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Title: The Politics of Denunciation
Author: Kristian Williams 
Language: en
Topics: critique, accountability, violence
Source: Retrieved on May 7th, 2014 from http://anarchistnews.org/content/politics-denunciation

Kristian Williams

The Politics of Denunciation

A year ago, on February 28, 2013, at an event titled “Patriarchy and the

Movement,” I watched as a friend of mine attempted to pose several

questions based on her experience trying to address domestic violence

and other abuse in the context of radical organizing.

“Why have the forms of accountability processes that we’ve seen in

radical subcultures so regularly failed?” she asked. “Is there a tension

between supporting a survivor’s healing and holding perpetrators

accountable?”

At that point she was, quite literally, shouted down. An angry roar came

up from the crowd, from both the audience and the panelists. It quickly

became impossible to hear her and, after a few seconds, she simply

stopped trying to speak.

The weeks that followed produced an atmosphere of distrust and

recrimination unlike anything I had experienced in more than twenty

years of radical organizing. A few people were blamed for specific

transgressions. (My friend was one: she was accused of violating the

venue’s “Safer Space” policy, “triggering” audience members, and

employing “patriarchal mechanisms” in her statement.) Others were called

out for unspecified abusive or sexist behavior. And a great many more

were alleged to have supported or defended or coddled those guilty of

such offenses.

The ensuing controversy destroyed at least one political organization,

and an astonishing number of activists––many with more than a decade of

experience––talked about quitting politics altogether. I know people who

lost friends and lovers, often not because of anything they had done,

but because of how they felt about the situation. Several people––mostly

women, interestingly––told me they were afraid to say anything about the

controversy, lest they go “off-script” and find themselves denounced as

bad feminists.

Questioning

One might expect that in the midst of conflict questions about how we

address abusive behavior and hold each other accountable would seem

particularly relevant. Instead, in a statement released after the event,

the unnamed “Patriarchy and the Movement” organizers tried to bar such

questions from being raised at all. They wrote:

We also feel that framing the discourse around survivor’s needs as

‘political disagreements’ or ‘political arguments’ is in of itself

sexist––as it pretends that this conversation should be emptied of

subjective narrative, or that there is an equal playing ground in the

conversation because the conversation itself isn’t about real power, or

that this conversation itself isn’t already racialized and gendered. It

is also problematic, in that it suggests that there is a neutral or

objective rationality in this debate, rather than the possibility that

the debate itself and the content of the debate is a socially contingent

result of prevailing power dynamics.

If political framing does all that––assumes objectivity, equality,

ahistoriocity, race and gender neutrality, and an absence of power––then

it becomes hard to see how political discussion is possible, not only

about gender, but at all. On the other hand, if political discussion

relies on those conditions, then not only would it be impossible, it

would also be unnecessary. For it is precisely the disputes over truth,

the contested facts of history, identity, inequality, and power that

give politics its shape, its content, and its significance. The second

sentence of the above quotation contradicts the first: the argument runs

that this discussion cannot be political, because it is necessarily

political.

Their statement continues:

There are direct consequences to these ‘debates’, and there [are]

physical bodies involved. As survivors and feminists, we must become

cautious when our bodies[,] our safety, and our well-being, as well as

our needs around our bodies, safety, and well beings, become the subject

of ‘political debate’. For us, there is more at stake here than just the

merits of a ‘debate’. Our bodies, safety, health, personal autonomy, and

well-beings are at stake. We do not agree with people having a

‘political argument’ at our expense. The outcome could be life or death

for us.

That is true: There are serious consequences to the debate about

accountability. There are lives, and not merely principles, at stake.

But rather than being a reason not to argue these issues, that is

precisely the reason that we must.

If politics means anything, it means that there are

consequences––sometimes, literally, life or death consequences––to the

decisions we make. When it comes to war, climate change, immigration,

policing, health care, working conditions––in all of these areas, as

with gender, “bodies, safety, health, personal autonomy, and well-beings

are at stake.” That is why politics matters.

Fallacies

While attempting to elevate feminism to a place above politics, the

organizers’ statement in fact advances a very specific kind of politics.

Speaking authoritatively but anonymously, the “Patriarchy and the

Movement” organizers declare certain questions off-limits, not only

(retroactively) for their own event, but seemingly altogether. These

questions cannot be asked because, it is assumed, there is only one

answer, and the answer is already known. The answer is, in practice,

whatever the survivor says that it is.

Under this theory, the survivor, and the survivor alone, has the right

to make demands, while the rest of us are duty-bound to enact sanctions

without question. One obvious implication is that all allegations are

treated as fact. And often, specific allegations are not even necessary.

It may be enough to characterize someone’s behavior ––or even his

fundamental character––as “sexist,” “misogynist,” “patriarchal,”

“silencing,” “triggering,” “unsafe,” or “abusive.” And on the principle

that bad does not allow for better or worse, all of these terms can be

used more or less interchangeably. After all, the point is not really to

make an accusation, which could be proved or disproved; the point is to

offer a judgment. Thus it is possible for large groups of people to

dislike and even punish some maligned person without even pretending to

know what it is, specifically, he is supposed to have done. He has been

“called out” as a perpetrator; nothing else matters.

This approach occludes––and herein, perhaps, lies its appeal––the

complexities of real people’s lives, the multiple roles we all occupy,

the tensions we all embody and live out, and the ways we all participate

in upholding systems of power even as they oppress us.

Under this schema, it is taken for granted that no survivor is ever also

an abuser, and no abuser is the survivor of someone else’s violence.

Naturally, no past victimization can justify or excuse present abuse,

but the strict dichotomy implied here too neatly defines the past away;

by the same reasoning, it also forestalls the potential for future

healing or growth.

What it offers, instead, is a reassuring dualism in which survivors and

abusers exist, not only as roles we sometimes fill or positions we

sometimes hold, but as particular types of people who are essentially

those things, locked forever into one or the other of these categories,

and (not incidentally) gendered in a conventional, stereotyped binary.

Each person is assigned a role and, to some degree, reduced to their

position in this story. One is only a perpetrator/abuser; the other is

only a victim/survivor. They are each defined by the suffering they have

caused, or the suffering they have endured––but never by both.

A double transformation occurs. Patriarchy ceases to be a mode of power

and system of social stratification and becomes, instead, identified

with the behavior of an individual man and is even thought to be

personified by him. At the same time, both perpetrator and survivor are

depersonalized, abstracted from the context and the narratives of their

lives, and cast instead as symbolic figures in a kind of morality play.

Our scrutiny shifts, then, from the abuse to the abuser, from the act to

the actor. Instead of seeking out ways to heal the harm that has been

done, we invest our collective energy in judging the character of the

man responsible. Support for the survivor is equated with, and then

replaced by, castigation of the perpetrator. These displays of moral

outrage serve above all as pronouncements of the innocence and

testaments to the virtue of those who issue them. And as such, they have

a way of becoming weirdly obligatory. Since we are not asking whether

some particular person committed some identifiable act, but instead

whether he is fucked up, then it makes a certain kind of sense to think

that anyone who “coddles,” or “defends,” or “supports,” or even just

likes him–– or who merely fails to denounce him––must take a share of

the blame. So there is a powerful impulse to line up on the “right”

side, to join in the denunciation before one finds oneself called out as

well.

Implications

The ideology at work here is self-defeating, producing a movement that

is less, rather than more, capable of handling the issues surrounding

sexual assault, domestic violence, and other effects of patriarchy.

Barring questions from discussion does not encourage learning or

improvement. And an atmosphere of public shaming provides strong

incentives for people who have done wrong not to admit to it or try to

atone. The charged environment makes things harder for those who take on

accountability and support work; it stigmatizes individuals who

willingly enter into accountability processes; and it may reduce

survivors of abuse, their experiences, and their needs to political

symbols used by others to advance some specific ideological line.

The politics involved are also deeply authoritarian, barring from

consideration a range of questions concerning authority, accountability,

punishment, and exclusion. Its advocates effectively claim a monopoly on

feminist praxis and exclude other feminist perspectives. And so they

silence those who disagree––literally, in the “Patriarchy and the

Movement” episode.

In the situation I’ve described here, these moves are being made in the

name of feminism, but there is no reason to believe the pattern will

stop there. The same tactics are available to any identity politics

camp, or any ideological sect seeking to rid itself of bourgeois

influences, or pacifists wishing to make a total break from the culture

of violence, or environmentalists looking to escape from civilization,

or really anyone whose radicalism consists of decrying other people’s

purported shortcomings. The obsessive need for political conformity, the

mutual fault-finding that animates it, and the sense of embattled

isolation that results––combined with a kind of self-righteous

competitiveness (on the one hand) and a masochistic guilt complex (on

the other)–– practically guarantees the sort of internecine squabbling

we’ve seen emerge, not only in Portland, but in Oakland, Minneapolis,

and New York as well.

The totalitarian impulse has found its expression, and it has proven so

destructive, in part because we have consistently failed to find the

means for handling disagreements, for resolving disputes, for responding

to violence, and (yes) for holding each other accountable. Without those

tools, we rely––far too often––on ideological purity tests, friend-group

tribalism, peer pressure, shaming and ostracism, as well as general

shit-talking and internet flame wars. Such behavior has been part of our

political culture for a long time.

It is unsurprising, then, that our tendency is to push people out,

rather than draw them in; but when we do that, our capacity for

meaningful action diminishes. A cycle of suspicion and exclusion takes

hold. As we grow less able, and even less interested, in having an

effect on the larger society, we become increasingly focused on the

ideas and identities of those inside our own circle. We scrutinize one

another mercilessly, and when we discover an offense––or merely take

offense––we push out those who have lost favor. As our circle grows ever

smaller, minor differences take on increasing significance, leading to

further suspicion, condemnation, and exclusion––shrinking the circle

further still.

We behave, in other words, not like a movement but like a scene––and a

particularly cliquish, insular, and unfriendly scene at that.

Visions

At issue here are strikingly different visions of what a political

movement ought to be.

In one vision, a movement and the people who make it up should be in

every respect beyond reproach, standing as an example, a shining city on

a hill, apart from all the faults of our existing society. To achieve

this perfection, we have to separate the sheep from the goats, the good

people from the bad, the true feminists from everyone else. This outlook

produces, almost automatically, a tendency to defer to the dogma of

one’s in-group. It is not enough simply to do the right things; one must

also think the right thoughts and find favor with the right people.

In contrast, in the other vision, a movement should attract people to

it, including damaged people, people who have done bad things, and those

who are still in the process of figuring out their politics. It will

require us, therefore, to address sexual assault and other abuse by

actually engaging with the people who do such things. We have to

struggle with them as much as we struggle against oppression.

Neither approach is likely to be easy. They each face the challenge of

developing a feminist praxis in the midst of a sexist society. But where

one vision imagines that the authors of that praxis must be individuals

free of the taint of patriarchy, the latter begins by acknowledging that

we are all shaped by the forces we struggle against and that we are

implicated in the systems of power that oppress us. The first seeks to

defeat patriarchy chiefly through exclusion; the latter, through

transformation.

The question we face, in other words, is this: Do our politics aim at

purity or change?