Who, we?

Today I came across a tirade against someone's use of the word 'we' in a piece of academic critical media theory writing. The upshot: to use 'we' is to suggest proud egoistic self-mastery as well as hypocritical participation in the social order. Now, I didn't read the essay being criticized. I'm taking up the attack on 'we,' then, not as a discussion of specific criticism but because the attack is a commonplace among left theorists. I've been seeing it rather frequently in graduate student papers, a critique wielded with intense sincerity, as if the person who used the term were singularly responsible for the invasion of Iraq or the genocide against Native Americans (a horrible term itself, but I'll save discussion of it for later). Attacking 'we' is a cheap shot that substitutes for engaging someone's argument. It's one of those pc monkey-tricks along the lines of "you erase difference in a logic of the same" and "what do you mean by 'women' given that there are differences between and among women?"

"We" can be annoying when the author is referring to herself in the first-person plural, like the Queen. "We think that set theory radically subverts biopolitics." But, although annoying, this assertion of 'we' is neither more nor less an indication of self-mastery than the assertion of an "I." Both designate the speaking position of the author. In English, they are grammatically pretty useful, enabling the avoidance of unwieldy passive voice constructions. They also render the author accountable for a position. For example, the issue isn't whether torture may be considered a lawful interrogation technique; the issue is whether the Bush administration viewed it and authorized it as a lawful interrogation technique. And,insofar as we speak in first person constructions, "I'll have cheese, please," aware that we split subjects, subjects who err, subjects who are spoken through, subjects who are uncertain and in flux, no pronoun, plural or otherwise, can install an already impossible mastery. This is the challenge of responsibility: taking it even when mastery is impossible.

Some of us write with 'we' as a way of including ourselves in the group being criticized: "as bloggers we waste way too much time." This kind of writing is sometimes difficult in feminist classrooms where women students are pulled between referring to women as 'they' or as 'we'. The inclusive 'we' can also be useful in attempts to interpellate a collective, to call into being a 'we' where there might not have been one before. Politicians also use this version of 'we'. For critical theorists, this 'we' strikes me as crucial: no one is outside ideology.

One of the trickiest "we's" comes in when the author is trying to speak of and to a discipline or movement, for example, where 'we' refers to political theorists in general or the left in general. So the writer might say something like "political theorists have ignored the emotions; we need to take emotions into account." And the critical response is--whom do you have in mind? Can't be Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, or Hume, for a start. This is the easiest use of 'we' to avoid, primarily because it isn't necessary for the point.

Ultimately, what bugs me the most about critiques of 'we' is the way that they mobilize a suspicion toward collectivity and privilege individualism. To this extent, they are little machines or engines of neoliberalism, neoliberal-bots that drive writers and thinkers to dismantle any collective sense or feeling of solidarity in advance, to suspect such sentiments rather than be responsible to them. Most of us who write in contemporary left political and media theory have been reading and writing about difference for a long time now. It's time that we redirect the suspicions leveled toward collectivity toward suppositions of individuality and autonomy.

Comments

[Dominic Fox]

I use "we" throughout in my book. I mean, we do. I mean, we mean we do. I mean...you know what we mean.

[Seb]

I'm pretty sure I know exactly what you read (we read?), and I had much the same reaction to it. Based specifically on the political content it was dissecting, it smacked of a smug distancing from any participatory responsibility.

I'm glad you took the time to write a meaningful rebuttal, though, since I just kinda scoffed it off as some wanky linguistic microscopy.

[patrick j. mullins]

It's time that we redirect the suspicions leveled toward collectivity toward suppositions of individuality and autonomy.

It's definitely time y'all did that, as I have never been fond of the royal or editorial 'we' myself, but continue to use 'one', as in 'one has a hard time', or 'one doesn't know what to think' or as in 'sometimes one just knows about it', and even toyed with a friend once about doing a glossy magazine called 'One's Darling Home' for the pansey interior decorator. In this way, I expect all of you Marxists to 'suppose' my 'individuality' and 'autonomy' until you catch me at something illegal that Marxists would approve of in someone more in y'all's 'solidarity'.

[Jodi]

Thanks, Seb. I've been wondering whether I should have posted this response to the list, whether that would have been more responsible. But I didn't want to get involved in that specific discussion, perhaps because I'm just a lurker rather than a participant.

We should all say we all the time for now on. Then we will know who they are.

[Jodi]

Hi Patrick--we were posting at the same time. "one's darling home" is adorable.

[parody center]

.you know what we mean.

No we never know what exactly you mean!

And what about GENDER? I always liked it in English that you don't have to declare your gender.

[Yukio]

I must beg to differ. In a concrete situation (e.g. "We went for an ice cream," or "we're going to seize the TV station,") the use of "we" makes sense, but in an abstract or philosophical context, it often seems to me empty.

I am thinking in particular of the use Lewis Mumford (a writer I very much like) makes of the term "we" in Technics and Civilization, where he spends a good final third setting forth all of the things "we" must do in order to discipline "the Machine" and set it to work for humanity. Some of these are even good ideas. But who is this "we" so endowed with such sovereign power? It is never made clear - and that seems to me a problem. If I could summarize it, I would say that here was a case of a) self-aggrandizement, according to which certain figures are licensed, by whom it is never made clear, to speak on behalf of some nebulous mass, and b) complacency, in which it is assumed that the only thing which is required in order for a "we" to be formed is for some writer or another to simply invoke it. I note finally in passing that clearly not all collectivities may be considered progressive: consider, to start with, "my fellow Americans..."

All in all, is not finally more honest, and more democratic, to simply say I - and let whomsoever wishes to identify with that, do so? "I have a dream," said Martin Luther King on the steps on the Washington Monument.

[Seb]

When MLK, Jr. said "I have a dream," the civil rights movement was up against the entirety of both America's history and power structure ("The Machine" as it were), and it was a brilliant dramatic gesture to cast himself as but a single man, nonetheless brave enough to stare down the whole "Machine." These days - when a lone crank with the wingiest of fringe ideals can connect with dozens of thousands of like-minds at the post of a blog - it seems falsely modest, borderline isolationist or solipsistic, to insist on "I".

The use of "We", more than anything, is a dare to unify, to struggle for consensus, to lay aside whatever pettiness or grievances excuse our division. Call it "self-aggrandizing" or "complacent," but that's an abdication.

Here's a declarative statement in the first-person-plural that no one could totally disagree with:

We can't stand each other.

If that alone unites us, at least it's a start.

Finally, RE: Parody Center's remark about English being a non-gendered language... a similar and greater thrill can be found in some languages like Japanese, which does away not only with gender, but articles and the entire future tense. How about that?

[Mehmet Çagatay]

Hello Ms. Dean,

As usual, this is an exciting post touching on the details that one commonly misses. I think "we" may also take a different approach. What does this mean? I am here… I read your post and the comments from the readers… Now, I am about to “effectively” participate in the proceedings. Therefore, I dare say, the very first massage of the personal pronoun “we” designates the subjective position, the locus of the speaker. Just as in Zizek's quote from Robespierre's speech in his latest book: "One wants to make you fear abuses of power, of the national power you have exercised [. . .] One wants to make us fear that the people will fall victim to the Committees [. . .] One fears that the prisoners are being oppressed... I say that anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty; for innocence never fears public scrutiny." Here, Zizek points out that by shifting from the plural second person "you" to "us" "Robespierre gallantly includes himself into the collective". So, I suppose, if there is a massage through the deployment of the first person plural, it doesn't indicate a passive-hypocritical participation in the social order as the naïve author of the text that you criticized. Rather, the massage indicates an involved, effective and thus honest participation in the discourse of the other. The subject here disclaims her mastery on her own speech: "I, truth, am speaking" (Lacan)

On the contrary, when the pronoun "I" goes in to operation, the subject declares her very authority: "I speak the truth" (I'm making a loose reference to Zizek: “The reversal from "I speak the truth" to "I, the truth, speak" occurs with woman's identification with the truth: men tell the truth, while in woman, truth itself speaks"). Robespierre concludes his speech with shifting from "we" to "I": "What does danger matter to me? My life belongs to the Fatherland; my heart is free from fear; and if I were to die, I would do so without reproach and without ignominy". Zizek's interpretation is: “Robespierre openly asserts himself as a Master… the very term "Master" has to be given here its full Hegelian weight: the Master is the figure of sovereignty, the one who is not afraid to die, who is ready to risk everything"… In other words, here, subject displaces or elevates his location to obscure somewhere which is imperceptible and unattainable from the position of big Other: Whatever my end might be, I am the only Master who decides its meaning.

I think the lesson here is that it is not preference between "I" and "we" which renders the speech accessible to the symptomatic interpretation. Instead, it is the shift from one pronoun to another.

Best,

[Jodi]

Mehmet--your emphasis on the shift is really interesting and thought-provoking. It draws out the careful use of a pronoun that asserts mastery as well as one that is honest about its participation in the discourse of the other.

I disagree completely with Yukio. The points Yukio raises are exactly the one's that I see as determinental to left politics as a part of left decline--the suspicion toward 'we' and the unwillingness to speak in terms of a collective. Yukio asks 'who is the we endowed with sovereign power'? There are various answers here: we the people, we the party, we the part of no part, we the voices of the past and future. There's a movement among leftists to eschew sovereign power rather than struggle for it and claim it? Why? So that the bad guys win? Critiques of sovereignty have clarified that it is not fully unified, complete, etc (as Hegel's reading of sovereignty already made clear long ago). Why assume that anyone who says we is an idiot assuming a false master? This presumption makes no sense. Leftists need to speak on behalf of nebulous masses--if we don't, the right will. It's difficult for masses to speak--although they are very good at forcing situations, disrupting expectations, confounding and exceeding claims made on their behalf.

Mumford: the we who must discipline the machine are those whom Mumford has convinced that the machine must be disciplined.

I also disagree with the claim of complacency and don't know how that assumption is possible.

Of course, there are non progressive collectives. They need to be combatted and we can do that better than I can.

[Yukio]

"Yukio asks 'who is the we endowed with sovereign power'? There are various answers here: we the people, we the party, we the part of no part, we the voices of the past and future."

But are not all of these answers rather abstract and grandstanding? The problem is one of connection; you can say that there are "voices of the past and the future" - but what is the connection between these voices, and, for instance, yourself?

I must repeat that I do think it is complacent to simply ordain oneself with the right to speak on behalf of others by fiat, on the basis that one self-identifies as a Leftist, but then again, perhaps I am just being solipsistic, falsely modest, borderline isolationist, etc.

[Yukio]

PS - I question incidentally in passing whether the invocation of "bad guys" is not a rather simplistic way of understanding the world.

[Mehmet Çagatay]

Hello Yukio,

Obviously there is some degree of identification with the other is involved by the application of “we”. But I think, it is not simply speaking on behalf of the others. The very firs text that has just come to my mind is notorious (!) Manifesto of the Communist Party, in a particular section Marx shifts from the third person plural (“The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole”) to “we” and “us” (“In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend”) I think, here, this is not Marx speaking on behalf of the proletariat but it is the proletariat speaking from the mouth of Marx.

[Jodi]

Yet again, Mehmet, I wish I had said and thought what you wrote--really well put.

Yukio--that one says 'we' does not mean that those on behalf of who one speaks agree or that they are silenced. To speak is not to install an immovable, incontestable, ultimate authority. You ask about the connection: Mehmet's answer is, I think, the best one--one is spoken through. At the same time, this can get tricky and get slip into a kind of perversion (I am the instrument of the people, of history, of progress), particularly if one uses one's status as instrument as a justification. There are other connections as well such as a sense of responsibility or of solidarity with others. Some make the argument in terms of racial, ethnic, and sexual identity. I think these arguments are deeply problematic.

[Mehmet Çagatay]

Ms. Dean, you are right about the risk to slip into perversion, becoming the object of the Other’s pleasure and fantasy. Maybe I am completely talking nonsense here; I think “at some degree” political discourse is a slightly perverse action since it presupposes a common grounds that enables mutual understanding and social interaction (Communists, Proletariat, Bourgeois, Turks, Kurds, Alevis, Islamists, etc, etc). But the distinction here what draws the subject to the logic of perversion is the object of identification and its relation with the magnitude of the enjoyment of the Other. I mean, identification with the Turkish identity, nationalism, within Turkey etc. should be regarded as a real perverse position since it is the instrument of “prevalent” oppression against ethnic minorities.

Please forgive me for possible blunders

[Jodi]

Mehmet--this is very interesting; thanks for taking the time to comment. Is the 'slight perversion' you note the same as the big Other? Also, I'm interesting in the way you explain 'real perverse position' in terms of instrument of oppression. My reading of Zizek leads me to think of perversion as a self (even in a collective senes) instrumentalization in the service of the big Other. It's a way of denying lack and contingency--even if no one is oppressed by it (although it may actually be the case that there is not an example of non-oppression). Your argument, I take it, is a different one that hinges on identification as an instrument of oppression?

[Yukio]

For what it's worth, it seems to me that, given the fact that the Other does not exist, adopting the stance that "the Other speaks through me" is the very essence of perversion - and not just a practice that *may* in some sad and unfortunate cases get tricky.

I'd further suggest that in the absence of the neat identity political solution (towards which, incidentally, I also suspicious - but which I also note applies too to the notion that one may speak for the masses on the basis that "one is a leftist") it is not entirely clear where we are left. With respect, and recognizing that perhaps this is simply my own ignorance talking, I see both Jodi and Mehmet spinning away here into tangled, jargonistic abstraction.

Finally, I don't really understand what Jodi is saying when she says
that "To speak is not to install an immovable, incontestable, ultimate authority." The issue is not one of overweening authority, but rather the fact that, by speaking as if one was oneself automatically a collective, or at the very least, the spokesman thereof, one may speaking entirely vacantly, which is to say, posturing.

[aidan]

...by speaking as if one was oneself automatically a collective, or at the very least, the spokesman thereof, one may speaking entirely vacantly...

A political voice that points to a 'vacancy' that links me to Others...

[Mehmet Çagatay]

I should admit that, “a slightly perverse action” is a fairly idiotic expression but I have something in my mind which requires clarification. I was thinking on the inevitable connection between political discourse and ideology, but ideology in the sense of Althusser’s formulation, the fundamental element of society (as Eagleton puts it, “socially necessary illusion”) “a representation of the Imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” which transforms the individuals into subjects by hailing them: 'Hey, you there!” (interpellation). This procedure of recognition resembles the gaze of big Other, while in the former, it is the act of successful misrecognition which enables the individual to be recognized by the Subject, and activates the subjection to the Subject’s orders, in the later, it is the very non-existence of big Other that leaves no room to escape from its gaze. Zizek points out in a couple of occasions that although it is obvious that the big Other doesn’t exists, we can’t simply traverse the illusion of the Big Other and perceive the world as it is: “that this "illusion" structures our (social) reality itself: its disintegration leads to a loss of reality” (Looking Awry). (As an anecdote, while I was playing 3-cushion billiards today I suddenly realized that, even if I practice by myself, my attitude at the table always has some theatrical dimension since I assume the presence of a Master spectator. I have been playing this game from the age 15, and recently, I have developed a strange tendency to imitate the shots of Belgian Frédéric Caudron, which have caused a little joke among friends: Çagatay plays like Caudron, always tries his trademark shots but usually misses. I suppose he has become my Other at the table, who decides instead of me).

The foundation of my ludicrous phrase “a slightly perverse action” is a bizarre question: “How big is the Other?” It doesn’t designate the particular consequence of a political practice (oppression), to be more precise, it concerns the coordinates of a political position in the ideological constellation. This is why I used the adjective “prevalent” in quotation marks, to emphasize the significance of nationalism in the ruling ideology. As regards to the question how big the other is, I’m signifying the magnitude of its nonexistence which implements its obviousness so that one could not easily recognize the twisted reality that big Other doesn’t exist. For instance, let’s take Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom”. There he inexplicitly counters President Kennedy’s statement, "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country" with the ethical posture of economic liberalism: Ask what you can do for the sake of free-market. In “Capitalism and Freedom”, free-market is the gaze that watches upon us, decides for us, and provides the most reliable ethical measure for us: everything for the benefit of its existence is virtuous and everything that defies it is evil, etc, etc. Since the market is the indispensable social construction of the capitalist mode of production, it is standard for every one of us who lives in capitalist order to internalize its obscure orders and messages so that, it eliminates the neurotic anxiety against the desire of the Other. I contrasted this situation with the logic of perversion given that as in perversion, it excludes the perpetual neurotic uncertainty.

On the other hand, Marxism for instance is a slightly pervert position (In the early days that I describe myself as a Marxist, I remember precisely that I was always questioning whether the stuff I wrote was fitting the Marxist theory. The gaze of the genuine Marxism was always there) as its massages have already been locked out of social order, one must strive vigorously to perceive sound that interpellates the individuals. It is something like rehearsing Althusser’s example but with a strange modification: You always knock the door, no one asks the question “Who's there?” yet you hesitantly mutter: “It is me, it is me”. There is always a dimension of neurotic uncertainty incorporated in the ideological position which is outside of the ruling ideology. This is why a forged the nonsensical phrase “a slightly perverse action”.

I hope that I have modestly clarified the absurdities that probably stemmed from my misunderstanding on both Zizek and Lacan.