Hard questions for liberal sensibilities – the play White Noise and its implications

10th October 2021

*Spoiler warning for the play White Noise*

In the play White Noise – currently showing at the Bridge Theatre in London – there is what the programme calls ‘an extreme proposition’.

This blogpost is about that ‘extreme proposition’ – and please only read on if you have seen the play or do not mind the key plot point being spoiled.

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*Spoiler warning for the play White Noise*

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In the play, set in America, the black male character, an artist, proposes to sell himself into temporary slavery to the white male character, a (supposedly) liberal professor.

The play then shows how that transaction affects all involved.

For the liberal professor, for example, slave ownership seems to come naturally, and he swiftly adapts to exercising the ‘rights’ of a slave owner.

Indeed, all four characters swiftly – and convincingly – adapt.

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Watching this play unfold prompted a number of thoughts and recollections.

One was this recent tweet:

https://twitter.com/TweetsByBilal/status/1445681197317689351

The second was reading about the (in)famous Stanford prison experiments and the Milgram experiment where it it appears a number of individuals also adapted quickly to behaviours that were cruel.

The third was an insightful comment by the philosopher Richard Rorty about Nineteen Eighty-four: that the last third of the book makes sense if you see it as not about Winston Smith, but about O’Brien – from the perspective of the torturer, not the tortured.

The fourth was a comment I once heard attributed to another philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, that the most difficult question to put to many British people was whether they would have collaborated with a Nazi occupation.

The fifth was to the valuable work of David Olusoga and others in highlighting how prevalent and routine slave ownership was in the United Kingdom until the 1830s:

This is the incredible research behind this series. Produced by the brilliant team at the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project at the UCL. This is their incredible database that contains the names of all the slave owners at the moment of abolition.
https://t.co/PO89seya5S https://t.co/wPcLNcfSZd

— David Olusoga (@DavidOlusoga) June 12, 2020

And the last thought was about my recent posts on slavery and the lawyers – about how lawyers and other professionals and business people casually provided the infrastructure for the slave trade and widespread slave ownership:

https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1271696745836228608

https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1272069550746546176

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What the play shows is the ease with which notions of slave ownership – and attendant cruelty – can be revived in a contemporary setting.

One of the other characters – a white lawyer – does not prevent this transaction – and indeed her law firm provides a deed of transaction for the parties to sign.

Whether such a transaction would be void under the United States constitution or by reason of public policy is not tested.

For the parties, it is enough that the deed does provide for legal rights and obligations.

The solemn formal legal document says a thing, and so the parties regulate their conduct accordingly.

And, far from the transaction being voided by the law, the play suggests that the police are more respectful of the ‘slave’ – for he is now the property of a white person, and so under his protection.

The law adapts, the law recognises, the law provides.

And so one of the many disturbing points about this extraordinary play is – in addition to the effects on the characters – is the plausibility about how the law – both in terms of the law of property and policing – would let this happen.

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Back in August this blog had a post setting out other areas where the law and lawyers facilitated and facilitate a range of horrible situations.

We are always only a step or two away from the law being there to enable cruelty – indeed, there are many areas of human activity from interrogation and prisons to the treatment of animals – where dreadful things happen out of sight and out of mind, with the full protection of law.

Civil liberties and human rights and humane treatment are all fragile standards.

It is not only ‘other’ people who will clap and cheer at humans being systemically inhumane.

It is not only ‘other’ people who will just carry on with a shrug and without a care at humans being systemically inhumane.

For most of us it will only be noise.

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