Privilege Does Not Exist, or the Violence of Being Mainstream
I would first like to establish something so as not to be accused of whatever later. I envision a world in which subjectivity is liberated, where there is no violence, where travel is free, money is detached from value, learning is life, free thought and thinking is life, art is life, curiosity is life, Profundity is life. Unfortunately, as a culture we are so very far from that.
With that established, I’d like to discuss the contemporary concept of Privilege, offering up an extortion model of privilege.
In our Consumerist culture I would be understood to be a progressive, left-leaning identity privileged because of my white skin and my maleness. I am privileged, for example, in that a Bank, merely because I am white, is more likely to lend me large amounts of money so that I will go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, having to spend decades paying that loan back, such that I am coerced into maintaining a steady job, in which an overly priced education is required. I will be forced repress my urges and obey my boss, and not travel, and say no to drugs, and cease to make odd and honest statements to various sorts of people, and dress in a certain way, and all the other trappings of mainstream, debt-ridden, captured, middle-class, America.
I’m not being snarky here, because this is what is being talked about with the traditional idea of white, male privilege, along with how and why that privilege is constructed. As a white guy the State(1) constructs me as a productive member of society and not a thug (a la Trump), because thugsdon’t work, or so the racist State conceptualizes, thugs are lazy and violent, or so the racist State conceptualizes, and all that other racist bullshit the State generates to systematize racism for its particular social functions.
The State sees me, a white guy, as a nice, tidy, pattern. My production and consumption patterns have been stabilized into a clean, plastic mainstream. I’m not revolutionary. My lifestyle doesn’t cause the State any trouble. As a white guy, I’m a Nothing, ie. I’m a predictable pattern.
As a contributing member the State will not externally destroy me (though, looking at white, male suicides rates, the State will simply convince me to destroy myself when I begin manifesting psychological resistance to being a cog in the great Consumerist machine). The State will not externally destroy me because it needs my economic contribution to keep this consumerist rat race going. The State needs my patterns of production and consumption for it to exist. The State needs me to produce and manage the production of commodities so to make enough money to spend on other commodities produced and managed by other cogs. The State needs me to be a nice little cog, “rewarding” me with privilege for being a nice, behaved cog. Though, it is more accurate to say the State “constructs” me to be a nice, behaved cog.
Again, this is what we’re talking about when we talk about “privilege.” The State conceptualizes whiteness (just as it conceptualizes every other demographic maker for particular social functions) as a certain mode of production and consumption, a specific structure of productive, contributing cogs. Simultaneously, the State constructs social and psychological mechanisms that hold whiteness in this specific structure to assure that whiteness will function in its preordained mode of production and consumption, to assure that whiteness will function to produce and consume what it is mandated to produce and consume. Again, every demographic marker has a particular social function the State generates, and unique specific social and psychological mechanisms to assure this functioning. To assure whiteness will function in a particular manner, a specific, unique to whiteness, social and psychological mechanism is constructed into white people, to assure a certain mode of production and consumption. The mechanism to assure whiteness performs a certain mode of production and consumption is privilege. Privilege is both the mode of production and consumption and the mechanism to assure that mode of production and consumption. Being imprisoned, or rather being created to be imprisoned, in this form of production and consumption is what we’re are talking about when we talk about privilege.
Essentially, the State orders one to do X, Y, and Z, and one is then constructed into the privilege-function of performing X, Y, and Z.
Privilege is a mode of extortion: produce and consume in a certain pattern and you become the victim of the violence of privilege; don’t produce and consume in a certain pattern and you become the victim of a different sort of violence (the State has a form for everyone and every group). It should be noted that the State decorates this form of violence , makes it seem appealing, and a “benefit,” so as to lure and assimilate and capture any subjectivity that was not directly constructed into it, as well as to hold any subjectivity already functioning within it that may be moving away from the stable, mainstream patterns.
An apt analogy is the Mafia. The Mafia offers the privilege of a flower shop to operate by protecting the flower shop, though protection means forcing the flower shop to pay $500 a month or else, who knows, someone may break all the windows and burn the shop to the ground. In this example, the Mafia is the State, and the “privilege” is not really a privilege at all. If the shop owner refuses the shop gets burned down.
Thus, “privilege” is having to pay the extortion and living in fear of violence by the State. However, the violence is already occurring, because privilege is fear, privilege is violence. If our traditional understanding of a prisoner is one who is forced to behave in a certain way, at a certain time, in a certain location, that is the violence of imprisonment. If privilege is being forced to exist as a certain pattern of production and consumption, then that is the violence.
Some will say, rightly, that another shop, say a bakery, that doesn’t pay for the Mafia’s privilege, is also living in fear. I agree. However, once the Mafia burns the bakery down, the fear is resolved, the fear that holds one captive is transcended. In a moment of catharsis the fear transforms to Righteous and Justified Anger. Once this catharsis occurs and angry is manifested, the anger is supported by the community at large, though of course in very repressed ways, for the rest of the community at large is still held under the violence of fear/privilege. Once this catharsis occurs, the anger becomes a catalyst for change. The Impotent Guilty Fear of the flower shop owner who continues to pay the extortion, is silenced and controlled, she dare not talk aloud about the extortion that is occurring, yet the anger of the bakery owner is communicated, both explicitly and implicitly, and gathers strength and could eventually force change.
Certainly, we can ask, is it any better to be filled with Righteous and Justified Anger rather than Impotent Guilty Fear? Obviously, we would all want to live joyful lives filled with love and empathy, absent of both anger and fear. However, at the pragmatic level in which social change occurs, clearly the righteous and justified anger is the more revolutionary useful psychology, and privilege does not allow those persons who experience it to unleash and tap into this revolutionary psychological subjectivity.
(1) For additional (necessary?) information on what the State is, please read here.
Augustus Fossly is an autodidatic deinstitutionalist dwelling in an (a)liminal non-representational space of immanance. His writings have been featured in the journal No Where. He spends his time as a gadfly. Follow him on instagram @augustus.fossly
