Any system can be devised, as long as it expels certain unwanted elements from itself. Through such exclusions, any sort of logic or maneuver can be put into action, justified. Any system can be imagined and instituted ‘simply’ by bracketing off from consideration certain elements as non-issues, as not pertinent to the system. Or rather, pertinent only to they extent that they must be dealt with by exclusion. Within the system, such elements do not have any definite meaning or dignity; nor do they have any justification for their duration, their survival, or their claim to rights. They are cordoned off, isolated out of sight, weakened to the point of powerlessness, or killed off, so that the system can develop unimpeded by them, guiltlessly. They are important only as things to be manipulated, controlled and conquered, like the bank teller in a robbery. Whether the teller survives the heist is irrelevant; and if they do, they’d better keep quiet, under threat of death. Such is how systems treat those elements which do not ‘jive’ with its directives and procedures, the undesirable elements that must be expelled.
Where this exclusion or bracketing-off takes place intentionally, it expresses a desire-not-to-know about the bracketed element. While the very need to treat of it does demonstrate its existence within the totality of elements, its dissonant or complicating aspect means it will be selectively left out of the picture or expunged from it. Observation shows that this is most often undertaken for the sake of the simpler and smoother running of the system. The purpose of smoothness, or of the semblance of it, is ‘don’t ask questions’. Limiting the field of what is considered, what can be considered, makes the attainment of the goal, the system’s own preservation, less difficult. Though the innocence of the term masks the violence of the operation, one could say the excluded element is considered only through inconsideration, through treatments that are logically ‘inconsiderate’. What counts for the system is to not be aware of the troubling element’s existence, save to the extent it can be ‘reified’, subjected to the machinations of the system.
The desire-not-to-know can be ‘justified’ by reference to anything whatsoever. Ease, the presumption that ease can be attained, is a frequent motivating factor. Even hatred shares a territory with this concern for ease. Like smoothness, which inhibits reflection, ease inhibits motivations for resistance. What hurts, what makes harder, what is tough, is instead: reflection on the discrepancies of the conception, on the illegitimacy of the supposedly rational procedures. Questioning is a suspicion of smoothness, of what ‘goes without saying’. Resistance is its intensification: a revulsion at ease, one’s own or another’s. But no one can go without sleep; smoothness is a lullaby, ease a dream. Nightmares come with the deal.
Suffering can always be assuaged by putting out of mind whatever irritates the concept, whatever might expose the illegitimacy of the reasoning, so that it doesn’t bother us, doesn’t enter the equation as something to be concerned with. Leaving the excluded element in the lurch, not exercising suspicion with regards to the system’s workings, or simply not having the resources to do so, enables it to go forward comfortably. By and large, that is what everyone, even the most professed ‘revolutionary’, prefers. Questions come up only “when it suits them.” Resistance is rarely extended to what might shake one’s own privileges. Because to want anything else would mean hatred of every comfort; a stringency of self-analysis condemning all good conscience, all faith that the life one leads is a justified. So the will of the blind eye prevails, permitting horror by definition.
These exclusionary operations, lubricated by pleasurable incentives and distractions, all refer to the preservation of the system. They make up the law, the laws of the system, which are at root laws of what gets to be counted as ‘considerable’ within it, what is allowed to constitute it, what ‘belongs’ – what is deserving of the gaze, of attention, of love. Exclusions are legislated out of the necessities of the system’s continued functioning; not so much the positive sacrifices it demands, the blood it is built upon, but more like the waste product, the flesh sucked of its juice. For if the excluded element were known, or were considered seriously as an issue, rather than a foreign, irrelevant element, then the system would be thrown into jeopardy, for it would have lost its power to measure its circumference, patrol its region, ‘think’ its ‘concept’. The law works as the blind eye of ‘justice’, which becomes the all-seeing eye of the law only by dint of the myopia specific to the system it rules.
Thus one can reliably predict that when the excluded part, the issue at best ‘left for later’, manifests itself in an unavoidable way; when ‘later’ comes and it renders itself visible to the system, ‘within’ the system though at its margins, knocking at its doors; when the ‘invisibilization’ procedures fail and the resistant objectivity of the excluded element appears, the first impulse of the system is to repress, oppress, or otherwise destroy that element; and this to justify its own status quo of operation. Obliteration is the last weapon of control when turning a blind eye no longer achieves the desired outcome. Then destruction lets itself be justified by law. System has an extreme capacity to gear all its resources toward finding reasons for that destruction. Law legalizes violence and obliteration so that the system will not fall apart; so that the contingency of its own reasons for existence, themselves based on the contingent priorities of the system, will not be revealed, will not become an issue infecting the health of its elements, will not destroy its purported ‘rationality’ and show its constitution–which is not to say its constituent elements–void.
In sum, the system interested in its own self-preservation disavows what it owes to its outside, in the name of its ‘reasons’, its intentions and goals, however vague, unthought, immediate or self-destructive these may be. For reason lets itself reach a curious limit that marks the end of reason: where it surrenders, for the sake of ease, the requisite reflection on its own reasons. At that limit, it states tautologically, “It must be because it is”, “That’s just how we do things”, “It cannot be looked at any other way.” These rationalizations, as they’re called, are aimed at maintaining identity: the identity of the system, which stakes a claim that cannot easily be absolved; and the identity of all the elements it treats of. Its internal ‘logic’ tends to totality, so that whatever escapes its purview simply does not exist. But this cannot last.
What is cast outside into nonexistence by the totalizing operation of the system has, in potentia if not in fact, a weak power of return over the existent totality produced by the system and its laws. “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last”; for Fanon, this will be verified by decolonization but only after a long struggle against the victors, against the category of victory. For the logic at play here is not one of remainderless totalization, but of autoimmunity. The foreign element to be eliminated by the system is in fact, objectively, inside itself. To defend itself, it can only destroy itself, thinking what it is destroying could somehow be kept outside. Unless this is raised to the level of reflection–such that decisions can be reached, not by the hegemony of the law of value (producing affluence on one side, exploitation on the other), but through the mutual interpenetration of reasons for life which exist both inside and outside the system, such that the latter’s hegemony is disempowered, depotentialized–lacking such reflection, the system is doomed to an interminable collapse, one which it will delude itself into thinking is not happening. Its semblance of ease, which was from the beginning haunted by the unease it had tried to displace outside its border–witness the paucity of its pleasures, its narcoleptic somnambulance–is now confronted by the ghost of its own deed, a ghost ready to claim rights over the spoils of the system.
And there one sees the contrary risk, that the system will only be reproduced in a new form. In truth, there is little to contravene or even diminish the tendency in beings of all sorts toward self-preservation, and so toward the exclusion of certain elements from consideration by their ‘system’. Probably all beings, all systems function and legislate according to what seems to be in their best interest, according to a rationality discovered immanently within. That they would favor their survival over another’s seems an unsurpassable natural fact. They make countless ‘automatic’ exclusions, most of which they could not bear to perceive. And so they do not even dare to want to know about it. But insofar as their existence depends on this very system, in practice desire-not-to-know amounts to saying: they cannot even look themselves in the face. For they could never say in good faith that they have eliminated all aspects of arbitrariness in their reasoning; only that they have controlled it through justification procedures, through the obviousness-to-self of self-serving activity – through the transparency of the non-fungibility of their own interests of self-preservation in all their own procedures.
For the system is what keeps them alive, keeps them comfortable, keeps their conscience clean. But it only believes in them because they represent it, embody it and glorify it, not because it values them as existents. They are nothing more, socially, than agents of *its* preservation. Reflection on the social system in late capitals shows: acts of individual self-preservation serve its indefinite continuation, secure its hold over every aspect of modern life, under the idea that it is what individuals really want. But they only value what it values in order to receive a semblance of value from it; in the end, am illusory self-worth serving only their own alienation and unfreedom. For they see to what an insane degree the system must hold up the prospect of their own obliteration as a means of coercing them to accept. The reward for participation–security–pales in comparison to the threat that at any moment this security could be snatch away, under any sort of pretense the system devised. Consciousness must of course repress this fact and get to work, for threat of starvation and homelessness.
It is thus that even the ‘free-floating’ elements strive after inclusion in the system, after the enjoyments afforded by inclusion, however minimal they may be. In essence, they are treated so inconsiderately that they are forced to appreciate whatever belittling consideration they can get. The system in effect degrades its elements to the point of willful subjugation and controllability, extending well into zones of the body with the help of pharmaceuticals. It pushes them into a hell of legally-binding and, for most, irrevocable indebtedness, such that the only option, psychologically, is to justify clammering for a ‘position’, for a reprieve from debt. For they know that inclusion is not at all a stable property, but rather that exclusion is.
To stay in the good graces of the system thus requires constant worship, a ‘Wertesdienst’ to the values of the system. It amounts to the implantation of the blind eye into the elements, such that policing of the system’s circumference can carry on independently of established law. This is the ideological operation: where allegiance is automatized, ‘common sense’, performed with votes of confidence, militarized into pride and I’d-do-anything-for-it mindsets. The elements have internalized the law, the principle of the laws, as their own, as though they were self-chosen, self-willed. They are disallowed, due to thousands of pressures and reinforcements surrounding them, from seeing things otherwise. They become emboldened, the immanent justification of the system, ready to defend its exclusions until their last breath. Little do they know that by inserting themselves into the systematic whole, they have excluded themselves from the moment of its truth.
But to access this implies a praxis of disidentification, self-abolishment: a thought not content with the illusion of heterogeneous utopias and difference, nor with exaltations of materiality and mythical nature, but which pursues its own negation to the limit of its demise and so reflects the prevailing conditions of estrangement, which have rendered every invocation of self-interest a betrayal, every self-image a lie.
fragilekeys 