Complicity by Docherty Thomas;

Author:Docherty, Thomas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786601032
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International

3. COMPLICITY AS THE HIERARCHY OF POWER

To answer this—and to conclude this current section of the argument about the nature of our martial bonds—we need to consider more fully the nature of how we enter into our social contracts or bonds.

There is a profound difference between complicity and cooperation: the former depends upon hierarchical or vertical power structures and can be enforced by coercion; the latter is horizontal, predicated upon equality and non-coercive freedom. This helps explain why ‘complicity’ is always cast in negative semantic terms (it’s the kind of bad thing whose extreme form is wartime collaboration), whereas ‘cooperation’ is always positively cast (we like it and it is the basis of civilisation). The suicide bomber, of course, claims the ultimate hierarchical authority for his coercive act; most regular office workers and dogsbodies have only the secular boss to look up to. Clearly, these two are worlds apart in material terms; yet, structurally, they are fundamentally organized around the same subscription to hierarchical authority or power. Yet, as I have already argued and as the biblical Daniel shows, it is not the case that ‘speaking truth to power’ will suffice to eradicate the iniquitous hierarchies upon which complicity and its coercive mode of operation breeds. The situation is more complicated than that, in that those who speak truth to power are prone to enter into a repetition of exactly the same structure as the hierarchy that they eschew or critique in the first place. The answer lies elsewhere, perhaps closer to something we can now explore as proper cooperation.

Cooperation has its logical culmination in consensus, that establishment of a kind of ‘common sense’ or sensus communis that allows us to establish a system of laws to which we can all freely subscribe and which will give us the norms and terms of our social bonds and contracts. Consensus is the basis of consent; and consent is the basis of democratic politics. It follows that we now have a problem if we can show that our complicity with certain political actions that are allegedly in defence of civilisation are not grounded in consensus or consent. If these actions do not operate on the basis of consensus and consent, then it follows that what we call civilisation is actually coercive and undemocratic. (It is very important here to bear in mind the opposition between ‘what we call civilisation’ and ‘civilisation as such’. I am questioning the former.) Our democratic modes and principles of cooperation are thereby being silently perverted into complicities with a system that is grounded in a war upon civilisation itself.

In short, if a bond is entered into by someone who is so constrained by circumstance that the bond itself is simply an articulation of power, then cooperation has become complicity. If we are a dogsbody without any real or realistic say in whether or not we have skin in the game, then we are placed in a position of complicity. In the case of the suicide bomber, say,

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