Abuse

The defence forces in Australia are in the news again as places where people have been abused, and I guess the important issue is whether or not there have been little cultures of abuse, little breeder reactors, insulated from justice by management. There is a level of abusive practice in the background - reading advice columnists like Prudence @ slate.com furnishes examples, and if you've ever been to or played competitive sport you will have your own.

This abuse is theoretically marginal, but there are a couple of things that worry me. The first couple are from Zizek. Zizek thinks that the rights-based subject is by definition a vulnerable porcupine, who can't experience unwelcome events except as harassment or abuse. He also quotes Ayn Rand's hymn to money (in which she says that without money, the only way to sort out power relations is guns or mobs) as giving the game away: money is (in capitalism) an instrument for domination.

The second couple are from the 'war on terror'. The kill/capture missions, as described by Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman and others, are a relentless pounding on people taken to be enemy soldiers. But some of them are very young, all of them are very misguided, and it isn't clear that there are attacks on the sources of misguidance, or that the strategy is headed toward making an ommelette. This may be a phantom resemblance, an artifact of feeling that anyone you can film for 8hrs, you can capture or negotiate with. Second, more obviously, the enhanced interrogation techniques that are brutal, and the lingering strong support for Bush-era torture. People still occasionally give the game away, that waterboarding is not merely functional - its also satisfying a power instinct, that this is punishment.

Another interesting correlate for me was something Amanda Marcotte put in a footnote on some anti-feminist pushback that included very low verbal abuse - vulgarity and namecalling. She pointed out that some abusers had posted pornography, intending it to be taken as hate speech.

The Toffler's (Future Shock etc) apparently suggested that the way you make money becomes the way you make war. I think we could be in the middle of one of Heidegger's reconfigurations. We were in a time when we considered ourselves blankly useable, possibly useful, in which there isn't any obvious way of evaluating goals against one another. He called it the default of the Gods - the closing over of the sky. There are no longer super-personal entities to relate your behaviour to. You can't resolve on any God and so you settle on none. You can't agree on any future, and settle for a future no closer than the end of your nose. We are going into a time when every practice will refer itself no longer to use, but to abuse. Where Heidegger complained of the emptiness of enframing, we will try to substitute a fullness of violation, of raw power. Google will try to do good, but find it is smothered by accusations of abuse and Government intervention because it turns out what they intended for good is experienced by people as bad.

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