ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
XX. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SLAVE
Early in our nation's history, attempts were made to enslave Native Americans, but that population was irrepressible. This had been their land for thousands of years, and it was very difficult to crush their cultural identity and fighting spirit as a result. On the other hand, the African history and identity of black slaves was ripped from them as they were kidnapped and dispossessed. The removal of their African culture was as devastating as were the chains and dogs. Destroying the cultural identity of a people is a necessary component of enslaving them. No ruling class in history has given up power without a struggle, and no underclass has ever waged such a struggle without a cultural identity that unifies the class and forges a fighting spirit. The working class today needs a sense of our shared history and oppression and needs to learn to reject the modern day petty-bourgeois "success" mythology. Awareness of racism, sexism, and homophobia is not enough to forge a fighting movement. Without a working class analysis and unifying identity, progressives are doomed to failure. The power structure knows this fact, and that is why they mono-maniacally censor and repress highly developed working class culture, and idealize "folk" culture, the culture of the pre-conscious underclass.
The struggle of slave classes to overcome the dominant myths has psychological as well as social components. Like small clock wheels turning inside larger ones, understanding the one process leads to a clearer view of the other. Cultural activists need an understanding of the psychology of oppression, and a social science of the individual based on economic and cultural analysis. The same "double binds" that act to paralyze the individual in a dysfunctional family also paralyze the slave class in a dysfunctional society.
When an individual or a class is faced with a battering no-win situation, the result is highly destructive of life force and self-image. Much attention has been paid recently to the alcoholic family and its structure, but what about the alcoholic class? There is a 6-millennium history in the slave classes of alcoholism, drug abuse, and other forms of escapist addictiveness, for obvious reasons. We live in a culture of abuse, for which the so-called 'dysfunctional family' is an excellent metaphor. When an alcoholic parent abuses a child they also give the child an excruciating choice: 1. Be angry about the abuse, and the anger is used as an excuse for further repression. 2. Dissociate, pretend the abuse isn't happening or is a form of 'love', and the abuser is temporarily placated but the sense of reality of the child becomes skewed, and she/he often are flooded with a bizarre form of false love known as traumatic bonding, which is experienced as a love much more intense than 'real' love because it is a mechanism by an person who feels extremely vulnerable, for regaining a lost sense of power. An abused child is totally dependent on the abuser, so their survival strategy is to distort their own perceptions so as to correspond with the hidden rationalizations of the battering parent. The child learns self-defeating and self-deceiving patterns of behavior. They must deceive themselves about their own internal state and support the parents in their deception, because even abusive parents need to be perceived as loving, and all children need love. To avoid the threat of total rejection, the children learn to falsely discriminate their own internal messages and also eventually external ones - the messages of others.
Gregory Bateson calls it a breakdown in the meta-communicative process - the ability to communicate about communication. Unable to determine what sort of message a message is, the person subjected to the double bind of traumatic bonding retreats into metaphor and an infantile denial. This primal double bind is sown so deeply and thoroughly into the processes that mold our working class consciousness that we seldom if ever notice its presence. Kidnapped persons often develop a strange kinship with their captor. Traumatic bonding is a natural result of the anguish of the powerless in any unequal power relationship, be it a family, a prison or a slave society. (The word "family" evolved from the Greek word for "slave".)
These same destructive and paralyzing psychological forces occur between slave holding classes and their victims. The working class develops a culture of dissociation from our own lives and a traumatic bonding with our oppressors, the ruling class, who act as an abusive parent in the dysfunctional family of the overall society. The end product of this denial-generating systemic pathology is the dissociative formalism and infantilization of our bourgeois culture. And it's not just workers who dissociate. Guilt produces its own alienation. As Lars Latham writes in his book, Money and Class in America, "The rich are intellectually stunted, emotionally cold and trapped by the preoccupation with the surface of life."
Could that be why they so love the heavenly blankness of the white canvas? Could that be why they so fear the unholy advent of the robotic beggar?