![A Tahrir Moment on Wall Street [Polish]](http://www.adbusters.org/files/magazine/teaser/flag_polish_guardian.png?1317158630 "A Tahrir Moment on Wall Street [Polish]")
I received a crash course in postmodern thought during my first semester at Swarthmore College. In a lesson that was to be repeated throughout my undergraduate education, the professor opened the class by admonishing us to reject binary thinking. As the class was staring at her dumbfounded, she divided the chalkboard in two with a thick vertical line and asked us to name the dualisms that structure our world. After she provided a few examples to get us started – male/female, white/black – we jumped into the game, calling out binaries one after another: rich/poor, smart/stupid, human/animal, cool/lame, skinny/fat … The game went on until the board was full and the air saturated with chalk dust. Pausing a moment, our comparative literature professor asked us if we noticed anything odd about the list we had constructed.
Looking at the chalkboard, we saw an easy answer: on the left of the line were “good” terms – cool, skinny, rich, smart, white – and on the right were their counterparts, the derided terms. In an instant, our class grasped an essential precept of postmodern philosophy: Western thought has hitherto divided the world into a series of binary oppositions that privilege one side over the other. The political implications of the lesson were clear: Oppression can be traced back to the way we think, and hope of liberation rests on escaping this binary thinking.
The postmodern project of overcoming binary thought, however, is more difficult than it may appear. First of all, one cannot simply flip the terms and privilege what was once diminished – that would merely replicate the binary in inverse. The issue is not which term is privileged but the false belief that existence can be divided into two distinct, competing parts. Thus the task of the postmodern activist became the blurring and problematizing of distinctions in order to destroy dualist thinking. It was all done in the name of political liberation. At least that was the intended goal.
In light of the traumas of modernity, where millions were slaughtered because they fell on the wrong side of the imaginary Aryan/non-Aryan divide, the project of deconstructing binaries should have been a positive development. In fact the primary way of disturbing categories – pointing out that the primary term is only defined through exclusion of the other – might have effectively stalled the pseudo-scientific Nazi eugenic project. The problem with the postmodern approach, however, was that it came too late. While it could have offered a way out of the genocide of World War II, by the time the project of deconstructing distinctions was widespread in academia and had filtered down to society at large, oppression lay not in the maintenance of dualism but in the opposite: increasing hybridization. That is the irony of contemporary philosophy: what we take to be a tool of resistance, the application of cutting-edge theory to our contemporary moment, turns out to be a hammer of our oppression. And by rejecting binary thought outright, we were not challenging the status quo … we were helping it along.
Consider the twisted fate of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s magnum opus, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a text long hailed as revolutionary because of its emphasis on fluidity, hybridity and multiplicity as anticapitalist tactics of resistance. The book has served as a handbook for leftist activists, anarchists and culture jammers since its French publication in 1980. And Michel Foucault, the archetype of politically engaged French leftist philosophers, even went as far as to declare that “perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian,” a statement that was taken to prophesy the inevitable victory of our May ‘68 inspired anticapitalist struggle.
And yet according to Slavoj Žižek in the final chapter of his book Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, the exemplars of Deleuzian philosophy are not the anarchists but the late-capitalists: “In short, and stated even more pointedly, the thought of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, the ultimate philosophers of resistance, of marginal positions crushed by the hegemonic power network, is effectively the ideology of the newly emerging ruling class.” For Žižek, the misapprehension of Deleuze as a philosopher of resistance has led to the awkward situation where major alterglobalization theorists are espousing a suspiciously similar rhetoric to that of the globalizers. Singling out Naomi Klein, Žižek continues, “So, when Naomi Klein writes that ‘[n]eo-liberal economics is biased at every level toward centralization, consolidations, homogenization. It is a war waged on diversity,’ is she not focusing on a figure of capitalism whose days are numbered? Would she not be applauded by contemporary capitalist modernizers? Is not the latest trend in corporate management itself ‘diversify, devolve power, try to mobilize local creativity and self-organization?’ Is not anticentralization the topic of the ‘new’ digitalized capitalism?”
The significance of Žižek’s stinging critique of Klein is that it effectively tars an entire lineage of leftist political theory leading from Deleuzian multiplicities to Hardt and Negri’s multitude. And in light of there having been no compelling response to Žižek’s critique, it is hard not to doubt the postmodern tactics we’ve been using. Could it be that while we’ve been smashing boundaries and crossing borders, consumerism has quickened its global expansion by piggybacking on our identity-blurring efforts?
And now, entering a new era of humanity where postmodernity is slipping into altermodernity, we find that the binaries we rejected are not only blurring but finally collapsing. Unable to say with any certainty what is real or virtual, human or animal, organic or genetically modified, some wish to resuscitate again, but this time with nostalgia, the failed antimodern project of shattering distinctions. While the chorus – composed now of cyberpunks and activists joined by capitalists and technocrats – rejoices in the indistinguishable difference between online and offline, organic and synthetic, man and machine, the most crucial distinction of all – that between resistance and complicity – is collapsing as well. Unless we can discover a way to critique the system without furthering the system, we shall be lost.
It takes courage to insist that in the coming era differences do matter – like the difference between comrade and consumer, human and glutton or the good life and consumption – and that without a return to the genocidal modernist project, we can forge a new path that gathers its strength from the difference between spiritual wealth and material greed.
Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org
I think post-modernism puts
I think post-modernism puts too much emphasis on language and binaries. It negates actuality by placing language binaries before lived experience. While these theories are interesting and necessary and a great course of study why did they have to become the end all of almost every single department in the humanities? I don't like postmodern theories because they are so complex and require so much energy that they prevent thinkers from listening to 1) themselves 2) others 3) the world around them. Talking with a fellow member of my graduate program he told me "we cannot trust the testimony of journalist or people on the street because they assume that language corresponds to reality and we know otherwise” In my mind this is a dangerous course of action it negates all other realms of society and experience to the "experts" who know the truth. Assuming all others are foolishly deceived by language.
In the same way a dogmatically Marxist critique (which I love in it's prognosis of capitalism) with it's emphasis on the future and what has to happen (revolution) dominates people and this ideology becomes their agenda, hence they become removed from allowing the changing stimuli from altering their thinking.
I really enjoyed reading this article it was a quick and less through than an academic paper and it got out some new ideas. When I became hesitant to study Deluze learning how the Israeli army was using his theories in their military tactics, I decided to study Levinas' notion of resistance. I found I was all alone with these concerns, and as I thought school was a place to challenge courses of thinking with new critiques in light of politics and society I found people were more interested in one upping in each other and sticking to the status quo. So I felt isolated with these concerns. This article is important because hardly anywhere else do you see a misgivings articulated about dominant ideas. So thank you!
Mr. White: As a
Mr. White:
As a long-suffering victim of postmodernity myself, I was pleased to read this essay in the print version of Adbusters #88 this February. I too think that we have reached a Fukayama-ish "end" and the time for theorizing the great 'what's next' is now. However, while I admire your pedigree as well as your intent, I find several major contentions with your logic and, most importantly, with your concluding course of action centering around the rejection of binaries.
Your initial articulation of postmodernism as "the blurring and problematizing of distinctions in order to destroy dualist thinking" is necessarily reductive but appropriate. However, your following claim that "It was all done in the name of political liberation" seems overly simplistic. Postmodernism is not a political reaction, not essentially so, and 'liberation' (whatever that it) is not the goal. Instead, it is a reaction against culture and the rejection of the simplifying force. Using articulations of postmodernism by Jameson or Harvey it is an economic liberative force; using the more broad strokes of Baudrillard and Lyotard, it functions more as the individuals rejection of their own reduction to tropes and pastiche. To resolve the Thomas-esque raging against the dying of the light of modernity to one for political liberation seems to me to be more action committee cheerleading than honest philosophy.
You use an anecdote from your time at Swarthmore to illustrate postmodernism syllogistically: "Western thought has hitherto divided the world into a series of binary oppositions that privilege one side over the other. The political implications of the lesson were clear: Oppression can be traced back to the way we think, and hope of liberation rests on escaping this binary thinking." I find this to be an accurate summary of pre-postmodern thinking. Both modern and premodern (within and outside of the Adbusters articulation) philosophies emphasize the binary instead of reconcile or dissolve them. I do disagree with your bold claim that oppression originates in how we think, but that bit of epistemological arm-wrestling is far, far beyond the scope of this humble letter. However, while you reach a reasonable conclusion that our hope rests within the escape of this binary, your treatment of this escape defines my philosophical bone to pick.
I'm sure he would not appreciate being my 'bright line', but Hegel happened. We live in a tradition where a solution for the binary exists. Thesis and antithesis produce synthesis. This, to me, is a more correct explanation of the descent of Deleuze into capitalist co-option. That being said however, the dialectic is apolitical, non-political; Hegel's tools can tear down Smith's house as well as Engel's. By embracing an epistemic tool that is philosophically productive instead of something that leaves us to the wolves, we can actually move forward instead of running the risk of making the same ideological mistakes as those the West currently is stained by.
You use the term 'Altermodern' to describe the burgeoning rejection of postmodernism. I am familiar with its use by the Tate and have had problems with their articulation of its meaning as well. Altermodern designates a new form of the modern, a change and restating: a new modernism. To risk stating the obvious: modernism did not work. It still privileged the monadic Enlightenment ego and centralized truth, but hid it from us, made it as inaccessible as God or Virtue. Modernism established a non-metaphysical Platonic world of forms and then laughed when he couldn't find it. Of course we couldn't find it, there were to tools. Joyce best illustrates this state: yes I am writing a novel, no I won't tell you what it's about.
What the altermodern is doing is embracing the same mistakes that modernism made, what postmodern struggled (and struggles) to reject. But postmodernism has shown that it is not the answer. Its track record is proof enough that the decentering and dissolution of the definitive and demarcated leaves life empty and devoid of meaning and at odds with real human experience. What is needed is a reconciliation between the establishment of a privileged position and an honest admission of omni-hybridity. Despite what may be accused as merely a semantical feud, I suggest post-postmodernism and happily pit it against your altermodern.
Where the altermodern is negative, the post-postmodern is positive; where the altermodern is binary, the post-postmodern is dialectic; where the altermodern is reactionary and political, the post-postmodern is sincere and personal. We may be altermodern, but I am post-postmodern...and so are you.
Of course, the reason why this letter is pleading is because the modernity is alluring. The privilege is like the ambrosia of the lotus. And while the philosophers you invoke - the esteemed Zizek, Deleuze/Guattari, the panopticon himself (Foucault) even the name-dropped Hardt and Negri - struggle with and vaciliate between modernity and postmodernity (binaries themselves), they acknowledge the danger therein.
Your article has not even that: "Unless we can discover a way to critique the system without furthering the system, we shall be lost." That's a binary, my friend, and an insidious one at that. It is also at odds with your claim that we need to find value in the difference.
I disagree. The binary needs not be rejected, effaced, erased from the plane but engaged and embraced to create a middle path, a synthesis that creates something productive from destructive forces of economy and culture. You could call it post-postmodernism, sure, or even "root beer float," but what is important is that is does something, makes something out of what we've already got and that, I think is worthwhile.
Sincerely,
DAT (thegreatslow.wordpress.com)
I can't believe i actually
I can't believe i actually wasted 5 minutes to read the crap above. This is stupid and daft, written in a pseudo-intellectual speak that attempts to demonstrate and 'expunge' knowledge while only playing with the surfaces of symbols in the most superficial way...
I gotta say: what's your
I gotta say: what's your problem? The author invokes a level of discourse and I reply thusly and you label it "daft"? That seems one-sided and unfair. As if the internet offers anything but.
A few objections to your criticisms: 1. Since the symbols are cultural and collective in nature, can I really do anything BUT play with their surfaces? 2. I'm not trying to efface any time of knowledge but instead to say why I think while the article is good, it's not complete.
Also: it's not psuedo-intellectual, it's actual intellectual; you're just hostile.
Complicity isn't through
Complicity isn't through philosophy, modernity, post-modernity, being binary or hybrid. Complicity-is-through-buying-what-they-want-you-to-buy. If you buy stuff they are marketing at you and/or stuff they are invested in then you are complicit in making them richer. That is all there is, period. Was that to simple for philosophy? Does philosophy need to spin its gears amongst its other gears without touching base with the real world in order to be philosophy? If you want to resist capitalism, its going to be hard because in this stage it has become extremely good at occupying almost every niche (market) conceived and executed, so that challenge, I believe, deserves attention from all the thinkers out there. But the only thing that actually exists in this physical world are actions. Ideas without action is nothing; a physical event has to take place in order for a difference to happen. Don't buy. Confront feelings that make you want to buy. When you overcome those feelings you won't need to "resist" because they no longer exist and who needs to resist what doesn't exist?
So binary is modern, hmph. I guess the crusades were modern as well as the witch hunts or catholic vs protestant prior to Queen Elizabeth, right Micah.
Don't forget kids; the internet is not a "series of tubes", it does not physically exist. I wish I could've used up less void.
I tend to agree. The path to
I tend to agree. The path to a post-consumer-capitalist way of life depends on maximizing local self-sufficiency, reducing reliance on and connections to the totalizing global structures of consumer capitalist corporations and institutions. We don't need to confront the current regime of power, we need to withdraw from it, creating new societies under their radar with built-in resistance to anti-democratic concentration of power in any form.
Ludwig Josef Johann
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein frowns upon postmodernism! The whole point of philosophy is to not use words like "mythopoetic" "subcultural" and "textual consciousness", for they bewitch the mind with meaningless language! All that can be communicated by philosophy can be done using simple language. Indeed, philosophy is dead as soon as you over-plumpen it with these meaningless terms...
Anything that contains ridiculous contractions should be scratched out with a pen! Since language is not like mathematics, when you say "the mythopoetic narrative of western science is to establish technological utopianism" ten people will have ten different meanings. No one can get tangled in something as simple as 1+1=2, and this should be the state of philosophy! Postmodernism as well as every other school of philosophical thought is merely a grouping of linguistical conventions. When I say "what is the grand narrative of western culture" you immediately reply "capitalism, utopia, individuality..." etc, not because these words have any meaning but because it is the convention to reply with these words!
Read my books!
Take it a step further and
Take it a step further and say that valid philosophy should be accessible to people with no knowledge of celebrities, be they academics or doers... & all the more accessible to those ignorant of "history"
Dynamics are dynamics.
Theories, theories
Academics is incest...
"Philosophy" it's most deformed progeny
Esotericism is criminal///
Greetings, I have regenerated
Greetings, I have regenerated my self for a very short period of time in order to speak to you all. Regarding this bit about "anti-centralization" being the new capitalism, I would like to remind you that I, the most effective supporter of decentralization in History, wholly supported capitalism. Tho I also supported equality, it is not what you today call equality. Today many prefer to equality as the right of the government to redistribute wealth. I do not support that. The only government allowed to tax her citizens in the first place is the STATE government. I support decentralization. And I support equality. And I support the worker. Not the loaf degenerate who believes himself to be "entitled" to government support. Tho I died before the euphemism "post-modernism", I believe myself to have been quite the proto-post-modernist, simply read my journals, however, please do not associate learnedness and individual rights (decentralization of power) with your anti-vitalistic political agendas. The agenda of the man who wishes to redistribute wealth is derived from a desire to steal other people's wealth. Tho those individuals may not acquire wealth through unlawful means and expect to be protected by the government, you also may not create law that allows you to steal the livelihood of others. Do not associate the prestige of postmodernism with your bloodless political agendas. You are pathetic.
... so says the slave owner,
... so says the slave owner, Thomas "Hemings" Jefferson.
please stay degenerated
please stay degenerated before u add another comment.
To believe that the
To believe that the postmodern deconstruction of binaries might have prevented World War II's genocide is intellectual megalomaniacal delusion of the worst order. And by referring to "the genocidal modernist project" you're falling into the most ancient and hoary kind of Manicheism, whereby pomo is all emancipation and tolerance, and extra-pomo is all oppression and slaughter. Liberate yourself from that!
In truth, language isn't all about unequal and invidious binaries. See the later Wittgenstein. But as a species we have a tendency (see the above) to drift into Manichean thought patterns, and language is where they show up. It's those patterns - or some of them - that kill and oppress people; the colours black/white form a binary pair but have to be invested with extra content (such as that provided by the Atlantic slave trade) before they can become the basis of oppression. And you can't change the world without some Manichean structures; to see everything as flat and indivisible is to leave it untouched.
Theories of culture and society after postmodernism have been proposed other than Bourriaud's altermodern. What about Raoul Eshelman's performatism, or my own digimodernism? What makes you so certain that the world after postmodernity has to be "altermodern"?
I discovered your article on
I discovered your article on digimodernism last week and found it most enlightening. Maybe you should be writing for adbusters instead.
Why not? Suggest it to the
Why not? Suggest it to the editors by all means.
Distantiations are embedded
Distantiations are embedded in language ... we don't need postmodernists to point that out to us.
I agree with the article
I agree with the article until the author states, "Unless we can discover a way to critique the system without furthering the system, we shall be lost." This is for me the fundamental flaw of postmodernism which as become such an ingrained cliche as to be perpetuated by an author who is writing of a world "after" postmodernism. It is the utopian belief that by somehow getting outside of or destroying the system - whatever that might mean - we can then start anew. The project smacks of a liberal ideal of purity which at its core sounds suspiciously akin to the assumptions of racial hate groups which also subscribe to this faux notion.
I would supplement the end of this analysis of postmodernism with one of my favorite quotes from Edward Said:
“Literary theory, whether of the Left or the Right, has turned its back on [worldly] things. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism. [And in Aijaz Ahmad's words, "the essential canonizing gesture."] But it is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical noninterference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism, or for that matter with a new cold war, increased militarism and defense spending, and a massive turn to the right on matters touching the economy, social services, and organized labor” (4). from "Secular Criticism"
Let us not forget the power of human agency to be subversive through reclaiming a system that is already in place. This seems to me to be the sole "radical" option left, as professional radicalism has only led us down a road toward political impotence as academics.
when you blur people's
when you blur people's identities they strive to fulfill their broken ego with false substitutes to the injunction to enjoy but not be able to have that what you enjoy... eg. sex and coke. It cannot give you what is promising. It's a mask for a void they play on your desires set yourself free:)
Keep in mind Zizek says
Keep in mind Zizek says Deleuze is one of his favourite philosophers. Zizek's relationship with Deleuze is like he characterizes Deleuze's relationship with Hegel: trying as hard as possible to avoid him but actually have more in common than would admit.
+ Zizek's favourite Badiou shares so much with Deleuze it's not funny.
"It takes courage to insist
"It takes courage to insist that in the coming era differences do matter – like the difference between comrade and consumer, human and glutton or the good life and consumption"
The point is these differences only matter so they can be destroyed: the consumer is not fixed as a consumer: destroy the possibility of being a consumer, not the consumer. And selling shoes or even a magazine isn't helping.
There's no point in saying 'I'M A COMRADE NOT A CONSUMER'. As long as there are consumers YOU'RE A FAILURE.
Why is the fact that
Why is the fact that Deleuze's theory corresponds so well with capitalism a bad thing? Zizek's theory is exactly the same, he is just explicit about it. (Almost?) All Zizek's examples are taken from late/cultural/postmodern capitalism: chocolate laxatives; kung fu panda; etc.
Marx said communism would come after capitalism.
Baudrillard said the only way to destroy a system is to push it into overdrive, to its limits.
The fact that Deleuze AND Zizek's theory help/explain/help&explain capitalism is not necessarily a problem. Before you even started talking about reintroducing binaries you reintroduced them by positing Deleuze as bad because he helps explain capitalism.
Marx spent half his life trying to describe capital in intricate detail!
The question is the same as it has always been, what is to be done?
Sdbusters isn't gonna do shit except mildy stoke the revolutionary flame in the far reaches of its readers' minds.
Did Baudrillard really say
Did Baudrillard really say that? I think you, if you legitimately think that and not just repeating something you heard, seriously mis-read his works.
This whole thing just seems
This whole thing just seems incestuous to me - the navel gazers get tired of deleuze, they latch on to zizek, but it's crucial that the cultural work can be done on a blackboard, that we can pride ourselves on conquering dualities (okay, some dualities) within our oh-so-up-to-the-minute critical sensibilites, and bash indispensable journalists like... See More Klein as somehow akin to upper management because they're not reading Zizek. The notion that the Holocaust wouldn't have happened if Germans had been even weirder in their antinomian spiritual contortions - that somehow Deleuze "came too late" to fix the world's problems - maybe that's just sloppy writing, rather than clinical insanity, but it's still shameful self-exoneration from a writer backpedalling away from a discredited intellectual fad (and apparently into a new one). Adbusters reeks of fashion to me, fashion for people who have no money and just loved Edward Scissorhands, and while I suppose someone should hold on to the hope, in case it somehow someday miraculously pans out, that leftism can be boiled down to fashion and the poor will someday be sexy and fun to champion (because, as we keep hearing, our movement fails because it isn't sexy and fun and people like sexy fun) I think we still have to occasionally set aside fashion - definitely including intellectual fashion - and fall back on whatever conscience we can muster. Down with Zizek, viva Naomi Klein.
i think we need more naval
i think we need more naval gazing and critique capitalism ... focus on that ... put all our energies on undermining capitalist ideology.. go for the root of the matter, the structural chains that zizek is trying to destroy. As for comparing zizek to naomi klein it's like comparing a dung fly with one of the brightest thinkers of the 21st century. In due time you will also bow your knee to God/zizek.
I will just make this short
I will just make this short and say that I do agree with alot of what the artical is saying and alot of the comments as well, and this is why i always say ....we just need to go back to tribal times.
Indigenous and Aboriginal
Indigenous and Aboriginal theories of PostIndian survivance and trickster hermeneutics are way ahead of this Hegemonic thought always focused on the self. However, as the recent Olympics show, NDN groups can be bought out too. But I think that future theories will learn a lot from these examples and we should be trying to understand humour and intelligence: qualities that only make sense in a social/community context... and then move towards survivance (survival and resistance) against the atomistic Capitalist worldview.
For example: Adbusters was a lot more radical and revolutionary when it was funny! Images of distopia are yet more Millenarianism --- rather than being revolutionary they actually bolster the worst Christian belief systems. Humour is much more powerful for it exposes truths irrationally. Take heed: humour is also dangerous - there is a lot of xenophobic humour that is oppressive carried on TV etc. Tricksters are not good. They are powerful but they also destroy lives.
We need to disempower Capitalism if we expect our fight to be of any usefulness. That means that (Capitalism being an ideology) building up the strength of the idea is counterproductive. We need to discredit and blur that power. But to a point, not just for nihilism.
It's actually not that difficult, the theory is more sophisticated and convoluted than the practice. And that truth lies in the daily life of millions of normal people who live everyday and create family, hope, joy even in the midst of Capitalism. It isn't a war of pious suffering to overcome: that is the very ideology of the puritans who founded colonial genocidal America. Even the post post post modernists still have this desire for that absolutist (even if nihilistic) abstracted truth. Lets stop chasing those pipe dreams - or at least no longer let them dictate our practice of resistance. We have to be more clever than capitalism and more funny. We can be. We don't have to be "stronger" because brains do win. Capitalism provides a lot of benefits, we can take some of that stuff to our advantage, clever doesn't mean martyr. Let's get our heads out of our asses and do that!
Learn your native languages, learn about your local land, learn to connect with global efforts but keep it grounded in your community rather than your self.
this reads like the
this reads like the postmodern generator:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
This is relativism a it's
This is relativism a it's worst. People need binaries as a framework for their existence and their actions: if you don't think in good vs. bad how will you ever be able to do the correct thing? If you even come to act as eternal doubt blurs your vision and thought.
Postmodernism seems to have
Postmodernism seems to have neglected the fundamental duality of (the self / the other)?
you mean our very own ego is
you mean our very own ego is split via the mirror stage that lacan mentions? ... that there is no "I" and that I am pretending to be the Other's desire when in fact i don't exist ?
Ha Ha! No:) Isn't it absurd
Ha Ha! No:) Isn't it absurd to pursue Lacan et al. about the subtleties of being oneself when we All Are It? I would rather say: "you know who you are directly from the inside, yet you believe the image in the mirror". The 'self' has evolved as a concept way beyond the realm of individual experience - it has become a highly abstracted idea. We falsify our experience of being to reflect that complex idea, resulting in countless contradictions.
"Our world consists of a multiple individual engaged in an absurd task of repressing and exploiting oneself via proxy."