people have a better understanding of power

this article is very heartening!

"18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed."

- BBC Newsnight: Paul Mason: Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere

Dangerous Conversations

new & exciting 'zine project - 'Dangerous Conversations'
email: dangerousconversations(at)riseup(dot)net
deadline for contributions to issue one: March 2011

Dangerous Conversations is a project born out of the struggle to end systems of domination. Our involvement in movements described as anarchist, activist, horizontalist, and so on has been at times inspiring and at other times disillusioning and frustrating. This zine is not aimed at Anarchists
or Activists but at anyone who struggles against the many forms of domination that blight our lives: ableism, ageism, authority, capitalism, civilisation, caste and class systems, heteronormativity, islamaphobia, male privilege, speciesism, transphobia, white supremacy (and others that are
still unrecognised).

Dangerous Conversations is intended as an intervention in business as usual. We hope to collect texts and viewpoints that challenge the status quo in a way that, rather than (or perhaps as well as) provoking hostility, provoke constructive responses and discussion. We hope that, as much as possible,
the zine becomes a place to converse and to deepen affinity. By showing solidarity with others who also see the struggle as their own struggle, evenwhen we differ on the details, we can become stronger as a movement. Ours is a strength that comes through diversity and empathy for different viewpoints
rather than the imposition of dogma and distrust.

These conversations are dangerous to oppressors because they threaten their privilege. They sometimes seem dangerous to us too because they threaten our own privilege. Because of this, they are important conversations to have.

This first issue (‘What next?’) is to be a collection of different viewpoints on where this struggle should go next. We are inviting a range of contributors who we think have interesting and sometimes conflicting ideas on how we should proceed.

We hope that readers will want to respond to and involve themselves in the project by contributing to this conversation in whatever way seems appropriate. There are no guidelines for what is and isn’t appropriate way to express yourself here. Submissions for future publication, participation
in the editorial collective, criticism and ideas are all very welcome.

- via Race Revolt

quote of the day

"Kyriarchy exists to give us tools to liberate ourselves by understanding the shifting powers of oppression. [...] It exists to radically implement our finest strategies to deconstruct our personal and political powers for the liberation of self and community.  For self AND community. [...]

[I]n the spirit of feminist theology, in the spirit of radical understanding of power, I would argue with 100% confidence that the absolute LAST thing that kyriarchy strives for is individual liberation. Solely pursuing your own liberation often comes at the expense of others.  That’s not liberation, that’s mainstream feminism."

Lisa Factora-Borchers, of My Ecdysis, via Flip Flopping Joy. i was relieved - in that way that i feel relief when someone does the incredible work of articulating complexities of power - when i came across Lisa's much-linked post in which she introduces explains the term. if you've also used and/or appreciated this word, be sure to read this update of how it has already been co-opted. 

on 'powerlessness'

i used the word 'powerless' in my last post, and then wrote a massive footnote, which i think should be a post in itself!
--------------------------------
* i hope it's clear that i don't mean to say that survivors of abuse, or mums whose children have been removed , or women who've been criminalised (or two of these things or all three) are powerless. i don't want to speak for anyone. and i am so full of respect for all the ways in which people in these situations find and use their own powers, and reclaim their powers. i want to find ways to talk about 'powerlessness', while recognising it is never total.

is there a word for power-squished-ness? as in - a way to say that someone has tried to eliminate or drastically reduce another's power - and that this has not been total (unless the person is killed*) but squashed, reduced, hurt...? i like the word squashed as it suggests the ability to bounce/grow/unfurl back. does this make sense? please comment if you can think of a word that means having had your power reduced, but not permanently.

serious power-squashed-ness has to be one of the worst feelings it's possible to experience. maybe it's the worst form of psychological pain. to the extent that generally, no matter what they have been through, people will not admit to having felt it. and - this is hard to talk about - i see this resulting in some women who've been through abuse, kind of denying that their partner ultimately had control. women say 'i gave as good as i got' because this is less painful than dwelling on how squashed their power may have been, even while he sustained injuries, or was poisoned, or was deeply unhappy, or said he felt afraid, or sometimes did as he was told, or negotiated in certain instances.

of course it's not up to me what women who've been through abuse want to talk about, and how anyone understands and describes their own experiences! but in terms of understanding domestic abuse as a pattern, understanding why and how it happens in order to minimise it, i think it is so important to find ways to talk about the intricacies of the power, and how where a woman is experiencing control and violence from a partner and taking control and perpetrating violence against him: of the stories i have heard this is very rarely a case of 'she gives as good as she gets', given the context of, for example, how men are generally able to be financially and housing-wise independent of their ex/partner and child/ren, while the reverse is generally not true. or the context of how men are more likely to make realistic threats to kill a partner, and (on some level) know they are more likely to get away with doing so, while the reverse is not true. and connected to both of these things, the context of how women are likely to be living in a much higher level of fear - of serious injury, death, homelessness, being sectioned, losing contact with their children by being deemed an unfit mother and so on - than men. to me, these kinds of factors bestow so much more power to men, that it is only in exceptional circumstances that women can give as good as they get. i certainly don't believe that it's impossible, i'm just itchy for real, clear, ways to talk about this stuff. i want to find ways of talking about and honouring how people surviving abuse can be powerful, and powersquashed, at the same time.

hmm. any ideas?

* footnote to the footnote: and i don't believe that people who haven't survived, people who've died as a result of abuse were powerless, of course not.

* another footnote: by tagging this 'collusion' and 'myths and excuses' i don't mean to imply that survivors are guilty of collusion, or stupidly taken in by, or propagating, myths and excuses by talking about their powerfulness! i use the tags to find my own way around my thoughts on here. what i mean is more that we all in this culture collude with abuse when we drift along not questioning the myths and excuses about abuse that are provided by the culture, which is an abusive culture.

society supports

i just read this, at Flip Flopping Joy:

"I was too wild, too out of control. And rather than find a way to *refine* my own personal style–that is, be the same big, wild, out of control person in a way that didn’t cross or step on other people’s boundaries–I tried to make myself smaller. Society *supported* me making myself smaller. Society *supported* me “controlling myself” through self abuse and shame rather than refining myself through love and consideration and compassion. Society supported me hurting myself–through the normalization of hurt. Through the normalization of hurting *me*."

and it reminded me of the last group. i was trying to guide the group through a list of reasons why abuse happens - reasons that members felt were true, as well as the myths and lies that we hear all the time. so that we could sort truths from lies, because understanding why it happens (because an abuser decides that the benefits of behaving that way outweigh other considerations) is key to being able to see it and stay away from it.

so i had a section on the flipchart(!) for 'ways that society supports abuse'. and people didn't get it. someone thought i meant, like women's aid. and i said yes women's aid support women who are abused but i mean - do you think there are ways that the way that society is set up, helps abuse to happen. and then someone said that their friends had said 'he doesn't mean it, he really loves you' - and of course that was a totally relevant comment. but what i was going for was like - when the police turn up and he says you're the crazy violent one and they arrest you because they're 'not trained' (to put it politely). but no one said stuff like that and because time was short i had to just validate the stuff they were saying rather than nitpick towards my own our-culture-is-fucked agenda. sigh.

but - how do we talk about it? is it necessary to talk about it? it's good to have that part in that exercise when i'm doing 'awareness sessions' with professionals. especially cos i get to make them feel guilty about colluding with abuse, ha, and maybe they'll think a bit harder about it. but if women who've come for a 'healthy relationships' course don't find it relevant to talk that way, well...

but it upsets me how much the women, on this course in particular, internalise the blame for the abuse, and their responses to the abuse. there may be more to it than this, but i connect this to the fact that most or all of these women are on probation, have court coming up, have had their children taken into 'care', have been criminalised. these women have had to learn to play the game of the powers that be. some of them were criminalised for their responses to the abuse they've been through. and those that came to the attention of social 'care' had their children removed for reasons connected to the abuse. and so i imagine these women have learned that if they display any anger at the way they have been treated - by individual abusers, or by social care, the criminal justice system, etc, they are knocked back much further by social care and the criminal justice system. and you can't live with that sense of injustice when you need to get your children back, or you need to act sane in a court room. you have to put it out of your mind, or drop it as just untrue.

and meanwhile individual abusers, social care and the criminal justice system, continue to propagate the notion of women being to blame for abuse, and/or choosing abusive man, and/or that an act of retaliation is at least as 'evil' as years of systematic abuse. these are the explanations offered to these women for the situations they're in. and it sure must be easier to believe that you yourself are bad, than to acknowledge the way society is engineered to make you powerless.*

one woman spoke of having called the police one time, when they arrived her partner told them she was in the shower, then she and her partner walked out of the house and past the parked police car, she with a swollen freshly-bruised face, and the police officer looked her straight in the eye and did nothing. and you know in the group i can validate that that is a terrible thing, that she was let down and betrayed (while meanwhile my cofacilitator remains expressionless, in that 'well it's just her story' way). and other women rolled their eyes in sympathy. and the woman herself said "i thought that was terrible; it was disgusting." but in that charity which has been co-opted by Probation, it's not the place to recognise and name the fact that the police help abuse to happen. everyone will have to deal with police in the coming weeks and months. the officers will be not unfriendly. it doesn't help to abhor them when you're just trying to get your children back. so these women absorb and absorb this 'normalisation of hurting themselves' and i can't figure out how much i'm colluding with this process vs how much i'm rightfully working within the boundaries of what they can cope with.

* see next post for extended footnote about my use of this word!

gender policing

ah, refreshing to wake up to a good bit of swearing. Queers Against Obama has something to say about proposed changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and its 'classification' of transgender people, check it out.

cosy opposition

i was writing the other day about a social work manager's use of assumed shared racism to distract from the fact that she was trying to deport a mother experiencing domestic violence. i have just read exactly what i was trying to say:

"“We” ostensibly embraces all true-born, good-hearted native folk, rich and poor, in thrilling yet cosy opposition to the alien menace. Even the humblest citizen may join this noble project. Or face the consequences. Such is the magic of populist politics, and the road to fascism."

The quote is from a remarkable article that my friend alerted me to: Too Many of Whom and Too Much of What by the folks at No One is Illegal. i love them, just feel relief at reading bang up to date, well-researched analysis of what is happening in UK political discourse at the moment. please read it.

jensen quote of the day

"This culture / civilisation... is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted, yet often unarticulated, hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always transparent, invisible, it's unnoticed. When it is noticed, it's fully rationalised. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher... is unthinkable, and when it does happen it's met with shock, horror and the fetishisation of the victims. And there are so many examples of this. One example is within my own family, when I was a kid, my father was extremely violent... so the violence flowed constantly downhill, and the one time that my brother ever fought back he got beaten far worse than any other time, because of course he had committed blasphemy by sending violence up the hierarchy."

From a talk Jensen did about his book Endgame, which i guess i'd better read. You can watch the talk here.

passages a l'acte

i got excited and ordered Violence by Slavoj Zizek. yeah! i tried to read another book by him once before that made absolutely no sense to me but this is much more accessible and compelling. fascinating, fascinating. i really should be taking it slowly and digesting but i'm itching to blog again while i still have a brain (post xmas break), before work sucks it out of me again. it was published in 2008 and it's really good to read analysis of events as recent as 2005, including hurricane katrina and the riots in france, which is the subject of the chapter i've found myself skipping to.

"If May '68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the 2005 revolt was just an outburst with no pretence to vision. If the oft-repeated commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era has any sense, it is here... What kind of universe is it that we inhabit, which can celebrate itself as a society of choice, but in which the only option available to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out? ... The protesters' violence was almost exclusively directed against their own ... More than a form of protest, [the riots] are what Lacan called a passage a l'acte - an impulsive moment into action which can't be translated into speech or thought and carries with it an intolerable weight of frustration. This bears witness not only to the impotence of the perpetrators, but, even more, to the lack of what cultural analyst Frederick Jameson has called 'cognitive mapping,' an inability to locate their experience of their situation within a meaningful whole... Perhaps it is here that one of the main dangers of capitalism should be located: although it... encompasses the whole world, it ...depriv[es] the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping."

This passage by Zizek articulates so much that i've been struggling to say. passages a l'acte. in the groups sometimes we talk about what women have done to cope, to resist and to survive "an intolerable weight of frustration". i wrote before about the woman who momentarily drowned her partner, knowing his retaliation would be worse, fueled by the self-justification he'd gain from having been 'wronged'. and women drink, scream, cut, talk back, fight back, 'provoke' inevitable violence to get it over with, whatever, some of these things are self-destructive, and often come from the impossibility, at that time, "to locate their experience of their situation within a meaningful whole". if in that moment a woman living with abuse could see the whole pattern of control, and had a realistic escape route and some uncrushed self-belief, she'd be out of there.

So what is happening to our culture that we can't understand what's happening, can't see the patterns that control us? Judith Herman says: "Like traumatized people, we have been cut off from the knowledge of our past." We only feel this confusion and hopelessness and have some folk memory of resistance that involves smashing, breaking, hurting, a plea for some acknowledgement, to be seen, or to feel something. any knowledge of how and why, of coherent political action has been erased as the papers describe anarchists as unhinged people who would break shop windows for no reason. how has popular political analysis been suppressed and eradicated, reducing us to people who blindly act out? i'd like to know whether Mai '68 is taught in french schools and if so, how. in the uk it's easy to avoid history lessons, and even if you sign up, you are taught that facism and totalitarianism in europe are History, all defeated by the greater good by 1945 and 1990 respectively (so 20th century!). how impotent do we feel, with no popular language to articulate that impotence. and we turn that rage in on ourselves, hurt ourselves, and 'provoke' further 'justified' retaliation, repression against ourselves.

divide-and-rule

ISOLATION is required for abuse. Repeated abuse can't happen if the person being abused can speak out, be believed and supported, and sanctions are put in place against the abuser continuing. "Divide-and-rule/conquer" is a big part of isolation.

In politics and sociology, divide and rule (derived from Latin divide et impera) (also known as divide and conquer) is a combination of political, military and economic strategy of gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into chunks that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy. In reality, it often refers to a strategy where small power groups are prevented from linking up and becoming more powerful, since it is difficult to break up existing power structures.

One of my main aims with this blog is to articulate and study how patterns of oppression operate on a personal and family level using the same strategies and patterns as political oppression. I believe that the most powerful way for people to become safe from domestic abuse and child abuse is for communities to understand how oppression works and to apply this understanding to all the structures in our lives.

Typical elements of [divide-and-rule] are said to involve

• creating or encouraging divisions among the subjects in order to forestall alliances that could challenge the sovereign.

Potentially, siblings living in a household ruled over by a tyrannical abuser could compare notes on their experiences, could identify patterns in his behaviour, could understand more about what their mum's going through and could unite to reduce his power and influence over them all. So before he can exert the worst of his behaviours he must first minimise the chances of this happening. So if a father is sexually abusing one or more children in the household he must say or imply "If you tell anyone ...." - so ISOLATION is so often backed-up with THREATS to be most effective. The other members of the household are silenced, they are divided, and they are ruled.

• aiding and promoting those who are willing to cooperate with the sovereign.

• fostering distrust and enmity between local rulers.

Children can be easily manipulated into joining in with verbal abuse against mum. They gain a sense of power (and perhaps material rewards from the abuser) from this, making them less likely to ally with mum in future. It can be very effective to play favourites with the children, gaining the strongest alliance from those who behave 'best' in the eyes of the abuser. This has the added benefit of creating jealously between the children and destroying their trust in one another, making them increasingly unlikely to unite against the abuser.

There is more to say about this, more to say, more to say...

secrets and complexities

sometimes the support groups feel like entering another dimension. this is when i really love my job. hearing secrets shared and shame demolished. hearing what really happened, what we're not meant to hear. the simple act of creating a space where it's possible to tell the truth, the power of that bowls me over some days.

someone told us about holding her boyfriend underwater. because she knew he was just about to get her. i got leathered for it afterwards like but.. how pure her power was, for those minutes.. i had control.

these acts of resistance don't exist in normal discourse, can't be written in the magazines: already it's too complicated for the victim to fight back against the monster. so many lives contain these untold moments where the power dynamic was flipped. and yet the fact that she was violent in that moment has been used against her ever since by the abuser, eclipses everything he's done to her before and since. and our failure - as friends, family, community, media - to articulate what was really going on here: a moment of resistance against prolonged, calculated abuse of power, leaves her with a burden of shame and guilt that becomes weightier every time we refuse to engage with the complexities of that moment.

"The survivor's shame and guilt may be exacerbated by the harsh judgement of others, but it is not fully assauged by simple pronouncements absolving her from responsibility, because simple pronouncements, even favorable ones, represent a refusal to engage with the survivor in the lacerating moral complexities of the extreme situation. From those who bear witness, the survivor seeks not absolution but fairness, compassion, and the willingness to share the guilty knowledge of what happens to people in extremity."

Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery.