Uncertainty and instability characterize these times. Nonetheless, success and progress endure as a condition to strive for, even though there is little faith in either. All individuals and societies know failure better than they might care to admit — failed romance, failed careers, failed politics, failed humanity, failed failures. Even if one sets out to fail, the possibility of success is never eradicated, and failure once again is ushered in.
(Le Feuvre, 2010)
On May 1, the people entrusted me with the task of leading their country into a new century. That was your challenge to me. Proudly, humbly, I accepted it. Today, I issue a challenge to you. Help us make Britain that beacon shining throughout the world. Unite behind our mission to modernise our country. There is a place for all the people in New Britain, and there is a role for all the people in its creation. Believe in us as much as we believe in you. Give just as much to our country as we intend to give. Give your all. Make this the giving age. "By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more together than we can alone." On 1 May 1997, it wasn’t just the Tories who were defeated. Cynicism was defeated. Fear of change was defeated. Fear itself was defeated. Did I not say it would be a battle of hope against fear? On 1st May 1997, fear lost. Hope won. The Giving Age began.
(Tony Blair, Labour Party Conference, 30 September 1997, Brighton, England)
Energetic, future oriented, hopeful and rousing; Tony Blair’s comments to the Labour Party Conference in his first few months as British Prime Minister are typical of the heady optimism characterising a range of late 1990s Western liberal democratic state projects. Australia, Germany, Italy and the United States all had their own versions of such future oriented new deal, third or middle way social democratic projects. The promise of these projects was the reconciliation of the principles of social equality and economic success. All had high hopes for social renewal through cohesion and harmony within the nation; a harmony to be created through an economically enabling and socially inclusive state. The cynicism, fear and social division associated with previous governmental failures to achieve such a socially and economically inclusive vision could be defeated within this consensus driven social democratic project. Following Blair here, the British project clearly fits this bill. The barely muted neo imperial tone conveys a sense of worldly omnipotence. Anything and everything appears possible within such a cohesive and united liberal democratic mission. There is no question about the direction of progress. Defeat over internal as well as external enemies has been achieved.
Viewed retrospectively the sort of heady optimism associated with this social democratic project might be understood as a hopeful blip, struggling to establish itself within the broader context of the sorts of governmental anxieties, paranoia and fears more often considered characteristic of late modernity’s ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 2009). These are fears fuelled by terrorism, natural disasters, spread of disease, the speed and unpredictability of technological advance, economic crisis and energy and general resource scarcity amongst a range of other social ‘threats’ (Hoggett, 1989, 2009). They are fears which attest to a fundamental human consciousness of mortality which makes citizens fearful about death, fears against which states claim to protect (Stevens, 2011). 1
In the English 2 context an overt sense of governmental anxiety was very firmly re-established by the time the Labour Party was voted out of office to the Conservative Party’s familiar tune of the left’s legacy of governmental failure. According to this Conservative mantra Britain was ‘broken’, in social and economic decline (again) as evidenced by ongoing inequality, falling prosperity and increasing social unrest. This decline is positioned as the result of ‘the poisonous legacy of thirteen years of Labour misrule’ (Cameron, 2010; Lister, 2011), where markets were allowed to run themselves rampant and overzealous bureaucracy tightened its grip in the wrong places or in the wrong ways. As the current Conservative-Liberal Coalition Government’s first term of office draws to a close, hopes rescind again. Potential for pending election success depends on the ability to re-establish these faded hopes. Thus, regardless of political hue, this circular story of governmental failure goes on; characterised by the pendulum swing between triumphal victory, accompanied by promises of democratic and social renewal, and crushing defeat, accompanied by cries of despair at (still) unfulfilled governmental promise.
What is it that is going on here that makes it so apparently impossible to learn from our governmental mistakes? And in particular why, in spite of a range of governmental efforts at inclusion, is it that some people always seem to be included and others are always excluded? And then following that; why is it that it so often appears to be the same people who appear to occupy these positions of included and excluded? For Chantal Mouffe (2000) this circularity of governmental failure is predictable from within the context of a consensus seeking liberal democratic project which fails to recognise its underlying paradox: that equality and freedom, or inclusion and differentiation in the terms I am using in Power, Politics and the Emotions, are not reconcilable. There are plenty of analysts who have come to the conclusion that the irreconcilability of core liberal democratic ideals suggests the redundancy of the liberal democratic state project itself (Dean, 2009). My aim in this book is not to argue for or against such a project. It is to engage with its lived enactments and the challenges and prospects presented through them. My sympathies are very clearly against the neoliberal drift in contemporary Western liberal democratic state projects because of the way they tend to be presented in terms that value the generation of profit over the protection and enhancement of life. However, I do not view any such drift as fundamental to the enactment of the state. This is mainly because I do not see the state, whether conceived of as liberal democratic, neoliberal or otherwise, as a thing in itself.
From my feminist psychosocial point of view the state comes into being through the everyday processes of relational contestation that I call ‘relational politics’. By relational politics I mean the everyday actions, investments and practices of the multiple and shifting range of people and other material and symbolic objects that make up the state. One of my core concerns in Power, Politics and the Emotions is to highlight this everyday relationally contested nature of the state because, if this is not recognised, then we run the risk of seeing a contemporary neoliberal drift as definitive of the liberal democratic state project’s nature. If the only manifestation of the state is the neoliberal, then the only option for those against neoliberalisation would be to give up on the idea of the state altogether, letting it wither on the vine, or killing it off by other more violent methods. But, if, as I am contending in Power, Politics and the Emotions, neoliberalisation is not all that there is to the state, then this killing off would be misguided at best. Indeed, if we understand neoliberalism itself as in some way hostile to the state, or at least to a state which engages with human subjectivity and agency in life enhancing ways, then such a killing off of the state by neoliberalism’s critics only serves to support neoliberalisation. Killing off, abandoning or otherwise giving up on the state project is a potentially self-defeating practice. It is for this reason that I conceptualise this risk of giving up on the state as part of a neoliberal suicide. This is a form of state suicide which, though it may be usefully contemplated, should not be acted upon. In the rest of this chapter I begin to elucidate the reasons why contemplating, but not acting on, the state’s suicidal tendencies is useful in rethinking the state in a more life enhancing form than the current English enactment of the (neo)liberal democratic model. At the end of the chapter I turn to overviewing the book’s content.
A very neoliberal suicide
The issue of suicide is fraught, controversial and contested (Jaworski, 2010, 2012). Its psychodynamics are complex, multifactorial and variously related to sadism, masochism, altruism, narcissism and, occasionally explicitly, to ideas of rationality (see Akhtar, 2009; Lees and Stimpson, 2010; Mikhailova, 2006). For David Webb, an analyst and survivor of suicidality, suicide is the acute expression of a crisis within the self, a ‘storm in the mind’ (2010, p. 6). The lived experience of contemplating and attempting suicide is ‘chaotic and confused, full of ambiguity and doubt. Anger, fear and other passions are also tangled with the paralysing hopelessness and helplessness’ (2010, p. 6). Yet, ‘contrary to the assumptions behind the [predominant] mental illness approach, it is possible to see thinking about suicide as a healthy crisis of the self, full of opportunity despite its risks’ (2010, p. 8; emphasis in original). Approaching suicide in this way does not mean downplaying the dangerous, life threatening and ultimately, for some, life taking risks, but it does mean refusing to either suppress or indulge painful suicidal feelings. It also means understanding that not all suicidal thoughts lead to suicidal actions, but that they could do. Following Webb’s argument such feelings should be honoured and respected as real, legitimate and important, as a central part of an agonising struggle for the self for some people. These feelings tell us as much, if not perhaps more, about the struggle for life as they tell about the desire to die.
The struggle for life central to suicidality is a struggle over relationality. It is essentially a struggle for belonging. This struggle becomes especially hard where there is an obvious tension between the subjective and objective senses of self, how the self is experienced ‘inside’ as the ‘real me’, and the way this ‘real me’ feels it is misrecognised or not seen at all by others. Stories about suicidality are often bound up with a subjective sense of passionate curiosity, a ‘passionate yearning’ (Webb, 2010) and a willingness to explore boundaries and to engage in adventure. Such stories tend to communicate a great passion for connection with others and the world around which is mismatched with the limited ability of that external world and the others that make it up to recognise and engage such a thirsty desire for community and belonging. This inability of the external world to match the love and affection of the subject is experienced as a deep grief, triggered by a sense of loss.
Suicidality points to the central human paradox considered within psychoanalysis which understands loss to be at the heart of the process of becoming a subject. This is the process Judith Butler (1997) calls ‘subjectification’. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, loss is central to the originating split between self and other which occurs through birth and which enables the self to understand itself as a distinct but nevertheless interdependent object in the world; as an object related to but differentiated from others, as a subject in relation to others. This loss is re-enacted repeatedly through the ongoing tensions of human relationality and the fundamental interdependence to which relationality attests. As soon as you become one thing, you are no longer in any clear sense the other that you were. Your belongings shift and you change. The subject is constantly being recreated through difference, metamorphosing, changing. This changing involves a constant process of differentiation from significant others, losing connections with them; losing relationship, but at the same time establishing new relations with new others. These new relations position you differently in relation to those other others and so on.
According to Freud in his 1917 paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (Freud, 2006 [1917]), melancholia is one way of responding to the fear and pain of the repeated human experience of change as a form of relationship loss. It is characterised by unbearable ambivalence towards the lost love object which was at some point interdependent with the self. The lost object can be a person like a lover, a mother, a friend, for example, or ‘an abstraction taking the place of the person, such as the fatherland, freedom, an ideal and so on’ (Freud, 2006, p. 310 [1917]). This unbearable ambivalence towards an object upon which one is dependent for self definition, but from which one also desires autonomy, outs as rage, anger and violence towards that lost aspect of the self. But because that aspect of the self is never fully lost or separated from the self (there is always at the very least a memory, or a trace of it), the loss cannot be processed or ‘gotten over’. But because the object itself is gone from the subject’s consciousness, in the sense that the relationship is broken and the object’s existence has been repressed and denied, the anger, confusion and fury at the loss is rained down on the self. At its most extreme and tragic this melancholia leads to an inclination to self extinction via suicide.
Failing to be able to fully grasp its own interrelationship with the lost object, the grieving subject turns its rage and disappointment in upon itself. Initially it does this via self reproach, subsequently escalating to increasingly violent forms of sadism and self harm. For Freud, ‘[i]t is this sadism which solves the mystery of the inclination to suicide which makes melancholia so interesting and so dangerous’ (Freud, 2006, pp. 318–319 [1917]). Suicide as per this Freudian analysis is borne out of the inability to contain the ambivalence and uncertainty which comes out of the constant threat of the loss of relationship. This threat grows into a problem of the relationship with the self in the context of the broader set of complicated and changing relationships in which the subject is embroiled. The source of the subject’s persecution is by this po...
