Notes on Freedom

May 26, 2015

Extremism Disruption Orders: state officials become outlaws

For centuries, kings’ coronation oaths included a pledge to serve justice and maintain the laws. Indeed, the English state was unified by law: England formed as a country not through the spread of state administrators, but through the spread of a legal jurisdiction (1). The growth of national courts from the 12th century – overtaking private feudal jurisdictions – was the result of their ability to deliver speedy and fair resolutions to injustices and disputes. England was one country under one law; the authority of the state stood on the fact that it represented the law.

We are now in the unique position where law proper plays a vanishing role in the uses of state power. Officials today seek to escape legal rules specifying the course of action in any particular case; they no longer even claim to be ‘representing the law’.

We see this most clearly with the growth of summary powers to issue ‘orders’. The prime minister recently argued that ‘extremism disruption orders’ were necessary to ‘bring our country together’: for too long, he said, the government had told citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone’.

Extremism disruption orders would allow for coercion to be exercised outside the application of the law. A person could be prohibited from broadcasting and would have to seek police approval before posting on social media. It would be a crime to violate the order, even if their publishing were entirely anodyne.

This is the latest in a long list of powers to order, including: Football Banning Orders, Dispersal Orders, Control Orders, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, Community Protection Orders, Public Spaces Protection Orders, Designated Public Place Orders, Eviction Orders, Closure Orders….

In these terms, the state doesn’t specify a rule; it doesn’t lay out a domain of prohibited activity, or specify procedures for the resolution of conflict. Instead, it makes it a crime to disobey the specific order of a specific official. It makes the official’s word in itself the law.

It henceforth becomes a crime to go to a football match (if one has been issued with a football banning order), to stand in a public place (if issued with a dispersal order), to enter one’s own house if that house has been subject to a closure order. The use of coercion loses any systematic basis, but is simply whatever officials find to be expedient in a particular case.

Officials are gaining the power to issue precise on-the-spot directions to individuals. In Newquay the council is issuing buskers with ‘community protection orders’, which can impose certain limits on the busker as the official believes to be necessary. This could be ‘you must not play in the town of Newquay’, or ‘you must not use amplification’, or ‘you must not play for more than an hour in the same spot’. It will then be a crime for that person to violate this specific direction of their musical activity.

Some of these orders go through a court, some do not, but this distinction is not great because the condition being tested is not the relation of this case to a defined body of rules, but rather whether the order meets the conditions under which an order can be made. Normally, a power can be invoked on the basis of authorities’ ‘suspicion’ or ‘belief’ that somebody’s behaviour ‘may lead to’ or ‘may be associated with’ some condition such as ‘harrassment, alarm or distress’; or that the order is necessary ‘in order to prevent’ or ‘reduce the likelihood of’ these things occurring.

The role of the court, then, is not to enforce the law, but to establish the conditions under which officials can make up the law.

This represents a fundamental constitutional shift. AV Dicey argued that the difference between English and French law was not that English law was more lenient, but that it was more predictable: it was defined by the ‘rule of law’ (2). The ‘rule of law’ precluded arbitrary actions on the part of officials. The law specified certain crimes, and anything outside of these specific areas was allowed. If officials were to use their powers in ways unspecified by the law, then it was they who were the criminals: they could be sued for trespass or theft in the ordinary courts.

Indeed, the current disdain for legal principle disrupts the very basis of a modern state. The sociologist Max Weber argued that the ‘calculability of the functioning of the coercive machinery’ is one of the essential conditions for the development of a modern state and market economy (3). Yet now, the rules can be changed overnight: people wake up and there is a new crime.

Suddenly it is a crime to sleep rough on the streets of Hackney, after the council passed a ‘public spaces protection order’ prohibiting this and a host of other activities such as ‘loitering’. This order appears like a revelation: there was no public consultation or prior discussion, and the exact text of the order appears only towards the back of a Hackney council magazine.

Councils including Lincoln have passed public spaces protection orders prohibiting ‘legal highs’; nightclubs and private homes are issued with closure orders on the basis of disorder ‘associated’ with the premises. In other areas, councils have banned the sale of high-strength alcohol or certain brands of alcohol, leading to losses of hundreds of thousands of pounds for small retailers.

Here, somebody has set up a business or purchased stock on the basis of a certain legal state of affairs. Overnight, they find their shop closed because an official has decided that their activities have or might lead to anti-social behaviour in the vicinity.

You might say: they are just legal highs; this person was a nuisance to their neighbours. But this is important. These are legal highs, they are within the domain of permitted activity, so a person sets up a business and invests money. Within weeks, the council declares this activity illegal. Worse, it threatened one shop with a ‘closure order’ before it passed the ban, and issued another shop with a Community Protection Notice before the ban came into force.

The council says that the shop or nightclub is ‘anti-social’ and fostering disorder, but in this case it is the legal high seller who represents the principle of the law, and the council who represents the principle of disorder and arbitrary will.

The enforcement of the law through the prosecution of a criminal returns social life to an axis: it affirms the fundamental principles of the operation of social life. The application of an order disrupts the idea of orderliness: it states that the only rule is the contingent, arbitrary will of officialdom.

These summary orders make it difficult to organise your affairs, because you do not know what you can do and what you cannot. More fundamentally, they make the question of right and wrong entirely contingent and based on arbitrary will.

A raid on a legal high shop or nightclub is not just an infringement against that individual, it is an assault on the whole idea of law in state and society. This is far more disruptive and fostering of chaos than any shop or club ever was.

Footnotes:

(1) The French state was unified through administration – through a central state administrator in every region – while the English state was unified much earlier through the development of a common legal system. (The State and the Rule of Law, Blandine Kriegel, Princeton UP, 1995.)

(2) AV Dicey, Introduction to the Study of The Law of the Constitution

(3) Max Weber On Law In Economy and Society, HUP, 1954, p72

April 22, 2015

From rights to privileges – the refeudalisation of the public sphere

In feudal society there was no such thing as a ‘right’, in the sense of a domain of autonomy held in principle by everyone. Any domain of autonomy was unique to a particular group, the result of their particular status or negotiations. The merchants of a city or a baron might hold certain ‘liberties’ – to elect a mayor, for example, or to export a particular item, be exempt from a tax, or levy toll duties. Feudal society was an intricate patchwork of immunities and benefits, all of which had the status of privileges, an allowance conferred by the grace of an over-lord or the king.

There is something feudal about the status of rights in contemporary society. It has become very difficult for groups or individuals to make a general claim for their rights as citizens, as allied in principle with those of other citizens. Instead, there has been a return to claiming rights only as a form of privilege.

The distinction between positive and negative rights – the classic freedom-from or freedom-to distinction – has been eclipsed. In many cases rights are seen as privileges, and vice versa. People talk about their ‘right to a quiet life’ or ‘right to self-esteem’, but then say that freedom of speech is ‘not a right’ but a ‘privilege’ or ‘responsibility’. In fact, these different claims have the same status, as a benefit conferred by some higher authority.

One of the ways one can defend interests today is by demanding special exemption from a restriction, on the basis of the special qualities or needs of your particular group. Musicians may claim that they should be exempt from entertainment licensing, for example, because of the particular value of music in social life. Or homeless organisations may seek to exempt rough sleeping from public space regulation, on the grounds of this group’s particular vulnerabilities or needs. For campaigners the pressures pushing you to pose your demand in these terms are very strong indeed: this is the existing way in which demands can be put and positions defended.

There is again a sense that one sphere of autonomy is exclusive of and set against those of others. This is why it is common for groups, in defending their own ‘rights’, to call for restrictions upon the rights of other groups. Big Issue sellers in Oxford supported the council’s ban on begging; local buskers supported a busking license because it benefits them over outsiders. Street traders often support leafleting licenses, as do institutions which are already prevented from leafleting as a result of their alcohol licenses.

In feudal times, if you had a right to export cloth, this in principle excluded others from carrying out this activity: a liberty was a monopoly. Now councils horse-trade over the use of public space in a similar way, as if one use were exclusive of other uses.

We are seeing the official micromanagement of public spaces as a patchwork of distinct and rival privileges. Woking Borough Council, for example, has divided up the town centre into a series of ‘event zones’, each with special allowances and restrictions for activities such as busking, leafleting or charity collecting. (The only activity allowed in all areas is ‘council events’: this is the right of the over-lord). So charity collection can take place in seven different zones, but a permit is required, and only one organisation with a maximum of four representatives can collect at any one time. Leafleting can occur in two locations, but is limited to one ‘booking’ a month.

There is no conception within this schema of any rights of free action in public space. Your realm of action exists only as sanctioned by authority, as licensed in some way. There are now licences for busking, leafleting, playing music, charity collecting, even for dancing: one can act only when one has a permission slip, and generally paid a fee. Your activity is not a right but a privilege, and a privilege explicitly set against the unauthorised group who are excluded from performing this action. A local musician will wave their ‘licensed busker’ card at an out-of-town musician who has just set up, showing their permission slip and so claiming their superior rights to use the space. In certain local authorities buskers must actually audition for council officials before receiving their licence.

And yet, the nature of these new privileges are quite different to those in feudal times. Feudal privileges represented fixed status divisions and customary rights, a hierarchical stratification which structured social relations from top to bottom. A particular licence was a recognition of the dues owing as a result of a person’s status as baron or churchman, or of past agreements or custom. By contrast, the pseudo-feudal divisions in today’s public sphere have an artificial quality. They are entirely contingent, constituted only through the whim of officialdom or the chance of circumstance.

There is a great difference between the status of different activities in official regulations, and their status in social life. There is no recognised Woking custom that leafleting should only happen once a month, or in certain areas of the town: Woking Borough council’s ‘public realm usage policy’ is a pristine invention of the realm of officialdom. The licensed busker takes on a status that is quite alien to their status among a public audience or fellow buskers: their position depends not on the quality of their music but on whether they have been compliant and jumped through the hoops. Therefore, the new realms of privilege are not a reflection of social reality, but an official construction laid upon it.

In this context, it is a progressive task to pose claims in terms of general rights, held by all people as citizens. In truth, homeless people have a right to use a bench, or buskers to set up in a spot, not because they are special but because they are citizens as much as anyone else; they have the same rights to use the space as anyone else. It is only by defending such general rights that the interests of groups could coincide, that the autonomy of one is also the autonomy of the other.

There is an objective potential for the uniting of different parts of civil society. The distinctive quality of state regulation today is that it is turned without exception against every part of social life. Public space regulations are not exclusively targeted at homeless people, buskers, or any other particular group, but against activities of almost any kind. War veterans must queue up with Greenpeace protesters to gain their ‘charity collection licence’; lost cat posters and nightclub adverts are equally prosecuted for unlicensed flyposting. The contemporary state has no favourites among the different sections of social life.

This suggests that there is a state-consciousness, already in existence. We dearly need a civil society consciousness to rise up in counter and opposition to these measures.

April 2, 2015

Why are councils banning pigeon feeding? ‘Public spaces protection orders’ and the destruction of public space

Why are councils banning virtually every conceivable activity in public spaces: pigeon feeding, begging, busking, rough sleeping, smoking in parks? And why are these bans so often popular?

At base, it seems to be because civil society is seen as a war of all against all. Any person’s activity is seen immediately as a restriction upon or violation of another. This is expressed in sayings such as: ‘Your right to smoke violates my right to a smoke-free environment.’ One person’s freedom to play music means that another’s life is ‘made a misery’ . One person feeding the birds means that another gets ‘covered in mess’.

The conceptual model of civil society is that of individuals facing each other as implacable and opposed interests. Any one activity – any freedom of one person – is resolved purely and simply into the negative effect on another. The activity, indeed, becomes defined only in terms of this negative effect: busking becomes ‘noise pollution’, leafleting and pigeon feeding become ‘littering’, ball games become an ‘obstruction’ or ‘nuisance’, begging for money is ‘intimidation’.

It is for this reason that activities previously seen as a benign, even positive part of the urban environment are today classed as ‘anti-social behaviour’ and acquire an aspect of criminality. It becomes inconceivable that anyone would defend the ‘right’ to drink or feed pigeons in public spaces. ‘Are you saying that it is a human right to engage in unsocial behaviours?’ asks one man. ‘Do you really think people should get drunk, publicly beg, do wheelies in carparks, intimidate the public in parks?’ asks another.

These activities are criminalised because they are viewed – and to some extent, experienced – only as a violation of other people. The definition of crime, previously restricted to a significant violation of person or property, becomes generalised to almost any public action which could ‘affect’ others.

Indeed, for some individuals their mere presence in public space is seen as harmful: hence council bans on ‘loitering’ or police crackdowns on young people ‘congregating’. One BBC Radio London presenter suggested that street drinkers should be stopped from ‘lounging’ on a park bench. Councils are banning smoking in parks because it ‘exposes others including children to smoking behaviours’. Your crime is merely that you have exposed others to the sight of yourself or your activity (which is objectified into something foreign and described as a behaviour).

This model of civic life is quite different to that which motivated Victorian bylaws, with their nit-picky bans on playing music in the park or playing cards on the street. In these cases, the ban had a class basis, elite versus masses, and the question of freedom in the newly formed public spaces was almost entirely a working-class cause. It was they who pushed back the legal boundary for protests into Hyde Park, filled the streets with pamphleteers and players and pavement artists. The ban was motivated by an elite fear of the public acting in concert, of the unpredictable, restive energies of the crowd.

Today, by contrast, freedom in public spaces is seen as an effete, ivory tower position, which nobody with any real experience of urban life could possibly support. The model of an unregulated public space is some kind of hell: wheelies in carparks, vomiting, urinating, firing BB guns, shooting up, ‘winged rats’, vermin, bird and dog faeces. It is a cacophony of barbarity. It is supposed that the public lacks any self-constituting power. There is nothing in the free association of individuals which could bring any kind of order or civility, any kind of mutual benefit or pleasure. As a result, it is supposedly only through the state that the public space is established as a compact.

Implacably opposed individuals face one another and cannot resolve their conflict for themselves; as soon as one moves the other is harmed, and vice versa. So the official mediator is called in, to place restrictions on activities – to say, as with Oxford City council, that the city centre shall not be a place for anybody to do anything. Or else, if people must do things, they must do them in discrete ‘zones’, where different activities can be carried out without meeting or coming into conflict. In a park there is a playground area for children (no dogs, no smoking), a dog walking area (no children), a ballgames area (no dogs), a field (no ballgames, no drinking, no dogs). One park even allocated a specific bench for street drinkers to sit on. The public space is sliced up, feudalised into its separate interests.

Yet this appearance of things is misleading. It may appear that the conflict within civil society necessitates state regulation, but in fact the opposite is more the case: that state regulation generates a conflict within civil society. It is the regulation and orchestration of public spaces, the ever-presence of the third party mediator, which polarises individuals as implacable opposed interests. It is the existence of an anti-social behaviour hotline which means that neighbours no longer go around to ask someone to turn the music down: they communicate not directly but through official mechanisms, which polarises a minor disagreement into an all-out conflict.

In fact, the pleasantness of public spaces depends in large part on their freedom from regulation. In the 1960s the American urbanist Jane Jacobs described the intricate web of urban interactions: the way in which people going about their business as private individuals look out for each other and enhance each others lives (1). Drinkers at the soda stand keep an eye on kids playing; the deli owner keeps people’s keys and packages. Jacobs notes how a ‘slum’ neighbourhood – with its soda stands, sweet shops and bars, sidewalks full of kids playing ball and adults loitering and chatting  – was a model of lively civility. By contrast, in the new housing ‘project’ opposite, with its manufactured public meeting rooms and cultural centres, kids were busy squirting fire hydrants through people’s windows.

It was the manufactured, state-constructed neighbourhoods that were the sites of barbarity, not the spontaneous, mixed-use sidewalks, where strangers stepped in swiftly to resolve children’s arguments.

The same would be the case today – except that public spaces have become so regulated, civic relations so mediated by bureaucratic organs that there is rarely any chance for relations to form or be negotiated on independent terms. These points occur not so much as an everyday habit, but more as a moment, something rare breaking through. We all witness these occasionally and find them immortalised on YouTube: with videos of a Liverpudlian drunk starting a crowd imitating his one-foot dance, or a boy stealing a busker’s mike to sing a solo. Here, buskers, street drinkers, children and adults are shown not in hostile opposition, but as enhancing one another. Such unexpected influences and inspirations are as much a part of public spaces as are disputes or disagreements.

The truth is that the ‘public spaces protection order’ doesn’t protect public space, it destroys it. The PSPO is founded on a model of civil society as a war of all against all, and in being enacted starts to bring about this very hell.

(1) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

March 20, 2015

Billy Boys: The rampant subjectivity of the criminal law

In the week when a man was imprisoned for singing the Rangers’ ‘Billy Boys’ song, we have to ask: who can say anymore what is a crime and what is not?

Since the first criminal code in 14th century BC, the world’s civilised nations have sought to define the nature of different crimes in precise, objective terms. If your horse eats your neighbour’s crop, you shall pay him back twice the quantity of grain. If your neighbour strikes you and injures your head, he shall give you 3 half shekels of silver.

The attempt to be precise led to the meticulous specification in Anglosaxon law of every conceivable kind of personal injury – one eye, both eyes, two spots of blood, a pool of blood – and the payments required for each.

The law should be objective, predictable, universal – this much was inherent in the earliest customary codes, in spite of their lack of legal theory or enforcing machinery.

Yet now – with all our complex legal machinery and coercive institutions – there is a blithe indifference to the definition of crime. No other age has shown so little interest in defining in objective, universal terms, what is a crime, and what is not, and specifying the punishment that should apply in each case.

New crimes are consciously created in order to be enforced in a subjective manner. The new terrorism offences, anti-social behaviour offences, speech crime offences – these are all described as ‘flexible’, as ‘tools’. The concept of ‘anti-social behaviour’ is not a precise one – it does not mean engaging in particular subversive activities, or belonging to particular groups. It is, at base, nothing more than the subjective experience of some form of conflict: the experience of ‘offence’, ‘distress’, ‘annoyance’, that one person’s feeling that another person had a ‘detrimental effect’ on their ‘quality of life’, or made them feel ‘uncomfortable’.

This gives crime an inherently unstable and unpredictable quality. The Welsh Parliament is currently legislating to allow tenants to be evicted if they cause ‘nuisance and annoyance’ to their neighbours or passersby. As a petition against the measure pointed out, what exactly is nuisance and annoyance? The petition gives examples of the kinds of everyday disputes between people, where the tenant could find themselves out on the street.

Increasingly, the content of a crime is nothing more than the subjective experience of the moment of conflict. Oxford’s City Council’s consultation on whether rough sleeping and begging should be banned in the city centre, asked people whether they had been ‘affected’ by this activity. There is no attempt to objectify the experience of having been ‘affected’, to say: what was the act, what kind of harm was it, what was the person’s responsibility for the harm, and so on.

Officials are equally enacting their own subjective perspective, and will seek to ban busking or homeless people if they think they look ‘messy’ or ‘undesirable’. Although they bear special coercive powers in their hands, they do not tend to think of themselves as a special kind of citizen, with a special mode of operation and restraints. Instead, they talk about powers as ‘useful’ and ‘flexible’: what is valued is the degree to which laws can give expression of their subjective perspective.

How then do we measure the degree of offence? Every criminal code had some way of measuring degrees of crime. For earlier codes, it was the literal damage to the body, or the property value of a person or object. Murder would carry different penalties according to the value of the person: this depended on their status and sex, and whether a woman was of childbearing age or pregnant. Modern criminal codes punish willful acts violating the liberty of another. The various categories of offences – GBH, theft, burglary, robbery, manslaughter, murder – is each is an objective kind of violation, involving a particular combination of intent, act and harm.

It is the claim to objectivity which distinguishes the criminal law from everyday conflicts in civil society. The realm of civil society is its own sphere, with its own modes of operation and forms of pressure and argument. Civil society is the sphere of particularity where things are open to debate and not a priori right or wrong, where likes and dislikes can be expressed and discussed. This is quite distinct from the sphere of criminal justice, where certain precise lines are drawn, and special coercive mechanisms employed.

What is occurring now is, in effect, the dissolution of the criminal justice infrastructure into civil society, into the immediacy of perspective of one person versus another. The coercive machinery starts to mediate everyday interactions and disputes between people, and between people and the state.

Any moment of conflict, any negative experience or sentiment, can now be a point for the intervention of the criminal law. Anything one doesn’t like – smoking in playgrounds, parents parking outside schools, buskers, pigeon feeding – is seen as an appropriate object for intervention. The debate about whether something should be criminalised or not depends on how much you dislike it. That is, the debate about the criminal law is not in principle different to the expression of one’s opinion in public debate.

This arbitrary and subjective character is different to past broad-brush laws – sedition, obscenity, and so on – which though on paper may have been broad, were in practice enforced tightly and specifically. A 1938 book by W Ivor Jennings, ‘The Law and the Constitution’, noted that sedition and blasphemy laws were extremely broad, but prosecutions were ‘hardly ever’ taken. Even an entirely arbitrary power such as the power of Lord Chamberlain to censor all stage plays, was enforced in a manner that attempted to be objective. In 1965, Lord Cobbard, the last Lord Chamberlain, said that he tried ‘to assess the norm of educated, adult opinion and if possible to keep just a touch ahead of it…. I have to make a positive effort to keep my own personal tastes, likes and dislikes out of the picture’ (1).

No official today would attempt to discipline themselves in this way; it is ‘likes and dislikes’ which drive the use of coercive powers.

The law is no longer predictable, enforced in the same way for everyone. A person can be locked up, like a lightning strike, where a thousand people who did the same thing would walk free. Your fate depends not on a set of rational, spelt-out principles, but on the vicissitudes of how a particular officer or your neighbours happen to be feeling on a particular day.

So we reach the worrying juncture where no one – not even legal experts – can explain why one thing is a crime and another thing is not, why one person is punished and another not; when people can be punished on little more than somebody’s subjective impulse.

March 12, 2015

Gay/bi/top/bottom…fake identities and the structuring of public life

One of the first questions gay men ask each other is: ‘Are you a top or a bottom?’ A person’s preference of sexual position becomes what one is: a top, or a bottom. The question of subjective preference in the context of a relationship becomes hardened into different categories of people – as if, one gay man said, ‘two entirely different species of gay male humans’.

A similar process is at work in many other areas of life. Indeed, it is such stereotyped categories of identity which to a large extent provide the structure for social life now. These categories both form personal identity, group individuals together, and structure their relations to one another and to other groups.

We can see this in the process of electoral campaigning: there is a pink battle bus for women, an Operation Black Vote, Operation Disabled Vote, Operation Muslim vote, and so on. This is the way in which an electorate is categorised and structured: not Labour v Tory, Middle England v Welsh pit towns; not constituencies of interest but categories of individuals.

With the end of the political party and association, some social theorists imagined that social life would be without structure. Zygmunt Bauman talked about the endless ‘fluidity’ of life, individuals moving into temporary and structureless connections with others: his ‘liquid modernity’ is formless and insubstantial. Jean Baudrillard imagined the post-political society as like a ‘mass’, a silent, expressionless and immobile lump which absorbed all meaning.

Yet what has happened is not this, but the emergence of a new social structure based on the category. Society is becoming an interlocking series of boxes, which break down into endless subdivisions. A person is male/female; gay/straight/bi/BDSM; top/bottom; versatile top/total top…and so on.

These categories have a rigid, caste-like quality. Even if you choose to be gay or straight, Muslim or non-Muslim, there is a way in which the category takes on a life of its own and seems to structure you. A study of the relations of top and bottom quoted men saying: ‘I sort of fell into this image of myself as being a very aggressive bottom’; ‘There’s a mindset about being a top’; ‘I hate to say it, but I’m a bottom … I don’t like to be identified like that because I feel it turns me into something all the way from my feet up to my head.’

Having chosen a box, they found that the box then ‘turns me into something’; it took away some of their individuality and made them a stereotype of a person, as well as determining their relations to others along stereotyped lines. The identity category, like the old social structures of caste, or feudal estate, is experienced as something foreign and external to the individual, as determining them.

This is quite different to the relationship of the individual to a  political party or association of which they are a member. As a party member, subjective interests are channelled into social forms, and in turn structured by them. An individual is part of the living body that is the association: one makes and is made by it. In the life of a voluntary association, the individual and the social group are in constant relation, forged by one another.

The category is more like a box: a box as an external form within which the individuals sit as separate items. It is a social form based not on dynamic interrelation between individuals, but on some common quality possessed by them: a genus. These categories have the appearance of something very private and personal to the individual – their sexuality or preference – but in fact they are ossified and hardened, and take over the inner life.

As part of a category, one’s actual personal and subjective life is eclipsed. You start to become your category, and to relate to others not as yourself but through it.

It is striking how the different identity groups are so hostile towards one another. The gay/lesbian/bi/trans community is taken up with fractious bickering between the different sections; a jostling for priority, and arguments about who is ‘included’ or ‘excluded’ in any particular initiative.

This can even reach the level of ‘trans’ people demanding that lesbians ‘accept them as sexual partners’; and lesbian feminists in turn defending the ‘safe space’ of their toilets against these trans invaders. The question of who has sex with whom, and which toilets people use, takes the strange form of a negotiation between tribes, as if sex again is a matter of endogamy or exogamy. There even appears to be a certain hostility between ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’.

This hostility has a different quality to past relations of social antagonism between, say, different professions, classes, or religious sects. In these cases, the antagonism was the consequence of the internal life of the association – it reflected the extent to which the interests of the association came into conflict with those of others.

By contrast, today’s identity categories lack this genuine internal life and real social existence: they are not an association but an aggregation of individuals. In a way, therefore, a category only comes to life in conflict with opposing categories. What one is is therefore defined primarily in the moment of conflict, set against what one is not.

A person is increasingly only really ‘trans’ or ‘Muslim’ when they are complaining about Islamophobia or the ‘lack of trans representation’. Only in the moment of opposition is a category-identity constituted – albeit in a shallow and stereotyped fashion – which is why these conflicts seem to be sought out as an opportunity for self-constitution.

This explains why individuals who have almost nothing to complain about spend all their time complaining. People have an opportunity to be who they want, love who they want, follow the religion they want – yet they seem to be prisoners to their labels, and locked in relations of mutual hostility with different labels.

The proper war now is not between the fake categories of identity, but of people against the categories. ‘We have to stop letting these titles wear us’ writes one gay man; another calls the divisions ‘stupid’: ‘whatever happened to love, chemistry and falling for a person?’

This is a claim both to be yourself, and to form meaningful relationships and associations with others. The war of people against the stereotyped and boxed forms of social identity would be the salvation of both the individual and the collective association – not to mention romance.