Surprised, Outraged and Can’t Understand What is Going On

 I used to have a ritualistic argument with my partner concerning her affective politics. Whether she is talking about coal mining, abortion, Zionist colonialism, or opposition to bike lanes in the city, she always expresses her principled positions against right wing politics doused with a strong sense of outrage. ‘I can’t believe they still believe x or y!’, ‘how outrageous is it that they have voted for z!’, ‘how can they act against their own interest like this?!’ I, on the other hand, having inherited from Bourdieu Spinoza’s ‘do not be outraged… just try and understand’ mode of dealing with things would always critique her outrage and try and provide a social explanation as to why this or that happened and why it made sense.

Slowly, I have been dissatisfied with myself doing this. I felt that by replacing her ‘outrage’ and ‘surprise’ with my ‘understanding’ I was banalizing what was genuinely outrageous about what we were talking about. I also felt that by continuously claiming to be ‘unsurprised by this’ and ‘unsurprised by that’ I was engaging in those immature fantasies of omnipotence of knowledge that marked my hyper-Marxist student days. The idea that ‘I understand it all’ meant that I had some power over the events I was understanding rather than letting them surprise me and outrage me. I could feel that it was a particularly male fantasy of power/knowledge.

When I had my visiting professorship terminated by Max Planck over my opposition to Zionist politics. I used to say to many people ‘what has happened to me has happened to so many others in Germany so it is not surprising really’. But then I started feeling a little bit irritated by the number of friends, even very close friends, who would say to me: ‘Sorry this happened to you but it is not surprising’. The irritation was strange given that I was saying it to myself really. But somehow, when people started directing it at me, I felt my experience was being banalised. My feeling was: “I don’t really want to know about how amazingly knowledgeable you are such that you are not surprised.” I really wanted to hear people say to me that this was totally surprising, outrageous and unacceptable, rather, than ‘ah well, this is how it is.’ I wanted to hear it even though I knew that it was indeed ‘unsurprising.’

I reflected on the fact that maybe I needed to hear that it was surprising just for my own psychological well-being. But I wondered to what extent we often use ‘this is not surprising’ also for our own psychological well-being, to protect ourselves from what is precisely surprising and unexpected in an event.

As an anthropologist, I know very well that things do not have to be either surprising or not surprising, just as an encounter with a foreign culture does not have to be either familiar or not-familiar. But I also know that just as an excessive highlighting of what is unfamiliar about such an encounter can dissimulate certain similarities, an excessive highlighting of what is familiar and unsurprising can dissimulate certain genuinely unfamiliar and impenetrable things that we need to explore. This is where I felt that an excessive usage of ‘this is not surprising' does.

I am writing this today as we have spent many hours with friends watching the American election results unfold on TV and having many discussions. Sure enough, just as we inundated ourselves with outrage and indignation, we were also copiously offering each other a good deal of ‘there is nothing surprising here because x, y and z.’ The elephant in the room was the rise and rise of anti-cosmopolitan right wing culture everywhere.

This is where something quite definite dawned on me: I have been studying this right-wing culture since its emergence in Australia in the mid-1990s. I have also researched it but to a lesser extent in France and in the US since that time. But I have to say, I am genuinely over ‘not being surprised by it’ because it is continuously surprising me. I am over not being outraged by it because this de-civilisational process is bloody outrageous. And, despite my own research and having read the research of many other, I definitely can’t say that I understand what is going on here in any way that I consider satisfactory. I feel that we've been scratching surfaces and all the work is ahead of us.