Interpellation, power, violence, structural constraint, emotion, hysteresis effect and resistance: an editorial

This issue opens with an article by Abigail Cary Moore and Isaac Ariail Reed on the social construction of social subjects within a context of social relations where violence is an implicit presence. In Althusser’s well-known account of interpellation (Althusser 1971), he argues that when a policeman hails a pedestrian and she stops and responds appropriately, the latter is constructed as a social subject. I would theorize that the policeman structures and the pedestrian confirm-structures the meaning and authority structure of police the authority of police officer and citizen as social subjects (Haugaard 2018).

In Althusser’s theory, ideological state apparatuses and repressive state apparatuses exist alongside each other, while it is unclear precisely how they relate. Moore and Reed theorize the link between interpellation and violence by contrasting the co-reproduction of a black and white citizen at traffic stops. In the USA there is a fundamental difference between the interaction between police officer and black or white citizen. In both cases the police officer is armed. However, in an interaction with the white citizen, the police officer is highly structurally constrained in their use of the firearm. Extreme threat has to be proven to justify an armed response. In contrast, in an interaction with a black male citizen, there is an assumption that the black male constitutes an intrinsic threat, as a dangerous other. Therefore, the threshold for the use of violence by the police is lower. In short, with respect to the use of violence, the police officer is less constrained while interacting with black male citizens than with white citizens.

From the perspective of the black male citizen, this has implications of how they interpellate their subject position. Consequently, interactive co-production of mutual authority has a different dynamic. For the white citizen, interpellative interaction is solely focussed around the coproduction of social roles; thus legitimacy and authority are to the fore. In contrast, the black male citizen will first and foremost ensure that he is not shot. So, the black male makes certain that he appears compliant, and non-threatening. The consciousness of violence makes him abject because his responses are driven by fear, not habitus practical knowledge commitment to co-production of social roles and authority structures. Viewed externally, both performances may appear identical. Theoretically, only the police-white-citizen interpellation is an interactive co-production of social structures, while the interpellation of police-black-male-driver constitutes the coercion of an abject social subject.

In the second article, Maria A. Gwynn explores the role of social structures in international relations. In realist theories of power, there is a tendency to interpret social structures as arising from resources, which are then used to impose constraints. Typically, resource-powerful states create regime structures that they use to constrain the less powerful. Reminiscent of the police-officer-black-citizen interpellation, the constraints experienced by the latter are a reflection of an imbalance of power, thus suggestive of domination. However, as observed by Giddens (1984), viewed as rules, structures are both enabling and constraining. There are two aspects of structures, as follows: structures as material imbalances versus structures as rule-bound restraints. These have different implications for the more and less powerful. Structures as rules offer the potential for the less powerful (as measured in terms of economic and coercive resource/structures) to prevail over the more powerful.

I would argue that the enabling aspect of social rule structure is key to understanding the enigma of, so-called, soft power. In much of the IR literature soft power is characterized as the power of attraction (Nye 2011) or endearment (Gallarotti 2011), which makes soft power solely a form of power-with (on power-over, power-to and power-with, see Allen 1999). However, if we take account of the enabling aspect of structure relations, soft power is also a form of power-to. As argued by Pansardi (2012), power-over is a subset of power-to. Soft power is not solely collaborative; it can include conflict, which is enabled through structural constraint. As I have argued (Haugaard 2015), the democratic process is an instance of conflict power-over that is made possible through structural constraint. A structured international arena constitutes a similarly enabling arena of conflict. Returning to the citizens at traffic stops, the white citizen is motivated not only by ideological indoctrination but also by what they see as the power-to of, so-called, ‘law and order’, which they consider enabling – delivering power-to, through power-over. For the black citizen, so-called, ‘law and order’ constitutes a system of asymmetric bias against his community. Interactively, in a police/black-citizen interpellation, there is significantly less power-to than dominating power-over. Hence, interpellation or subject formation has different levels of consent and coercion depending upon its place in racial social hierarchy. In international relations, the interaction of states constitutes a form of systemic interpellation or subject formation. As argued by Gwynn, in the international arena, often it is the less powerful states that gain power-to from rule-based structural constraint. Possibly, it is because the international arena is more anarchic, thus coercive, than everyday interaction rule-bound constraint favours the less powerful over the more powerful. In that sense, weakness in a context of uncertainty makes interpellation through rule-bound structures attractive.

Constraint is often linked to self-restraint. Part of the objective of interpellation is to socialise the social subject in a manner that they internalize reflex blind obedience, which comes from high levels of self-restraint. In Elias’ theorization (Elias 1995), the internalization of restraint resulted in a suppression of emotion over time (the, so-called, ‘civilizing process’ – a sociologically unfortunately evaluative term). Elias considered this increase in self-restraint a condition of possibility of the democratic process. In the third article, Jonathan Heaney explores how the expression of emotion, as a form of capital, in Bourdieu’s non-economic sense, has increased in value within the field of contemporary party politics. While Elias theorizes the advance of modernity largely in terms of the increase of constraint, the model provides conceptual space for the reverse process: the decline of self-restraint (so-called, de-civilizing).

Based upon the work of political scientist Mair (2013), Heaney argues that there has been a decline of party politics driven by ideological conviction. In its place, there has emerged a void, which is undermining the democratic process, as evidenced by a trend of declining voter participation in politics. Heaney argues that this ideological void creates the conditions of possibility for emotion to become the driving force of politics. This shift means that political competence becomes tied to the ability to manage emotions. In other words, the expression of emotion, rather than repression, becomes a source of social capital. Older politicians, such as Gordon Brown or Hillary Clinton, for whom the repression of emotion was key to a professional ethos, suddenly find themselves with an inappropriate habitus, relative to the field of political participation. This mismatch between habitus and the current field, whereby social actors become left behind, is a phenomenon that Bourdieu called the hysteresis effect (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977, p. 78).

In the previous issue of this Journal (12.1), Alexandre Bohas (2012) explored how consumers suffered from the hysteresis effect, whereby they think nationally, consuming products based upon supposed national characteristics (e.g. German cars are reliable, etc.), while living in a world of global production. Arguably, the nostalgia at the core of Brexit support constitutes a similar longing for a familiar but vanishing world of sovereign nation states. To return to Heaney, the rise of strong leaders and Tweet politics, where the response is either a thumbs up or down, is symptomatic of an emotionalization of politics. The thumbs up or down reactions suggest policies are like taste, analogous to ‘I like chocolate but not vanilla ice cream’.

If we think of Brexit and similar nativism as nostalgia for the past, I would argue that there is a double hysteresis effect. Social actors who fail to think globally are reacting to a world where they no longer feel at home. Hysteresis makes them want to turn back the historical clock. Simultaneously, the typical party politicians, characteristic of archetype nation state politics (of the past), find themselves out of tune with the contemporary politics of desire. Consequently, the new, more emotionally in-tune, nativist politicians resonate better with ontologically insecure, angry, social actors. Ironically, the hysteresis of the latter makes them desire a past politics, yet they reject the politicians typical of that past politics.

In their paper on network and cultural theory, Maroussia Favre, Brendon Swedlow and Marco Verweij, distinguish between social actions that are self-actional, interactional and transactional, which is a distinction first developed by Selg (2016). The first is self-referential action; the second is interactional but still presupposes a kind of homo clausus (Elias 1995), whereby the social actor is unchanged from interaction. In contrast, transactional interaction is relational action where both actors become mutually transformed as part of the process of interaction. The latter constitutes the fourth dimension of power (Haugaard 2012) and interpellation, whereby social ontology is not just a given, as in homo clausus, rather it is malleable and transformed through interactive power relations. In the model of Favre et al., positions in networks are influenced in fundamental ways by social ontology, which reflects the cultural characteristics of the interacting social actors. The same network with different social ontologies will deliver incommensurable outcomes. To return to Heaney’s more and less emotional politicians, we can see how networks of power become transformed through shifts in emotional habitus. I would hypothesize that, at an early stage, those social subjects who are subject to hysteresis effect become prone to more closed behaviour, their interaction moving from transactional to interactional relations, as the external world becomes more incomprehensible because habitus practical knowledge becomes deficient. However, once emotional politicians fill the void, they become more emotional. Fatalism is a variant of more closed socio-ontological subject predisposition. As explored by Farve et al., a fatalist emotional social ontology is often constitutive of the less powerful, as a response to continued experience of unpredictable behaviour. Trump’s approach to power is one of deliberate unpredictability, which Farve et al. suggest results in fatalism in those at the receiving end of his policies. So, when disappointed by Trump, these social actors return to fatalism.

I would add that unpredictability of leadership renders external reality hostile relative to habitus practical knowledge, so analogous to hysteresis effect. So, a retreat into homo clausus subject identity is a logical response. Following this idea, combined with Heaney, there is a curious juxtaposition taking place. On the one hand, Trump’s election is the result of his ability to sell emotional capital to social subjects suffering from hysteresis effect. On the other, once in power, those over whom Trump exercises power find him unpredictable, thus become more fatalistic, which results in the suppression of emotion. To return to Elias, this is an interesting example of how the loosening of emotion (de-civilizing) and the constraint of emotion (civilizing) can become combined. However, a curious reversal occurs: in Elias’ work, it is the powerful who gain power by supressing emotion, while the less successful lose because of their lack of self-restraint. In contrast, here the more powerful owe their success to their ability to express emotion, to have emotional capital, with the result that the less powerful become fatalist, thus less emotional.

Interactional modifications of subject formation change the manner in which social actors resist domination. In Shauna Mottiar’s article, she explores forms of everyday resistance (Scott 1985) in South Africa. She compares the resistance of small street traders with that of shack dwellers. Mottiar finds that street traders use less visible forms of power than shack dwellers. What is crucial here is sheer physicality. Illegal street traders use trolleys, which they set up as temporary stalls. These physical structures can be disassembled in minutes and the trolleys used to ferry their cargo away. When word goes around that the authorities are on their way, typically the street traders vanish. For street traders, resistance equates to invisibility, which is the type of power that characterizes guerrilla tactics. In contrast, a shack cannot be disassembled in minutes. The physical structure of a shack demands a different level of protest. Shack dwellers are visible whether they like it or not, so visible forms of resistance, such as protests and petitioning politicians, become the logical form of everyday resistance. Furthermore, shacks require infrastructures that include illegally sourced water and electricity, which requires collaboration. So, the physicality of illegal water and electricity leads to socially integrative unifying social forces. This reinforces the effectiveness of more formalized visible, social movement type protest. Theoretically, this relates to the issue of the agency of things. Can the physicality of things shape the nature of social interaction and, therefore, can we attribute a kind of agency to things? The answer is clearly, yes.

The concluding article, by Julie Uldam, is also focused upon resistance. It explores how social actors with little access to parliament and formal channels of politics attempt to resist and influence the political decision-making through the use of social media. In her analysis Uldam distinguishes between protest groups that wish to influence existing structures and those, who consider themselves radical, therefore wish to undermine and change the system structures. This follows the distinction between one-dimensional power that reproduces social structures, and two-dimensional power that seeks to engage in structural conflict (Haugaard 2003, 2012). This scale is juxtaposed with a second scale concerning access to channels of influence, including lobbying. What emerges is that radical anti-systemic social actors, with little formal access, have a predisposition towards uses of social media to advocate violent protest. However, this is tempered by the fact that advance announcement of such violent anti-systemic protests serves to alert the police, who use violence to supress the protests. So, they find themselves caught in a dilemma, where violent confrontation begets a response in kind, which in turn leads to physical exclusion.

To return to interpellation and violence, we saw that self-subjectification as an abject reaction to violent subjection has a self-exclusionary aspect, which is replicated in protest movements. However, in contrast, for protest movements, such a projection of self also serves to distinguish these groups from reformist groups who, through their lobbying, give legitimacy to the system they wish to oppose. In that sense, the radical, dangerous other is attractive. To go back to the significance of the emotions, radical protest with violent confrontation has the potential to inspire emotion that may prove an effective tool of resistance. If relayed by video on social media, there is nothing more emotional, and empathy inspiring, than a police officer hitting a protester with a truncheon. In that sense, voluntary interpellation of the subject position as a dangerous other can have a power-enhancing effect. This also applies to black citizens caught on video being attacked by police at a traffic stop. Radical protest against racial inequality in the US is empowered by showing videos of police officers using their firearms. When such images go viral, a spontaneous social movement results. When exposed to such footage, conformist social actors, who normally legitimize the system, experience hysteresis effect, dissonance, and thus become open to the emotion of protests movements. Therefore, the violent aspect of interpellation can either be disempowering as part of routine interaction but when captured on alternative media the same coercive interpellation can be massively empowering for the less powerful.

If we contrast the black male drivers and the protesters, the physicality of things makes a difference. In Europe, these protesters experience violence from truncheons (or tear gas and water canon), which are typically non-lethal. In contrast, the black male drivers are confronted by the violence of a gun, which is typically lethal. Hence, the cost of violence is greater in the case of the drivers than the protestors. The nature of the physicality of violence makes interpellation as a dangerous other a more risky proposition for US black male drivers than for European Green protestors. In both cases the empowering aspect, if caught on alternative media, is present. However, the agency of physicality (the contrast of guns versus truncheons, which is theoretically analogous to the contrast between stalls/trolleys versus shacks) is a social force in its own right, which exercises agency. This agency explains why, typically, interpellation as a dangerous other is less attractive for black male drivers than European Green protestors, even though equally effective for both.