The internet standards document RFC-2196 defines authorization as a granting of privileges to users [1]. Although ‘privilege’ in computer systems is something entirely different from the political sense of social privilege based on unjust social conditions, if we are going to migrate the word authorization from the digital domain into the social and philosophical domain, we have to deal with the equivocity of ‘privilege’. Since the bad sense of privilege is ubiquitous in the academic discourse, let us instead seek the good sense of privilege.

Remember Marx and Engels’s communist slogan: “Workers of the world unite! You have a world to win!” This is a declaration of a privileged class position: If you can assert that you belong to the ranks of the proletariat, you can fulfill your communist destiny and “win the world” by joining the triumphant political flag-bearers. According to this vision, privilege takes a bad sense for (petty) bourgeois individuals but it takes a good sense for the working class as a massive whole. Of course the great problem is that neoliberalism has disintegrated the reality of the world and we can no longer rely on the minimal stability (or even the existence) of the world’s symbolic rules in order to compete as a class, win the political race and establish our truth.

McKenzie Wark distorted the Marxist slogan to obtain his own version: “Workings of the world untie! You have a win to world!” This version expresses radical doubt about the world: We can no longer rely on the world, we have to construct it from scratch. However, the win or gain is re-positioned as something we already have, instead of something our visions about future reach for. So what is this given win, gain or privilege that we already have? What one already has is one’s body [2]: Start from the given true existence of your body and construct the reality of the world from scratch by symbolically combining and joining these existences into a new order.

In Wark’s version, truth and reality have changed places: The Marxist version relies on the reality of class society in order to seek the future truth of communism, whereas Wark’s version relies on the given present truth of our bodies in order to re-construct the symbolic reality of the world. In other words, the Marxist version approaches the problem in a masculine manner, whereas Wark’s version approaches the problem in a feminine manner [3]. The common denominator of these two approaches is the acknowledgement of the separation between reality and truth.

The truth of the privilege of having a body admits a certain mythologization: God or Nature has granted us the privilege of having our bodies either for an unknown purpose or entirely contingently without any meaning or purpose. In this mythology, God vs. Nature is reflected in the presence vs. absence of purpose. I call these two aspects Exigency vs. Enjoyment respectively. The truth is that the privilege is enjoyed, but the reality makes it exigent that this privilege be granted. In this way, Enjoyment supports the truth of embodiment and Exigency supports the reality of authorization [4].

Maybe the best example of the separation between the exigency of authorization and the enjoyment of embodiment is the separation between the writers and the actors/actresses of a TV show. The actors/actresses are the ones who embody the enjoyment of the show, but their acting does not happen naturally, they must follow the script, they must be authorized by the writers. On the other hand, the writers are the ones who authorize the exigencies of the show, but they cannot play god and fully design the reality, because the script must conform to the engagement capacities of the actors/actresses. In this separation between authorization and embodiment, the writers’ position is somewhat masculine, whereas the actors/actresses’ position is somewhat feminine. In this example, acting is the privilege and writing is the granting of that privilege. It’s crucial that these two aspects are separate as well as dependent.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Towards a Contemporary Philosophy of Authorization”

[2] See “Authority, Body, Will, System, Desire, Malfunction and the Coronavirus”

[3] See “Masculine and Feminine: Truth, Reality and Semblances”, “Masculine and Feminine Marxism”

[4] See “Theory stages the entropy of the true truth”