Martyrdom, Or, The Solar Phallus

The martyr welcomes the suffering inflicted by the enemy or the non-believer and in the process aims to give an inspiring lesson to all those watching. So, a martyr does not simply self-sacrifice for the cause, they also hope to save souls. This lurid Christian-masochist fantasy comes pretty close to certain "radical" political fantasies I have encountered both in the "revolutionary avant-garde" camp and in the "anarchist" camp that, despite aspiring for the opposite, often succumbs to vanguardist narcissism. Hence, I suggest that exploring the functions performed by the fantasy of "martyrdom" within the bourgeois symbolic order and its ecstasy machines can give us some tools for tinkering with our own ecstatic mechanisms; or, at least, might stir some of us to face the deep bonds we have with certain bourgeois apparatuses of subjectivation.

The Magical Wonder of Bourgeois Life
The modern-colonial ideology paints a heroic aura around the tragicomic character we call "the bourgeois": this model citizens of liberal-capitalism is supposed to represent the apex of human evolution, a complex, reflexive and free individual in control of their destiny and choices, one that, unlike the "savages" around them, does not blindly obey the law but on the contrary, confronts it with their sharp rationality. The tragic element of this ideology is that, no sooner one starts looking at what the battalions of bourgeois are actually doing that they see servants content to spend their lives obeying orders, upholding cast systems, venerating fetishes, collecting amulets and devotedly following absurd rituals. To avoid the disaster of exposing its flock  as nothing but a bunch of jubilant moppets, the bourgeois ideology came up with a couple of strategies, shiny beads and mirrors trying to blind the onlooker: the first one is to convince everyone that the supremely banal elements of bourgeois lives - the dull events to do with their family, children, work, sex/love/gender, death, illness, travelling, interior decoration or marriage - are in fact Olympian dramas that chart a unique and extraordinary life. The second one is draping the stupidity of bourgeois life in the majestic mantle of trauma or, in other words, making a martyr out of each and every bourgeois (since, as argued above, martyrs are nothing short of heroic, dignified and exceptional). I'll say a few words about the first strategy, although it surely deserves more attention than that, before saying more words about the second.

What Max Weber diagnosed as a “disenchanted” modern world actually preserved inside its fantasies all the fairy tales it could fit. We, Westernised moderns, fervently believe in gods, aliens, reptilians, Atlantis, fairies, illuminati, spirits, ghosts, horoscopes, divination, astrology, karma, fate, spirituality, magic, absolute truths, the primordial nature of desire and the divine nature of the soul/self/personality. This “re-enchantment” sprinkles the dullest elements of bourgeois reality with stale, but efficient-enough, magic dust: technology and science are “miraculous”; art or creativity are “incredible”; children, reproduction and the bourgeois family in general are also ”a miracle” or a “gift from heaven”; colonial tourism is once again “incredible” and “marvellous”; nature, while being quite natural, is likewise “miraculous”; and oh my, the consumption frenzy and grotesque family allegory of Christmas is similarly “magic”.

However intensive this sprinkling might be though, mining everyday bourgeois compulsions for traces of magic is less efficient than its reverse that is, than presenting oneself as blessed not with supreme joy but with supreme suffering. Thus the second, even more reliable and exciting strategy: encouraging each bourgeois to cultivate trauma or, in keeping with the theme of ecstasy, martyrdom.


 The Ecstasy of the Martyr
As a tool for self-definition, trauma achieved huge popularity in contemporary liberal-capitalism: there is a florid production of trauma-related artefacts in the bourgeois regime, from trauma-literature to the traumatic kernel that defines the individuality of each and every Hollywood hero or celebrity. My dad was a bully, my mom was stifling, my brother was sickly, my wife died young, we were poor, I worked in terrible jobs, I had no access to education, I am ill, I was abused, bullied and discriminated against as a kid (because I was different), etc. - these days, one cannot be a proper (unique, special, etc.) person without a personal trauma to display. Notice that all the events that the bourgeois produces as traumas are based on a specific understanding of the bourgeois order as one in which every "model citizen" has a right to be untouched by anything considered "hurtful" or "humiliating". An understanding of the bourgeois order as a system predicated, among other things, on phallic ecstasy and therefore on mutual hurting and humiliation would, of course, yield rather different psychic results.
 
Below, I will argue that the mechanism of turning an event, something that happens to someone, into a trauma that is, a looping narrative that becomes the scaffolding of one's "self", involves a passionate identification with authority, narcissism and the annexation of the whole social world around the traumatised as an instrument of this narcissism. If so, then one can more easily understand the popularity that trauma has as a (self)governing technique in contemporary neoliberalism, a regime that thrives on such a mix of submission, narcissism and aggressive self-valorising and self-importance. However, trauma is not an invention of contemporary capitalism - the fantasy of individual martyrdom has a long genealogy and precise governmental function in the bourgeois order. It is, for example, a central part of the British imperial cosmology:

Captain Cook in the South Pacific, General Wolfe in Canada, General Gordon in the Sudan; or else there was mass martyrdom (the Black Hole massacre in India) or crucifixion averted (the popular tale of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas in America) … After Cook’s death in 1779, poems by Helen Maria Williams, William Cowper, and Hannah More, along with a famous elegy by Anna Seward, all compared him to Christ and stressed his having been deified by the Hawaiians who killed him … (John Kucich)

These British myths of martyrdom sanctify the heroic and beneficent agent of colonialism and suggest that, just like in the myth of Christ, suffering is a beginning rather than an end, in this case the beginning of an imperial resurrection; today, they have achieved global appeal and continue to be efficiently put to work as governing tropes, as for example in the post 9/11 narratives of USA imperial martyrdom.

And if it worked for Christ and Cook, why wouldn’t it work for the rank-and-file bourgeois? As fantasies of suffering trickle in the social tissue, the “middle classes” appropriate them as a sign of their moral higher ground. Hence the bourgeois fetish with moral crusades that promise redemption through suffering (“X walks alone to the North Pole dressed only in his logoed spandex G-strings to raise money for the children of Africa!” or “I am sacrificing my life for the revolution!”).

“Trauma, Fill My Hole!”
Every bourgeois trauma involves looping in one’s mind a personalised scenario of losing something important, be it wholeness, perfection, integrity, dignity, purity, innocence, bliss, autonomy, grace, selfhood, self-worth, knowledge, territory, wealth, a dear one, power and prestige and so on. But paradoxically, this scenario of “loss” is actually a fantasy of wholeness. In the martyrdom scenario, the constitutive “hole” of subjectivity and along with it the fundamental uncertainty and anxiety of being are re-represented as generated ex nihilo, from scratch, by the traumatic event, thus as tragic but avoidable occurrences. "I was full and now I am missing something crucial!"

This is a narrative with big stakes since it presents lack, anxiety and uncertainty as reversible and the “original”, “pre-traumatised” subject as whole; in other words, the traumatic scenario uses a narrative about past loss in order to keep alive the bourgeois hope to achieve a life of fullness, satisfaction, incontestable desirability in other words, to enter paradise. Trauma, therefore, gains overwhelming mass in the subject’s psychic cosmos, enough mass to convert it into a sort of black hole that sucks all their other psychic worlds in its gravitational field. Or, if we want to keep the astro-patriarchal theme going, enough mass to convert it into a psychic “solar phallus”, the signifier in relation to which all other “planets” of the person’s psychological system are defined.

Trauma and Submission
Trauma is not an objective thing, something with intrinsic defining properties - nothing is. An event does not in itself contain the qualities that will transform it into trauma - in fact, people in different times and spaces might go through very similar events with very different results in terms of "developing" a trauma. It is therefore interesting to ask the question:  why are there so many "traumatised" people in the bourgeois order? And I suggest that the popularity of trauma in the bourgeois regime has to do with the way in which its mechanism of production matches those of the dominant apparatuses of ecstasy: a mixture of submission to authority and exaltation of one's self (or individuality, or identity, or uniqueness, etc). This is because I think that, at least in the Eurobourgeois environments I am writing about, representing an event, which could gain a variety of significations in the subject’s psyche, as a trauma always involves processes of recognition by an authority or by an authoritative symbolic system (even if this recognition happens in the traumatised subject's fantasy). This is not to say that representing an event as a trauma is a voluntary process; but while the construction of trauma is not necessarily under the subject’s voluntary control, it remains under the control of the dominant bourgeois apparatuses of identity and ecstasy production. For example: it is only if one’s being is equated with masculinity that is to say, if one associates a penis both with "who they really are" and with inborn power over others, or inborn symbolic status as an aristocrat of the human race, or inborn desirability that one can be traumatised by being submitted to “de-masculinising rituals”, in other words by being put in a situation that shows they do not have the phallus (incontestable power or desirability) or shows that "they are not a real man", although they have a penis. Jacqueline Rose has a good discussion of the trauma of castration that shapes the most aggressive tendencies of contemporary Zionism; more generally, any form of fascism stages a traumatic myth of castration  - "they have taken (or are taking) our force from us!" - in order to fuel its macho ecstasies.

But this is not the whole story: even if the representation of an event as traumatic submits to the dominant symbolic codes unconsciously there still is an assumed moment of submission involved in trauma, a moment for which the subject has direct responsibility (although, to paraphrase Lacan, one should assume responsibility even for the ecstasies they are not voluntarily responsible of, meaning in our case for any type of trauma). This moment that involves the action of the subject is their demand to be recognised through their trauma. "You should respect me, or nurture me, or cut me slack, or treat me as a special being, or submit to my desires, etc. because I am traumatised!" It is this demand that makes trauma into such a widespread technique of the self in contemporary liberal-capitalism and that, at the same time, keeps the traumatised subject invested in authority and its rules of recognition. Since the demand for recognition and adjacent submission happen at ego level, there is no wonder that one is often shamed and aggressive when demanding recognition for their trauma, for example when asking the patriarchal, heterosexist and racist bourgeois regime to recognise and heal one’s gendered trauma in the name of  “woman’s rights” or one’s racialized trauma in the name of “minority rights”.


The Joy of Trauma
 Today, like in Cook’s time, the representation of trauma is not the end of the subject’s social history, but its beginning. Once recognised by an authority or another, trauma functions like stigmata, marking the bearer as a “chosen one” and yielding all sorts of “ecstasy of presence”.

“Histrionic martyrdom”, one’s publicly displayed suffering at the hands of “fate/’authority” - the State, society, the world, parents, job, car traffic, one’s boss, and so on – transforms a bourgeois that in terms of their practices is a slave of ritual into something of a hero: a Promethean champion pitted against the mighty gods. In any social relationship ruled by the demands and desires of the martyr, the witness has the obligation to listen to their confession, deplore their loss, recognise their uniqueness, devote oneself to protecting and nurturing them and, even, share their aggressiveness (the duty of sympathy and support towards the traumatized involves sharing their enmities, enemies, phobias and so on). Traumatic narcissism obliterates the other’s ecstasies and uses them as fuel for one’s own.

So, while no doubt experienced as distressing, terrible and so on, trauma is actually a form of bourgeois (phallic) ecstasy that reduces the whole spectrum of social relations to an enjoyable obsession with the “I”. The traumatic symptom becomes an addictive technology of the self, propping the myth of the unitary ego and submitting one’s social reality to a form of imperial control with her/himself as the centre.

 
The Radical Olympics of Desire
 One of the dungeons of bourgeois ecstasy that still towers over our spaces is the “hierarchy of radical desirability”, with its array of ritual practices of competition for the spotlight that follow closely the bourgeois criteria of value: academic or theoretical prowess and credentials or, more generally, mastery over accredited mechanisms of knowledge-formation and erudition; experience and achievements in “struggles” (the radical equivalent of “work”); radical travelogue; self-assurance and authoritativeness in decision-making, strategy and organising; looks, lifestyle, sexual prowess, and so on. In order to secure this aura but also to make sure that it is distinguished from the bourgeois competition for desirability from which it is otherwise undistinguishable, trauma – personal or collective - is often added to the mix, glazing this conformist cake with the sugar of martyrdom. Many of the "radical" environments  I have encountered were stifling and uncomfortable because someone, or more than one, or all were demanding at the same time to be recognised as authorities, obeyed and respected and to be nurtured and protected like wounded puppies because they were traumatised or martyred. It's a great cover for getting away with being a narcissistic and resentful dickhead. And whenever the "radical martyr" experiences a libidinal conflict – say, self-defining as an anticapitalist but displaying the desire for a cosy, hipster, fashion, artsy, jet-setter, philanthropic, family or academic bourgeois life - the invocation of trauma allows them to evade the critical analysis of their own enjoyment and to delegate responsibility to the Other (“Let me heal first and then I’ll be able to think about my ecstasies!” “I am entitled to this because I have been traumatised!” or its twin, “I need to make up for my suffering!”).
 

Trauma and Aggressiveness
 In Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten” parable, a child has a masochistic fantasy of being punished by paternal authority that in fact hides the child's desire to be loved (in more than one way) by that authority; however, because this masochistic fantasy is somewhat shameful for the child, they very easily transform it into a more "acceptable" one: the sadistic fantasy of watching other children being punished by this same authority. While Freud and all his followers always have to be read with caution and distrust, this little story is not an unuseful fable because, at least, it points out the ease with which a bourgeois transforms from punished into sadistic witness, an ease that we witness a lot in the modern era. And isn't this ease explained by the ability of the bourgeois martyr to aggressively project their shame on others and then enjoy watching them suffer as a way of forgetting the martyr's own guilt? Judith Butler makes a similar argument (I’m adapting her occult prose): the bourgeois, a creature obsessed with “independence” but that enjoys submission more than anything, struggles to represent their submission as martyrdom. Once this martyr status is achieved, the bourgeois uses it as a permission to enact atrocities against others in the name of self-defense.

The 3-step quick guide to recognising bourgeois martyrdom
 
1. Trauma asks for recognition and reparation from the very same order that makes possible the trauma, increasing the hold of this symbolic regime on the traumatised (e.g. the hold of the phallic order, where the penis is fantasised as the supreme weapon that can give or take away worth, dignity, recognition, desirability and love).

2. Trauma is an attempt to eliminate the anxiety of being and the uncertainty of the Other’s desire by reducing everyone’s desire to the recognition of MY trauma and to everyone’s duty to cater for MY well-being.

3. Trauma not only allows one to embrace the crudest egotism; but also to feel entitled when perpetuating violence against the others in the name of one’s martyrdom.