Absolute Capitalism, Mass Murder, and Suicide

[American Dream]

http://uprootingcriminology.org/blogs/a ... suicide-2/

Absolute Capitalism, Mass Murder, and Suicide

January 4, 2016 Author: Gary Potter

Mass murder has become all too common in the United States. From Columbine, to Newtown, to San Bernardino the response has been both predictable and banal. There are almost ritualistic calls for additional controls on firearms. There are commentaries on the problem of mental health. And there are suggestions that the depiction of violence in movies, television programming and video games sparks imitation and stimulates the deeply buried dark impulses in the minds of some potentially dangerous people. To some degree these all have a core of truth. To some degree they all have the exaggerations of myth. Yes, we are a gun crazy culture in which the carrying of firearms serves as a substitute for an inability to think and talk our way out of conflict; the inability to defend oneself with our hands and minds; and the inability to contain compulsive masculinity. But, not all gun owners commit mass murder. Yes, starting with Reagan, neoliberalism has eviscerated our mental health care system, contributing to homelessness, social displacement, and some violence. But, not all mentally ill people commit mass murder. And, yes, we glorify violence in mass culture. From sickeningly violent, jingoistic, racist films like American Sniper to the millions of pretend warriors who savage victims with differing skin colors and different cultures, living in foreign lands (both real and pretend) while playing Call of Duty we worship violence as a solution to our problems and as a salve for compulsive masculine behavior. But, not all gamers and movie-goers commit mass murder. The problem is that while there is some logic to all of these responses none of them are able to come to terms with the subjective realities of these crimes. They are all insufficient and partial in their analyses.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi addresses these complexities in his book Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. Berardi sees the Columbine mass shooting in 1999 as a pivotal event heralding in a new era of violence and despair. He contends that we should not see these events as isolated phenomena that can be “cured” by a little legislative first aid. Berardi sees these events as acts of desperation, social explosions resulting from the devastation wreaked by pathologies of late capitalism and the corrosive ideology of neoliberalism. Zygmunt Baumann has written extensively on this process of adiaphorization. According to Bauman, adiaphorization occurs in late capitalism when “systems and processes become split off from any consideration of morality” (Bauman and Lyon, 2013: 8 ).

Berardi’s research centers on a series of case studies. He examines James Holmes’ shooting which killed 12 people and injured seventy more at the Aurora, Colorado screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. He also focuses his attention on the Hikikomori culture in Japan; worker suicides in China; and, the violence associated with Islamic fundamentalism.

His analysis of the Aurora shooting and other similar crimes points to the perpetrators as “heroes of an age of nihilism and spectacular stupidity: the age of financial capitalism.” We all recognize the environmental carnage, the gentrification of the inner cities, the pervasive and unending wars and the grinding economic deprivation of capitalism in late modernity. But, Berardi goes beyond a simple recitation of the evils of contemporary capitalism. He is more interested in the devastation of human life, the violence imparted on human consciousness and subjective understanding.

Each of Berardi’s case studies treats personal biographies as secondary to the rational conditions which govern the perpetrators lives. He sees the perpetrators not as victims of tragic events and circumstances but as the victims of what he calls absolute capitalism. Absolute capitalism refers to the pervasive extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of personal feelings and desires. It is the total egoistic, self-absorption which dominates life in late capitalism described by Jock Young (2007) in terms of ontological insecurity and essentialism. Absolute capitalism is also defined by the ubiquitous financial abstractions of the market; the production and exchange of immaterial signs; the randomization of digital values; and, the emergence of a new bourgeoisie no longer bounded by nations or even political ideologies.

Berardi sees Eric Harris, James Holmes, Dylan Klebold and Finnish mass murderer Pekka-Eric Auvinen as complete losers from their experiences in school to their failed attempts to succeed in the new economy of endless and brutal competition. The structured economy of late modernity has seized control of every aspect of life. None of us, any longer, has even a modicum of privacy in which we can hide from the pervasive, eviscerating demands of late capitalism. Berardi analyzes the confessions and manifestos of these mass murderers in excruciating detail. He points to their inability to address the world in any way except for a brutal Social Darwinist ideology. Predatory capitalism has imbued its victims with total isolation and instability. It leaves them desensitized and traumatized. Their horrifying acts are in many ways a form of suicidal acting out which they justified as retributions against enemies who were obstacles to their own pursuit of meaning and status in their miserable lives of desperation.

Berardi sees mass killers as captives of two contradictory impulses. First, there is the oppressive, demoralizing, alienating existence under absolute capitalism and the suicidal urge to escape that existence. But, there is also the ethos of capitalism in late modernity marked by intense competition and a pathological need to be the winner in this brutal, dehumanizing game. It matters little if we are talking about those who have ended their lives as a result of oppressive austerity measures in the European Union and the United States, or the Chinese workers who end their lives as a result of horrifying working conditions, or the mass murderer who seeks to create his own spectacle as he frees himself from social failure. In the winner and loser culture of the 21st Century absolute capitalism demands that the murderer or suicide who is “disconnected from conscious elaboration” and unable to understand his own desperation seeks meaning in a frantic explosion of the violence he has been assimilated to by society’s culture. Berardi sums this up by saying: “The mass murderer is someone who believes in the right of the fittest and the strongest to win in the social game, but he also knows or senses that he is not the fittest nor the strongest. So he opts for the only possible act of retaliation and self-assertion: to kill and be killed.” His violence against others and his release through death is an act of redemption.

The ontological insecurity resulting from globalization and the loss of territorial and national identity has a dangerous underside. While many, if not most people feel a loss of identity, increased isolation, and a sense of what Jock Young calls “vertigo,” others retreat to essentialism. Racism, nationalism, compulsive masculinity, religiosity and other forms of aggressive personal identification become more public and more pervasive. As economies and cultures become global and physical insecurity and displacement become common, identity emerges as a safe place in which to hide. Previously strongly held personal meanings are disrupted and eventually buried by globalized capitalism. Essentialism emerges as a reactionary and totally fanciful return to the “good old days.” So white supremacy and patriarchal terrorism reemerge with increased ferocity in the United States and new far-right political parties threaten political stability in Europe.

It is this ethnic and religious essentialism which Berardi sees as having a major role in the Arab-Israeli conflicts. The calcification of “identity” and the changing territorial realities of the Middle East is, in Berardi’s words the result of a “hypertrophic sense of the root,” and “the reclamation of belonging as criterion of truth and selection.” The violence of Islamic extremism is a result of a “regressive cult of origin.” The nationalism of Israel is similarly linked to an “imagined place of belonging “and a “false sense of memory.” So essentialism and identity become deadly traps and dangerous lies. The collective memory of a primeval source of origin stokes nationalist and religious war.

Differing from the self-loathing and doubt of the mass murderer and the collective sense of historical identity of the Arab-Israeli conflict is another form of desperation and rejection. According to Berardi, absolute capitalism creates a growing, and indeed pervasive, precariat class of workers worldwide. The precariat has no sense of place or permanence, no stable work, no clear social identity. Wage laborers today live in a constant state of anxiety over their economic futures, often being forced to change jobs and homes ten or more times in their lives. This precarious existence impinges on all aspects of life, even those fleeting private moments. In late modernity even pleasure is subject to digitized accounting on social media. Play time and relaxation have become increasingly rare. But even that scarce, precious time is interchangeable and easily replaced with the spontaneity of Twitter, Facebook and the rest. Not only is economic insecurity omnipresent but social insecurity is increased by the constant judgments and records created by social media. So there is no private time, no time to be safe from the social reaction of others. The habitual patterns of even moderate social media consumers, in Berardi’s view, show the same signs of irrational self-indulgence and preoccupation that often explodes in the violence of mass murderers. We become less a living thing and more an automaton in the ebbs and flows of the digital world. We are simultaneously “connected” and totally disconnected from any substantial meaning in our lives.

It is in this context that Berardi turns to an examination of hikikomori (used both as an adjective for a style or life and as a noun denoting a class of people). The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in Japan defined hikikomori as individuals who choose not to participate in society as workers. They are primarily of middle class origin and usually university graduates. They often stay in their abodes having little or no social contact with others. The hikikomori have chosen an alternative to the precarious world of labor. They are isolated from the outside world. They live alone and structure their existence around a computer interface. They believe they exist in a life with no borders, one of unlimited opportunity in an environment of total digital freedom. But, to Berardi the hikikomori are actually committing a form of living suicide. Their lifestyle is not an act of oppositional dissent but simply total surrender.

Heroes is not a happy, fun-filled read. Some criminologists will dismiss Berardi’s work as just more ethnographic, narrative discourse without generalizability or concrete solutions. They will retreat to their datasets, their statistical analyses, and their comfortable government grants. In many ways they will become the hikikomori of academia. On the other hand, there is a point of departure that scholars might embrace. Criminologists might finally admit the empirically obvious: there is nothing the criminal justice system or the criminal law can do to control or reduce crime. Crime is a social fact which has antecedents far above the purview of police, courts and prisons. We might finally point to the savagery of globalized “absolute” capitalism.

Berardi does offer come suggestions starting with distance and disengagement. Berardi calls this “ironic autonomy,” the refusal to participate, distancing ourselves from extant political systems. We should make clear our despair, rejecting existing economic and political structures which have no substance and no truth. Berardi suggests that in that despair we might find imagination and new potential solutions: “Remember despair and joy are not incompatible.” Berardi argues that if you are not outraged you are simply submitting to madness and lies. In Berardi’s view despair is a form of oppositional discourse, a tangible form of social conflict. Berardi argues that we should not retreat but rather we should engage in “skeptical” rejection of all accepted dogmas and rules, and that rejection should be open and visible. As Berardi says “dystopia has to be faced, and dissolved by irony.” Reject and rebel and celebrate that rejection and rebellion.

Gary Potter, PhD
Professor, School of Justice Studies
Eastern Kentucky University

References

Bauman, Z. & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid Surveillance. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Berardi, F. 2015: Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso. http://www.versobooks.com/books/1746-heroes

Young, J. (2007). The Vertigo of Late Modernity. London: Sage.

[Wombaticus Rex]

The Mark "Problematic" Ames book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion is also excellent.

(Recommended for those more interested in the subject at hand than "ontological insecurities," at least.)

Ol' Berardi got the VICE treatment recently, although I think they did him few favors -- they even name checked renowned socialist intellectual Russell Brand in the intro copy -- it's kind of a "LOL WEIRDO" piece:
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/berardi-interview

Q: You say in your book, controversially, that the mass murderer is "less hypocritical than the average neoliberal politician". Do you think that mass murderers are performing neoliberal ideology?

A: Well, I will ask: What is the core of neoliberal ideology? Firstly, that you are alone, that you are an individual competing with everybody else. Secondly, that the real distinction among human beings is between winners and losers, right? There's no more stable class identity, no more stable political identity – the real divide is between neoliberalism's winners and losers. And if you are a young person who has grown up in this capitalist environment, and you understand that actually you can never be a winner, what will you do?

He gets a much more sympathetic treatment at The White Review and, accordingly, makes a better case:
http://www.thewhitereview.org/interview ... o-berardi/

In my experience, in relation with young people, students and so on, I see that when you touch on the subject of suffering, of psychic suffering, sexual suffering, loneliness and so on, all of a sudden they see that this is something that politically can give you a common ground of understanding.

[American Dream]

Also related:

making a killing: suicide under capitalism

Our interest in the phenomenon of suicide is not simply a function of the number of people who kill themselves: fewer people do so globally every year than those who lose their lives in road traffic accidents (1.2 million). Yet, suicide appears as an expression of an accumulation of pressures which are experienced by most people in one quantity or another; combined with the absence of alternative coping mechanisms – most importantly, good relationships with others and an obvious meaning or purpose to life. Consequently, our interest in the phenomenon should be as much about what it tells us of those who don’t kill themselves, as those who do. In this respect, it is interesting to observe that

suicide is often inversely related to homicide. There seems to be something in the psychological cliché that anger sometimes goes in and sometimes goes out: do you blame yourself or others for things that go wrong? [Earlier] we noted the rise in the tendency to blame the outside world – defensive narcissism – and the contrasts between the US and Japan [i.e. people in Japan tend to blame themselves for misfortunes]. [9]

As Stengel, quoted at the beginning of this article, says, suicide “is also an act of aggression against others”. Capitalism makes some people so upset and lonely that they contemplate killing themselves, and others: even if none attempted, or even if none succeeded, it would still be a tragedy. The Telegraph’s correspondent reporting on Foxconn, in search of a framework to understand what has happened, is driven to restate, in brief, Marx’s theory of alienation.

Marx identified four types of alienation that arose from the capitalist system, including workers feeling inhuman because they were cogs in a machine, because the work they do is reduced to a commercial commodity that is traded on a market, because they have little to do with the design and production of the product, and because their work is repetitive, trivial and meaningless, offering little if any intrinsic satisfaction . . .

However, for Marx, alienation is not only something about work. It is that workers also have little to do with the design of the whole society, and it there is not only a lack of purpose in work, but in life as a whole. It is not just work, but all of society, the society we create, which appears as a power outside and against human life. Suicide is only one product of this phenomenon. For us, to understand suicide politically is not so difficult: we can see the relation between capitalism’s dynamism and its inhumanity all the more sharply during a crisis. But capitalists cannot understand suicide. To understand it fully would be to understand themselves, and their role in the world: and that they cannot do.

Suicide is a far greater cause of death than war, although it occupies far fewer headlines. It is the most intense expression of a silent and more brutal war, of each against ourselves. Still, nobody thinks of waving red flags around these silent deaths. Yet we can abstract from the complex and confused personal reasons which bring them about; and understand something of their meaning. What can we say about suicide and capitalism that doesn’t crassly subsume each individual tragedy to an abstract political programme, but still provides some sort of analysis, and some sort of hope? I don’t want to add any too-easy last words. We can’t let it be like this for ever.

https://thecommune.wordpress.com/2011/0 ... apitalism/

[American Dream]

The Sun and the "Mental Patient"



Analysis behind today's headline in The Sun newspaper: "1,200 killed by mental patients".

Fuck The Sun. I want to be composed and rational. I want to maintain a distance. But how? 1200 killed by mental patients. So proclaims the headline of The Sun. And so a rage comes to possess me. Anger, the most political affect, seizes my body and makes writing difficult. But I'm going to try to be composed. Let's examine this headline. Let's have a quick look at what lies beneath it: what it says in what it has said and what it says in what it leaves unsaid.

First, we have to understand that this story is coming off the back of a particular murder inquiry. That story is the death of 16 year-old Christiana Edkins at the hands of Phillip Simelane, a patient with the Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Services. Simelane had been released from prison with no community treatment for his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, by far the diagnosis that most terrifies people who have never had any contact with people experiencing extreme altered states of consciousness. The story has been understandably potently charged with affect. The death of a 16 year old will always strike us as senseless, especially when the victim of an unprovoked attack. Added to this is the fact that the victim was a young woman and that the perpetrator was a criminal and a black male, facts that often play to heighten the affective tensions of the media's audience, whether consciously or unconsciously intended or provoked in either party.

This story has also seen a flurry of similarly themed articles appearing, such as this at the Telegraph's website. In that article we are given some more names, some more murders, and introduced to the personal suffering of victims of so-called "mental patients". I'm not so stupid as to claim that the suffering of the bereaved isn't real or that they don't deserve every sympathy. To lose a loved one is always difficult, to loss a child- I can't even imagine it, not really. Yet the suffering of the people who have carried out these acts, because they have carried them out, is completely ignored by the Telegraph. As the story isn't available to read as I write this, I can only imagine The Sun, being The Sun, will be all to happy to produce a portrait of a monstrous schizo roaming the streets with violence glinting in his eye. This bullshit isn't new bullshit.

In 1992 a man diagnosed as schizophrenic killed another man after stabbing him to death at London's Finsbury Park train station. Christopher Clunis had refused to take his medication and his care had not been properly handled following his discharge from a psychiatric care setting. The death of Jonathan Zito was followed by news stories not dissimilar to those we are reading today. The BBC reported that community care had failed, meanwhile The Daily Mail (29.6.93; (22.7.93) , The Independent (19.7.93), and The Evening Standard (30.6.93) all featured headline stories depicted Clunis as a "killer" who had been "set free" or who was allowed to "roam free".

The implication is clearly that Clunis's horrific actions weren't those of a man who was undergoing extreme mental distress, hallucinating and/or delusional, but the actions of a "killer" who happened to be suffering mental distress. The early media reports on the Zito killing were muted and slow in coming but these stories all exploded once it had been announced that an investigation would be launched into the attack. That Clunis was a murderer was set-up in these reports as if it were a necessary fact and an essential aspect of his being; the distress that had led to his being diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic was almost accidental and contigent. Except of course that had Clunis not been free to roam and kill as he liked, as the hysterical reports were suggesting he was, then Jonathan Zito would never have been killed. What does this deprivation of liberty mean here? The papers didn't mean that Clunis should have been locked up in prison for a murder he hadn't yet committed but rather that he should have been locked up in a secure psychiatric setting. While it seems like his diagnosis of schizophrenia is accidental, it is really the conditional fact of his being a murderer. The affectively charged message of this is not the rational one regarding mental health services and their failure but the more simple formula: schizophrenic=(potential) killer.

This is an effective formula in part because people with extreme forms of mental distress often exhibit very strange behaviour. They can say and do things that don't meet up with the regulative norms of public behaviour. They say and do things that wrong foot and confound our expectations, those coordinates by which we navigate our interpersonal conduct. In short, they can be weird. It doesn't matter that this weirdness is often an effect of medication rather than the distress itself because phenomenal experience doesn't allow us to peer inside the schizophrenic other's body and know that extra-pyramidal symptoms- so called "side effects"- are causing this odd behaviour. Phenomenal experience also doesn't allow us to grasp the schizophrenic other's strange behaviours as attempts to cope with a disrupted sensorimotor system that makes everyday body movement difficult. Nor does it always allow us the time to sit and listen and realise that delusional speech isn't jibberish or nonsense but often expresses a kernal of meaningful content in a confused way. Instead we see the weirdness, we attribute the person as weird, and we instinctively wonder about threat. The formula that we should fear the schizophrenic because they're probably a killer plays into physiological heuristic or rules-of-thumb that already make us anxious around things that disturb our expectations. Today's The Sun and The Telegraph stories will work on to inspire fear in so many people because it taps into this primordial fear of otherness.

The Clunis case also needs to be contextualised in its historical contigency. The stabbing occurred in 1992, just two years after a new Mental Health Act enshrined the goal of deinstitutionalisation in law. People were already frightened of the prospect of "the mad" wandering the streets. I was only a child at the time but I can remember the 90s being marked by a lot of talk about "care in the community" and how dangerous it was. Coverage of cases like the Clunis-Zito killing only served to whip that fear into hysteria.

Most of the reporting of Clunis's attack and the subsequent enquiry didn't happen until 1993. As I've said, Clunis was a black man and in 1993 Britain was undergoing a period of huge racial tension. There had not long ago been riots by young blacks and the reasons for their rage were far from being addressed, and remain so. It was in 1993 that the institutional racism that infects the police reached its symbolic height in the handling of the brutal murder of Stephen Lawrence by a gang of white racist youths. This was not a period in British history when race was could even be treated as if it were of no consequence. The rage of black people, their ongoing criminalisation, and the fact that Clunis was a physically imposing black man would have all combined within a racist climate to provide us with another simple formula: black=dangerous.

Continues at: https://libcom.org/blog/sun-mental-patient-07102013

[American Dream]

SOLECAST: FRANCI “BIFO” BERARDI ON CAPITALISM, MASS KILLINGS, SUICIDE & ALIENATION

[American Dream]

German Anti-Semite Murderer, Stephan Balliet’s ‘Manifesto’ Emerges.

Like other far-right attackers, Stephan Balliet seemed to be inspired certain subcultures of online chan boards. To that point, it seems the stream to his Twitch video of his attack was first posted to a chan board.

https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2 ... o-emerges/

[American Dream]

“Lone gunmen. They’re always alone. No ties, driven by inner voices. The public always prefers it that way. As if everyone is free to think for themselves. As if.”
― Ada Wilson, Red Army Faction Blues