Unconscious Protest
10.26.23.
Every young American in my class is taught to fight unconscious bias with a conscious unspooling–“Do you realize why your words have damage? Do you realize why your prejudice is ill-founded?
This well-meaning condescension misses the mark completely–“Do we realize that our unconscious is self-aware?” People generally understand that they are prejudiced and they generally understand why, even if they can’t articulate this. It is not a question of making them understand themself or some objective moral truth. It is a question of spirit and psyche. To assume they are unaware and to explain to them why they are wrong will only demonstrate our own delusion: when we are compelled to “unpack” and explain, we are displaying our own unconscious, our own unarticulated libidinal tendencies, masqueraded as conscious objectivity.
What is it that really moves people? When we touch their soul. If my coworker says something unsavory, I respond with “Come on, man.” Am I too easy on him? After a certain point, it is useless to explain why I disagree. But if a critical mass of people in his life–people who he respects and people who respect him back–communicate on unconscious terms, then it is more likely that he will be emotionally and spiritually swayed.
Now we must apply this approach to our political circumstances.
The international political elite says one thing and does another: though liberalism is rhetorically committed to popular will, it is uninterested, for example, in anti-war protests like the movement we are currently witnessing against the Israeli assault on Gaza. The powerful have likely convinced themselves that their moral compromises are justified to prevent an even “greater evil” from taking power, but this is only a conscious logic. It is what they tell themselves, not what they necessarily believe. And so popular outrage will do little to move them, just like “unpacking” the harmful words of my coworker will have little effect on his moral economy.
This is not to say that we should forgive the perpetrators of genocide, or even the man on the street who says a slur. Rather, I’d like to suggest that immaterial bodies of power like corporations or states behave more similarly to individuals than we like to imagine. Power, in the abstract, operates unconsciously, perhaps even more so than individuals.
What is the unconscious language of our international political elite and how can we speak that tongue? How can we counter it and take power? How can we institute our own unconscious language? Measures demonstrating popular sentiment–protests and petitions–clearly matter little to the international community (the anti-war movements have done as little today as they did for Iraq twenty years ago). These methods of protest appealed to the official surface of our political reality (“You are behaving hypocritically!”), and so it should come as no surprise that we have not yet punctured any meaningful bastion of power.
(As an aside: European fascism was so successful in achieving power because it spoke to the deeply unsettling truth that war could touch our unconscious language, both commoners and elite.)
As Norman Finkelstein has recently mentioned, the Hamas attacks on October 7th might be likened to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. Both horrifying “excesses” have caused “moral crises,” without a doubt appealing to our unconscious language in grotesque fashion. While this most recent “appeal” has done little to change the actions of our political elite, it has been followed by even more grotesque excesses from the Israeli state and a groundswell of public support for the Palestinian people across the world. Perhaps most horrifying is that the October 7th attacks were the most “successful” action Hamas could have taken. Palestine’s non-violent movements from the past few decades have been suppressed and ignored because they have not touched our unconscious language: liberals simply do not care about symbolic economic protests (we know this because this is the institutional method of protest provided by liberalism, the way we are supposed to protest). Until we (Palestinians and the world together) formulate new methods of dissent which touch this unconscious nerve, we will only see more “excesses” like the Hamas attacks on October 7th and more of its occupational reaction. If this is the only unconscious protest available to us (slave rebellions which spark popular dissent but no real political concessions), we will sleepwalk deeper into a neo-fascist period.
go back, How Should We Protest? 10.12.23.