• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Welcome to Phil’s Website
  • Phil’s Blogs
  • Projects Map
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Newsletter
  • Contact Phil’s Website

Phil Cohen Works

  • Autobiography
  • Poetics and Other Arts
  • East London and Post Olympics
  • Generation and Gender
  • Mapping the Pandemic
  • Race Class and Imagined Community
  • The Cultural Politics of Knowledge
  • Living Maps – Critical Cartographies of the City

ON LIVING IN A GREY ZONE

March 15, 2023 by philco

This text is an introduction to  Waypoints Volume 2 ,  a new collection of occasional writings  from the last five years due to be published  in the Autumn by eyeglass books.

INTRODUCTION : ON LIVING IN A GREY ZONE

Taking sides

On the day I am writing this the following happened :  I heard that a friend of mine , a life long smoker, had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. My son was rushed to hospital with a heart attack . Russia sent missiles to destroy a residential home for pensioners in  the Donetsk region of Ukraine, killing 42 and seriously injuring  another 60.  The case of a women raped by a police officer finally came to court , whilst 30 other sexual violence   cases in the same town   were not prosecuted; A Jewish cemetery in East London was desecrated for the third time this year. A white gunman opened fire in a school  in a black neighbourhood in the USA, killing five children and the security guard.  Across the world floods  and fires linked to global  warming  destroyed  nearly two thousand homes and made thousands of people homeless.  108 men , women and children crossed the channel in small boats seeking asylum   in Britain, two died and the remainder were housed in squalid conditions pending being sent to Rwanda . Meanwhile in  Ukania 38 people attempted suicide, ten succeeded, including one refugee being held in a detention centre. A report into the treatment of autistic children in residential care concluded that many of them had suffered physical abuse over many years. Another report into social inequality headlined the fact that the gap between rich and poor , in terms of health and well being, had increased exponentially  since 2008. A government survey showed that 44% of the British population had experienced chronic pain for more than two years of their lives, and that 67%of school students aged between 11 and 14  experienced depression and anxiety about their future prospects.

It was not a good day at what passes for my office!. One of the questions which any such list of catastrophes raises is  whether or how to scale them in importance .  Obviously my son’s heart attack  assumes the greatest personal significance. But it also raises a question about  the current crisis in the National Health Service – he would have died if the ambulance had  got there  an hour later, and arrival times vary considerably from area to area. He was lucky to live where he did.   Equally the lives and livelihoods of people inhabiting areas  already being devasted by  climate change are being literally uprooted. Each calamity is experienced asan  intensely first personal singular event   but it  is always part of a wider political situation  , albeit one not always perceived as such.

To be subjected  to  such a  daily dose of   disaster both large and small, carries with it  a  health warning:  take  sparingly unless you want to feel hopeless and helpless under the weight of the world’s oppression, or  unless you have already rendered yourself immune to feeling or thinking  about such events, in which case why bother to find out about them?.  

What does it mean today to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing  try to end them?. Contemporary audiences, schooled in the neo-liberal catechisms of possessive individualism,   tend to be impatient with Hamlet’s vacillation and the kinds of ambivalence which immobilises him. Why doesn’t he just re-invent himself, get over it  and move on ? However as soon as we   go  beyond existential angst at the state of the world, and try  to do something concretely about it, we often find  ourselves in a   space where things are more complicated  than simple  binary oppositions : to be or not to be on the right-or left – side of history.

For example, It is easy enough , especially for those on the ‘Left’,  to  enumerate our current political  afflictions : the climate emergency, the geopolitical drift to a new world war,  the obscene concentrations of wealth and power, sexism, racism,   etc etc.. And  to take sides, if not arms ,  against them. But  not only is it increasingly hard to stay with these troubles without feeling overwhelmed by their  concatenation , it is  even more difficult   to  sustain  forms of collective opposition which stand a  realistic chance of ending them. We can all be rhetorically  on the side of the people of Ukraine in their heroic resistance  against Putin’s villainous attempt to annex their country  as part of a new Russian Empire. But does anyone really have a clue about what can be done to bring the war to a just conclusion ?  Almost everyone is nominally enrolled  in the fight  against global heating , but most of us are heavily addicted to patterns of consumption which accelerate it.  Those who are wealthy enough to live ‘off grid’  in their luxury bunkers will find their every comfort catered for by the entrepreneurs of ‘disaster capitalism’ , while  those whose  ‘anti-capitalism’   does not extend to refusing their digital devices  are  involuntarily  implicated  in the commodification of data which fuels platform capitalism’s  dynamic growth.

In  the new uncertainty principles  which currently govern  outcomes , it is not just that  actions undertaken in good faith may have unintended and negative  consequences ( or none at all!) but  that this opens up a frame of reference in which those acting in bad faith can  blur crucial distinctions  between what is progressive and what is reactionary, what is in the  best interests of the many and what serves to legitimate the privileges of the few , what is  a moral and what  an immoral economy.  When  such demarcations are no longer being clearly  articulated  in everyday political discourse and are instead replaced by euphemisms, equivocations, or  disavowals,  a vacuum opens up which is increasingly filled by  free floating denunciatory rhetorics, often with  a populist slant .  Against this backdrop the  current proliferation of conspiracy theories can be regarded as an understandable if   delusional attempt to reinstate  Manichaean  moral    distinctions as vectors of  social and ideological challenge  :  to feel emboldened  to call a spade a spade if only  because it is being manipulated by a ‘hidden hand’. 

The proponents of adversarial politics tend to hold to a  somewhat similar ‘two legs bad, four legs good’’ Manichaeism;  their struggle is to de-construct an imagined  ‘centre ground’   through strategies of asymmetrical polarisation to either ‘Left ‘ or ‘Right’, with the  aim of  dissolving grey areas  into a clear cut ‘black and white’ configuration of the issues.  For good or  ill, the messy complicated, ever shifting  web of  situated alliances and oppositions   that constitutes the contemporary  realpolitik   is not easily fitted into   the procrustean bed of a  fixed political geography centered on binary system of representation.  To call this a ‘crisis of representation ‘ is an altogether too abstract way of referring to the multiple disjunctures  between the existing maps and actual territories  of political allegiance in Western democracies.

  A somewhat similar problematic   can be found at work  in the more toxic and authoritarian  brands of identity politics with their moral, symbolic and doctrinaire takes on who is and who is not a victim or perpetrator of injustice. .  In so far as this standpoint  reduces the fluidity of social identifications to the interplay of  fixed  binary categories  viz  women /gay/ black people  equals  good ;  male/ heteronormative/white people-equals   bad , this world turned upside down tends to reproduce the emotional logics of  domination even as it challenges or reverses the  terms and conditions of subordination . For example it was  normal practice in the anti-racist meetings I used to attend for victims of racial violence  (e.g. by the police) to give graphic descriptions of  their brutalisation at the hands of the authorities. This testifying was certainly therapeutic for the speakers in restoring  their sense of voice and agency, but for the  listeners  who strongly identified with them , it was anything but. For now the boot was metaphorically on the other foot, and it was our turn to feel speechless and helpless, as we were‘beaten up’ by  the interlocutor’s detailing  of  injuries  received.

Such practices  anticipated  a shift in the  centre of gravity of public debate over race away  from a   celebration of ‘multicultural values’ , mixed  race relationships and the virtue signalling of cultural hybridity ( as in  two tone music)  towards  a re-assertion of  essentialised  or inherited identities  whose boundaries are  fixed to binary racial codes. According to this world view there is no more grey zone, everything is resolvable into black and white.

 In stark contrast, gender politics  has moved in the opposite direction, completely uncoupling cultural and biological  identities , and  attempting to render the latter as  fluid and mutable as the former.   In what we might call the pro-nominal revolution ,  the binary code which hitherto  sent children to  separate  destinies according to  fixed definitions of male or female have been performatively dissolved.  Now we can   decide to be interpellated as s/he or him/her,  we can pluralise  our selves as  they , or be a gender neutral  me or ‘it’.  Gender  has thus become a major new grey zone, a site of radical experimentation  as well as existential confusion and  moral panic[1].

Nevertheless  beyond  the social plasticity of immediate modes of address,  at  a deeper , more intimate,  level of  discourse, in the body language and imagery  associated with sexual roles and  rules , we  find binary  oppositions still  firmly in place ; on gay dating apps for example , although ‘versatile’ and ‘bi-curious’ are growing in popularity as self designations,  , the familiar distinctions  top/bottom, butch/femme , dom/sub are still very much in use. And now , of course they have been joined and partially subsumed by another:  ‘trans’ and ‘cis’ .  The language of desire remains stubbornly non-binary.

Being In two minds

When we move from the front lines to the backyards of social conflict we often find ourselves trapped in a rather different kind of binarism , one which Gregory Bateson famously defined as a double bind,  in which ’we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t’.  As Bateson showed If we  find ourselves being continuously wrong footed by contradictory  responses to our communications we  may well begin to doubt or feel dissociated from what we intend to mean . This is only an extreme version of everyday quandaries if which we are unsure of how  our actions or words are being interpreted by others , what their import or impact is ,  and what or whose advice  to follow.

 it is easy then  to forget that to be in  two minds  is actually a quite normal state of affairs and reflects a  simple neurological fact : the operation of the limbic system  is intimately entangled with  that of the pre-frontal cortex;  it is literally  a no- brainer to recognise that  our emotional and  rational impulses, the expressive and  instrumental dimensions of our  interaction with the material world , are intimately connected ,  and  continually and contingently generate  feelings of ambivalence whenever they are simultaneously mobilised.

In one sense, then, we are all double agents, working on both sides of whatever  lines are drawn in the shifting sands of our lives and times. According to  circumstances ( over which we may have little or no control) we may be capable of  acting  generously or meanly, behave with  kindness or cruelty,  display bravery or cowardice.  We are fully  capable of holding two quite contradictory beliefs, without experiencing  any cognitive dissonance.  We want to have our cake and eat it.

If ‘being in two  minds ‘ persists as a description of  our political ambivalences , then in my view it is not    because of some  principle of undecidability  built into the very fabric of  human existence  (to be  or not to be)    or  because  there are so many states of affairs   which are  equally probable and improbable, or , from another standpoint, neither possible nor impossible .  I think we remain split   in our responses to situations  for so  much of the time  because of the ever  widening gap between what is desirable and what is achievable  in terms of both  political and personal outcomes .

In the capitalist West we are continually being encouraged  to want and to be more and more,  whilst  many of us experience our  basic human needs and demands being  less and less satisfied. So at one moment we cling on to the hope that our situation will improve , while at the next we are in despair and feel that everything is going from bad to worse in ways we cannot fully fathom or control .  This principle of bi-polarity, of false  or manic optimism coupled  with  chronic but precipitate  despair  is the emotional logic of late capitalism.

For example current scenarios of environmental crisis feature narratives of both Incipient  Doom , (we are living in the End Times) , and the Dawn of a New Age.  Both can be found in the  bunkering down strategies  of the Super Rich  and  the extra-terrestrial  projects of the ‘transhumanists’ . Meanwhile  those who live  on the other side of the social tracks   and cannot afford to entertain such escapist fantasies , have to conjure up  principles of hope from their own limited  resources in order to  defend themselves against  the insidious   impact ofa  chronic poverty of choice.

 To understand the latter response I think we need to connect  the notion of bi-polarity to the concept of double consciousness . The term  was first coined by W Du Bois in his  analysis of the complicated  position of   African Americans: their experience of slavery and racial oppression gave them a critical insight  into the living nightmare which underpins the so -called American dream, even and especially if  they aspired to be part of it.  The concept was subsequently further elaborated by Antonio Gramsci in relation to class :  working class people might internalise many of the dominant values and beliefs of bourgeois society , for example about meritocracy and the notion that that ‘anyone can make it if they really try’ . As a result they tend to blame themselves  if they  fail to improve their  lot or to pass on better life chances to their children. Yet their own material   conditions of life and labour gives them a quite different  perspective, one which recognises the inherent injustice of a political economy which rewards a few with great wealth and power while so many struggle to make ends meet  and feel powerless to do anything about it.  

The grey zone is  not populated by rich escapologists or impoverished  revolutionaries , there is no place for Utopianism here .  It  is  inhabited   by those who want to have their cake and eat it ( for example people who vote for lower taxes and want better public services)   andthose who know that this is impossible but choose instead  to  hold out for a few crumbs which may fall from the cake eaters table.[2]  In terms of political choices, grey zoners tend typically  to want to have the best of both worlds; they want  to combine the best features of capitalism  ( its technological dynamism) and socialism ( its historical project of egalitarianism)   whilst eliminating their downsides( (structural inequalities/ authoritarian command and control systems). The great fear of grey zoners is that they may end up having the worst of all possible worlds.

In the past  it  was possible for the commentariat to sit on the ideological  fence on such issues with at least a semblance of equilibrium, whether in the name of ‘objectivity’ ‘ neutrality’ or ‘seeing both sides of the argument’, or even by saying  ‘a plague on both your houses’ . Today in many contexts that notional ‘third space ‘is not a credible option. Who apart from climate deniers can in all honesty  assert that there are two sides to the argument about climate change when the science is so overwhelmingly on the side of acknowledging  the damage caused by fossil fuels?  

If mass  indecision  persists in the face of such  decisive facticities   it is not just down to  apathy , resignation    or whatever of the hundreds of good  and  bad reasons people may have for doing nothing while the world goes up in flames.  It is  because  political decisions  always imply  a leap into the unknown  and the more these unknowns are known about , the more frightened and anxious  people become and the greater the urge to foreclose on the painful and complicated process needed to address them.  Easier to believe that God or Gaia is punishing us for mismanaging the planet’s resources, than to do anything to mitigate the  crisis of global heating.

Under our present conditions of radical un/certainty , there can never be any guarantees that we are embarked on the right course of action. Which is why   we invent fictional ones.   That is the work that pollical ideologies do , especially those  that give a   teleological twist to the tall stories they tell  : they replace debilitating fears of the unknown with motivational  faith in  re-assuring outcomes. By no coincidence the most popular (and populist) versions of these grand narratives  answer to a widespread but   disavowed desire to magically close the gap between what is desirable and what is achievable.  Nevertheless that gap or grey zone persists and continues to overshadow even the most resolute and self confident programmes of action. At best It offers a space for the micro-management of chaotic synchronicities, at worst a context  for their implosion. 

Lessons from the grey zone

We use the  term ‘grey zone’ to describe  issues or situations of conflict   in which there are no clear cut  zero sum outcomes , no final winner and losers,   and/ or where our moral   vocabulary  does not adequately capture their complexity.  But what about  when we are not just dealing with  conflicting subject positions but  contradictory structural locations over which we have little or  no choice and control?   

The term grey  zone was originally made famous by  Primo Levi  in his 1971   essay  about the culture of Nazi concentration  camps[3]. The essay   argued that it was in the character  of coercive regimes to not only  brutalise those subjected to them through direct violence, torture  and terror  but by  enabling  some of its  victims to collaborate and even identify with their oppressors. This  could involve carrying out   beatings and other punishments , or routine administrative tasks which kept the machinery .of oppression going .  Whether those who were recruited for such roles did so to secure  minimal privileges for themselves or in the belief that they could mitigate  some of the regime’s  worst effect on fellow inmates, Levi argued that their ambiguous status , as at once perpetrator and victim of institutionalised violence  did not absolve them from judgement, even if it added to what  had to be taken into account in making .

Just how complicated this grey zone can become was explored with  great precision in  the recent  film Persian Lessons. The film, directed by Vadim Perelman,  is an adaptation of a story by Wolfgang Kohlhass  and  is believed to be based on true events. It   takes place in an unnamed  Nazi concentration camp, and pivots on the relationship between  the camp deputy commandment ,Koch, and a French  Jewish prisoner , Gilles.  At the selection, Koch asks  the new prisoners if there is anyone from Persia . It turns out he has a dreamsof opening a restaurant in Tehran after the war and wants to learn Farsi. To avoid being sent to the gas chambers,  Gilles says his name is Reza and he is Persian not Jewish. Koch offers him a job in  his office as a book keeper, copying the names of all the new prisoners , except those crossed out who have died in transit.  After work  the ‘Persian’ lessons begin.

The pathos of the relationship between the two men  comes from  the process of sentimental education   that  unfolds  between them within the fragile envelope of the lesson . Gilles/Reza  , who  of course, does not speak a word of Farsi, has to create    a substitute language  and demonstrate his facility in it .  In that sense they   are both beginners  and members of the same imaginary speech community.  Beyond that they  become dependant on each other  for the dream of an alternative future . For Reza too might  now hope to survive  the camp and return to a post- war world in which running a small business  and enjoying  the ordinary pleasures of life might once again become possible. 

Yet of course their relationship  is a lie, it is based on  disavowal and deceit  Gilles is not Reza, and  Koch is learning a fake language, one whose ‘mastery’ will  ultimately unmask the false identity he hopes to assume by learning to speak it.    Reza/Gilles deploys all the subtle arts of the confidence trickster, flattery, expressions of empathy  etc to persuade Koch that  their tutelary relationship is genuine ;there is even a momentary hint that  he is beginning to believe in it himself, until he is brutally bought back to reality  when he is beaten by Koch for stepping out of line. His  success in winning Koch’s trust is confirmed when  the latter becomes so invested  in the lessons  that he ignores warnings from his fellow officers,  who have become suspicious of this ‘special relationship’ ,that Reza is not what he seems and is really a Jew , a race who , they point out is  well known for its cunning and  duplicity .  In a key subplot, one of  the  other inmates , who is jealous of Reza’s ‘privileges’ and is planning to denounce him , is murdered   by Reza’s friend  before he can betray him.

At the end of the film Koch tries to  save Reza/Gilles as  the Americans forces close in on the camp and the remaining prisoners are either shot on the spot or marched off to  a no less certain death .   Yet  he is not that contradiction in terms , ‘a good Nazi’. He is a Nazi  who deludes himself into thinking that he can re-invent himself as something other than what he has become , and who enlists someone who  is also pretending to be someone he is not  as an accomplice in this project. This is not a folie a deux.  Reza and Koch are not ‘trading places’.  Reza has no illusions about what would happen to him if his true identity is exposed whereas Koch has no idea that he will be unable to pass himself off as a Farsi  speaker and start a new life in Tehran after the war is over.

The device which dramatically subverts  the false  equation between the Nazi and Jew is the mnemonic system which Gilles/Reza invents   when , as a test of his credentials,  he is tasked by Koch with translating forty German words into ‘Farsi’ and  then  repeating them from memory.  He  hits upon the idea of cross tabulating  his made- up  words with the crossed out names of the  prisoners who have died. In that way he both manages to pass his test  and to store  a detailed   inventory of  the victims’ names in his head.

The film ends with Koch at Tehran airport being questioned by immigration officials. He tries to  supplement his fake passport by  reeling off  the phrases   Raza has taught him   to  prove he is  an authentic  Persian,  only of course to be  betrayed by the gobbledegook he is uttering . As he is lead away we cut   to Gilles/Reza  who is reciting the names from the ledger  to a team  documenting  Nazi war crimes . So  he  has the last laugh on his tormentor.

Much has been made of the film’s memory politics – its stress on the importance of keeping  the record  of the Holocaust alive  to ensure justice for its victims  and so that this  terrible history never repeats itself.   From my perspective the unusual significance of this story is that it  illustrates a central feature of  transactions within  a grey zone. The  blurring of the distinction between  perpetrator and victim of oppression is initially achieved  through an apparent symmetry of positions,   but this  ‘equality’ in fact  conceals  and legitimates the structural asymmetry of power  relations which silently govern the  whole transaction .  In this example ,the two impostures are not equivalent either morally or sociologically. Gillles  disavowal of his Jewish identity is a strategy of  individual survival in the face of  mass  extermination which also manages to document it. Whereas in the case of  Koch it is an  attempt to evade responsibility for his war crimes. So we are not talking about a ‘folie a deux’ , or a  case  of ‘trading places’, even at the level of fantasy.

 As the story unfolds its centre of gravity gradually  shifts from the initial dichotomy of situations , to the shared  intimacy of the lesson and then at the end back again to the divergent paths of the two protagonists.  This is a journey into , across and beyond the grey zone in which the stark  contrast  between the lives of the camp  officers  and the inmates, is supplemented  by a grisaille   effect, a  play of light and shade in which finer  judgements about the characters can be finally  made.[4]

  In reality there can be no guarantee of such an outcome.  If  his plan had not worked  out  Gilles /Reza would have simply  been condemned as a collaborator. Yet collaboration  also  raises  complicated moral and sociological  issues. In wartime  it is a treasonable act, punishable by death under most jurisdictions. But the term itself covers an enormous range of actions, from sharing  secret information with the enemy  to sharing ones body and bed with them. Collaborators may be active accomplices and supporters  of the enemy cause; they may have been blackmailed  or otherwise pressurised into reluctantly adopting such a role ; they may  simply be behaving opportunistically in the belief they will end up on the winning side. The question of motivation cannot be entirely excluded from the final judgement, even if it is not the  decisive factor.

It is worth emphasising again that In grey zones we do not find an actual symmetry of  positions , as, for example,  in competitive mirroring behaviour    where one actor’s  boast or threat  or flattery is capped by a counter move of the same kind ,  leading to escalation within  the same  mimetic frame What we find instead is a masquerade of power centred on  the dis/simulation of  complimentary acts, So  transactions in which the  stronger and more assertive  one party becomes , the more submissive and weaker  the other,   are bracketed  or mis labelled , and treated as if  they are part of a game of mutual seduction , as in sado-masochistic relationships, or mystified  as a form of negative reciprocity if which each is other for the other. The underlying power structure remains intact even as it is plagiarised or travestied.   That is why grey zones are so frequently inhabited by trickster figures, who  know how to exploit the  arrogance of wealth and power and use their wits to turn the tables on their masters so that ‘loser wins’.  But it is also why the principle of mastery, however it is secured ( via the state , the economy or cultural hegemony )  survives  intact precisely n and through its apparent subversion.. 

The philosophically inclined might like to note that we are  not talking here about some dialectical resolution of  a  life and death struggle for mutual recognition between rival actors as in  the Hegeli’s Master/Bondsman paradigm. It is certainly   the case that Koch and Gilles/Reza needed each other , and used the  other as a means to their  different ends.  But we are not  dealing here with moral choices which can be judged according to some fixed code of human rights and wrongs  as defined by  universal ethical values , a la Kant. Rather what we are having to grapple with  are locally  situated   dilemmas whose terms and conditions are negotiable and may change over time as a result of our actions or inactions, as well as from  changing circumstances beyond our control. When the jury is  being enrolled  to come up with  a verdict  in such contexts  deontologists need not apply!

The interplay of affinities and enmities within a grey zone is  also rarely straightforward . And not just in cases of conflicting loyalties.  It is easy enough to be allies  if  you share a common enemy  even if you do not like what your ally stands for (Viz Russia in WW2) . By the same token the enemy of your enemy  is , grosso modo,  your friend , even if you have nothing in common with them except that enmity. So , for example , sections of the European Left are hostile to NATO, which they see as the arm of US imperialism ; as a result they  have produced an apologetics for Putin’s  invasion of Ukraine , following his line that Russia has been pushed into that action in response to  the threat of  NATO expansionism . And after all everyone knows  the best form of defence is attack! !n this way those who pride themselves on their fight  for justice on behalf of oppressed groups around the world  , find themselves  tacitly or openly supporting  Russian Imperialism and the murderous  assault it has unleashed  on the Ukrainian civilian population. In the grey zone the path to hell is frequently  paved with good intentions.  

There is another sense in which the conflict in Ukraine  can be considered a prime example of a  contemporary grey zone. One of the more transferable aspects of Levi’s  concept comes from  its highlighting  the way  State actors i.e. those officially  appointed and employed by the State  to prosecute its  policies , often make use of unofficial or non- State proxies  to carry out some of their dirty work for them.  This has led to its  more recent adoption by military strategists  to denote situations of armed conflict which are neither all out war  nor  secure peace, but where  a range of actors , both  civilian  and military, irregular militias, ‘special forces’ etc  , operate clandestinely to conduct  what is called ‘hybrid’ or  ‘asymmetrical ‘operations. This euphemism refers to a range of tactics designed to  weaponise social and ethnic divisions,    undermine the morale of the local population  , and destabilise existing forms of democratic governance. Prior to its full scale ‘limited military operation’ Russia was deploying  just such tactics in the Crimea and the Donbas over many years. However  this initiative ran into   Ukraine’s  own special  apparatus of unofficial militias,  business  gangsterism and  corrupt administrators . The  resulting chaotic engagement   of these forces on the ground   have been brilliantly chronicled by  Andrej Kurkov  in his novel  Grey Bees, Even in the grey zone it still takes two to tangle .    

In the twilight of the earth  all moles are grey

Levi’s  model of the grey zone  serves  to complicate unilateral models  of domination /subordination as well as deontological codes of ethics. It  highlights the  inter-personal  and  institutional  relations  which can often mediate  victim/ perpetrator relations and render them perverse.   His  concept  has subsequently been applied to analysing the culture of  the Soviet Gulag, to relations between house and field ‘niggers’ and overseers on  slave plantations ,  to  inmate hierarchies in contemporary  penitentiaries and to the position of foremen  in large  industrial  factories and logistics centres. Even to the prefect system of ‘faggng’ in English public schools.

As a result of this expanded  take up , the definition of ‘grey zone’, the limits and conditions of its appropriate usage , has itself become a site  of  ambiguity  and contention.  Surely we need to distinguish  between  Kapos in Auschwitz beating fellow inmates to death for  some minor transgression  and public school prefects beating a ‘fag’ for failing to polish their  shoes , even if both can be considered examples of institutionalised sadism?   Similarly   guerrilla campaigns to protect  indigenous communities against land grabs by logging companies should not be compared to  cyber attacks on corporate  information infrastructures by criminal hackers ; equally   the actions of  the  Wagner group of mercenaries  against civilians in Ukraine   should not be discussed in the same frame  of judgement as the actions of  volunteer civil  militias mustered to defend their homes against  such attacks unless they too have committed atrocities . The fact that both can  be equally  considered non- State actors is a necessary but not sufficient condition for bracketing them together.

The danger  in such   diverse usage   is that it conflates  a whole lot of disparate  situations   reducing them to a lowest common denominator of being ‘borderline’ or ‘non-normative’ in a way that tacitly erases key moral and strategic  distinctions  that need to be made. Perhaps then we need to find another term to define the position of those who are  caught up  as perpetrators in the most egregious examples of human rights abuse. We might call  them anthropocidal exterminators in so far as  the effect of their actions or inactions, whether intended or not,  is to help  systematically destroy the grounds of human  solidarity which might make other options possible, including for themselves.

 In contrast we might  reserve the term   ‘grey zoners’  for those   who find themselves trapped in   contradictory subject  positions  as a result  of   interventions by  the State into the life of  civil society, operations  which aim to identify, isolate and ‘pacify’ groups regarded as an ‘enemy within’  through a   mixture of legal and extra-legal means.  The  perceived threat posed by such groups is often linked to  their characterisation as o  ‘moles’ undermining the foundations and territorial integrity of the body politic, as they burrow away underground, only then to  suddenly  and unpredictably   emerge throwing up ‘earthworks’  which  disrupt   the   smooth  administration  of the control society. The  role of the moral panics which are frequently orchestrated around such groups is indeed to make mountains out of these molehills, by dissolving their specific instances  into   scenarios  of  generic existential  threat.   The real crime of these ‘enemies within‘ is not the danger they pose to   homeland security    but that their very  existence  challenges  the state’s   claim to be creating a level playing field  in which all are treated equally under the law.

Take, for  example, the  Tory government’s current ‘Prevent’ strategy which is designed to intervene  in British Muslim communities  to stop the radicalisation of its youth  and to  de-radicalise  those who have already identified with the doctrines of  Wahabism , or the evangelical mission of al- Quaeda and Isis. The programme set up Muslim leaders, teachers,  youth workers and community elders  to monitor and report  on their own children and students.  They may well  initially have  taken on this role willingly ,  if only to performatively dissociate themselves and their communities from these extreme versions of Islam,  to demonstrate that  they are  good Muslims as well as loyal  British citizens. But they too will   have experienced Islamophobia  and racist attacks  in this country , and some at least may well have had sympathy with the reasons why  some young British Muslims might be drawn to join such organisations as way of ‘fighting back’.  Many of the participants in the programme  have indeed  come to see  Prevent as part of the problem not the solution in so far as it treats all young Muslims as potential terrorists and alienates the youth even further .  So far so grey zone. But if and when someone actually joins Isis or al-Qaeda and commits atrocities   against ‘ the infidel’ in the name of Allah , then they join the ranks of anthropocidal exterminators and  their actions put them beyond exoneration, however much they may  have been victims of racism in the UK .   

Interventions such as Prevent  have  been greatly facilitated by the development of new technologies of mass  surveillance which have  enabled practices  previously confined to military operations  to be  systematically  embedded in  the policing  and governance of whole populations  of citizenry ‘for their own protection and good’.[5]  So there are  declared wars against poverty,  crime and drugs which have the outcome of  criminalising , demonising   and incarcerating  various kinds of ‘dangerous class’  The use of such illiberal measures  in liberal democracies has  been achieved not just by mobilising populist  rhetorics  against ‘outsiders’  but by  winning the  consent  of a substantial number of those who are potentially their target; these groups may be anxious to  draw the line under their own feet and  distance themselves from  ‘bad actors’ in their own communities.  Even more insidiously , such measures draw in and implicate a whole lot of otherwise ‘liberal’  actors  in their administration; for  example  doctors and teachers become  unpaid border guards  reporting on the  behaviour or  attitudes of immigrants and other groups  regarded by the authorities as potentially forming a fifth column .  Whether such roles are undertaken willingly or not, in good faith or bad, they inhabit a special kind of grey zone created by the fog of undeclared civil wars.  

Neither subtle dialectics nor crude thoughts

In  the era of what Naomi Klein has nicknamed ‘disaster capitalism’,[6] states of partial exception have emerged in which civil rights are routinely suspended for  targeted groups;  a new strategy of crisis management has been developed  in which its implementation is outsourced to  private corporations.   These administer  various kinds of shock therapy to the body politic  designed to strengthen its immune system  against both internal and external threats. By no coincidence over the same period we have seen the parallel emergence of conspiracy theories featuring the semi clandestine operations of these  same corporate  interests ; in these narratives, which can be found on the Left  as well as the Alt-Right  the  particularities of different crises ( soco-economic,  environmental, health, geo-political )  are subsumed  within a totalising  frame which attributes them  to a single , hidden , over arching agency.

As an example of this tendency it is worth considering the Gray Zone  news platform. It styles itself as a project of investigative journalism  and its focus is on  stories which  disclose  a ‘world wide web’ of US imperialism in action;  its hidden hand I at work everywhere  fomenting disorder wherever there are conflicts  whether directly or indirectly through proxy organisations like NATO . There is a special emphasis on its current  role in Ukraine,  presented here as a  site of   rampant neo-fascism   and mafia style political corruption .  Current stories  include ‘ Neo-Nazi  Terror Threat grows as Ukrainian fighters jailed in France’ -‘Ukraine media ask  who should be next after car bomb kills Russian writer’ and ‘How Nato states sponsored Putin’s arrest warrant’  . It can ,of course, be argued that this is a salutary corrective  to the Western media’s perspective  which  offers a sanitised , not to say idealised,  portrait of Ukraine’s political culture .  However the fact that Putin’s  ‘causus belli’  narrative is being  tacitly endorsed , with  no mention   of the war crimes committed by his forces, or the explicitly Imperialist  ambition which drives this ‘limited military operation’ , means that  the actual grey zone which exists in the  fog of  this or any war  is  effectively ignored and replaced by  a   white washing exercise in favour of one side in the conflict.

To understand what is going on in any grey zone , we need instead to develop  a method of critical investigation which eschews subtle dialectics as much as crude thoughts , and stays   with the trouble  long enough  to  disentangle its varied  elements  without hierarchising them   according to some  a priori principle of causation . If is always Jewish finance capitalism or US Imperialism or the White power structure   what dunnit,  then, the question of how , loses salience   . and what ‘it’ is   remains obscure.

 Addressing those questions  is the ethnographer’s stock in trade ..But however valuable it is to  document and validate the stories, perceptions and experiences  of those immediately caught up in such  front line  conflicts    that is far from the end of the story.  Only the wearer may  know where  and how the shoe pinches,  but it is in the nature of pain to reduce its awareness to the  immediate sensation.  So  the why  questions remain , especially in the grey zone .  Cue for conspiracy theories, of course, but also   for Left field analysis. What follows is an attempt to contribute to the latter.


[1] When Freud enunciated his famous  golden  rule ‘There where It was I shall be’  he was convinced  that the polymorphous perversity associated with  our earliest narcissistic   object relations    would  normally  be replaced by an  ego ideal  conforming our desires to the reality  principles of patriarchal society, and   that transgressive desires would either be successfully  sublimated or   issue in psycho-pathology.  Today, however , the rubric has been reversed :. It now reads  There where I was It shall be’  . ’where It’ now signifies not the  instinctual drives  but their neutralisation.

[2] Anything it seems rather than risk changing the mode of cake production and distribution  so that  there  might be enough cake to go round for everyone to have an equal slice! Or might not. There is always the danger of  ending up with  little or  no cake at all.

[3] The text appears in a collection of essays originally published in 1989. See  Primo Levi The Drowned and the Saved Abacus 2013i

[4] Grisaille  refers to  a monochrome effect  in painting   produced by a subtle  mixing of black and white, while avoiding the  cruder and more dramatic contrasts achieved  by chiaroscuro.    The  negative connotations of  grey, its  association with desolation, fog , monotony, chronic depression and, of course, ageing ,have tended to obscure or over-ride the  aesthetic and moral possibilities    . contained in the concept   for exploring the phenomenology of complex conflicts.    

[5] For a discussion of this see Stephen Graham Cities Under Siege : the new military urbanism Verso 2010

[6] See Naomi Klein The Shock doctrine :the rise of disaster capitalism  Verso  2016 and Arthur Loewenstein   Disaster Capitalism: making  a killing out of catastrophe Verso 2019

IVerso 2019

Filed Under: Phil's Blog

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • Phil Cohen Funeral

    December 1, 2024
    Sadly Phil Cohen died on November 7th 2024. Funeral details and a link to his obituary can be found here...
  • Phil Cohen Obituary

    November 27, 2024
    Phil Cohen 1943-2024  Professor Phil Cohen, radical activist, cultural theorist, memoirist, poet and urban ethnographer, has died aged 81. ‘When I first met Phil Cohen,’ recalls Dr Toby Butler, ‘he was professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Fizzing with ideas, he drew together an astonishing array of artists, academics and policy […]
  • WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT ALWAYS WHAT YOU GET : A DOUBLE TAKE ON THE UK ELECTION  2024 

    July 15, 2024
    Note: These two short pieces written after the June 4th election result ,  are  extracted from a  collection of essays , Studies in the Grey Zone, due to be published by eyeglass books in October. Take One:  One Nation Labourism and the Great Moving Right Show The question of just how and from where, and […]
  • Waypoints 2

    March 27, 2024
    Publication date: first quarter of 2025. New introduction by Andrew Calcutt This new book brings together Phil Cohen’s most recent writing and spans the period from the Covid 19 pandemic to the ongoing wars in the Ukraine and Gaza. Like the pieces in the first Waypoints volume, these essays are occasional in that they were […]
  • Living Maps : towards a poetry made by all

    December 24, 2023
    Looking back on the first ten years of Livingmaps Network     Every project has its founding myth , a story about its origins in which the cold rational prose of ‘aims and objectives’ melts into  the thicker air of  an auto-poetics. The risk is that in the process  starting points become end points,  and the […]
  • ANTISEMIT-ORIENTAL- ZION-ISMS

    December 23, 2023
    The Triple Misalliance I An extract from‘Studies in thr Grey Zone; Waypoints Vol 2 to be published by eyglass books at Easter 2024 .Introduction One of the many  fallouts from the current  horrific conflict in Palestine/Israel is the way sections of the Hard Left have advanced an apologetics for the atrocities committed by Hamas, while […]

Copyright © 2025 · Phil Cohen · Site designed and maintained by Dallura Web Design