Solving the Problem of Sexual Assault

It is not often that the state of California arrives at simple, elegant solutions to the very problems the state has engendered. (Its laws severely restricting firearms ownership come to mind. Background checks do not manias dissolve.) But credit where credit is due: this time, to Kevin de Leon, Democratic state senator from Los Angeles. According to LA Weekly,

a law co-authored by L.A. state Sen. Kevin de Leon would have state-run college campuses establish an "affirmative consent" standard for its students.

According to the language of the bill, SB 967, students who want to have sex must essentially establish that there has been "an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity." In fact, the legislation says: "It is the responsibility of the person who wants to engage in initiating the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the consent of the other person to engage in the sexual activity. Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent." 

No more making sexy faces and sounds for you. You've got to verbalize. Or get it on paper.

The proposal has drawn jeers from the left-right commentariat: what collegian, already doubtless impaired by spirits, would stop or even think to stop and obtain written permission for the further progression of sexual concourse?

Since according to the proposed law verbal consent is sufficient, critics need not appeal to the absurdity of written contracts in order to make their point. It would be equally simple to devise a consent-granting iPhone app in which the scanning of proprietary matrix barcode identifications suffices for consent. Better yet, with the looming advent of biometric identification tied to smartphone applications, we could simply allow our smartphones to decide for us whether we consent, based on their evaluation of signals in relevant brain regions.

The current problem of sexual assault revolves around the question of consent -- whether it was granted, and in what manner the granting of consent can be reasonably perceived and understood. The hookup culture to which allegations of sexual assault are usually tied cannot be brought under scrutiny, however. To challenge the hookup culture would be to brush up against the sacred doctrine of consent, according to which everything consented to is good and everything not consented to is bad -- except when done in order to foster better consent. (Various regulations and other state managerial policies designed to improve consent can thus be justified even if they are not consented to, since they are ordered toward further consent in the realm of personal interaction.)

But the doctrine of consent can be restated another way. Every personal interaction consistent with the consent principle, or consistent with the nonaggression principle, is acceptable. Liberalism conditions a society for the maximum level of mutual abuse consistent with the harm principle. Once you wall off physical coercion, everything else is a-OK.

These observations return us to the problem of sexual assault, and how to solve it.

Contrary to the critics of Rep. de Leon, he can only be faulted for not going far enough -- so to speak.

If the state of California requires written consent and release of liability prior to sexual activity, it has simply adopted a practice necessary for the legally regulated, commercial-industrial production of sex, whether through prostitution or through obscene materials.

It would be much simpler for liberal society if all sexual relations, at least all nonreproductive sexual relations, were simply made public according to legal standards -- i.e., made pornographic. Consent would be given first, with a release of liability. No obligations would follow. And since our society fears that events do not exist unless they are photographed, the requirement that all sex be pornographic will ensure that everything everyone does is (as in universal photography) simultaneously meaningful and completely meaningless.

Is this suggestion any more absurd than other stratagems our society has undertaken to remove itself from all human responsibility through the doctrine of consent? If the laws of contract could appear before us, they would surely blush.

When we admit that liberalism arranges a society for maximum mutual abuse consistent with the doctrine of consent, we have unwittingly slipt into the observations of a social thinker whose equations of liberalism with the "authoritarian personality" grow daily, and frightfully more true.

There is only one problem remaining, more acute than ideology was even in the day it had critics. We have so excused ourselves through the ideology of consent that we do not even acknowledge the problem, still less its depths.

Whose Politics? Which Antipolitics?

The noted political philosopher Russell Brand begins his essay on revolution by recalling the nonpolitical reason why he was willing to edit The New Statesman's issue on revolution. "I said yes," he tells us, "because it was a beautiful woman asking me." Whether it is Brand's intention to highlight the connection between beauty and political revolution is a matter for separate inquiry. The real thrust of Brand's complaint is simply that we have no politics in which to participate. There's no reason to vote, he told Paxman, and thus he violated the sacred rule that one mustn't impugn the democratic process no matter how undemocratic it may be. To do so would of course be "deeply dangerous."

Doubts about the democratic process are now routinely cited as examples of the "rising climate of anti-politics" (anti-politics being evidently not a tide). Americans want sexual permissiveness and legally sanctioned access to marijuana, FT notes, and they are concerned about the national debt. But they may not go in for the Southern-tinged populism of the Tea Party, and they're likely to prefer Rand Paul to Ted Cruz -- two largely similar senators who nevertheless project different images.

As everyone knows, only 8% of Americans think Congress is doing a good job. The hand-wringing class isn't sure whether to fault Congress or the American people for such a dismal statistic: who, after all, elected the bastards? The people perhaps, but certainly "democracy" doesn't deserve the blame.

The European Union's poll numbers are hardly better, and recently registered their all-time low. But if Nigel Farage points this out as he did yesterday, he can count on UKIP's being called "indignant, angry people" and "brainless Eurosceptics." It takes a special brain to appreciate European democracy.

Our blame of the people and exculpation of democracy indicate that whatever else it may be, today's democracy is by no means rule of the people. Nor could it ever be. The rule of the people is now wholly impossible. Why?

When we ordinarily speak of "the rule of the people," we indicate that the people take themselves as their own ruling principle. It's this aspect that has become impossible today. Only non-"people," namely intellectuals and academics, assert that the people rule. The people themselves defer to other gods, to the sports-actors whose exertions enable their lassitude, to the musicians whose songs are elaborate disguises spun over a core of nothing, to the techno-prophets and their endless stream of computational anesthetics. The rule of the people is a cipher for the rule of technocrats over the ruins of ordinary life.

The reason why democracy is always on the lips of our technocrats, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other cynics, is that "the people" are the object of their social science. Politicians and capitalists alike aspire to perfect knowledge of the behavior of "the people," no longer constituted as the subject of political action but as an aggregation of very peculiar codes -- genetic, epigenetic, environmental, "political" and consumer codes. Knowledge of these codes is a different type of wisdom, not the wisdom enabling activity in ordinary life, but knowledge enabling the extraction of resources from those who are living (putatively) ordinary lives.

Who is the greater cynic, the "anti-political" citizen or the authors of The Victory Lab? Everyone knows the answer. The cynics who rule cannot tolerate cynicism in the ruled.

Every former context of political dispute is now outside the realm of politics properly so called. What the psychotic technocrats call "anti-politics" is only a vestige of human nostalgia in the posthuman world.