Part 5
Authoritarian and other selves
Whenever attention is paid to the authoritarian orientations of liberal democratic societies, there
is a tendency within criminology to focus exclusively on statutory institutions and those measures which rely on the exercise of sovereign and disciplinary power – such as harsher, deterrent
sentencing; high visibility and targeted policing; greater use of surveillance technologies;
intensification of juridical powers. This limited focus results in a void in our understanding of
what it means to govern the ‛authoritarian self‛ in a context of insecurity and disorder.
Elena: What characterizes the action of the instinctive realm is the use of force. Those who are successful are those with more physical power to kill without being accounted for. We must understand that there are varied forms of death in society, not only physical death. People without jobs are socially dead: they do not participate. Their participation becomes “violent” even when it is passive because they “take” without producing even if they are willing to produce. The frustration at not belonging and not being a part of a whole that they know instinctively and intuitively that they belong to detonates a process of revolt. It is a legitimate process: a “throwing up” of the social organism in which the individual that has been “poisoned” out of the whole at the same time poisons the whole and ‘throws up’, revolts. _____________
Nonetheless, there are important expositions of the form, means, function and content of
‛authoritarian techniques of the self‛ to be found in the wider sociological literature. I am
thinking here of Hindess’ essay on the notion of ‛(self-)improvement‛ and its centrality to what
he describes as ‛the liberal government of unfreedom;‛
83
and Valverde’s innovative work on the
notion of ‛habit‛ and its role as a key technique for different forms of self-despotism.
84
In each
of these accounts, practices of self-government are always-already embedded within the
‛common obligations of citizenship‛
85
such that by working through a programme of self-improvement, or resolving to rid oneself of ‛bad habits‛ expresses a social and political
relationship and an ethical commitment to others.
Elena: That is what cults are about: sublimize your anger and frustration and control your self ethically committed to the guru’s work of ‘salvation’ of all human beings while at the same time exploiting your all and every effort. That is the epitomy of fascism at its highest effectivity. ________________
Dean talks of the formation of citizen-subjects as concerning a ‛‛mode of subjectification‛
or ‚mode of obligation‛< the position we take or are given in relation to rules and norms<
81 See, for example, David Garland, The Culture of Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). John Pratt,
David Brown, Mark Brown, Simon Hallsworth & Wayne Morrison (eds.), The New Punitiveness: Trends,
Theories, Perspectives (Cullompton: Willan, 2005). John Pratt, Penal Populism (London: Routledge, 2007).
82
See, for example, Roger Matthews, ‚The Myth of Punitiveness,‛ Theoretical Criminology, 9, 2 (2005), 175-201.
83 Hindess, ‚The Liberal Government of Unfreedom.‛
84 Valverde, ‚’Despotism’ and Ethical Governance.‛
85 Mead, 12, cited in Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism,‛ 39.Campbell: The Emotional Life
50
why we govern ourselves or others in a particular manner.‛
86 Though I agree with Dean’s
analysis, deontological questions do not solely involve normative ways of thinking, being and
doing; this overlooks the transformative potential of affective modes, and how particular ways of
feeling are implicated in practices of the self, in the production of self-alterity, of becoming-other,
of feeling otherwise in order to be otherwise.
In September 2005, the UK government set up a Respect Task Force, appointing both a
Government Co-ordinator (Louise Casey) and a Minister for Respect (Hazel Blears) to oversee
its progress. Committing £80 million of new funding to the programme, in January 2006, the
Prime Minister published a Respect Action Plan and by the end of October 2006, the Respect
agenda had established its own Respect Squad and set up its own web-site and action hotline.
With its nifty logo and catchy sound bites, the roll-out of the Respect programme was well
underway before, during and after the spring scandals had left the UK citizenry reeling in
despair for its own protection. Accompanied by a good deal of trumpet-blowing, the programme promised to deliver an affective mode of obligation which would enhance ethicality,
mutuality and sociality. In the launch speech for the Respect Action Plan, Blair announced:
Respect is a way of describing the very possibility of life in a community. It is about the
consideration that others are due. It is about the duty I have to respect the rights that you
hold dear. And vice-versa. It is about our reciprocal belonging to a society, the covenant
that we have with one another.
87
To earn respect, feel respect, be respectable, act respectfully is, then, expressive of an affirmative
ethical affiliation, and for Blair, is an affective disposition held by the majority of people. For
example, in the launch speech, he comments, ‛(o)f course, the overwhelming majority of people
understand this intuitively and have no trouble living side by side with their neighbour;‛
88
and
in the foreword of the Respect Action Plan, he notes that ”(m)ost of us learn respect from our
parents and our families.‛
89
It is this reference to ‛the majority‛ – those who are capable of selfgovernment as respectable citizens – juxtaposed with ‛the minority‛ – those who have limited
or no capacity for living an ethical life based on respect for others – which is of particular
interest here. As Dean reminds us, in liberal democratic societies, those who do not, cannot or
will not form themselves as subjects of government are eligible for authoritarian techniques of
rule.
90 Thus, the Respect Action Plan makes it crystal clear that ‛(e)veryone can change – if
people who need help will not take it, we will make them.‛
91
What seems to be proposed here is a cartography of un/governable subjects. With the
assurance that those who lack respect are to be subjects of and subjected to authoritarian
technologies of rule, the ‛rest of us‛ can be (more) confident of living in a stable, ordered and
86 Dean, ‚Foucault, Government and the Enfolding of Authority,‛ 224.
87 Tony Blair, Respect Action Plan Launch Speech, (January 10, 2006, original emphasis)
http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page8898.asp (accessed May 17, 2007).
88
Ibid., Emphasis added.
89 Respect Task Force, Respect Action Plan (London: COI, 2006), Emphasis added.
90 Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism.‛
91 Respect Task Force, 1.Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.
51
certain society. To realise this telos, rather than rely on ‛deep-end‛ authoritarian measures as
conventionally conceived in articulations of ‛more government,‛ sovereign and disciplinary
forms of government are to be put to work in, by and for the community. In other words, in a
process of responsibilisation,
92
civil society forms the key locus for the deployment of a range of
affective technologies for constituting subjectivities of both confidence and respect, displacing
(though not replacing) the need for overt practices of ‛crime control‛ in favour of a series of
networks of obligation and alliances of mutuality.
Elena: We need to understand that there is no more respect in those who belong to the status quo than in those who don’t belong to it. To be able to belong to the status quo, the people have had to submit and they unconsciously loathe themselves and others for that submission. Their loathe is expressed in the myriad forms of separation from those they are afraid of outside of the status quo as much as in their inner conflicting lives both within the family and their work environment. The crisis is in every one because we are all involved in the status quo. The real problem is that those who belong to the status quo develop an ultra-powerful authority and use it AGAINST the others. They develop little strategies to mitigate the imbalance of the status quo but do not actually correct the mechanisms that continue to explode the organism from within.
In the long run, the people in power are more decadent than those under its power because they have had to develop an ultra-ego to justify them selves and their actions while the others are submitted but in that submission manage to keep, to a certain extent an inner integrity until it goes out to the Public Squares and protests. The fact that they are so disempowered keeps the status quo in place nevertheless. They protest but seldom with an effective effect. They do not usually have the means or the consciousness to turn the process around and I doubt that they could do it alone even if they did. I suspect that, like in an individual, the change of being comes from the many individuals struggling within and willingly empowering themselves to Change. Every positive change whether in an individual or a society is an act of conscious will._________________
Arts of the emotional self
The Respect programme assumes the existence of a ‛respectable majority‛ who, despite their
own capacity to self-govern, need to work on themselves and others to achieve an affective state
of confidence and assurance. Such an ascesis is most clearly spelled out in the strategy document, Confident Communities in a Secure Britain: The Home Office Strategic Plan 2004-2008,
93 which
is further elaborated in the Together We Can Action Plan,
94
and is articulated repeatedly as ‛our
(the government’s) commitments to law-abiding citizens.‛ Amongst other things, ‛the respectable majority‛ is encouraged to make use of an array of ‛new‛ opportunities and arrangements
for getting involved in community concerns by, for example, keeping themselves informed of,
and getting involved in the steps taken by local agencies to address local cultures of disrespect;
by taking a stand against anti-social behaviour by reporting incivilities; by regular updating to
the ‛relevant authorities‛ of the impact of anti-social behaviour in neighbourhoods; and by
helping to set local policing priorities and making suggestions for specific actions from local
policing teams. Through these governmental modalities, the ‛respectable majority‛ is thereby
transformed into a variegated and fluid network of responsible authorities, and through this
process is enabled to self-actualise (become-other) as a confident citizenry. But what of ‛the minority,‛ those who lack respect and for whom a more authoritarian approach may be necessary?
Elena: Empowering the middle class to act against the lower class is the key
As Dean notes, authoritarian liberalism distinguishes between subjects according to their
relative capacities for autonomy.
95 Thus, as well as their difference from ‛the majority,‛ within
‛the minority‛ are those ‛who can be profitably assisted in the exercise of their own freedom
and those who must be coerced.‛
96
In relation to the former, the Respect agenda holds that
‛parenting is one of the most important responsibilities in creating a strong society based on
mutual respect.‛
97 Parenting technologies, therefore, constitute a key component for inculcating
appropriate dispositions and aesthetic comportments. It may be that individuals within ‛the
minority‛ are capable of self-governance in some aspects of their lives – as consumers, as
employees, as tenants, for example – but if, as parents, they ‛are unwilling, or unable to meet
their responsibilities we (‛the majority‛) must ensure that they are challenged and supported to
do so.‛
98 Support comes by way of various ‛new‛ services, interventions and sources of
92 Rose, ‚Government, Authority and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism.‛ Garland, The Culture of Control.
93 Home Office, Confident Communities in a Secure Britain.
94 Civil Renewal Unit, Together We Can (London: Home Office, 2005).
95 Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism.‛
96
Ibid, 47.
97 Respect Task Force, 17.
98
Ibid., 17.Campbell: The Emotional Life
52
financial, social and cultural help for both parents and their children. Challenge, on the other
hand, renders support compulsory, enforced via a panoply of new and extended (out-of-court)
summary powers of which the ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) is the most notorious. At
the level of ascesis, then, the operationalisation of liberal/illiberal modes of governance maps
onto a dichotomised population wherein membership of ‛the majority‛/‛the minority‛ is
determined by the presence/absence – and within this latter, the educability – of an aesthetics of
respect. In light of this, I want to suggest that the modalities and techniques of liberal/illiberal
forms of government are mobilised through familiar ‛taxonomies of affect‛ or what I have
termed, ‛emotionalities of rule.‛ In this paper, I have examined confidence and respect as
‛emotionalities of rule,‛ as preferred and promoted sensibilities which are nurtured, engendered and enfolded through specific governmental technologies and practices. Of course,
confidence and respect do not exhaust the emotionalities that circulate in governmental
discourses; we can think, for example, of how tolerance, compassion, optimism and (even)
happiness
99
assume a special relevance and importance within liberalism – these are not merely
personal dispositions but are expressive of a specific political and ethical relation. Quite
properly, then, we can speak of ‛emotionalities of rule‛ as arts of government through which we
seek to govern and be governed in sentient, aesthetic and affective ways.
Elena: “WE” must be very careful with all these techniques because they are the same as those used in cults: people have to behave in certain ways so as to belong to the status quo and once people accept those forms of behavior and submit, then they have voluntarily sacrificed their Self and with it, their right to exercise ontologically. They give up their sovereignty to question and act on the status quo and society becomes fixed in a rigid structure. That is the most dangerous process that can happen to people. Suicide as much as criminal cults, prove the point. __________________
4. Conclusion
Analyses inspired by Foucauldian governmentality do not purport to apply theory to the
empirical world, and thereby explain it. Rather, the Foucauldian project suggests a number of
conceptual tools for understanding how different forms of government are made thinkable and
do-able, and how subjectivities are formed and transformed when autonomous individuals
identify with a complex array of governmental technologies, strategies and expert authorities.
However, and despite a rich and diverse ‛governmentality scholarship,‛ little attention has been
paid to how desire, affect and sensate life is implicated in processes of subjectification; how
passion can prompt (or not) an identification with governmental programmes; and how
‛emotionalities of rule‛ propose and suggest ways of feeling about the world – how we should
feel about ourselves and others, how we participate in, cultivate and enact an aesthetic life, and
how we seek to govern and be governed in sentient, expressive ways. The case study presented
here demonstrates how questions of government, power and politics, morality and ethics can
never be solely a matter of cognition and reason. To assume that self-directing individuals
identify with particular technologies and practices of the self on purely instrumental grounds is
to deny the emotional and affective intensities which circulate, permeate and inform cognitive
and discursive ways of being, doing and saying. It is these intensities which confront and
unsettle our ontological security, and which not only trouble our sense of social order and
stability but also provoke a questioning of the work of government and its capacity to direct our
own and others‛ conduct. Moreover, such emotional ‛disturbances‛ are not reducible to a
singular psychic state – melancholia, as psychoanalysis would have it – but are highly
differentiated, complex and fluid such that they open up multiple ‛lines of flight‛ and initiate a
plethora of alternative possibilities for the (re-)formation of un/governable subjectivities.
99 Minette Marrin, ‚The dangerous Business of happiness,‛ The Sunday Times (June 18, 2006), 16.Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.
53
However, such moments of intensity may incite new identities and provoke ethical attachments
that are inimical to particular regimes of rule such that they pose dangers for that regime, and
problematise its modes and rationalities of governance. In the case study, loss of confidence in
the work of government, along with expressed feelings of distrust, disappointment, shock,
outrage, confusion and fear, create the affective conditions for questioning the exercise of
governmental power in a liberal, democratic society, and prompt the need to realign an
uncertain citizenry as confident, assured subjects – a process which I have described as the
‛enfolding of emotionalities.‛ There is much to be learned from an account that places affective
agency at the heart of an analytics of government. First, it alerts us to the way in which modes
of obligation within liberalism involve obligations not only to legal and moral codes, but also to
normative sensibilities, particular ways of feeling which are deemed appropriate to sustain
political and ethical life in a liberal society – for example, tolerance, confidence, compassion,
trust, optimism. Secondly, it suggests that participation in and full membership of civil society
relies as much on an affective identity as it does on any other kind of selfhood, as a ‛rational
actor,‛ for example. Thirdly, and following this last point, an account which centres on affective
life emphasises how politico-ethical credentials are demonstrated and established not solely by a
capacity to be a self-enterprising or self-sufficient individual, but also relies on expressive
capabilities and the display of certain aesthetic qualities. Finally, while the co-existence and
intersection of sovereign, disciplinary and governmental power has been widely recognised,
very little attention has been paid to the way in which taxonomies of affect underwrite the
deployment of liberal/illiberal modes of governance across constituencies differentiated by
ontologies of feeling. Governing through subjectivities of affect is, then, an integral strategy of
governance and is indispensable to the notion of governing through freedom.
Elaine Campbell
Reader in Criminology
School of Geography, Politics and Sociology
Claremont Bridge
Newcastle University
Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU
United Kingdom
Elena:
I’m afraid this article seems far from addressing the objective it posed itself. The liberal status quo is not and cannot establish trust, confidence or compassion because it is based on the principle of injustice: the more for the few and the many at their service.
It is a status quo aiming at increasing forms of slavery and the real human problem is that those in power will not be any happier or more fulfilled individuals because of it. To have things, to OWN, does not satisfy the human being’s development. It is not that those who have more power, more luck or more cruelty will gain from enslaving others, it is that they who enslave are equally enslaved by the system that they have to hold on to and their cruelty reaches unbearable levels even to themselves. Libya today is an example of this that has been going on for decades. They put dictators in power to hurt the people then can’t even tolerate the dictators they’ve empowered.
Wilhelm Reich was much closer to understanding the Emotional Life of Government particularly in his “Psychology of Masses of Fascism” and the Emotional life of Governing is better understood in his “Character analysis”. But beyond Reich I believe we need to explore the mythical sphere of the human being to understand the pathology of sovereignty, or the problem of ‘Being’ or ‘the process of becoming’. Other titles for that exploration could be “the actualization of love” or ‘life’!
In addition, to be able to understand the Emotional realm playing out particularly in the sphere of politics, we need to focus on sovereignty and its understanding. The fact that we have no real political leaders in our times attests well for the fact that governments today have ‘hidden’ behind the force of their authoritarian representation without a true leader. Perhaps Brasil’s recent leader had some legitimacy, I would need to study him more deeply but our innocence could not reveal itself more clearly than the disappointment we’ve suffered with Obama.
The sad thing is perhaps that the status quo has itself become so powerful that it can put as the President of the United States a black man avowing for change who will betray each and every one of his promises without anyone being able to charge him accountable.
He has proven more than anyone else in our days, that the Word of a Man is worth nothing and that what moves our world is not the commitment that leaders have towards the role they’ve been elected to play but the military force behind those in power and the inertia with which the status quo continues to play itself out, increasingly disempowering the people generation after generation.
We need millions of Julian Assange’s willing to stand up for freedom of expression and all other freedoms inherent in the sovereignty of humaneness. We need people in all spheres of society to give up the fascist within their own self willing to play the role of authoritarian privileged, submitting their children, workers, students and people in lower classes, different race or gender to stop actualizing the fascist within in every ‘fold’ of our lives. We need sovereign individuals to act as sovereigns: protect life and all its expressions in every sphere of society, not only for the people of one’s nation but for the people of the whole world. The King was perhaps a legitimate role in periods of human development in which groups of people needed to develop cultures and surround themselves with a sense of their clan unity but consciousness in the human being is not about clan consciousness but about human consciousness: the fact that WE are One: All equally human, All with equal needs and Rights. There is enough for everyone if we learn to share it. We just need to trust our selves… with love.
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