Leviathanic Autocannibalism
During tumultuous times, we cling so desperately (and thus precariously) to that most oppressive yet protective of institutions: the self. It clings to our surfaces all the more tightly when it senses that it might lose its grip. It rips desperately at our decaying souls for any morsel of sustenance. It is fed, but not satiated, by consumerism and brand loyalty, demographic identification, online presence and creativity. (Who am I? The market will tell me, or "the algorithm" behind advertising and social media feeds, or whatever media franchise catches my attention and makes me a fan, or the roles I adopt in order to fit in.) The self is a machine, a dead thing thriving on borrowed life. We are cannibalized by our selves, made into commodities to be advertised and consumed, all in order to survive in a world of unbearable expectations.
In Fredy Perlman's Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, he describes the process:
At first the imposed task is taken on as a burden. The newly captured zek knows that he is not a ditch-repairman, he knows that he is a free Canaanite filled to the brim with ecstatic life, for he still feels the spirits of the Levantine mountains and forests throbbing inside him. The ditch-fixing is something he takes on to keep from being slaughtered; it is something he merely wears, like a heavy armor or an ugly mask. He knows he will throw off the armor as soon as the Ensi's back is turned.
But the tragedy of it is that the longer he wears the armor, the less able he is to remove it. The armor sticks to his body. The mask becomes glued to his face. Attempts to remove the mask become increasingly painful, for the skin tends to come off with it. There’s still a human face below the mask, just as there’s still a potentially free body below the armor, but merely airing them takes almost superhuman effort.
And as if all this weren't bad enough, something starts to happen to the individual’s inner life, his ecstasy. This starts to dry up. Just as the former community’s living spirits shriveled and died when they were confined to the Temple, so the individual’s spirit shrivels and dies inside the armor. His spirit can breathe in a closed jar no better than the god could. It suffocates. And as the Life inside him shrivels it leaves a growing vacuum. The yawning abyss is filled as quickly as it empties, but not by ecstasy, not by living spirits. The empty space is filled with springs and wheels, with dead things, with Leviathan’s substance.
Wearing armor, carrying orders, feels like conducting electricity at high resistance. Red hot, too hot to touch. You need some distance, some insulation, and then what fills the spaces that open up inside? And what does the heat burn away?
He's talking about the beginning of coerced labor, and more importantly the beginning of identity. We tend to think of identity as either something created or something discovered, but the reality is that identity must be imposed by some coercive authority. And once imposed, taking off the armor is impossible without violence, towards others but more often towards oneself. It's much easier to transform the armor, which can be an effective act of resistance. But it is not liberation.
I use my journal to study and alter my armor. My journal is very important to me. At this point I write in it almost every day, and I have a system for regularly reading over past entries. My life before I started it is mostly a blur by comparison to what my life looks like to me now, seen through that lens. I like to think it allows me to see myself more clearly, but I'm regularly surprised and disturbed by what I read in there. I don't know myself, even now. Despite my efforts, I relate to my self as merely an object to be examined and consumed.
There's a quote from Raoul Vaneigem that I wrote down in my journal back in 2016, and I referred to it regularly as I went through some very dramatic life changes:
I am in enemy territory, and the enemy is within me. I don't want him to kill me, and the armour of roles gives me a measure of protection. I work, I consume, I know how to be polite, how to avoid aggravation, how to keep a low profile. All the same, this world of pretence has to be destroyed, which is why it is a shrewd course to let roles play each other off. Seeming to have no responsibility is the best way of behaving responsibly toward oneself. All jobs are dirty so do them dirtily! All roles are lies, but leave them alone and they'll give each other the lie!
Will Graham, on the TV show Hannibal, understands this: he adopts roles but tries not to wear them as true armor, in the sense Perlman speaks of. He lets them have a life of their own, even while living inside him, and so preserves his own life, alone with his found family of stray dogs. Even teaching forensics he keeps his distance from the role, right up until Jack Crawford calls on him to consult on a case with Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
Hannibal is, in addition to being a cannibalistic serial killer, a brilliant psychiatrist. In Will he almost immediately recognizes a kindred spirit: someone who also sees beneath the armor of others. So of course, he can't allow him to continue to live in peace. He has to see what Will sees, to show Will what he sees, to blur the lines between them. Self and other is a meaningless dichotomy without the armor of identity to keep us separate.
I'm almost finished with a rewatch of the show. I hadn't seen it since it was still airing. The first season is burned into my brain, and watching over it was like, oh I know every single word and gesture. I don't know how that happened. I guess between sharing it with several people and waiting for the second season I saw most of those first episodes multiple times. And I saw the regular clips, commercials, advertisements, it was like the last TV show I watched on live TV before I stopped watching live TV altogether.
The third season feels almost totally new. I was so deeply depressed that year (2015 I guess?), it didn't make an impact hardly at all. I definitely watched it, but there's no real memory of it. It doesn't help that so much of it is essentially a fever dream, sometimes it barely feels real. At the end of episode six, Will's head almost gets sawed open during a drawn-out slow-motion sequence focused on reflections in droplets of blood. I couldn't help but think, how is this real. This was on TV. This was on NBC. And they lean so hard into making Hannibal and Will's relationship into a twisted romance, filled with surreal artistic bloody violence.
As his psychiatrist says a few times, Hannibal wears a "person suit," armor that, unlike most, he regularly removes, at the cost of much violence. Of course, what makes and enforces his armor (along with everyone else's) is also violence. The violence of psychiatry, law enforcement, class society, and civilization as a whole is all just as real as the violence of crime. Hannibal indulges in all those forms of violence. Armor on, armor off: it's all just a game for him.
Will, on the other hand, has no real armor. He is naked in the world, absorbing the passion and the affect of the armor of those around him but failing to acquire any of its protection. He gets too close to the people he profiles, but also to all the other people in his life. He has to keep them at arm's length. He has to protect himself with masks. Masking means, for him, not putting on his own mask, but looking as if through the eyes of one worn by someone else. Masks enable him to survive when confronted with Leviathan's enforcers. But they do not protect him from its enemies, and eventually Hannibal tears them off.
Ultimately, self-knowledge only really amounts to understanding the roles or armor that one wears, the bits and pieces of who and what you've absorbed or been trained to imitate. This self-knowledge is false. It derives from turning inward the very consumption by which we acquire our armor and construct our selves. To truly see what's underneath, you need someone else to show you. Will says, about Hannibal, "I've never known myself as well as I know myself when I'm with him."
May we all find someone who can show us what we really are.