I.
Thanks to David Graeber.
Violence may be the only way to predictably affect someone else without trying to understand them. It’s just as effective when it’s a threat or when outsourced to State actors who carry the “legitimate monopoly” on its means.
There’s a joy in perceiving oneself as a cause, and when bound up with social privilege, this pleasure can rein-force identification with violence as the basic paradigm of action. Because (implicit) threats of violence are built into the historical matrix of everyday social interactions, those who benefit from those threats can misrecognize their individual agency as self-caused.
Social power doesn’t have to objectify itself to the internalized gaze of another to assert its needs and desires. It can simply act as if it is its spring. It can act on others without needing to understand them because others appear to it as objects rather than subjects.
Feminist critique has shown how these delusions of autonomy and mastery are maintained only by erasing and disavowing others’ care labor. This care labor stitches together the fabric of everyday life as an ongoing work of social reproduction. Because that work occurs in (implicitly) violent contexts, one side of the social relation faces coercive threat if they do not perform their role. To survive, they have to exert imaginative effort to understand the perspectives of violence’s beneficiaries. Interpretive labor, whether or not consciously performed, thus falls disproportionately on the minds and hearts of the oppressed. Structural violence perpetuates not only socioeconomic inequality but also inequalities of the need to mentalize. Oppression doesn’t eradicate intersubjective care. It parasitically exploits it.
II.
Thanks to intersubjectivity, both a given and the goal.
There’s a brighter side to recognizing that intersubjective understanding and care labor form the foundation of social life even under racial capitalism. It allows us to ground radical political action against structures of violence in everyday ethics of care, to offer a psychosocial view of the healing potential in practices of community autonomy and mutual aid. JessicBenjamin attempted this in her critique of Adorno’s politically pessimistic marriage between Marx and Freud. For her, the marriage is more between Hegel and “Anna O.,” whose trauma recovery and demands for recognition involved feminist activism beyond her “talking cure.”
III.
Thanks to Judith Butler.
If we take this foundational relationality seriously, then we have to acknowledge the risks of violence and mourning which follow from our constitutive interdependence. Psychoanalysis reveals how forms of life based upon a fantasy of invulnerable selfhood bear witness to violent preconditions and too often bear violence as their fruit.
If violence denies and exploits our essential vulnerability to one another, then mourning makes it possible to heal by accepting our relational reality. We are never separate, whole beings, in truth; our bodily existence is always already ecstatic, placing us outside and beside ourselves, with and for others. I am both made and unmade by you, by your loss, and by the loss of something in you, and thus in me, that may as yet be unknown. It’s harrowing work to feel into the ways that we socially value some lives less than others, foreclosing their grievability by denying that their lives fully counted as lives at all. But without it, how would we move beyond denial and projection to practice reparations?
IV.
Thanks to activism, both major and minor.
Psychoanalysis compassionately illustrates the tragic nature of our self-contradictory, unconsciously fated lives while demonstrating real possibilities of personal change befitting a hopeful comedy. But much of this remains too individual and intrapsychic. Suppose the astounding generality of trauma in the etiology of the suffering we listen to in our practice has returned to popular awareness. In that case, this need not only suggests that the concept has lost its specificity and utility. It may also suggest that an honest examination of the psychopathology of everyday life includes careful elucidation of the structural violence of everyday life, the social contexts of which our psychological vocabulary can obscure and thereby naturalize. For whatever we think of death drives and instinctual aggression to individually and collectively heal from social structures of violence means understanding that they have a history. Because their determinate qualities are historical rather than natural, we must hold the faith that by working-through them, whether on the couch or in the streets, they can be overcome.
References
Benjamin, J. (1977). The End of Internalization: Adorno’s Social Psychology. Telos 7:32.
Butler, J. (2004). Violence, Mourning, Politics. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso.
Graeber, D. (2007). Revolution in Reverse (or, on the conflict between political ontologies of violence and political ontologies of the imagination). Revolutions in Reverse. Autonomedia.
Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books.
