What, then, is the relationship between Brown’s critique of Socrates’ “myth” of morality’s independence from power as an illustration of Nietzschean resssentiment, on the one hand, and her subsequent apparent approval of Socrates’ attempt to locate critique at a “right degree of remove” from politics, on the other? At issue, perhaps, is a distinction between a focus on abstract knowledge, and localized critique, or between abstract power and specific political-juridical structures. Nevertheless, the tension between these two formulations would also appear to underscore an inherent contingency in the relationship between power and critique, together with the role of ressentiment in mediating between the two.
These questions of morality’s relationship to power, and the paradoxical nature of ressentiment, together with the logic of exclusion on which it is grounded, are foregrounded particularly clearly in the line of reality shows which itself helped spawn the Pop Idol phenomenon: Survivor — which debuted in Sweden under the name Expedition Robinson in 1997, but spread virally to media markets throughout the world.
As it well-known, the basic premise of Survivor is that 16 or more contestants are placed in some remote location, divided (initially) into two competing “tribes,” instructed to perform challenging tasks, and at the end of each episode one contestant is voted off the show by secret ballot. The process of elimination is particularly pernicious because it has the contestants themselves eliminate one of their own peers (indeed, in the inaugural season of the original Swedish show, the first contestant to be eliminated committed suicide shortly afterwards).
The sinister beauty of the show, however, is that the final winner is selected by a pool of contestants who have been voted off most recently. Therefore, in order to succeed, contestants must not only maneuver to have their peers help vote off their strongest opponents, but furthermore to do so in such a way that, at the time of the final vote, they can capitalize on the sense of injury and ressentiment of those who have already been eliminated.
The classic example of how to walk this line can be found in the figure of the corporate trainer Richard Hatch, the winner of the inaugural (2000) US version. Hatch very aggressively formed coalitions with other contestants, skillfully arranging to have his most dangerous rivals eliminated early. When it came down to him and his last competitor, Kelly Wiglesworth, however, Hatch’s speech to the last seven contestants to be eliminated essentially asked for their vote on the grounds that his actions had been predicated on strategy, rather than morality :
I don't think you really know who I am. I certainly had a strategy and I came to play the game. For me, instead of who's the better person, it is really about who played the game better...My approach to the game has been one of strategy. It certainly didn't turn out according to plan...But I was playing a game. I wouldn't change anything that I did and I trust you will respect what I did to play the game...
This speech is deservedly famous, as it adroitly transposes the excluded contestants’ feeling of frustration and resentment into a tool for Hatch’s own purposes, and effectively elides any distinction between tactics and ethics (an elision which, Brown argues in Edgework, is also characteristic of neoliberalism, as it “submits every aspect of political and social life to economic calculation…”). Indeed, as Hatch himself concludes (with no apparent irony): "I think I played as ethically as is humanly possible."
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