Hegel's manner, and in fact had already dissolved and reformed all such patterns of constraint, such that they were largely, if not entirely, mere expressions of it. Here, of course, we also encounter a grand field of collapsing so-called "opposites," of the type dealt with in postmodern theory. Politics is business and business is politics, while all is "revolutionized," without a revolution, by symbolic exchange and the system of capital production and accumulation. None of which automatically means that "capital"--something which on the old register of "the real" is properly "nothing"--is bad, but all of which means that our means of analyzing it are as woefully inadequate as the general means employed by people dealing with "hate speech." But one does wonder if "hate speech" is not largely an expression of "capitalization" within the outmoded and still unadjusted "social forms" promoted in the past development of the self-same capital system. This would then be particularly true of the United States, which has never "socialized" anything.[Back]
"Some years have now passed since the intellectual was called upon to play this rote. A new mode of the 'connection between theory and practice' has been established. Intellectuals have got used to working, not in the modality of the 'universal,' the 'exemplary,' the 'just-and-true-for-all,' but within specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family and sexual relations)."--Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 126.[Back]