Yesterday, I decided to cut the beard that had been growing for ten years. I had to walk into a cosmetics store and get myself another shaving kit: gel, razor, lotion, brush, etc. After throwing away the clump of beard I had cut off with an electric trimmer, I gave myself a close shave. The man in the mirror was my father as he had looked in his fifties. From then on, I knew where I needed to look whenever I missed my father. Anyway, after leaving the bathroom, I started waiting for my wife to come home from work. The woman who had told me at least three times a week, “Cut that beard already, Chao!” now started telling me, “Grow your beard back, quick!” I imposed only one condition on her: “I don’t want to hear another comment or instruction about my beard.”
Some people want to be the Robinson Crusoe of modern times; others, Emperor Nero. Some want to be stranded on a deserted island, looking at the planet from outer space; others want to be a diva carried around on people’s shoulders. Either way, I suppose a person is needed both to be alone and to feel like one among the crowd. There is only one difference: in one case, you need people for their presence; in the other, for their absence. I am somewhere in between. I feel the way Bukowski did; I am bothered by people being physically close to me, yet I want them to read what I write. I suppose this much interaction and love of humanity is more than enough for me. The other camp, meanwhile, is umbilically attached to every form of social interaction. Interaction is the most fundamental means people have of proving that they exist.
There was a story about Ozzy Osbourne that used to circulate in the late eighties. It was probably an urban legend, because despite searching for the video on YouTube countless times in the years that followed, I could never find it. According to the story, Ozzy would walk onto the stage with chicks and crush them to death under his studded boots. Back then, animal rights activism had not yet spread so deeply into the mainstream, and extreme acts of cruelty could still be regarded as part of a stage performance. At least, if the person doing it wasn’t famous, they might be labeled “crazy,” “insane,” or “eccentric”—labels that could even sound endearing from the outside. Those who engaged in behavior disturbing enough to offend the conscience, however, would be branded “punks” and pushed out of the social environment. The tools of interaction in the pre-internet world consisted, once again, of acts designed to attract attention and push the boundaries of accepted social behavior. While punks displayed their aesthetic sensibility under the motto “ugliness is beauty,” young heavy-metal fans grew their hair long, wore leather clothes, and adorned themselves with flashy accessories. Meanwhile, young people gathering around rap and arabesque music in the ghettos twisted and reshaped their own realities, first creating their own spaces for socialization and then their own subcultures. They were rebelling on the one hand and constructing their existence on the other. All of it was part of being seen. As the crowd grew, visibility diminished; and I suspect this made people question their own value, driving them into smaller groups where they could become more radical, more insane, more hooliganistic.
Finally, in the world of social media, the path to becoming visible became dependent on a set of conditions: your act of madness had to be recorded, uploaded, noticed, and subjected to a public lynching. As the conditions became harsher, interaction with this digital pornography of people’s madness moved into a different phase, eliminating the stages that ought to occur in an ordinary society—condemnation, correction, shaming, moral reckoning—and replacing them with something else. Now, our first reaction to the pornographic feed of food, sex, violence, luxury, religion, and even art that we encounter on social media takes the form of a single demand: “Arrest them.” Fascism was once perceived primarily as an idea of the state, an institutional ideology. But the evolution of our forms of interaction, blended with technology, has popularized fascism and turned it into the ideology of individuals living inside social states. The other day, a young woman killed a tortoise by crushing it under the heel of her shoe in a video her friend had recorded to attract attention. Those who joined the outrage that erupted shortly after the video began circulating were, like an angry mob of peasants rising up in the Middle Ages, all demanding the woman’s head. As far as I can tell, the video I saw today is actually fifteen years old. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t; that is not what I am discussing here. What I am discussing is how every frenzy that begins with follower-driven interaction on social media eventually takes on an identity that begs the state to punish someone. The famous slogan of our ancient coffeehouse culture—“Hang a few of them in the town square and see if they dare do it again!”—has now become: “Arrest them!”
The aesthetics of social life once lay, in part, in its ability to judge without passing judgment, and in its power to make the offender engage in self-criticism without granting them the right to defend themselves. When a person was exposed while committing a wrongdoing, they would feel intense pressure, criticize themselves out of shame, and take care not to commit the same offense again. This was society’s way of punishing without punishment, of compelling people to be good without forcing them to be good. Everything was hidden in silence, in refusing to advertise sin, and in the gratitude inspired by the ability to conceal what was bad. Crime was the domain of the state; wrongdoing was the domain of society. In this way, it was possible to build a social organization made up of highly self-regulating individuals, one that prevented the production of criminals.
Now, in Foucault’s terms, a person who encounters crime or wrongdoing at some point in their life is immediately exposed to everyone and handed over to the state. Instead of giving the individual a chance to reorganize themselves through self-criticism, we open the way for them to rationalize—even organize—their wrongdoing. Even the simple label “Juvenile Delinquent” turns every child into a potential offender while also potentially encouraging some children to voluntarily gather and organize themselves under that label. After all, every exclusionary discourse eventually stands before the one it excludes wearing the very label of exclusion as armor.
Unfortunately, in this age of exposure, when everyone from someone wearing a miniskirt to someone drinking alcohol, from those who criticize cult-like leaders to those who simply ask for an address, is being targeted for arrest, we are sick with the delusion of treating everyone in Pornography as a pornographer.
I think we, as societies, are standing at a critical threshold:
Are we going to tame the tortoises, or are we going to kill them?
ANARCHISTALES 