Asserting psychology overrides reifies contingent tendencies---humans are socialized into racism.

If the second order of politics in the age of the spectacle is to harvest our attention and seduce us into desiring our own oppression, our task is to [End Page 220] recognize our own shameful compromises with the spectacle. This requires modes of critical reflection which not only forces us to be alert to the ways in which our attentions might be harvested by the seduction of violent images, but how we might be co-opted by forms of depraved aesthetics that debase the political subject. We need to learn to live with violence less through the modality of the sacred than through the critical lens of the profane. By this we mean that we need to appreciate our violent histories and how our subjectivities have been formed through a history of physical bloodshed. This requires more of a willingness to interrogate violence in a variety of registers (ranging from the historical and concrete [registers] to the abstract and symbolic) than it does a bending to the neoliberal discourses of fate and normalization. We need to acknowledge our own seductions with the varied forces of violence. And we need to accept that intellectualism and the ideas it generates, the imaginaries it creates, and the visions of the world it endorses shares an intimate relationship with violence both in its complicity with violence and as an act of violence. Having said this, we cannot divorce here the idea of the desiring subject of violence from wider systemic relations and historical configurations. Too often, the mediation of suffering through the formal qualities of tolerability and design are presented as matter of personal pleasure and taste rather than part of a broader engaged social-political discourse. This all too easily leads to questions of individual pathology altogether removed from any sense of the conditions that give rise to libidinal investments. If we are to have a better picture of the debasement of the human subject, we need to address the relationships between individual desires, representations of human suffering, humiliation and death as part of a wider economy of pleasure that is collectively indulged. As decadence and despair are normalised in the wider culture—though this is very different from accomplished in the goal to remove all dissent—people are increasingly exploited for their pleasure quotient while any viable notion of the social is subordinated to the violence of a deregulated market economy and its production of cultures of cruelty.