2.24
Let’s turn to an obstacle to this kind of openness. People learn, with precise responsivity and vulnerability, how to fit in with glances, gestures, facial expressions, body language, and tone. We learn how to answer, to whom or what and how much, to whom to yield, when, and so on. This regulation never ends — it is re-established, reaffirmed. The investment requires constant energy and attention.
This situation can lead to ressentiment, a drive for revenge born in those who’ve bent in these various ways.[1] This revenge, this weak grasping towards security, is taken out on those who don’t bend in the same and ‘proper’ ways.
There’s what I’ll call a code of sensations, a patrolling of insights, an adjudicating morality of and for spaces and time. We pass by what calls and addresses itself to us — the trees, the birds, the sunshine. Sociologically, psychologically, and aesthetically, we’re blocked by the patrolling of the sensible instilled in us — where the ‘sensible’ isn’t only what is available through our senses, but also that which makes sense.[2]
Limits can be made explicit through transgression; even minor transgressions are resisted. Some forms of response are governed by law. Others, by custom. There are ways to punish transgressions: ostracization, which operates on many levels, from the gross to the subtle; glances, postures, gestures, conversations; people and behaviour can be labelled furtive, suspicious, odd, weird, crazy, insane. There are responses up to and beyond incarceration; behind symbolic violence lurks possibilities of physical violence.
If this sounds hyperbolic, pay attention to pockets of behaviour, which happen within particular language-games, in particular contexts, in particular institutions, with particular actors and characters. Pay attention to gendered, racialized, classist, marginalized, and normalizing differences of all kinds. I’m drawing our attention to micro-behaviours, micro-gestures, that codify everyday experience.[3]
There’s nothing wrong with micro-gestures per se: they aren’t avoidable for a species like ours (probably for many species).
Nonetheless, politics, or any transformative project, must contend with micro-gestures and the level of the sensible. Thus, Zwicky’s concepts of thisness and metaphor are political, for they think around the contours of the everyday fungible experience of things as objects. Transformation is political.
What we need is a ‘bravery’: to listen and let be, not necessarily to, but in spite of the micro-gestures. We must work around particular micro-gestures when they deny parts of our experience.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 20, 33, 93–4.
[2] These thoughts—the realm of the sensible and its rupture—are indebted to Rancière, whose politics are discussed in §2.67. Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999), p. 28–31, 40, 55, 104; The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2009), p. 12, 64; “Ten Theses on Politics,” trans. Rachel Bowlby and Davide Panagia, Theory & Event 5.3 https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2001.0028 (2001): par. 20, p. 8–9; Davide Panagia and Jacques Rancière, “Dissenting Words,” trans. Davide Panagia, diacritics 30.2 (2000): p. 114–6, 124, 125.
[3] I suggest we see Rancièrian politics operative on the level of micro-gestures. See §2.67.