More thoughts on privilege: a reading of John Scalzi's Redshirts

       I found myself returning to the question of privilege as I read John Scalzi's Redshirts over the past few days.  Scalzi's novel can be largely understood as a satire on the tropes and conventions of Star Trek, and the many shows that it influenced.  The novel begins with the growing recognition on the part of a number of junior officers on a number of away missions, and follows their efforts to understand the reasons for that phenomenon.  The novel is clearly premised on the well recognized trope in the show in which a junior, red-shirted officer will inevitably die on the away missions, in order to create tension and drama in the show without sacrificing any major members of the crew.  Scalzi's narrative moves on from this premise to begin to explore a number of ideas, notably around intertextuality and the function and role of the author.  Without dismissing the larger telos of the narrative, I want to read the novel as a remarkably sensitive engagement with the role of privilege in the interactions of the crew of the ship, and the ways that it isolates individuals through a combination of fear and consent, to use Machiavelli's classic categories of governance.  Scalzi both invites a significant critical rereading of the Star Trek franchise, and allows for a further exploration of the ways that privilege naturalizes and perpetuates structures of domination and exploitation.

      Early in the narrative, the text establishes the privileges of rank through the ability or inability to speak, as we can see in this early interaction between the protagonist, Dahl, and the Chief Science Officer, Q'eeng, in  a brief interaction about foreign languages.

      "I understand you spent several years on Forshan, and that you speak the language," Q'eeng said. "All four dialects."
      "Yes, sir," Dahl said.
      "I studied it briefly at the academy," Q'eeng said, and then cleared his throat.  "Aaachka, faaachklalhach ghalall chkalalal."
     Dahl kept his face very still. Q'eeng had just attempted in the third dialect the traditional rightward schism greeting of "I offer you the bread of life," but his phrasing and accent had transmuted the statement into "Let us violate cakes together."  Leaving aside the fact it would be highly unusual for a member of the rightward schism to voluntarily speak the third dialect, it being the native dialect of the  founder of the leftward schism and therefore traditionally eschewed, mutual cake violation was not an accepted practice anywhere on Forshan.
     "Asschkla faaachklalhalu faadalalu chkalalal," Dahl said, returning the correct traditional response of "I break the bread of life with you" in the third dialect."
     "Did I say that correctly?" Q'eeng asked.
     "Your accent is very unusual, sir," Dahl said.
     "Indeed," Q'eeng said, "Then perhaps I will leave any necessary Forshan speaking to you."
     "Yes, sir," Dahl said.

      Within this brief interaction, the formal structure of rank also translates into an informal series of privileges of speech, of who can correct an error, of who can act without sufficient expertise, etc.  Rank not only allows for formal decision making, but it also gives those who have it the ability to claim a whole series of skills and abilities that they clearly don't have.  Subordinates have to pretend that the types of incompetence occurring in front of their eyes, simply didn't occur.  The interaction depends on an incredible degree of self-consciousness on the part of Dahl, while Q'eeng remains oblivious.  The social labor of the entire conversation is thereby put onto one party, rather than the other.  In many ways, the micro-structures of power exemplified by privilege is tied into these inequalities in affective labor.  It also invites a certain rereading of the the hobbies and casual interests of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Instead of figures such as Picard and others being extraordinarily versatile and skilled figures, the crew of the ship simply could not comment on their immense incompetence.

      However, the politics of privilege doesn't stop at the relationships between the senior officers and the subalterns, it also ties into the relationships of the subaltern structures of the staff itself.  The text carefully maps out how the crew itself interacts collectively.  The older members of the crew have begun to recognize the mysterious deaths happening on the ship, but attempt to keep that information to themselves, in order to sacrifice new crew members so that the older crew will not be put at risk.  In effect, rather than challenging the structure that unnecessarily kills so many crew members, they take advantage of their relative status within that system to preserve themselves, which also, in effect, preserves the system.  Moreover, they are willing to take actions that will lead to crew deaths to reinforce that system, and respond with anger when those perceived systems of privilege are broken by the protagonist.  These actions also preserve the larger structure of the ship, a structure that puts all of the subaltern staff of the ship at risk, it acts as an implicit form of consent for those structures, an act of voluntary preservation.  The micro-structures of privilege divide the interests of the crew, constructing small factions who implicitly accept the rules of the game. 

      The text moves away from this exploration of the life of the ship to a set of an exploration of the author function, but it's worth lingering on this early section of the text, which offers such a useful analysis of the functioning of privilege, at a multiplicity of levels.  Probably most significantly, Scalzi creates a narrative that both recognizes the ways that these informal and formal structures of privilege help to reproduce structures of domination and exploitation that may not have their origins in any of the parties involved.  After all, neither the crew nor the officers ultimately created the narrative shifts that affect the crew, but they all acted to preserve that system, despite that fact. I'll leave it there.

Informal Thoughts on Privilege

      I've been giving the concept of privilege a lot of thought recently, primarily in response to some of the criticisms that have been made recently from a number of perspectives.  Rather than taking my usual approach of close reading and critique, I thought I would put my thoughts down on the concept with a slightly more informal approach.  The usefulness of the concept of privilege largely comes out of its ability to provide a sort of conceptual lens to understand the often personal and informal problems that arise in groups of ostensible peers, particularly within radical and progressive activist circles.  After all, the framework of privilege largely arises out of W.E.B. DuBois' effort to understand the inability to produce inter-racial forms of working class solidarity within his analysis of the reconstruction period in his 1930's text Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.  DuBois argues that these alliances collapse due to the formal and informal privileges offered to white workers in order to keep them committed to the cross-class white nationalist formation of the United States, or to use David Roediger's later term developed out of this framework, white workers are offered a kind of psychic wage to compensate for other modes of inequality, a sort of wage of whiteness, to use his vocabulary.

     The concept of privilege then has its origins in the attempt to understand the inability to produce radical political assemblages within the United States.  However, it would be possible to draw other genealogies of the concept.  For instance, a history of privilege could be created out the long and multiple feminist analyses, produced over the past century, starting with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's analysis of the treatment of boys and girls for instance, or earlier thoughts.  We can see the need for this analysis arise out of most movements responding to a multiplicity of oppressions.  In each case, the analysis points out the unthought benefits assumed by a dominant group, or structure.  In many cases, such as the sex/gender system or structures of race, these forms of inequality were deliberately created in order to resist counter-systemic politics from forming, and some cases which those structures tie into modes of normalization such as homophobia, but in other cases, such as disability issues, the slights were unintended.  What a lens of privilege allowed for an ethical critique of those practices of inequality, in effect creating an analysis and framework of micro-power in the everyday structures of communal life.

     However, as the concept of privilege has become increasingly institutionalized, a number of intellectuals have tried to transform privilege into a lens that explains larger political phenomenon, the larger structures of capitalist accumulation, for instance.  The simple problem is that the notion of privilege does not explain the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and structures of violence and brutality associated with it, nor the institutional structures of white supremacy, or the structures of domination within our sex/gender system.  Attempts to do so produce a sort of atomism, assuming that the larger structures of our society are a sort of expansion of the small interpersonal relationships that exist in social movements and daily life.  They miss the obvious fact that these relationships are an effect of those larger structures, and a reinforcing mechanism, not an explanation for them.  By doing this, they often prescribe highly personalized and individualistic methods of solving structural problems, ignoring the social movement work that is necessary to actually solve such problems.  This is not to say that our ability to cooperate and work together isn't significant, or dismissing the implicit argument that those of us who benefit from those systems need to be the ones who shift our practices for the sake of the community, but to simply point out that the analytic of privilege is insufficient, although necessary, for a radical politic. 

     Within this context, it's not surprising that the analytic plays a significant role within non-profit politics.  As a number of folks have pointed out, the non-profit structure largely exists as a mediator within structures of inequality and domination, not as entities that exist to challenge or destroy those structures.  Communist philosopher Antonio Negri notably compares them to the Benedictine monks of the middle ages, an institution that often worked to ameliorate poverty, but in order to preserve the larger system.  I don't think that this fact in and of itself neutralizes the value of the institutions that produce this kind of work, but it does mean that we as radicals need to look at these institutional structures, whether in university activism or other movement organizing, with a skeptical and critical eye.  There is no way of returning to a pure form of radical analysis of privilege.  After all, the non-profit institutions are far too intertwined with genuine counter-systemic movements, but we can rework them into a new approach to radical politics, preferably one that translates into a new historical bloc far larger than previously seen.  The analytic of privilege answer to many significant questions to inter-subjective problems to every be fully erased, for all that they symptomatize a sort of neo-liberal subjectivity and collectivity.  A new radical assemblage can only be created through an engagement with these forms, not by avoiding them.