Issue #416: Ice Storm Group Psychology
This season, I have decided to embrace the opportunity offered to me as a New England resident to be a Patriots fan. For the moment, I have an even greater connection to the team. Terrell Jennings, a football player from my alma mater, Florida A&M University, is currently a Patriots running back.
This is not usual. HBCU sports programs are generally under-funded and produce fewer professional athletes than their PWI counterparts. So having FAMU represented on my local team’s roster, in the Super Bowl no less, is awesome.
I have also gotten back to updating the Paradox Newsletter Radio since there are no Music League playlists.
It’s pretty good right now, but I’m also maintaining an archive so you can see everything that has been on the playlist: Paradox Newsletter Radio Archive.
Aside from Spotify playlists and Super Bowls and whatever other nonsense I would usually write about, the United States is teetering on the brink of total collapse. This newsletter’s most frequent topics are not the realpolitik scenario of the U.S. However, I have done plenty of political writing throughout the history of the newsletter and will continue to do so as it suits me.
This week, Freud explains it all.
“We have already travelled some distance from the world of hard facts”: Police States in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies
Why do people say “ACAB”? Why don’t there seem to be any principled, moral ICE agents who stand up and object to the extrajudicial killing of unarmed or disarmed civilians asserting legal rights? Why don’t the municipal police arrest or impede the federal enforcement agents if the federal agents’ conduct violates state laws? Unsurprisingly, my belief is that any explanation begins with Freud and his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). In the introduction, Freud writes:
In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so … the very first individual psychology … is at the same time social psychology as well. (3)1
The fundamental assertion is critical, if non-controversial. There’s no such thing as “individual psychology,” every subject enmeshed in social life exists in relation to many others. The psychic life is always intersubjective. This claim, as well as the entire substance of Group Psychology, is built upon the foundation of Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules. Freud quotes Le Bon extensively:
Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological group. He is no longer conscious of his acts … He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will. (11)
For Freud, what is critical here is that group membership means a subject might “feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation” (7). The gulf between individual capacity and activity within a group has virtually no limit:
Le Bon thinks that the particular acquirements of individuals become obliterated in a group, and that in this way their distinctiveness vanishes. The racial unconscious emerges; what is heterogeneous is submerged in what is homogeneous. (9)
There’s a tension in what Freud concludes. On the one hand, Freud’s view of the state of the human subject under the regime of the group is decidedly pessimistic. On the other hand, Freud suggests all ostensible individuals are subject to the psychic vicissitudes of group membership to some degree. The idea that one might behave differently because of what a group accepts, encourages, or values is another non-controversial ones: it’s obvious in the case of fraternities and sororities, sports teams and fandoms, and cultural alignments (national, ethnic, and otherwise). It is, indeed, the governing principle of a society itself. This mechanism of group psychology applied to the larger society is what Freud goes on to explore in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
Perhaps Group Psychology is sufficient to explain why law enforcement officials act in ways that seem contradictory to ‘normal’ civilian behavior. There is a confrontation between the values of a society’s members and the values of a law enforcement group. Something that appears ‘wrong’ from the outgroup vantage point is acceptable, or even ‘right’ from the vantage point of the ingroup. But how has this disjunction between the social contract and the mandate of law enforcement grown so vast?
Contemporaneously with Freud, Gramsci offers an analysis of the precise relation between citizen (broadly defined) and state power mediated by law enforcement. David Forgacs writes:
Gramsci says that his distinction between state (political society) and civil society is not ‘organic’ but ‘methodological’ (metodica) (see above p.210). By this he means that, although the two levels must be analytically distinguished from one another, they must also be seen as being intertwined in practice. One might illustrate this by saying that a state education system is at one level clearly part of political society, just as trade unions are when they take part in tripartite planning with employers and government. But this does not mean that everything which takes place in schools or trade unions is subservient to the state or reflects ruling-class interests. By making such a ‘methodological’ distinction between the two spheres, Gramsci avoids on the one hand a liberal reductionism, which sees civil society as a realm of free individuality entirely apart from the state, and on the other a statist and functionalist reductionism, which sees everything in society as belonging to the state and serving its interests. (A Gramsci Reader 224)
Through Prison Notebooks (1947), Gramsci develops a thesis of how political society imposes itself upon civil society following the colloquialism of ‘police state’ emerging in the 1850s. The state as such contains elements of both, “the general notion of state includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society” (A Gramsci Reader 235). He goes on:
In the doctrine of the state —> regulated society, one will have to pass from a phase in which ‘state’ will equal ‘government’, and ‘state’ will be identified with ‘civil society’, to a phase of the state as night-watchman - i.e. of a coercive organization which will safeguard the development of the continually proliferating elements of regulated society, and which will therefore progressively reduce its own authoritarian and forcible interventions. (235)
Law enforcement writ large, then, is this “coercive organization” which attempts to render invisible the authoritarian impositions of the state. Though Gramsci’s view is that the police’s ultimate function is to make their coercive power invisible to the end of a “regulated society,” this function sometimes requires the manufacture of scenarios that would require greater, visible law enforcement as Stuart Hall argues with his co-authors Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts in Policing the Crisis (1978). They write:
Strictly speaking, the facts about the crimes which both police and the media were describing as ‘novel’ were not new; what was new was the way the label helped to break up and recategorise the general field of crime — the ideological frame which it laid across the field of social vision. What the agencies and the press were responding to was not a simple set of facts but a new definition of the situation — a new construction of the social reality of crime. ‘Mugging’ provoked an organised response, in part because it was linked with a widespread belief about the alarming rate of crime in general, and with a common perception that this rising crime was also becoming more violent. These social aspects had entered into its meaning. We have already travelled some distance from the world of hard facts — ‘social facts as things’. We have entered the realm of the relation of facts to the ideological constructions of ‘reality’. (29)
There is no ambiguity here. The scenario Hall et al. describe specific to the cultural phenomenon of ‘mugging’ in 1970s Britain is identical to the “illegal immigration” panic of Trump.
Between Gramsci and Hall are the actual revolutionaries themselves with similar analyses. Malcolm X says in his May 29, 1964 speech “The Harlem ‘Hate Gang’ Scare”:
And once all of them realized that they were blood brothers, they also realized what they had to do to get that man off their back. They lived in a police state; Alergia was a police state. Any occupied territory is a police state; and this is what Harlem is. Harlem is a police state; the police in Harlem, their presence is like occupation forces, like an occupying army. They’re not in Harlem to protect us; they’re not in Harlem to look out for our welfare; they’re in Harlem to protect the interests of the businessmen who don’t even live there.
George Jackson writes in Blood in My Eye (1972):
The rise of socio-political institutions to their present form and complexity was not the result of chance. The corporation, the university, the unions, the mass media, the foundations, the associations, the courts, the prisons, the army (police—national and international—uniformed and disguised) from their beginnings were formulated as enforcers of state centralism. An examination focused on the history of all the major socio-political institutions of the United States (a study in the genetics of hierarchy) would certainly uncover the totally economic motive underlying the foundations of these institutions. For my purpose, I would broadly divide the major socio-political institutions into two classes, one designed by the state to move people into certain actions, and the other to discourage, curtail or completely deny certain other actions. (91)
These various theoretical formations all contribute to a comprehensive understanding of police function, enforcement methods, relation to the state, and ultimate ends. One might read Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2007) for a more detailed view of prisons themselves as economic functionaries or Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970) to understand the precise mechanism for how officers themselves are so inextricably interpellated into their state function.
My point here is not to assemble a totally bulletproof and detailed analysis of police power across these excerpts, quotations, and references. Instead, I want to assert: this is nothing new. The answers and explanations that make sense of our current moment, the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, are in the great works of political philosophy and theory that have underwritten (and been distorted into) contemporary aphorisms about law enforcement. One must look to these texts and read them, cover to cover, if there’s any hope of getting out of this mess.
Organize? Yes. But at home, read.
Weekly Reading List
If this album was on Spotify, I would put “I Hate Violence” on the Paradox Newsletter Radio playlist.
I recently discovered the Fake Documentary “Q” series, all of which are available on youtube. They vary in quality, but this one and “Hidden Link” have been my favorites so far. Daichi Minaguchi and Kôtarô Terauchi pay tribute to both the cinematic tradition of J-Horror and the many ostensibly non-fiction paranormal investigation TV series in Japan.
Event Calendar:
Until next time.
Page numbers are from Norton’s Standard Edition volume from 1989. The one with the blue cover.