The Internalization of the State and the "Culture of Consent"

[KC]

Lately I have been contemplating the development of the state in class society and I have been thinking about how there are various stages in the development of the state. These can be roughly divided into four particular periods:

The open use of force: This would be particularly in revolutionary periods, when for example one state does away with another and must consolidate its rule and centralize power structures in order to ensure its existence.

The open threat of force: This would be a period where the state must simply apply the threat of force, or subsequently carry it out to maintain that threat, in order to pacify those over whom it rules.

The implicit fear of force: This is a period where the open threat is no longer necessary. The threat is asserted within ones' self. We become our own police, essentially.

The state as a moral authority: This would be when the process of internalization has developed to such an extent that it is linked up with morality itself. No longer is one forced with simply the legal or the material question of the use of force or the consequence of one's actions, but rather the question becomes one of morality. In this sense a culture of consent has developed where, not only is it materially bad to oppose the state (and by oppose I don't simply mean politically, I am also speaking of crime in general), but it is also morally wrong to do so.

Now I haven't really read much on this kind of stuff. I know that I should probably pick up some Gramsci as I know what he writes has to do with this generally. I also know that Foucault wrote on some of this, specifically his writings on the Panopticon would fit in with the idea of a "culture of consent" and the "automation" of the state by replacing force or state actors with our own self-policing.

I also have Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness and am guessing that this will be relevant somehow, at least to what I'm thinking about lately, which is the decline of states and how states become illegitimized.

This also probably has a lot to do with "false consciousness" and the propagation of "bourgeois culture," although I am not looking for something so general.

Anyone know of any writings/authors that deal with this process of internalization/automation?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Aren't those four stages sort of common sense? :confused:

The "Late Stalin" era after WWII ushered in the "open threat of force" (purges were sporadic except in Eastern Europe), for example.

Also, the fourth stage can only be achieved when even civil disobedience is considered morally wrong. Thankfully society hasn't reached that point.

[WendigoGuerilla]

Aren't those four stages sort of common sense? :confused:

The "Late Stalin" era after WWII ushered in the "open threat of force" (purges were sporadic except in Eastern Europe), for example.

Also, the fourth stage can only be achieved when even civil disobedience is considered morally wrong. Thankfully society hasn't reached that point.

With riot police dispersing unscheduled demonstrations,rallies, and marching it makes you wonder if we already have reached the fourth stage.

[Die Neue Zeit]

That's still Stage #2.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

You'll have to excuse the Canadianness of my examples, it's just what I'm most familiar with.

What's problematic in conceptualizing there MOs as stages is that they co-exist, and arguably rely on one another. To pretend that, for example, Western Liberal democracies have passed beyond the open use of force is counter to the daily experience of many marginalized people, or the massive and shameless display of police violence in Toronto this summer (or against Natives and supporters at Barrier Lake, or . . . ). The ongoing open use of force is, of course, what makes individuals take the state's threats seriously, leading of course, to self-policing. The reproduction of self-policing in our day-to-day interactions and relationships is what normalizes this state (ha) of affairs, and creates the moral-ethical authority of the state.

In this sense, our strategies for resisting the state have to take into account the interrelationship of these forms.

[RedMaterialist]

There is Chomsky on the internalizing and manufacture of consent.

[Amphictyonis]

Aren't those four stages sort of common sense? :confused:

The "Late Stalin" era after WWII ushered in the "open threat of force" (purges were sporadic except in Eastern Europe), for example.

Also, the fourth stage can only be achieved when even civil disobedience is considered morally wrong. Thankfully society hasn't reached that point.

In the states eyes it has and many Americans see 'protesters' as 'extremists'. We're getting there. Protest zones and all. Activists homes being raided, people being beaten by cops without societal outrage etc.

[Bilan]

You've already mentioned Foucault's "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" which would be very useful.
I imagine the Frankfurt school would've touched on this. Might be worth looking into that.

[Ravachol]

As Virgin Molotov Cocktail already said, I don't think these states exist as discrete phases seperate and distinct from eachother.



"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen."


The panoptical prison model is remarkably similar to the functioning of surveillance society. Through observation and the implicit threat of force, we reproduce the norms set by 'the tower' (which isn't necessarily a central point of capital "P" Power but might as well be the biopolitical tissue at large) thus self-policing ourselves into normality. This, in turn, leads to the further strengthening of normality and the further reproduction of the given moral-ethical norms.

But we must realise that central to the capacity of 'the tower' to force us into self-policing is this implicit threat of 'violence' (in the broadest sense of the word). For if behind all the CCTV cameras weren't the state's batons and prisons, for if behind all social norms wasn't the process of exclusion there would be far less reason to reproduce these norms.

Obviously, there still is the question of the reproduction of everyday life, where normality is reproduced through the full fabric of social institutions and dominant discours, thus limiting our horizons to a fixed state. After all, one who is born in prison can't fanthom the freedom behind it's walls.

For me, the panoptical society is merely an extension of the diffuse network of power relations underlying our society, a new 'technology' of Biopower (in the social sense) as Foucault calls it, to mold our biopolitical tissue.