Revolting Subjects

Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain

Imogen Tyler

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848138544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Revolting Subjects is a groundbreaking account of social abjection in contemporary Britain, exploring how particular groups of people are figured as revolting and how they in turn revolt against their abject subjectification. The book utilizes a number of high-profile and in-depth case studies - including 'chavs', asylum seekers, Gypsies and Travellers, and the 2011 London riots - to examine the ways in which individuals negotiate restrictive neoliberal ideologies of selfhood. In doing so, Tyler argues for a deeper psychosocial understanding of the role of representational forms in producing marginality, social exclusion and injustice, whilst also detailing how stigmatization and scapegoating are resisted through a variety of aesthetic and political strategies. Imaginative and original, Revolting Subjects introduces a range of new insights into neoliberal societies, and will be essential reading for those concerned about widening inequalities, growing social unrest and social justice in the wider global context.

1 | Social abjection

Along the fault-lines of the world disorder piles of human waste are rising (Bauman 2002: 47)

The wretched of the earth

In an extraordinary short essay entitled ‘Abjection and miserable forms’ (Bataille 1993 [1934]), Georges Bataille, writing in the shadow of Hitler’s rise to power, developed the concept of abjection to explore what he perceived to be the pressing political issues of the 1930s: ‘the dehumanization of labour, class struggle, mass fanaticism’ (Lotringer 1993: 3). Bataille argued that abjection is the imperative force of sovereignty, a founding exclusion which constitutes a part of the population as moral outcasts: ‘represented from the outside with disgust as the dregs of the people, populace and gutter’ (Bataille 1993 [1934]: 9). Whether this marginality is the effect of an inability or unwillingness to be sucked into proletariat classes of factory workers and servants, or, in the case of fascist (or colonial) systems of power, a consequence of perceived racial inferiority, these surplus populations are disenfranchised to the degree that they are ‘disinherited [from] the possibility of being human’ (ibid.: 11). The wretched are those who are deemed fundamentally unequal, rightless, ‘the scum of the earth’ (Arendt 1973 [1951]: 267). These are classes of people who are, paradoxically, classless, a section of the population that has been omitted ‘from the processes of representation to the point where it can no longer think of itself as a class’ (Krauss 1996: 100).

Yet, while they are excluded, Bataille argued that the waste populations created by sovereign power at the same time intrude at the centre of public life as objects of disgust: the ‘national abjects’ I examine in this book. In this sense all prohibitions are inherently paradoxical since, in order for a prohibition to function, it must at the same time be continually transgressed. For example, in order for a sexual practice to be declared obscene, experienced as disgusting and regulated accordingly, it must be seen to be practised within the body politic. Social prohibitions are dependent upon the (re)intrusion of that object, practice, thing or person which has been constituted as abject, cast out and illegalized. To summarize Bataille’s argument, the disciplinary forces of sovereignty, its processes of inclusion and exclusion, produce waste populations: an excess that threatens from within, but which the system cannot fully expel as it requires this surplus both to constitute the boundaries of the state and to legitimize the prevailing order of power. As Stallybrass and White argue similarly, ‘The low-Other is despised and denied at the level of political organisation and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaginary repertories of the dominant culture’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 5–6). Waste populations are in this way included through their exclusion, and it is this paradoxical logic which the concept of abjection describes. As Bataille argues, abjection describes ‘the inability to assure with sufficient force the imperative act of excluding abject things (which constitutes the foundations of collective existence)’ (Bataille 1993 [1934]: 10, emphasis added). Within this paradox lies the possibility of resistance to abjection. As Bataille writes: ‘[i]n the collective expression, the miserable, the conscience of affliction already veers from a purely negative direction and begins to pose itself as a threat’ (ibid.: 10). Or as Fanon puts it in The Wretched of the Earth, ‘[h]owever hard it is kicked or stoned it continues to gnaw at the roots of the tree like a pack of rats’ (Fanon 2004: 81).

Introduction

Abjection (noun):

The action or an act of casting down, humbling, or degrading; an act of abasement.

That which is cast off or away, esp. as being vile or unworthy; refuse, scum, dregs.

The state or condition of being cast down or brought low; humiliation, degradation; dispiritedness, despondency.

Abridged from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2012

At the heart of Revolting Subjects is the question of how states – states of being (human life) and states of belonging (political life) – are made and unmade and how we might critically engage in this process of making and unmaking (Butler and Spivak 2007). In this chapter I use Bataille’s essay as a point of departure with which to develop an account of social abjection that might assist us in thinking about these two states, subjectivity and sovereignty, together. Why abjection? Abjection is a concept that precisely ‘hovers on the threshold of body and body politic’ (McClintock 1995: 72). As Bataille’s account suggests, abjection describes the violent exclusionary forces of sovereign power: those forces that strip people of their human dignity and reproduce them as dehumanized waste, the disposable dregs and refuse of social life (Krauss 1996). However, as a dictionary definition reveals, abjection not only describes the action of casting out or down, but the condition of one cast down – that is, the condition of being abject. In this sense abjection allows us to think about forms of violence and social exclusion on multiple scales and from multiple perspectives.

This chapter begins with an account of the politics of disgust; it then offers a summary and critique of Julia Kristeva’s account of abjection which aims to clear the ground for a richer understanding of abjection as a mode of governmentality – an abjectionality that might assist in our understandings of changing forms of subjectivization and subjugation.¹ To this end, I draw on feminist and post-colonial theory and in particular the work of Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in my account of social abjection. What drives my revision of the conceptual paradigm of abjection is a political concern with thinking about how we might exploit the paradox abjection describes to contest the state we are in, the neoliberal states that are effecting new categories of ‘wasted humans’ (Bauman 2004: 5).

The politics of disgust

Disgust is an urgent, guttural and aversive emotion, associated with sickening feelings of revulsion, loathing or nausea. However, while it is experienced physically, in the gut, disgust is ‘saturated with socially stigmatizing meanings and values’ (Ngai 2005: 11). In his scrupulously researched genealogy, The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), William Miller reminds us that ‘[d]isgust and contempt motivate and sustain the low ranking of things, people, and actions deemed disgusting and contemptible’ (ibid.: xiv). As William Cohen argues similarly:

People are denounced filthy when they are felt to be unassailably other, whether because perceived attributes of their identities repulse the onlooker or because physical aspects of their bodies (appearance, odor, decrepitude) do. Actions, behaviors, and ideas are filthy when they partake of the immoral, the inappropriate, the obscene, or the unaccountable – assessments that, whilst often experienced viscerally, are culturally constrained. All of these versions of filth have one thing in common: from the point of view of the one making the judgment, they serve to establish distinctions – ‘That is not me.’ (Cohen 2005: x)

If disgust was once a neglected topic of intellectual enquiry, over the past twenty years a significant body of scholarship on disgust and other aversive emotions has emerged, much of which is concerned with detailing the social and political function of ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai 2005; see also Ahmed 2004; Meagher 2003; Miller 1997; Menninghaus 2003; Nussbaum 2004; Probyn 2000). The first significant study of disgust was made much earlier, in the 1920s, by the Hungarian philosopher and political theorist Aurél Kolnai (1905–73); although his essay ‘On Disgust’ (1929), was published in an English translation only in 2004 (in Korsmeyer and Smith 2004). Kolnai’s Hegel-inspired phenomenology of disgust emphasized the intertwined physiological, emotional and moral qualities of disgust reactions and in so doing prefigured much of the current theoretical preoccupation with aversive emotions. The considerable efforts made by Kolnai to both differentiate between ‘natural’ (physiological) and ‘moral’ forms of disgust, and to systematize the differences between disgust and other aversive emotions, such as hatred, fear and contempt, oversimplify what are experienced as tangled emotional and affective responses. Nevertheless, Kolnai makes two important observations. First, he notes that disgust is a ‘spatially’ aversive emotion. In being disgusted, Kolnai writes, ‘we perform a sort of “flight” from the “perceptual neighbourhood” of the revolting thing or person and from possible “intimate contact and union with it”’ (in ibid.: 587). If disgust is a reaction to the imagined over-proximity or intrusiveness of the disgusting thing, it creates (or attempts to create) boundaries and generates distance. Secondly, Kolnai introduces the concept of ‘moral disgust’, which, he suggests, emerges through an associative transference between physically and morally repulsive reactions. That is, in moral disgust, a physical experience of disgust slides into contempt and judgements of value. Yet because disgust is an emotion associated with involuntary bodily reaction, moral disgust is often experienced, or retroactively understood, as a natural response: anybody would find x as repulsive as I do. As Korsmeyer and Smith argue, ‘So strong is the revulsion of disgust that the emotion itself can appear to justify moral condemnation of its object – inasmuch as the tendency of an object to arouse disgust may seem adequate grounds to revile it’ (ibid.: 1).

Disgust consensus

In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, one of the most influential treatises in the recent history of disgust scholarship, the anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that disgust reactions are always anchored to wider social beliefs and structures of taboo (Douglas 1966). In her account, disgust functions to affirm the boundaries of the social body (the body politic) through the (actual or symbolic) expulsion of what are collectively agreed to be polluting objects, practices or persons. Thus, an awareness of dirt – that is, of something or someone being ‘dirty’ – reveals the social norms and rules in operation in a given social or cultural context. As Michelle Meagher (2003) suggests, what is important about Douglas’s argument is that she reveals that there is no ‘natural dirt’. Rather, that which is experienced and/or imagined to be filthy (be that faeces on the skin, or a ‘foreigner’) corresponds with prevailing belief systems, and involves community-wide complicity. In this regard, disgust reactions are always contingent and relational, revealing less about the disgusted individual, or the thing deemed disgusting, than about the culture in which disgust is experienced and performed. As Meagher summarizes:

disgust is not a condition of an object, but an effect of a beholder’s intentional relationship with an object. […] objects are rendered disgusting or dirty through implicit social agreements. That is to say, rules of dirt and the regulation of bodily contact with dirt are not behaviours that can be reduced to ‘personal preoccupations of individuals with their own bodies’. (Ibid.: 32)

I want to emphasize here the social agreements in operation within disgust reactions. There is no disgust without an existing disgust consensus. As Miller notes, an ‘avowal of disgust expects concurrence’ (Miller 1997: 194). Sianne Ngai similarly describes the ways in which expressions of disgust often seek ‘to include or to draw others into [their] exclusion of [their] object, enabling a strange kind of sociability’ (Ngai 2005: 336). In sum, it is through repeated citation, then, that a disgust consensus develops which in turn shapes perceptual fields. It is a disgust consensus that allows disgust to be operationalized in a given social and political context as a form of governance to sustain ‘the low ranking of things, people, and actions deemed disgusting and contemptible’ (Miller 1997: xiv). When we approach disgust as symptomatic of wider social relations of power, we can begin to ascertain why disgust might be attributed to particular bodies. Disgust is political.

The aesthetics of disgust

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Ahmed adds a Foucauldian dimension to the scholarship on disgust by emphasizing the performativity of aversive emotions. As she notes:

when thinking about how bodies become objects of disgust, we can see that disgust is crucial to power relations. […] The relation between disgust and power is evident when we consider the spatiality of disgust relations. […] disgust at ‘that which is below’ functions to maintain the power relations between above and below, through which ‘aboveness’ and ‘belowness’ become properties of particular bodies, objects and spaces. (Ibid.: 88, emphasis added)

Ahmed describes how the attribution of disgust constitutes the disgusting object in the following way: a subject feels something to be disgusting (a reception that relies on a history previous to the encounter), expels that thing (either literally or metaphorically), and through expelling it finds it to be disgusting. In turn, this disgusted response becomes ‘the truth’ of the object, thing or person deemed revolting (ibid.: 87). In short, through the act of being disgusted the subject constitutes the disgusting object. Ahmed argues that this process always operates discursively, and that images and signs of disgust become habituated through repetition. Disgust does not come from nowhere, but relies upon ‘histories of articulation’ which bind signs of disgust to specific objects and bodies (ibid.: 92). As she writes, ‘the attribution of quality to substance […] relies on the figurability of disgust’ (ibid.: 90, emphasis added).

Throughout this book I consider the figuration and mediation of those deemed abject. For, as Ngai argues, if we want to understand the central role of aversive emotions in, for example, processes of racialization, we need to think ‘the aesthetic and the political together’ (Ngai 2005: 3). This attention to revolting aesthetics resonates with Rancière’s argument that the political is always aesthetic, in the sense that regimes of representation and perception delimit ‘the visible and invisible’ and ‘speech and noise’ in ways that shape ‘the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience’ (Rancière 2004b: 13). If we map the aesthetics of aversive emotions in any given context, we can begin to apprehend the ways in which disgust is provoked, roused and incited in the service of prevailing social and political classificatory practices. Indeed, the ways in which aversive emotions come to shape perceptual fields and the stigmatizing effects of disgust directed towards persons or groups deemed revolting are a central concern of the account of social abjection I develop.

The neoliberalization of disgust

As Martha Nussbaum has argued, disgust has been used throughout history ‘as a powerful weapon in social efforts to exclude certain groups and persons’ (Nussbaum 2004: 107). All political ideologies – but perhaps particularly those preoccupied with social hygiene, such as racism, xenop...