NOTE TO MY READERS: THIS WILL BE MY LAST POST OF 2020. PLEASE LOOK FOR MORE POSTS BEGINNING IN JANUARY 2021.
Traditionally, emancipatory practice has been tied to a desire to become a subject. Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subject of history, of representation, or of politics. To become a subject carried with it the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to be an object was bad. But, as we all know, being a subject can be tricky. The subject is always already subjected. Though the position of the subject suggests a degree of control, its reality is rather one of being subjected to power relations.
—Hito Steyerl[i]
Hito Steyerl
Now that the 2020 Presidential election is over, we might well ask to what extent voting in such a process makes one “a subject of history” in whom “the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, [and] agency” is fulfilled — to use the same terms Hito Steyerl, a German documentary filmmaker, philosopher, and professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Art, does in the lines above. Or is becoming such a subject even in that agentive sense finally a matter of being subjected to some sovereign, as she goes on to suggest in her remark that “[t]he subject is always already subjected”? That is, is becoming a subject even in the sense of becoming an active agent always already at bottom the very process of being cast beneath someone or something who or which exercises sovereignty over that one or that thing, as fits the etymology of the very word subject (from Latin sub-, “beneath, under,” plus iacere, “to throw or cast”).
If, in voting, we are being subjected to becoming subjects, just who or what is doing the subjecting, the casting down beneath? Who or what is really in charge here, where we are all so subjected? Who or what is really the sovereign authority commanding us to vote, constantly threatening us with losing “autonomy, sovereignty, [and] agency” if we don’t?
Sovereign over us today is no person or body of persons. Rather, it is the system itself, the very system that masks itself behind the image of “representational democracy.”
* * *
Jean Baudrillard
Our relationship to this system is an insoluble "double-bind" — exactly that of children in their relationship to the demands of the adult world. They are at the same time told to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free, and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive objects, inert, obedient, and conformist. The child resists on all levels, and to these contradictory demands he or she replies by a double strategy. When we ask the child to be object, he or she opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, the strategy of a subject. When we ask the child to be subject, he or she opposes just as obstinately and successfully a resistance as object; that is to say, exactly the opposite: infantilism, hyper-conformity, total dependence, passivity idiocy. Neither of the two strategies has more objective value than the other.
— Jean Baudrillard[ii]
Children need to be left alone just to be children. They should not be forced to become subjects-objects. When adults experience any temptation to objectify children and/or force them to become subjects, those adults need to be careful not to yield to that temptation. They need to access the child that remains buried in any adult, and let that child activate rebellion against any such tendencies.
That is never easy for adults to do, especially today, after centuries now of adults having been forced to be subjects, and therefore also objects, ever since they were themselves children. It always involves resisting heavy pressure to assume the role of subjects that has been forced upon them, and the role of objects that is inseparably bound to that of subjects. To take off such costumes after decades of wearing them is like taking off one’s skin. Indeed, such once-worn and never-till-now-even-once-removed outfits have become just that: a second skin.
Stripping such hide off oneself and then keeping it off is, however, the only way to true liberation for anyone. As Spinoza famously said: “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
We must make that difficult effort, for the sake of all children, both those within us and those who are other than us. To help us along our way, we can take heart if we attend to what Baudrillard has to say in the remainder of the passage I quoted at the beginning of this section of this post:
Subject resistance is today given a unilateral value and considered to be positive — in the same way as in the political sphere only the practices of liberation, of emancipation, of expression, of self-constitution as a political subject are considered worthwhile and subversive. This is [to] take no account of the equal and probably superior impact of all the practices of the object, the renunciation of the position of subject and of meaning — exactly the practices of the mass — which we bury with the disdainful terms alienation and passivity. The liberating practices correspond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects; but they do not correspond at all to the other demand to constitute ourselves as subjects, to liberate, to express ourselves at any price, to vote, to produce, to decide, to speak, to participate, to play the game: blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, probably more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is to demand the liberating rights of the subject. But this seems rather to reflect an earlier phase of the system; and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer a strategic territory; the present argument of the system is to maximize speech, to maximize the production of meaning, of participation. And so the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and the refusal of speech, of the hyper-conformist stimulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is another form of refusal by over-acceptance. It is the actual strategy of the masses. This strategy does not exclude the other, but is the winning one today, because it is the most adapted to the present phase of the system.
We might also, altogether unexpectedly, take heart from the example of all the corpses that the Nazis—not the present-day ones who have crawled out of their holes recently in the United States and elsewhere, but the original, German ones from the middle of the preceding century—heaped up. This passage from a French prisoner-of-war who survived the Nazi camp-system suggests so, at any rate:
There are moments when you could kill yourself just in order that the SS fetch against this limit as it confronts the impassive object you’d have become, the dead body that has turned its back on them, that doesn’t give a shit about their law. The dead man will at once be stronger than they are, just as trees and clouds and cows, which we call things and incessantly envy. The SS undertaking is careful not to get to the point of denying the daisies growing in the fields. And like the dead man, the daisy doesn’t give a shit about their law. The dead man no longer offers them a handle. Let them savage his face, let them hack his body to bits, the dead man’s very impassiveness, his complete inertness, will counter all the blows they strike at him.
—Robert Antelme[iii]
May we all be like the daisies growing in the fields! May none of us give a shit about their law!
Robert Antelme
[i] Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” e-flux, no. 15 (2010). Available online at https://www.e-flux.com/journal/15/61298/a-thing-like-you-and-me/
[ii] Jean Baudrillard, “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media,” translated by Marie Maclean, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster (Standfor: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 218-219.
[iii] Robert Antelme, The Human Race, translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston, Illinois: The Marlborough Press/Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp. 93-94.