Oppressive Fear

I Q1 n t r o d u c t i o n Fear may grip us directly in a myriad of very different circumstances: a creaking footstep in the house at night, being flung about in a plane during a thunderstorm, dreading a nuclear attack on our city or closing our eyes in terror during a horror movie. It is now widely accepted in socio-cultural anthropology that despite such diversity of situations, fear is always a relation, if only a relation we have with an imagined future disaster . This paper suggests that fear is evoked and 'managed' within relational assemblages, which might include other people, frightening objects, ghosts, animals, diseases, omens, technologies or monstersand fear itself. One is conscious of one's own fear and hence fear itself can become like another external 'thing', 1 which somehow must be dealt with along with the object or situation that is perceived to make one afraid. 2 What are the implications of this? In anthropology and the humanities in general, emotions, like fear, love or ragemore so than affects, like anxiety, tedium or disquietare usually analysed as personal, internal and requiring a first-person subject (Massumi 2002: 23-45; Ngai 2005: 27). But if an emotion such as fear seems to involve at least three elements ('me', 'my fear' and 'the thing causing the fear') and if fear is something that needs to be dealt with and even eliminated, this not only puts wholeness of 'the subject' into question but, more interestingly, suggests new ways we could think about the mobility of this passing element (fear) that attaches to people. This paper does not deal with all possible kinds of fear and it discusses only that which occurs between people (or at least humanoids). Along with its temporal and spatial aspectsthe timing and locations of having fearthe paper investigates the distribution of fear among people. For in a socio-political arena we observe that at the same moment some people are fearful when others are not. To some extent such an 'organisation of fear' must be set up in different ways by various local concepts: 1 This can be seen most clearly in techniques to control emotions. In modern Thai Buddhism, for example, behaving 'emotionally' is understood to detract from merit. A central meditation technique practised by nuns consists of developing mindfulness of each posture and each emotion as it comes up (these are often the 'defilements' of boredom, guilt, fear, anger…), the aim being consciously to purify the mind from these attachments and realise their insubstantiality. At the very least, this meditation establishes that 'I' am neither my body nor my emotions (Cook 2010: 73-81). 2 The usual distinction between fear and anxiety is that we fear something that can be discerned as an object or a situation, something that can be articulated. Anxiety by contrast is often perceived as a state that is objectless, and it is horrible precisely because we do not know what provokes it. I shall broadly follow this distinction, while being aware that it has been complicated and elaborated by psychoanalytic theory (Salecl 2004: 18-23).

Emotions and Society

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This collection of thirty-four published articles and essays explores the dynamic interaction between two of the most influential forces shaping human societies in modern history. Values are reason-based principles and rules that shape the nature of civilised societies. Fear is a primal emotion that can trigger a fight or flight survival reflex in the individual. These powerful forces intersect when the State acts to ensure collective security and protect citizens from various harms. These articles highlight the vital importance of a transparent risk management process for objectively determining national security priorities and justifying actions that impinge on individual rights.

New Perspectives Quarterly, 2006

london-Global terrorism and the global war against terrorism both fuel, in equal and pernicious ways, the global ideology of fear. When we examine the countries of the West or those of the South, particularly where the population is primarily Muslim, we can only conclude that fear is omnipresent and deeply ingrained. It is having an unmistakable impact on the way human beings perceive the world.We can observe at street level three principal effects: First, fear, naturally and often unconsciously, breeds mistrust and potential conflict with the "Other." A binary vision of reality begins to impose the outlines of a protective "us" and of a threatening "them." The second effect derives from the absolute domination of emotions in our relationships with the Other and of emotional responses to events.When fear rules, emotions undermine rational analysis. In such a state, we condemn the consequences of some action and reject the individuals who commit it, but we don't seek to understand what led to such action. Our "good reasons" and our "just causes" are praised by the general public without critical examination, while at the same time their "bad reasons" and their "evil intentions" are indiscriminately condemned. Fear authorizes us to forgo all explanations, all understanding, all analysis that might allow us to understand the Other, his world, his hopes. In the new regime of fear and suspicion, to understand the Other is to justify him; to seek out his reasons is to agree with him. A curious-and dangerousreductionism transforms reality into a series of discreet, disconnected facts, and the Other into a series of acts without cause, without history or historic depth, without reason and rationality. Emotion does not understand but rather appreciates or condemns; one's "feelings" determine everything. The third consequence is as paradoxical as it is startling:We may well live in the communication age, but human beings seem to be increasingly less informed. We have witnessed the multiplication of "communication superhighways" that diffuse a dizzying excess of information in real time, saturating the intelligence and making it impossible to place facts in perspective. The communication age is an age of noninformation. We are passive receptors of reality and of facts; it is as if we have no grasp on how they come to be. Swept away by our emotions; trapped in binary, The communication age is an age of non-information. WINTER 2006

This is the unedited manuscript of the book published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Rechtsphilosophie-Zeitschrift für Grundlagen des Rechts, , 2025

Coercion is generally taken to diminish the voluntariness of one’s action and, correspondingly, to cancel or diminish one’s responsibility for action by undermining one’s autonomy. In this essay, I analyze cases of “oppressive coercion”, in which the coercive threat builds on an oppressive normative practice or social schema. How to treat such cases? Are they dyadic or collective? What sorts of responsibilities are in place? In contrast to widespread arguments, I argue (i) that oppression is not an exculpatory condition for the coercer, (ii) that the victim of conditional threat retains the normative power to refuse the coercer’s deal, and (iii) that precisely this power raises the puzzle of distributed responsibility. To address this puzzle and identify the victim’s scope of responsible agency, I propose a dynamic model of institutional agency, in which moral responsibility for oppressive coercion is rationally negotiated and distributed across individuals and institutional agencies. Finally, I argue that this approach vindicates the normative act of claiming responsibility for action as a key mode of self-affirmation and resistance.

2009

Psychotherapy and Politics International, 2006

The last in a series of four papers describing how individuals' minds and bodies are affected by severe stress. The purpose is to develop a deeper understanding of what happens to stressed individuals who come together to form stressed organizations and the impact of this stress on organizational leaders. The series also explores the parallel process that occurs when traumatized individuals and stressed organizations come together to form stressed societies. Part I focused on the basic human stress response. Part II explored the more extended impact of severe, chronic, and repetitive exposure to stress on the functioning of the emotional system and the ways in which human beings tend to adapt to adversity and thus come to normalize highly abnormal behavior. The focus of Part III was on the impact of chronic stress on memory, the ability to put words to feelings and the tendency to repeat the past automatically. Part IV reviews the way attachment schemas are disrupted by trauma and how the accumulative experience of stress leads to downward spirals of anxiety and, finally, alienation if the progress of this deterioration is not stopped.

The Sociological Review, 2003

Psychotherapy and Politics International, 2005

This is the first in a series of four papers looking at the ways that minds and bodies of individuals are affected by severe stress and using that to develop a deeper understanding of what happens to stressed individuals who come together to form stressed organizations, and the impact of this stress on organizational leaders. The series will also explore the parallel process that occurs when traumatized individuals and stressed organizations come together to form stressed societies. Part I focuses on the basic human stress response, also known as ‘fight-flight-freeze’, as a starting point for understanding the impact of acute trauma and repetitive stress on individuals, organizations, and nations. Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

This chapter can be seen as the corollary of the book. The authors summarize the main findings of an ethnography that took five long years in the main bus stations and airport of the country. The four schools of risk perception were placed under the critical lens of scrutiny because of methodological limitations. The current chapter presents a rich empirical research, which though not statistically represented, helps in the expansion of the current understanding of risk perception. The ways risks are conceived in laypeople and experts notably vary. The authors finally found a clear correlation between trauma and risk aversion in professionals while bad working conditions are the preconditions to perceive further risks in laypeople.

2016

Conclusion and Implications Limitations and Suggestions References 301-351 Appendices 352-415

The only thing we have to fear is the 'culture of fear' itself NEW ESSAY: How human thought and action are being stifled by a regime of uncertainty. Frank Furedi Fear plays a key role in twenty-first century consciousness. Increasingly, we seem to engage with various issues through a narrative of fear. You could see this trend emerging and taking hold in the last century, which was frequently described as an 'Age of Anxiety' (1). But in recent decades, it has become more and better defined, as specific fears have been cultivated. The rise of catchphrases such as the 'politics of fear', 'fear of crime' and 'fear of the future' is testimony to the cultural significance of fear today. Many of us seem to make sense of our experiences through the narrative of fear. Fear is not simply associated with high-profile catastrophic threats such as terrorist attacks, global warming, AIDS or a potential flu pandemic; rather, as many academics have pointed out, there are also the 'quiet fears' of everyday life. According to Phil Hubbard, in his 2003 essay 'Fear and loathing at the multiplex: everyday anxiety in the post-industrial city', ambient fear 'saturates the social spaces of everyday life' (2). Brian Massumi echoes this view with his concept of 'low-grade fear' (3). In recent years, questions about fear and anxiety have been raised in relation to a wide variety of issues: the ascendancy of risk consciousness (4), fear of the urban environment (5), fear of crime (6), fear of the Other (7), the amplification of fear through the media (8), fear as a distinct discourse (9), the impact of fear on law (10), the relationship between fear and politics (11), fear as a 'culture' (12), and the question of whether fear constitutes a 'distinctive cultural form' (13). Fear is often examined in relation to specific issues; it is rarely considered as a sociological problem in its own right. As Elemer Hankiss argues, the role of fear is 'much neglected in the social sciences'. He says that fear has received 'serious attention in philosophy, theology and psychiatry, less in anthropology and social psychology, and least of all in sociology' (14). This under-theorisation of fear can be seen in the ever-expanding literature on risk. Though sometimes used as a synonym for risk, fear is treated as an afterthought in today's risk literature; the focus tends to remain on risk theory rather than on an interrogation of fear itself. Indeed, in sociological debate fear seems to have become the invisible companion to debates about risk. And yet, it is widely acknowledged by risk theorists that fear and risk are closely related. As Deborah Lupton notes in her 1999 book Risk, risk 'has come to stand as one of the focal points of feelings of fear, anxiety and uncertainty' (15). Stanley Cohen makes a similar point in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, published in 2002, where he argues that 'reflections on risk are now absorbed into a wider culture of insecurity, victimization and fear' (16). A study of New Labour's economic policies argues that they are couched in the 'language of change, fear and risk' (17).