8 Mile Movie Analysis

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4 Power

It is fitting that “Pow” is embedded in the English word “power”. it is diffi- cult for many people to disentangle the notion of power from violence. Yet, it is easy to demonstrate precisely the opposite: that people have recourse to violence precisely when and because they feel powerless. Violence is the last resort of people who feel they cannot use more collaborative means to get what they want or need from others. The most egregious example is child abuse, where an adult resorts to physical force after failing in efforts to get a much smaller child to stop crying or whining or whatever the annoy- ing or frustrating behavior might be. Of course, the crying only intensifies. Violence is counterproductive. Gandhi reportedly said that an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind. He emphasized that non-violent resist- ance took more courage, and was more effective than violent resistance. He proved his point by organizing a successful non-violent campaign to get the British to leave India.

In the short run, however, violence often does succeed in temporarily transferring a sense of helplessness from the perpetrator of violence to the other person, the victim of violence. Helplessness is associated with a feel- ing of humiliation, a catastrophic loss of self-esteem. Losing a physical fight is a primal humiliation, especially for males who are raised in many cultures to stake their all on their physical prowess—athletic, sexual, and aggressive. The bully gains power from the fear of humiliation in those he intimidates. Violence can escalate with each party upping the ante to humiliate the other. The need to rid oneself of one’s own fear of humiliation by humiliating others creates classic cases of projective identification. A psychic state is defended against, evacuated, by transferring it to, or induc- ing it in, another person. Such a use of projective identification produces a temporary and illusory sense of power. In abusive childhoods, character can be built around the threat of violence and intimidation. The result can appear to be an identification with the aggressor (A. Freud, 1936/1966).

Altman, Neil. White Privilege : Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wayne/detail.action?docID=6280227. Created from wayne on 2021-12-09 18:07:00.

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What is left of power when we factor out violent projective identifica- tion? Put this way, the question may seem to answer itself: power is the capacity to do and be what we wish. And, as we shall see below, there are other conceptions of power that do not directly flow from physical violence. Yet, it speaks to the pervasiveness of “dog eat dog” environments that we so often and unreflectively equate power and violence, even though we know quite well that power consists in many sorts of capacities, often negatively correlating with violence.

In many ways, dog eat dog environments were and are part and parcel of the European project of conquering, colonizing, and settling territories in the Americas and around the world. The same is true of colonial projects throughout history. In the case of North America, the killing and removal of the Native population from lands they formerly inhabited created a per- vasive kill or be killed situation. Agricultural and industrial development was vastly accelerated by the free labor provided by slaves and cheap labor provided by underpaid and overworked laborers of all types. Dog eat dog environments are not limited to schoolyard bullying by a long shot. In fact, schoolyard bullying may be seen as a symptom of a cultural addiction to domination and violence with deep roots. The conflation of power with domination and violence that we are discussing here is another symptom of this addiction.

Jessica Benjamin (1988) has highlighted the way a dominant-submis- sive orientation to human relationships, which she calls a “doer-done to” paradigm, pervades human interactions, organized around distinctions and polarities along critical dimensions, from gender and sexual orientation to race and ethnicity, to social class. Benjamin’s later work, integrating social theory with clinical psychoanalysis, shows how the dominant-submissive paradigm appears in therapeutic relationships, in the form of impasses between therapist and patient rigidified around struggles over who is the “doer” and who is the “done to”. A prototypical and oversimplified example would be a late cancellation of a session for which the therapist charges a fee. The patient feels potentially done to, i.e. charged for ser- vice not rendered, with the patient as doer. The therapist feels potentially done to, i.e. unfairly deprived of income, with the patient as doer. Such impasses are seen by Benjamin and others working with this perspective, as therapeutic opportunities, insofar as they bring into focus a dominant- submissive, doer-done to, structure that characterizes problematic human interactions in general, including those for which the patient seeks help. Reframing the problem this way opens up the possibility of resolution, referred to by Benjamin as a “third”. The third is a non-polarized way that offers a way out of the conundrums into which the cultural focus on

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40 Power

dominant-submissive structures tends to lead us. The achievement of such a transcendent third position constitutes, in itself, the therapeutic impact of psychoanalysis.

Benjamin has faith in the resolvability of doer-done to impasses based on the paradox at the heart of dominant-submissive relationships brought to light by Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The paradox, or dialectic, here is that the dominant party, the master, seeks to extinguish the submissive party’s subjectivity and agency, yet depends on the slave’s possession of his autonomous subjectivity to recognize his dominance. Power based on dominance is thus self-undoing.

Whereas one form of power rests on violence, another form of power is insidious. A conception of hegemonic power not based on physical violence per se is found in Foucault’s conception of power as based on “regimes of truth” (1991). In Foucault’s conception, power is discursive and dispersed, i.e. it pervades taken-for-granted ways of thinking and speaking that under- write the beliefs that keep power structures intact. Power is not exercised by individuals or governments or groups of rich people. Rather, power is embedded in the socialization and the acculturation process, unknowingly conveyed by parents to children and otherwise within families and within peer groups. The result of this insidious infiltration of minds is what Layton (2006) refers to as the “normative unconscious”. The aim of this book itself is to expose how some of the ways we think and speak about race, power, and guilt keep the structure of violent domination of some people by others in place. This book undoubtedly puts forward its own regime of truth that, hopefully, you, the reader, will note and expose.

Foucault’s notion of power, then, is about the short-circuiting of chal- lenges to violent domination by infiltrating people’s minds with ways of thinking that make particular political and economic regimes seem natu- ral, i.e. unchallengeable, while alternative ways of thinking are rendered strange, alien, subversive. This infiltration of minds in itself can be seen as a form of violence, a non-physical form of violence. The violence underlying this more insidious form of penetration of minds is some- times exposed when opposition to socialized-in norms results in violent opposition. Violence against gay and lesbian people, people who expose and oppose prejudice against darker skinned people, against immigrants, against authoritarian regimes that use violence to keep people in line, is commonplace. The threat of ostracization, of excommunication, for those who “think different”, who act or look different, is a potent disincentive to the taking of non-mainstream positions.

A case in point of Foucault’s thesis is psychoanalysis itself. The way the classical psychoanalytic situation is set up, in which the patient free associ- ates and the analyst interprets (Aron, 1992) ensures that the analyst has the

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power to define the patient’s meaning systems or mental operations. This form of infiltration of another person’s mind, rationalized as the clarifica- tion of Truth (as per psychoanalytic theory, a particular regime of truth) breaks boundaries between one person’s mind and another’s in a form that in some respects is similar to that of projective identification, except that the focus is broadened from the process of projection from one mind to another, to the process by which culturally shared regimes of truth are transmitted across minds.

Nonetheless, psychoanalysis offers an alternative vision of power, by which the internalized capacity to understand and contain one’s psychic states confers potentially more autonomy and true power in living, with fewer destructive side effects, than violent projective identification. As long as the patient has the capacity to think and feel independently from the analyst, that is, as insurance against one’s mind being insidiously infiltrated.

The ability to differ with the analyst depends on the analytic situation being defined as intersubjective. That means that both parties have their own perspective on what happens within the dyad, resulting in the potential for dialogue, or what Irwin Hoffman (1998) termed “social construction” (later dialectical construction) of meaning in psychoanalysis. When the ana- lyst has privileged access to truth, the analytic situation is composed of one subject and one object. The analyst knows, the patient is known. Power flows from this position of objectivity, parallel to the power of the white man or the Colonist, the one “privileged”, one might say, by a perspective that is regarded as standard, taken for granted, unlocated.

The paradox of classical psychoanalysis, then, is that the effort is to empower the patient through disempowering means. Discomfort with the potential contradiction here accounts for the emergence and popularity of the intersubjective perspective, especially in the United States with its dem- ocratic ideals and suspicion of authority.

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