You must be what you can't see

A life of convenience, not so much my own, but others against mine, others against each other—a force-feeding of the senses. A busted gut and gaped tunnel vision. However wide the hole, not wide enough. The paradox of time and size: in getting fatter I’m becoming thinner than I will have been. Discomfort of constriction and stretching at the same time, cornered and blown open all at once. The low-tide pain of loneliness and obscurity and the crashing waves of exposure and examination, irresolvable tension seeking a singular point of discharge, the winged or caped or horned or hoofed or hook nosed enemy, the jowly pig demon, the network of slimy shadows on my job(s), my relationships, the institutions; the absent father or the father in my face, the devouring mother and the frigid bitch. Every entity has two sides; each of those sides can be split into two more; each riddled with grubs in gladiatorial combat, with the chaos folded into opposing camps for the purpose of stabilizing the war of all against all.   

Second story apartment safe from street level stink and noise, not a chance. The heart falls and the chin tilts earthward, the dregs work up; Two howling dogs, the woman who has wwe style wrestling matches with her furniture, the hobo at 4:30 in the morning wandering into the backyard looking for a place to sleep. Flies and ants squeezing through cracks in the wood, opening windows. Insect home invasion, flies swatting me, crawling up through the pipes and kicking down doors and tossing flashbang grenades into my kitchen.   

For the last week a team of carpenters has worked on the exterior of my apartment. Renovation, repair, some mix of interests. I haven’t taken a good look from the outside but from within it sounds like they’re hammering and sawing the inside of my skull. They play latin music, I don’t know what to call it. Stereotypical Mexican work crew stereo blaring underneath the hammer blows and power drills, the sounds of a foreign festival nailed with the universal bad grammar of construction. I don’t know Spanish. My parochial blood never burned for other tongues; to learn another language I’d have to speak it, and I already talk to way too many people. A language appeals to me if I could commune only with the dead, but I can’t fool myself, I’d still hear those shades through many levels of hell, at a remove, translate them into the terms of my current English soul, and would take a much longer route to get to the same place, still saddled with my vernacular sensations.  

I can’t hate the Hispanic carpenters because they’re Hispanic, I’ve been told a time or two by a few people, but I can surely hate them because they’re here, pounding the sides of my house, doing their part to knock my teeth out and kick tin cans around the dirty garage floor of my brain. Of course I also note their differences from me, as I do of every person I encounter. Small and brown and saying things I don’t understand count as descriptors for the basic human shapes working outside my window, shapes I’d treat with the same impatience, irritation and dismissive characterization if they presented me with a white canvas, reminded me of my heritage, sent me down south to relive my younger days in suburban backwoods. 

Two equally obnoxious tendencies: the centering of the self and the pious regard for the other. I don’t want to be someone else’s other, to be accepted or loved as part of a 12-step program or graduate seminar or an ad campaign. Celebration of difference flatters the one who celebrates and establishes a more subtle method of control over the strange, reinforces the smothering creep of inclusion and turns on the hidden hinge of contempt for those smaller splintering differences smoothed over into a false image of the same.  

It’s assumed we naturally love people who resemble us, when we clearly don’t, but native hatred doesn’t offend, it’s more likely to be considered good form, a sign of strong principles and a promising future. The narcissism everyone diagnoses entrenches itself through idealized projections and romanticized deprecation; people love mirrored lies, touched-up and stripped-down images, not themselves. And the closer we come to real embodied sameness, a direct encounter with the identical, the hotter the immolating fury. I can tolerate the mariachi band or the donkey show in my backyard but if I saw my double writing in a cafe I’d murder him on the spot.  

Those signs that say no hatred in this house tell a partial truth; no hatred in the house for those on the outside, plenty of it for those right at hand. Just as psychology contends that aggression against others is an act of disguised self-destruction, so love for the official other, the distant, the strange, is an attempt at resolving internecine conflict.  

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Note on inclusivity: what in the old days of the early 20^th century went by such terms as totalization, totalitarianism, rationalization and the administered society, now wears the label of inclusivity. And it must be admitted, it’s stitched on a fabric with a softer feel. But at the same time no less encompassing in hew.  

Inclusion is both a logical selection mechanism and a set of instituted material practices. The logical side can be reduced to a binary command: either assent to the included others or be excluded. What begins as a measure to bring in the fringe, incorporate scattered resistance, to gather up the outcasts, increasingly remakes the center in its own image, as a process of chewing at limits and sucking back outsides, as part of a programming that forms the spirit of an age and justifies the technical and legal procedures of its dominant institutions.  

Those who are assumed to be included by default are held to question, resubmitted to a new test of loyalty: The old membership and its terms are rejected, and the new mode of security is found in the commitment to widening the circle of acceptance, to adjudicating rival claims by absorbing them all. But this attempted absorption or elevation of all lowers the stakes while raising the temperature of each conflict, of every disagreement, as now everyone vies for social and material resources of depreciating value. While extending its scope, the ideology of inclusion puts the clamps on individuals, narrowing their vision and vocabulary to make room for a swelling crowd of categorical demands. Over-recognized individuals bury free expression in the ballast of their own interests, and censorship grows naturally in a hypercompetitive environment masquerading as its opposite.  

(Despite self-expression's subversion of itself, it lives on as a babbling mockery, a set of keywords and passcodes, as a fusion of administrative reason and infantile wish fulfillment. Machine-raised babies turn public forums and art galleries and halls of learning into daycare centers.) 

For a time, critical theory worked against identity. But the emphasis of its criticism landed much more heavily on certain kinds of identity, identity with particular features and histories, which had the effect of mystifying the possibility of carrying the critique to the form of identity as such. Instead, identity was left intact, emboldened even, and new criteria were put in place to distribute and rank its contents. Now nothing is more important than wielding an identity, using it as both weapon and armor, while for the Frankfurt School, for early twentieth century critical theory, identity stood as the ur-structure of totalitarian social systems, the skeletal logic of fascism. The project not of dismantling identity but fleshing out its necessary links to the unidentifiable, to its contingent and mediated conditions, if only for the sake of opening a space free from the totalizing logic, has led to the total incorporation of identity into the gears of power.  

Fear of fascism today has less to do with specific movements and leaders and even discourses, and more to do with the discordant atmosphere of identity struggles pervading all orders of interaction and lending a hybrid imperial/anarchic air to all mediations. The continued fascination with standout figures of oppression and exclusion concentrates the otherwise diffuse antagonisms of the social space into an obvious opponent, allaying the mutual hostility of all the apparent includers. 

The ironic outcome of 20^th century critical theory and all the related though necessarily harmonious academic and high cultural modes of analysis, including structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and the Foucauldian hermeneutics/genealogy of power, is the idolization of representation itself, the glorification of identity in struggles for resources and prestige. It should be noted that these schools have not so much produced this situation but have rather been sidelined and/or misappropriated by the far more directly powerful social, political and economic tendencies of the last 75 years, even though they still appear in some circles and their recondite disputes as causes of contemporary dysfunction and conflict. 

Popular though contested campaigns waged under the banner of such concepts as normalization, equality, diversity and inclusion serve individual interests secondarily, primarily serving an aggregated, mechanized social body and its functions of assimilation and excretion. The ongoing mutation of social norms coalesces with the elaboration of technical complexes and legal institutions, altogether expressing the further development of what Foucault called biopolitics, the construction and extension of control grids that modulate behavior, categorize identity and assign value to populations as statistical entities and organisms. 

The product of rapidly improvised morality and the increased refinement and adoption of control technologies is a type of individual socialized down to the last atom but at the same time without relations. A person essentially released from historical and social bonds for the most part but also thoroughly determined in behavioral and emotional patterns by material pressures and ideological currents. A trained refusal of traditionally oppressive standards and relations clears ground for an even more thoroughgoing internalization of a contrived and amorphous notion of society largely drawn from media representations, selective data, and the experience of highly administered environments without clear figures of authority, a notion upon which neurotic habits are built and inconsistent values are articulated, poorly, and then, if possible, enforced. In effect, machine socialization, not as the becoming human of machines but the hyperindustrialized programming of social instincts.  

There’s neither atomization nor incorporation as independent dynamics, but both at the same time, reciprocally determining each other. Incorporation occurs through atomization, not in opposition to it, for the liberation of the person from certain roles and responsibilities coincides with the creation and multiplication of new dependencies on technology, bureaucratic organizations and shifting patterns of agreement, crowd affects.  

The expanded definition of autonomy refers not to a tradition of self-reliance as a strengthening of conscience, resilience and practical know-how, but a canniness in manipulating impressions and managing the machinery of power, which increases subjection to vast, interlocking social and techno-medical systems in the guise of individual empowerment and expression. Political and economic problems of scale are translated into issues of personal morality and education, while the decline of competence and the breakdown of organic social networks are treated as matters of administrative and technological palliation.