visceral switch

Oh if we had but a people's Dante, to make a special circle in the Inferno for those who live on this misery...

     Annie Besant

 

The fantasy always runs something like this. I've overpowered his elite guard, burst into his secret bunker with my machine gun ready. He lunges for his Luger. I knock it out of his hand. He lunges for his cyanide pill. I knock that out of his hand. He snarls, comes at me with otherworldly strength. We grapple, we fight, I manage to pin him down and put on handcuffs. "Adolf Hitler," I say, "I arrest you for crimes against humanity. Here's where the Medal of Honor version of the fantasy ends and the imagery darkens. What would I do if I had Hitler? It's not hard to imagine once I allow myself. Sever his spine at the neck. Take out his eyes with a blunt instrument. Puncture his eardrums. Cut out his tongue... 

           Robert Sapolsky

 

There’s a fear of being revealed for who we actually are. That fear is always tethered to the idea that revenge will follow — that these people must hate us. They must want to do to us what we have done to them. I think that sense of impending doom or retribution moves us about.

    James Baldwin

In a yellow cell you become increasingly sunken eyed, emaciated and calloused and you have no choice but to acquaint yourself well with genocide, which is all that your curriculum consists in now. Eventually you are led to the end of one of many piers protruding from the walls of a great dark hallway. You watch your former colleagues hanging, or being hung, at the end of their respective piers, then a noose is placed around your neck and it snaps like a babies back bone trodden into Auschwitz mud. If half the human race, to be more specific, the worst half, were to evaporate all at once then the earth would heave a colossal sigh of relief, like a consoling breeze blowing everywhere and in unison; a breeze that tells gentleness and silence to come out into the sunlight. Or perhaps they could, instead of evaporating, become shoals of leaves rushing through alleyways and spiraling above cold lakes.

I don't know who authored the following description of a moment in a TV interview with someone who had several incredibly good reasons to be very angry: 'That isn't sadness, that's rage. The look on her face and the fury in her eyes resonates strongly with me because I've felt something similar. It rears up and threatens to consume you and feels like it's going to split you in half - like you're exploding and imploding at the same time'.

Justice may have to be sidelined however much rage some feel at injustices and regardless of how strong their ethical sense is, how great the passion is that motivates them or how much we may, failing all else, want to be paid back in blood. But what if this sidelining makes us ill? We should at least acknowledge its centrality to the subjects discussed here. 'Governments often blame a lack of resources, but, in fact, many people face systematic discrimination, while those on the margins of society are often overlooked altogether...' Economic, social and cultural violations '...are not a matter of inadequate resources; they are a matter of justice.'(Amnesty International) Civil rights activists chanted: there can be no peace without justice, and perhaps it's sometimes the case that without justice there can be no sanity. Even a minor gut-level acknowledgement by (implicated) others, of the meaning scrunched up in rage can feel like ears beginning to unblock or blinkers lifting a little from eyes - can allow you to hear and feel a quiet breeze that you have been numbed to for what seems like forever. 'Rage inverted goes bad pretty quick — it festers fast into fear, then numbs further into apathy, which feels like a big, dulling cloud coiling around your brain' Katie Heindl said, with reference to the aftermath of being run over by a drunk driver.

Heindl found that the fuel, the heat of her anger (when un-inverted and refined) began to vaporize the gloom that melted gray days together, began to ameliorate her fear, her apathy - the dulling cloud coiled around her brain, as did (perhaps equally importantly) the chance to see the driver sentenced. But she couldn’t allow herself to express it in court: 'Anger, maybe the most honest reaction I could have had, would have been my undoing in that situation.' It would have been her undoing, in part, because: 'Our anger is caricatured back at us in order to mitigate it...' She emphasises the way in which women's anger is supressed and suggests that not everyone's anger is seen as inadmissible or at fault - anger is framed quite differently depending on, for example, who or what it is aimed at, whether you are towing a party line or not or whether you are positioned as an insider or not: ‘there are levels assigned to anger’ she says. And if you’re on the wrong side of dreamed up, then enforced, lines, then your ‘...anger becomes a stigma, something to be curbed outright—and if it can’t be, then lessened.’

If you do not posses a strong voice to begin with then you will, likely, be viewed as of little worth and so further silenced - your value will then decrease exponentially. Feeling less but more intensely until all that's felt is a pin prick which, because it is all that is felt, feels infinite; your world narrows, as James Baldwin put it, to a red circle of rage.

If we lack the means (particularly when we are growing up) to meet societies standards then, in the classic Durkheimian way, anomie and social distress intensify. As Gramsci had it, these standards or rules are set, in the main, by those who rule and, as such, reflect a narrow set of interests. Anomie, and whatever results from it, may then be stigmatized, along with non or sub-standard individuals in that stigma becomes their defining feature - in that they are automatically defined, in the main, by their distance from a standard as per Goffman or Foucault. And, as Thom Davies, Arshad Isakjee and Surindar Dhesi said, citing Achille Mbembe: suffering becomes a political technology through which '...certain groups are exposed to conditions in which they are "kept alive but in a state of injury". This process is naturalized and it snowballs, leading, often, to the complete destruction (or, as Engels had it, social murder) of those who lack the means initially outlined. If un-inverted rage or anger (or affect in general) leads to such conclusions then those who rule would have good reason to supress and to misdirect it.

Sarah Ahmed writes: 'Some have to look after themselves because they’re are not looked after: their being is not cared for, supported, protected...social privilege...is how some relationships are nurtured and valued, becoming a means of organising not just one’s own time, but a way of sharing time and significance: how a we has something; how a we loses something. How you lose as well as what you lose can even become a confirmation of the worth of what you had'.

I want to say (at the risk of presumption) that Heindl lived in a world that asked for emotional responses, that was emotionally enlivening and that she has a high emotional I.Q; it can be difficult to get a handle on or to read our emotions without this kind of intelligence; even with her E.I or emotional literacy and even though she’s a journalist who knows how to put things into words, it was still plenty difficult for her, judging by her account.

Inverted rage goes bad pretty quick; anger needs or wants to latch onto its cause, or else, as Heindl says: it is a ‘divining rod your body can wield to home in on something deserving of your attention.’

If it finds no place in the world; if it is undermined, suppressed, seen as ‘somehow suspect’ or ‘implicitly radical’ then what can it do and where can it go except turn inwards? Some psychologists suggest that anger is a 'secondary emotion' which conceals a wide array of negative affects - feeling bored, betrayed, disgusted, trapped, afraid, agonized, frustrated, guilty, humiliated, overwhelmed, immiserated, ashamed or tricked for example. On the other hand, as an APA article has it: '...we’re taught...not to express anger. As a result, we don’t learn how to handle it or channel it constructively'. Anger is also '...what some psychologists consider a "moral emotion," a feeling associated with moral transgressions...So when guarded and deeply personal notions such as justice are threaten...anger lights our brain up like a pinball machine.'(Heindl) I’m reminded here of Cornel West and John A. Powell’s line: ‘Justice is the public face of love’. Degrees of justice are not achievable merely though looking inwards or paying attention; their achievement requires a suitable world and, perhaps, a tailored set of affordances or organisational bootstraps. Emotional shutdown or disconnect leads to a world experienced as without much meaning, this has obvious parallels with depression, DPDR, PTSD and so on. Rage often involves (present or past) helplessness in the face of transgression, while depression is said to entail learned helplessness. There is probably, at least, something in the folk psychological notion that has it that depression is anger turned inwards, it is, after all, classed as an 'internalizing disorder'. If anger points in the direction of that which has intense meaning for us - if it is telling us to bring to some kind of resolution a deep sense of having been wronged (individually or collectively) and if that sense is thwarted then we might also expect our sense of meaning and purpose to drain away.

We would, I think, expect to feel something like this: '...it felt like the visceral switch that would propel my next move had shorted. My sense of fight was flattened—I couldn’t bring myself to give a shit.'(Heindl) I hesitate to say that the processes that Heindl describes clear the air (perhaps I should use her metaphors again and talk of fog) because the phrase is a trivializing cliché, but if one is to move on to address other pressing matters then sidelined emotional injuries can form an impasse - they can constrict our attempts at articulation and sabotage our ability to move on, both inwardly and outwardly. This is why things like transformational, restorative and retributive justice are vital. This is why reparation is necessary: In 'Critique of Black Reason' Achille Mbembe writes: 'Reparation, moreover, is necessary because of the cuts and scars left by history. For much of humanity, history has been a process of habituating oneself to the deaths of others—slow death, death by asphyxiation, sudden death, delegated death'.

A car is every bit as real as a blade of grass; to say that something is made is not, of course, the same as saying that it's unreal or fleeting. I would agree that status or class and race are complicated social constructs and that there is a sense in which gender is constructed. And that (often and to a degree) disability, distress and powerlessness or (learned) helplessness are, also, made, and I would agree that they are constructs that many have been forced into at the end of gun a barrel for a very long time, as such, restorative justice is overdue. James Baldwin said: 'I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it too, for the very same reason.'

We could say that where there is anger or rage there is also guilt - if the drunk driver had half a conscience and half a brain (and was supported in his accountability) then his guilt would be articulated and used as a divining-rod with which to discover much the same well-springs of transformational and restorative justice. More often though, as is the case with pain, grief and with anger, we find (sometimes we have no choice but to find) ways in which to compulsively self-soothe in order to avoid or to deny pain or to avoid the oceanic upheaval associated with guilt; pain and conscience laundering - or guilt washing charitable help - is one such way, there are many others. There are many ways in which we can dump emotional labour onto those who lack both the strength to reject it and to perform it. 'Externalizing disorders' are, sometimes, valorized, encouraged and rewarded in this culture - perhaps there is a sense in which, in many ways, societies themselves are externalizing disorders.

About the equivocal nature of anger, Katie Heindl suggests a '...difference between outright rage that obliterates and the driving energy that anger, thoughtfully directed, can provide — anger meant to bind, rather than rage that fractures.' Rage is Chernobyl and anger a power plant that has not melted down, whether we meltdown or not is rarely a choice.