Tunnel of Privilege: Interpassivity as a Political Performance
The Tunnel of Oppression first began at Western Illinois University in 1990. In recent years, it has become an annual event on many college campuses across the country, including Boise State University (BSU). According to BSU’s “Enter the Tunnel” website, student-volunteers meet once a week to design an “eye-opening, conscious-raising experience…for those who have rarely or never experienced oppression.” Unfortunately, the Tunnel of Oppression, while well intentioned, is nothing less than political masturbation par excellence: a thirty-minute vacation into the realm of “feel-good” identity politics that confuses political activism with the passive consumption of “political” information. The Tunnel of Oppression is an “interactive exhibit in which student actors, films, and recordings are used to expose participants to a variety of abusive situations” (Barrett-Fox). The Tunnel of Oppression encourages students to learn how to simulate oppression, instead of teaching them how to think about the structures and policies that produce material inequality. This essay will examine BSU’s Tunnel of Oppression in the context of Gijs Van Oenen’s theory of interpassivity to understand how the Tunnel of Oppression appropriates marginalized perspectives to re-center the privileged subject and lure students away from political strategies that challenge structural inequality.
Interpassivity, as articulated by Gijs Van Oenen, refers to a cultural or political performance that seeks to consume itself. According to Van Oenen, the “spectator or consumer is made redundant…his or her involvement in the realization of the work has become superfluous.” Like the person who fills an awkward silence by laughing at their own racist joke, the Tunnel of Oppression “aims to consummate itself, actively dis-interesting the spectator in its realization” (Van Oenen). The problem with this sort of self-referential political strategy is that “an increased amount of ‘interactivity’…is accompanied by a loss of involvement and interest in the product itself” (Van Oenen). It doesn’t actually matter whether the Tunnel of Oppression increases the overall quality of life for anyone in the community. In a stunning deferral of political agency, student-volunteers and participants are encouraged to feel good about their “commitment” to liberal tolerance while they outsource political activism and structural reform to some unspecified third party. The Tunnel of Oppression is only successful insofar as it is self-referential. A poster at BSU’s 2015 Civic Engagement Exposition captured this point perfectly. According to the student-volunteers who created the poster describing the event, “the Tunnel of Oppression raised awareness. Even if people didn’t admit to their new awareness, there was still a seed planted. Actors, actresses and participants were all affected in one way or another [emphasis added].” It is precisely this assertion—this fantasy that change will happen “one way or another” (even when no one is actively working to make it happen)—that characterizes political interpassivity.
Interpassivity is not limited to the political attitude that informs the Tunnel of Oppression—it is also reflected in the assembly-line structure of the event. The Tunnel of Oppression is a kind of “tolerance factory” that treats participants like raw material, ushering them through a series of stations designed to “re-work” the average individual into an enlightened liberal subject. The end result, from the perspective of the Tunnel organizers, is the production of surplus-value—the participant is supposed to “profit” via the increased valuation that their subjectivity assumes as a result of being re-worked on the Tunnel’s assembly-line. One former participant explains how he was “shattered” by the Tunnel in “all the best ways” and had to “unlearn and relearn values about race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and religion” (Enter the Tunnel). The subject claims to have been transformed into a “a better, kinder, more inclusive, and well-informed person” (Enter the Tunnel) through the labor of the student-volunteers. The problem with this model of production is that the student-volunteers who provide labor for the Tunnel of Oppression are alienated from the final “product” of that labor—the tolerance and political activism that the Tunnel is intended to produce.
In other words, the increased activity of the student-volunteers produces a corresponding loss of political agency in both the participants and the student-volunteers who organize the event. Remember: it doesn’t matter if participants admit to their new awareness because awareness has been imposed on them externally. Subjects are rendered passive recipients of their own political agency. The Tunnel of Oppression succeeds because there is no element of choice—a person cannot “become unaware” of an issue after it’s been brought to their attention. It doesn’t matter if people who participate in the Tunnel of Oppression continue to deny the Holocaust or consciously subscribe to the belief that black people are intellectually inferior, because there was still a seed planted. The popularity of the Tunnel of Oppression is due, in part, to this incredibly low standard that the Tunnel sets for itself. Student-volunteers get to feel like they’re making a difference “in one way or another” without being forced to worry about whether anyone is actually listening to what they have to say.
The central fallacy of the Tunnel of Oppression is the way that it frames the acquisition of information as a political accomplishment, insofar as it raises awareness about the problem in question. The implicit suggestion of such a political paradigm is that “being aware” of a problem is somehow on par with working to solve it. Political activism is confused with the passive consumption of “political” information, without regard for content or the quality of the information in question. The result is a backwards disavowal: “I know I’m not fixing the problem (I may even be helping to create it) but at least I’m not ignorant about the existence of the problem, like those people over there.” In other words, a person’s knowledge about a problem becomes an excuse not to do anything about it. “Raising awareness” serves as a stand-in for effective activism. As long as student-volunteers uphold their social responsibility to make other people aware that problems exist, well-intentioned would-be activists can rest easy knowing that someone, someday will eventually get around to solving them.
Interpassive performances like the Tunnel of Oppression protect the status quo by reproducing a political paradigm that emphasizes “pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to ‘participate,’ to mask the nothingness of what goes on” (Violence, 217). Political simulations like the Tunnel of Oppression function as a placebo for effective political activism. Students get to feel like they are making a difference, without actually challenging the structural coordinates of the oppression they claim to address. A cursory glance at Boise State University’s Tunnel of Oppression website reveals the extent to which political simulations obfuscate questions of structural oppression. This year, for example, Boise State’s Tunnel of Oppression will feature a performance entitled “Genocide – Invisibility of Natives” that (while undoubtedly well-intentioned) ends up reinforcing the very invisibility it claims to address. The rhetoric used to describe the performance reveals the political limitations of the Tunnel of Oppression project:
Native Americans have become invisible in our culture as a result of the genocide that occurred when Christopher Columbus arrived in this country. Since people do not see Natives as people, they…often get used as mascots, costumes, and various fashion statements. The issues Natives face today, such as health care, domestic violence, alcoholism, poverty, police brutality and education all stem from the atrocities committed against Natives since the arrival of Europeans on this continent, however we seldom see this in current media because the population is so small. (“Enter the Tunnel”)
The political rhetoric being used here is problematic for a few reasons. First, the “issues Natives face today” are not the “result” of a genocide; they are a genocide—a genocide via government negligence, certainly, but a genocide nonetheless. It’s the difference between locating the oppression of the Native Americans in the distant past (where individuals are powerless to do anything about it) and recognizing that the targeted destruction of Native American communities is an ongoing process made possible by the tacit approval of students, community leaders and government officials who aren’t doing anything to stop it. When violence against Native Americans is located in the distant past, achieving equality becomes a question of changing the dominant historical narrative instead of examining the current economic policies that lock Native American communities in a cycle of poverty. Well-intentioned activists waste time and energy demonizing Christopher Columbus for something that happened centuries ago, when they should be learning how to hold their government accountable for the practices and policies it implements in the present day
The second reason this sort of political rhetoric is problematic is because it misconstrues structural inequality as a question of (mis)representation. The problem is not that alcoholism, domestic violence and police brutality exist; the problem (according to the organizers of the Tunnel of Oppression) is that “we seldom see [these issues] in the media.” The implicit suggestion here seems to be that if we increase the visibility of the problems plaguing Native American communities, these problems will somehow resolve themselves. Unfortunately, issues like health care and access to education don’t have anything to do with how white people dress or what Washington D.C. calls their football team. To conflate structural inequality with questions of cultural representation demonstrates a surprising lack of political literacy for an organization that claims to educate people about social justice issues.
This begs the question: if the Tunnel fails to challenge the actual political and economic structures that produce oppression, why does Boise State’s campus community seem to consider it a good example of successful student activism? The truth is that the Tunnel exists primarily for the benefit of “those who have rarely or never experienced oppression” (Enter the Tunnel) and for the student-organizers who host the event. The Tunnel is not political activism, so much as the ultimate “win-win” scenario for everyone involved: participants get to feel enlightened, student-volunteers get to feel empowered and Boise State gets to showcase how much students at BSU care about diversity. Participants confront privilege, but they are not required to relinquish it. In other words, the Tunnel is not successful because it initiates meaningful structural reform, but because it makes people feel good. It is an example of how “interpassivity perversely makes capitalist subjects enjoy…a ‘surplus of pleasure experienced as unease’ from the melancholy induced by interpassivity” (Van Oenen). The Tunnel functions like a haunted house, transforming the frightening and disturbing experience of oppression into a theatrical performance that can be consumed and enjoyed by the privileged subject.
Consider Boise State University’s description of the event, which explains how “the Tunnel of Oppression attempts to “create an environment where participants can actually feel disoriented, dehumanized and uncomfortable” (Enter the Tunnel). Like people who fast before a feast to more thoroughly enjoy the experience of gluttony, the “disorientation” and “dehumanization” experienced by the participant return as a form of obscene enjoyment; a moment of catharsis that the participant experiences upon leaving the Tunnel. The official website for Boise State University’s Tunnel of Oppression is plastered with testimonials from past participants, the overwhelming majority of whom make explicit reference to this moment of catharsis. According to one past participant, “Tunnel allowed me to feel it. I can’t explain the overwhelming feeling…it allowed me to experience what others feel…I’m forever changed” (“Enter the Tunnel). These sorts of testimonials demonstrate how the true purpose of the Tunnel of Oppression is the creation of an intense (and easily consumable) emotional experience. They reveal the extent to which “oppression is…not only often accepted, but even welcomed and desired” (Van Oenen) by the participants and the student-volunteers who host the event.
The testimonials of past participants also demonstrate how the Tunnel of Oppression cleverly re-centers the privileged subject. Marginalized perspectives are pushed back to the margins to make room for the sheer magnitude of the life-shattering experience that the Tunnel is intended to produce. The Tunnel of Oppression encourages students to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” (Enter the Tunnel), but the emphasis is always on what participants feel. The figure of the other is both a reference point in a grand drama of white catharsis and a prop being used to stage a one-off encounter with oppression. In the testimonials of past participants, eyes are opened, but the actual figure of the other is invisible: dissolving behind the “scene, props, scripts, set design and actors” (Enter the Tunnel) used to construct the simulation. The perspective of the other is valued, but only insofar as it can be appropriated and converted into a visual spectacle that can be consumed by the privileged subject. There’s an old joke that gets to the point perfectly: the true advantage of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is being a mile away after having stolen their shoes.
This appropriation of identity is actually quite common: advertisers do it all the time. Coca-Cola, for example, is now mass-producing bottles and cans of Coke with people’s names on them as part of its “Share a Coke” campaign. The most fascinating thing about this advertising campaign is that there’s no way to opt out of it. It doesn’t matter whether you identify with Coca-Cola, because Coca-Cola has chose to identify itself with you. Consumers who despise Coca-Cola are still part of the advertising campaign (whether they want to be or not) because others will purchase and consume Coca-Cola in their name. The same is true with the Tunnel of Oppression—which is nothing, if not an advertisement for politically correct behavior. It doesn’t actually matter whether marginalized people speak to their experiences, because there are plenty of student-volunteers on campus who are perfectly willing to do it for them. This is the logic behind the Tunnel of Oppression: if marginalized perspectives are underrepresented, privileged subjects must take it upon themselves to represent those perspectives. As with the consumer, whose willingness to participate in Coca-Cola’s advertising campaign is merely incidental, marginalized voices are rendered superfluous. The Tunnel of Oppression is not performed for the benefit of the oppressed—it is performed in the name of the oppressed.
Coca-Cola’s campaign is an interesting paradox: the mass production of an intensely personal experience. Of course, its inclusivity is an illusion. The campaign homogenizes or completely sidesteps individuals who exist outside its very narrow frame of representation. Coca-Cola selects the 150 most commonly used names in any country where it launches its campaign, then uses generic signifiers like “dad” or “wingman” to address any remaining outliers. Many names are left out. Other names are intentionally omitted, for fear of creating too much controversy. The Tunnel employs the same tactics, to service the same end. Student-volunteers must present the Tunnel as all-inclusive to maintain the project’s political legitimacy. As with Coca-Cola’s advertising campaign, this inclusivity is an illusion. There are many individuals who are either homogenized by or omitted from the Tunnel’s affirmation of marginalized identity.
The Tunnel’s reductionist and non-representative interpretation of human sexuality is a glaringly obvious example of its failure to appreciate the complexities of human identity. The star that guides the Tunnel’s “simulated experience” of marginalized sexual identity is the Cass Identity Model, a linear interpretation of identity development. The Cass Model consists of six sequential stages: confusion, comparison, self-tolerance, self-acceptance, pride and identity synthesis. According to the Cass Model, individuals are initially unsure how to interpret their potential homosexual feelings. They progress through each stage, learning to affirm their homosexual identity through a process of identity disclosure. In the last stage of the Cass Model, the “lesbian or gay identity becomes an integral part of the person’s complete personality structure” (Inside the Tunnel). The implication of this model is that individuals who do not progress to the sixth stage are either underdeveloped or in denial about their sexual identity.
There is no room in the Cass Model for individuals who enjoy the occasional homosexual experience, but choose not to identify as gay or lesbian. Sexual identity is considered static and permanent. Deviations from this standard are dismissed. In other words, the Cass Model reassigns the stigma associated with gay and lesbian identity to other forms of non-normative sexuality. The Tunnel’s website literally characterizes bisexuality and atypical sexual attraction as the homosexual’s last-ditch effort to cling to some remnant of heterosexuality:
The rationalization or bargaining stage [is] when the person thinks: “I may be a homosexual, but then again I may be bisexual”; “Maybe this is just temporary”; or “My feelings of attraction are simply for just one other person of my own sex and this is a special case. (“Inside the Tunnel”)
This casual dismissal of both bisexuality and atypical sexual attraction is ironically reminiscent of the homophobic parent who denies his or her child’s homosexuality by asserting that it’s just a phase. It underscores the Tunnel’s commitment to a static and reductionist interpretation of sexuality. Central to this interpretation is the assumption that sexual activity is synonymous with sexual identity. A person who enjoys a homosexual experience has given up his or her claim to heterosexuality. They can either ‘come out’ to their friends and family by disclosing their non-normative sexual preferences or they can live in denial and try to manage the consequences of an underdeveloped sexual identity. The problem with this prescriptive model of sexuality is that it defines people according to their desires and experiences. In doing so, it denies them the right to interpret those things for themselves.
The Tunnel ultimately fails on two levels: it misdiagnoses structural oppression and it fails to acknowledge the complexity of the very identities it seeks to affirm. In addition, it siphons volunteers and resources from political strategies that prioritize structural reform and creates complacency by making students feel like they’ve done their part to address inequality. The Tunnel of Oppression is the epitome of interpassivity; students come together to pay lip service to dismantling oppression in lieu of actually working to challenge specific policies that create inequality. While it is tempting to argue that participating in the Tunnel is better than doing nothing at all, it is precisely this logic that must be rejected. If forced to choose between political apathy and a self-serving brand of political activism that re-centers the privileged subject in the name of the oppressed, student activists should be prepared to choose the former over the latter. Interpassive political performances like the Tunnel do more harm than good, to the extent that they obfuscate the secret that defines unsuccessful student activism: namely, the fact that “speaking truth to power” is not the same as making power listen.
Works Cited
Barrett-Fox, Rebecca. “Tunnel of Reification: How The Tunnel of Oppression Reaffirms Righteousness for Members of Dominant Groups.” The Radical Teacher No. 80. TEACHING BEYOND “TOLERANCE” (2007): 24-29. JSTOR. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.
“Cass Identity Model.” Multicultural Student Services. Boise State University, n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2016.
“Enter the Tunnel.” Multicultural Student Services. Boise State University, n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.
“Inside the Tunnel.” Multicultural Student Services. Boise State University, n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2016.
Oenen, Gijs Van. “A Machine That Would Go of Itself: Interpassivity and Its Impact on Political Life.” Theory & Event 9.2 (2006): n. pag. ProQuest. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Courtly Love, Or, Woman as Thing.” Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (1994): n. pag. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. New York: Picador, 2008. Print.