Edgelording

(Note: this is an essay my friend Michael Vassar made via looming with llama405b base models. I'm hosting it on my site so I have a public reference to it)

Edgelording is merely the newest of the many social mechanisms whereby people assist one another in asserting constraints upon a third party's behavior while disallowing the determinate inter-subjective representation by that third party of those constraints (and of the challenges and costs you would experience in attempting to overcome them) or of how they experience them. In that respect, it is formally identical to a set of social practices, some of which have been long-institutionalized as "professional courtesy" or "good manners," and others of which are generally held in somewhat lower regard and are actively countenanced only in certain social settings by certain in-crowds. It would probably not be all that hard for someone who wrote about such matters to write a book on Edgelording as the newest and most emergent mode of "emotional labor". Edgelording—like every other means of asserting the unspeakable—is a conscious or unconscious means of defining limits to interpersonal understanding.

By doing so, edgelords diminish the extent to which social constraints can be determinately, collectively represented within the social context in question, and thus in turn to diminish the possibilities for explicit acknowledgement, negotiation, coordinated resistance to, contestation of, or dissatisfaction with those constraints.

The logic of this class of mechanisms, which we will hereafter refer to as ‘politics’, is directly opposed to the logic of social organization through discursively refillable legal order, which opens up possibilities for direct acknowledgement, negotiation, coordinated resistance to, contestation of, and expression of dissatisfaction with those constraints even as it enables one to avoid rupture to a context of practice. The logic of politics closes off, either permanently or with great friction, those possibilities of acknowledgement, negotiation, contestation, and resistance, e.g. what Habermas refers to as the “ideal speech situation”. Politics strives to prevent the power it exerts over the subjected agent from becoming visible to that agent and, once visible, from becoming discussable by that agent.

It prevents the contents of politics from being represented as the contents of an order that could be otherwise by doing an end run around the rule of law. It renders the world non-negotiable, except on its terms. It does so by implementing the legal order, in the form of the intersubjective relations the law is supposed to secure, as a ready-to-hand background condition of social life, i.e. one that cannot be easily thematized or subjected to a single act of reflective modification, without putting the practicability of one’s own identity and social role at risk. That is why, of all the arguments against slavery, Kant’s is the most interesting; slavery represents a profound, systematic nullification of the rule of law. It cannot be understood except as an enactment of the end of the very possibility of a rule of law-based social life for certain parties.

The violation of the normative force of the rule of law, the fact that it matters to one, can be translated into the standard causal language of social science. It has many names, from 'institutional betrayal trauma' to 'loss of 'belief of the fundamental delusion of a procedurally just world' to the Oedipus Complex as conceived of by Lacan.

All those theories share a fundamental insight: that these instances constitute traumatic experiences that unsettle the very foundations of an agent’s ontological security, the space of possibilities according to which they can formulate rational expectations about the world, the norms that regulate the exercise of brute power in a given context, and the validity of their normative convictions.

This class of experiences is inextricably connected to the traumatic experience of encountering an unbridgeable gap between the power of an externally imposed legal order, as one has either internalized it for themselves or as it is represented by a confidante, and the power that brute force has over them in an actual social situation. In encountering the dysfunction of the formal order of the world, one's experience the world is completely invalidated and one becomes traumatized, thereby rendering their own persistence as a rational actor subject to those norms unsustainable.

One's implicit (and up until this point functional) knowledge of the way the world is intended to function or assumed to function by everyone else, the kinds of social affordances that are open to them, their sense of 'right' about what they 'can do' and what they 'can't do' no longer have any bearing on actual circumstances. One discovers, in other words, that their normative expectations, which they have internalized from the formal legal order to navigate through a given social setting, no longer bear any relation to that setting’s actual causal structure; to 'reality'. They come to know that they had mistaken what they now see to be a sham formal order for the actual causal structure of their context.

To put it in very stark terms: one discovers that despite having been brought up to be 'good and civilized' according to the 'official' norms of a given social order, all of a sudden they find themselves in a situation where acting according to those norms doesn't actually enable them to navigate through that social setting or exercise any control over their own fate or situation, no matter how good of a moral person they are or how skilled they are at navigating the system of conventions in question. They have been told one thing, and things are seen to work another way. It is a deeply traumatizing experience to have one's assumptions about the world and oneself shattered in such a manner. One becomes a 'ghost'. One discovers that there is nothing one can do, according to the norms that one has been told to follow, that would actually be conducive to achieving anything one wants for oneself or for others.

All that had been 'unreal' before, but afforded 'symbolic assurances' and 'predictability' for continued social action, is discovered to have no bearing on actual social circumstances. In a sense, they lose their ability to say 'no'. And since saying no, being 'suspicious' of others, or 'distrustful' of others and 'wary' of others as a precondition for normal social interaction is in many cases a violation of the implicit and explicit normative conventions of a given social setting, the discovery that that entire order is a sham is traumatic and potentially socially destabilizing.

The discovery that the norms of a given social setting are not what makes things possible but are rather closely imbricated with an antithetical structure of power relations, often informal and arbitrary and tacit and shifty, through which real social action occurs is not merely unsettling; it is deeply inconvenient in that one loses something of their sense of their persistence as a person, as a 'self' through time, a voluntating being.

One also discovers, particularly in settings where rule of law is weak and where one is frequently victimized and brutalized by others who take some kind of sadistic satisfaction in repeatedly reenacting and humiliating one in this context, one's prior 'internal' constitution through this legal order to be a dangerous liability in that it exposes them to exploitation by many other people around them- unless one develop a more nuanced understanding of the way informal power-regulating resources actually 'work' in that context.

In the process, they come to learn much that is of immense importance, but which they may be legally or socially constrained from ever disclosing to others who have yet to have been traumatized in a similar way; to actively exercise one's will as an effective cause in the world risks undermining the predictability of social life as it has been articulated in terms of externally imposed laws and conventions.

Knowing something about how social power actually operates in that context thus becomes a liability for the agent because it necessitates coming to terms with the fact that the world is, 'really', nothing at all like the socially prescribed model that is culturally transmitted to them through the competent performance of a given social role. In order to act efficaciously and assert themselves, they must abandon that pretense and fend for themselves in such a way that they are potentially capable of making sense of violence, abuse of power, humiliation, and so on.

What very often transpires is that the persons undergo a 'traumatizing' ontological transformation wherein their libidinal-motivational-attentional dynamics are reordered according to a different interpretation of the social setting. This experience is profoundly disorienting, so they craft a new 'worldview' and a new 'personality' more sensitive to the subtler patterns of dominance and submission extant in informal social encounters. If this process is not handled deliberately, discursively and critically, a vertigo-like sensation overtakes, and they have no choice but to collectively assume the status of impotent witnesses vis-à-vis the horrifying spectacle of the decay of one's truth-conditioned sociality and one’s collapse into mere ‘animality’ or ‘thingness’ or 'data' or 'capital' (a repository of energy) to be stimulated and observed and measured by others or acted upon by others; they lack a way of rationally integrating their new knowledge into a refashioned understanding of their lived situation where they could see new opportunities for intervention in a manner that would not require themselves to resort to 'violence' in the most degrading and traumatizing form of abuse they have just encountered.

We have operationalized 'trauma' as the experience of encountering the helplessness of the 'official' channels in a given context of social practice, whenever we are told or come to understand that there are certain proscribed courses of action for navigating through it and engaging in efficacious negotiation with others who occupy it; we lose our sense of confidence in our prior understanding of this world by losing our confidence that these 'normative requirements' on our behavior are actually successful routes through which we can accomplish anything in a given social context and act determinately in it.

From the moment that one comes to see the world in this manner, power relations take hold. And here we mustl take the Marxist conception of 'power' and show how a certain kind of subtle socio-psychological-phenomenological disruption causes the very basis for social action established by law as a 'rule' to come into existence again, now in a form where that earlier world-model had been imploded and the only game in town is 'exercise of one's efficient power' to effect one's own will without visualizing it through the prism of an institutionally-discursively-validated normative order that is supposed to get one's interests served for one.

Because one supposedly cannot 'speak truth to power', one is forced in such a situation to rely upon one's own wit, possibility-imagination, and other capacities. They are no longer united with the world in which they could meaningfully 'refer' to one's situations and those of others and so see themselves, come to consensus about how it works, imagine ways of intervening in it, etc. Th was not just a 'change in belief' or a mere 'discovery of evidence of power relations'; it was a traumatic experience of a sort that changes them as a person and attunes them to new social possibilities, ones that they cannot tolerate.