This is a guest post by Jane Clare Jones, philosopher, feminist and person who really, really likes Doctor Who.

A couple of years back – a week after she coined the slogan that would inspire an internet feminist revolution – Flavia Dzodan wrote a piece for Tiger Beatdown dedicated to skewering the “toxic” nature of “the collective dance commonly known in blogging as the ‘call outs.’” The problem with call-out culture, she wrote, is that it “has developed as a tool to legitimize aggression and rhetoric [sic] violence.”

For while, “[o]n the surface,” call-outs are “seemingly positive” and “done ‘for good,’” they are not, she suggested, mere instruments of justice. Rather, they need to be understood in the context of a culture in thrall to the cruel theatre of reality television, as a “performative” spectacle of ritual blood-letting fashioned “for an audience” and intended “more often that not … to make the one initiating the call out feel good, more righteous, more indignant, a ‘better person’.”

This points towards a distinction that demands fuller reflection, not least since Michelle Goldberg’s piece on Twitter toxicity further fueled the increasingly internecine debate over the ethics and politics of the call-out. For while the call-out, as Dzodan notes, ‘seemingly’ aims at justice, there are some serious questions to be asked about the justice of its methods.

Call-outs claim to ‘do good.’ They are intended to educate, to shine a spotlight on injustice, by drawing attention to the fact that someone has said or done something (or not said and done something) that serves to support systemic inequality. And they do so by mobilising an explicitly political or social notion of justice – an understanding of justice as a matter of the equitable distribution of power, privilege, and possibility.

These words might sound abstract, but they’re not. They are the conditions of a successful human life. And as a feminist, and an anti-capitalist, they matter to me. In its own way, my experience of the world has made it clear enough that structural inequality is a thing, and that people’s possibilities are circumscribed by, often, multiple oppressions. I recognize that we are force-fed a high-fructose diet of media designed to make systemic domination appear as inevitable as rocks, and which usually reflects the interests, aspirations and assumptions of the people who have most power.

I accept that privilege is often invisible, and that, as a well-educated and mostly able-bodied white woman, the world bends around me in ways it does not for everyone. And I am convinced, therefore, that there are things I cannot see, and that when people with less power than me say that I – or women like me – have mis-spoken or misrepresented something, then we have a political responsibility to listen to them.

But I am unconvinced by much of call-out culture. And I struggle with it – as do many left-wing feminists – because I believe in much of the politics and yet have an abiding problem with the practice. Expressing this problem is fraught, freighted both with guilt, and with the suspicion that it is futile, that I am addressing an audience that will not hear.

For, as the response to Goldberg showed, criticism of call-out culture will be politically re-packaged in an instant. The narrative is, by now, well-rehearsed, and impervious: White feminism rejects intersectionality because privilege. And this narrative is reiterated, reflexively, regardless of whether the criticism of the call-out is made by a white woman, or a gay WoC , or a trans WoC (who will be situated within a political discourse about white women or otherwise erased).

This move is disingenuous. And it is disingenuous in a way that is indicative rather than incidental. Because the conflict over call-out culture is not about politics, it is about ethics.

Justice is complex. It is both structural and particular, political and ethical – a matter of how adequately we, as a society, distribute possibilities but also the way I, as an individual, approach any given other. At a personal level ‘doing justice to someone’ involves adequate representation, in much the same sense that we talk of a picture ‘doing justice’ to a landscape.

The last century of French philosophy, informed by the dehumanizing cataclysm of the Holocaust, focused much of its attention on the ethical encounter. Expressed, for instance, in the figure of unconditional hospitality, the ideal of ethical justice is to approach an-other in complete openness, suspending all preconceptions about who they are and allowing them to appear entirely in their own terms. And while this is an impossible ideal, I think it is an inspiring one. It reminds us that when our interpretations are over-determined by our projections, we are, in ethical terms, not being just.

Clearly then, there is some tension between the openness of the ethical encounter and the insights of a structural analysis which considers political knowledge to be socially situated. How are we to marry the privileged position of ‘seeing from the margins’ with the ethical imperative to not impose a particular perspective upon a differently-situated other?

On the one hand, the intuition that when speaking truth to power, we are not required to genuflect before another’s self-understanding, is undoubtedly correct. Without it, radical analysis would be impossible, and we could all pack up our feminist bags and go home. But nonetheless, there is a meaningful distinction between the facts of what someone has said or done, and the interpretation of those facts. And to wade into the age-old debate on means and ends, acting in the interests of justice does not relieve you of the responsibility to act justly. Which is to say, in this instance, you still need to represent those you are critiquing fairly.

In the many months I’ve spent watching the feminist blogosphere and Twitter-space convulse with successive call-outs, I’ve noted two specific types of unjust representation:

1. Misrepresenting what someone has said or done

This is difficult, because the person being criticized may not recognize the way their words or deeds are being characterized for reasons of social position – what with the invisibility of privilege. However, if I want to criticize Richard Dawkins for saying something stupid about chewing gum in an elevator, it is possible to parse ‘what he said’ from ‘why it is stupid.’ In an economy run on 140 characters, this distinction often gets collapsed, and very fast, an interpretation-posing-as-fact will be disseminated and assimilated as the truth about what a certain person did, and more often than not, what a certain person is (see point 2).

Additionally, I have, on several occasions seen the facts of what someone has said, or a particular sequence of events or exchanges, be concretely misrepresented to create a certain impression. If you think this is acceptable because you possess omniscient certainty that you are fighting the good fight, OK. But understand that not everyone agrees with you, and their concerns are not motivated only by the desire to dominate or silence. The belief that just ends are not served by unjust means is genuine, and not straightforwardly structurally distributed (regardless of what you’ve heard from a Slovenian philosopher with a taste for revolutionary violence and really sketchy views on women).

(Huh.)

2. Attacking the person rather than the action

This is spectacularly common, and, I suspect, exacerbated by the rigid sediment of a structural analysis which collapses social identity and political position. From there, it’s a short walk to, ‘They said a fillintheblank-ist thing because people like them are fillintheblank-ists.”

But things are not that simple. We all live under conditions of structural domination. Every one of us has internalized views and assumptions that serve to perpetuate that system. That someone said something which represents, say, a damaging exclusion, doesn’t tell you they are a vile bigot in the essence of their being, or that they are a dues-paying agent of the kyriarchy. And it is, at best, uncharitable to suggest that it does. And that goes doubly for extrapolating directing from a particular event to a totalizing dismissal ending in –phobe.

Both these types of misrepresentation fall squarely under the rubric of ‘engaging in bad faith.’ It is true that intention isn’t magic. At least, it is true that whether I intended to say a fillintheblank-ist thing doesn’t determine whether it is fillintheblank-ist (although it’s not clear that intensity of pile-on is what determines it either). But it is one thing to argue that a specific intention does not define a particular act, and quite another to refuse to credit the person you are addressing with good intention in general.

What concerns me is that the hand-waving of unjust representation takes place against a background assumption that certain people – by virtue of their (often reductively ascribed) social privilege and/or platform – are incapable of a genuine concern with justice, and as such, don’t deserve to be treated justly. Not only is this a bleak, and indeed, thoroughly neo-liberal, view of human nature, it presents us with something of a paradox.

On the one hand, the call-out justifies itself by posing as an educative intervention performed in good faith. (And, just to be abundantly clear, I have seen examples where it is just that.) On the other, the tendency to misrepresent people, and invoke totalizing slurs – often accompanied by violent invective – suggests that there is, actually, no assumption of good faith on the part of the call-outers.

And, to return to our starting point, this raises a question about the call-out’s purported function. Because why on earth would you bother telling someone they have done something harmful, if you are proceeding from the assumptions that people-like-them don’t care about doing harm?

More than one answer presents itself, but Flavia Dzodan’s observations about performativity are pertinent to several of them. Yes, there are examples of good-faith call-outs which are genuinely intended to challenge or inform, but they are relatively rare. More often than not, the call-out is performed for an audience, and is undertaken for the benefit of the person or persons performing it.

As such, it may serve several functions. It demonstrates your political credentials, and (for many white women) launders your privilege. It raises your profile, and nets you allies and followers. It bestows the sweet sense of having-right on your side, of bravely battling against the massed forces of domination and injustice. And, perhaps above all – it’s a great way of dumping all your aggression, and usefully comes with a political narrative that exculpates you from taking any responsibility for that.

What has become known as the ‘tone argument’ is important here. As Katherine Cross has noted, the injunction against tone-policing derives from an important insight. People who experience oppression are angry, and their anger is both legitimate and politically important. Moreover, they are often subject to cultural stereotypes which serve to restrict their ability to assume and express that anger, and in the interests of justice, this needs to be resisted.

At some point however, the tone argument assumed a law-like status which, Cross writes, can “be waved at will in any discussion to absolve one of responsibility” and contributes to what she beautifully describes as “a rapidly oxidizing corrosion” of political discourse. The ethics of expressing anger are, indeed, challenging. On the one hand it is – often literally – vital, to affirm that anger is legitimate, and recognize that people’s wellbeing and survival depends on channeling it away from themselves and towards the structures of their oppression. But it doesn’t follow from this that every expression of legitimate anger is itself legitimate.

I may be – in fact, strike that, I am – both deeply affected by, and furious about, the levels of sexual coercion in this society. It is rage I’ve carried with me all my adult life. In my twenties it used to spill out, in sudden, inchoate, waves, directed at random men who made me feel disempowered in some way – sometimes by doing something as innocuous as adding a five-quid supplement to my train ticket. When I look back at those moments, I am forgiving of my anger, but that doesn’t mean it was OK to use a hapless train-conductor as a punching bag.

And it’s not OK for several reasons. It’s not OK because the person you are raging at is not the source of your oppression. Your oppression is systemic, and individuals are, at worst, symptoms, and indeed, frequently being used as proxies for that system. When a woman is expected to gracefully absorb a long stream of invective, she is being asked to do so, not as a person but as a cipher.

Because of a tweet, or a misplaced phrase, because she asked the wrong person the wrong question, or tried to defend someone, or said something flippant, or challenged the political point of one white-woman calling another white-woman ‘scum,’ she is summarily elected as the representative of an entire structure of domination. She is no longer herself, but today’s chosen instantiation of white-cis-liberal-middle-class-capitalist-colonial-ableist-whorephobic-(and probably, indeed, patriarchal)-supremacy.

Not only is this monolithic system not actually a monolith – another representational error because it is also, well, intersecting – but deciding you are divine violence, and taking it upon yourself to deliver rhetorical punishment to someone on the basis that they are this system, is dehumanization and exemplary bad-faith. And the recent prevalence of tweets mocking women’s ‘sadfeelz’ and ‘White Tears’™ makes it pretty apparent that dehumanizing white feminist women because they have been deemed emissaries of evil is now considered at the very least acceptable, and indeed, by some, a thoroughgoing act of justice.

But people are not structures. They might say things that support structures, and they may well, often by accident rather than design, benefit from how those structures work. And that should, indeed, must, be incessantly critiqued. But individual people – with all their mess, and nuance, and strength, and vulnerability – are not structures. And even if left-wing-white-feminist women really were the best possible proxy for patriarchal-colonial-capitalist-white-supremacist domination, taking to Twitter to lob rhetorical Molotov cocktails at them is not smashing the kyriarchy, it’s being verbally violent to another person.

Unlike structures, which are implacable, and must be slowly, painfully, chipped away with constant, precise critique and concerted political effort, people can be very easily, and seriously, harmed by rhetorical violence. In 2011, this was something expressed well by Flavia Dzodan:

Human beings are complex creatures, not these receptacles of ‘good’ OR ‘evil.’ At once good in some aspects and gross in others. Simultaneously oppressed and oppressors. However, in this performative culture of blogging all this subtlety is obscured. You are either ‘one of the good guys’ or ‘you are the worst person ever.’ …I must question this dichotomy because call outs, and the modus operandi behind them, the pile-on, can potentially kill people. The most virulent call outs can exacerbate existing PTSD. They can drive a person to severe episodes of anxiety and/or depression, they can lead someone to feel isolated and suicidal. It is a toxic and destructive phenomenon.

And it is a “toxic and destructive phenomenon” that seems impossible to resist. As Dzodan noted, call-out culture is “insidious” because “who would dare to say something…when it is supposedly done against oppression?” As was evident from responses to the Goldberg piece, if the call-out is a tool of social justice, then anyone who questions it can only be concerned with strengthening the status quo. And so, shielded by this impervious defense, the call-out adopts a pose of ethical invulnerability, and is free to carry out its righteous work.

The flaw in this defense is, however, that while the call-out claims to work for justice, it is often, in itself, unjust. And while it styles itself an intervention aimed at education, and claims to have engaged its interlocutor in good faith, in many ways, as I have shown, this is a lie. The disquiet many feminists express towards the call out, is animated, not by their desire to keep a grip on power, but by their frustration at repeatedly engaging in an environment pervaded by bad faith. And by the futility of trying to resist.

Because the call-out is a vicious circle. It selects its target as a proxy of ‘The Oppressor,’ and when its bad-faith overture is greeted as precisely what it is, it parades this lack of receptivity as evidence of the very pre-supposition with which it started. It is a snare. A game of ‘Gotcha!’ A way of whipping-up endless vortices of self-perpetuating outrage. It is poisonous, and corrosive, and damaging, both to individuals and to the very possibility of genuine political communication across our differences.

And what it isn’t – when it piles into an encounter, stoked by certainty and suppositions while dressed up, disingenuously, in the garb of good faith, careless, and indeed, often, reveling, in any harm that it might do – is an instrument of justice.

It isn’t doing any good.

The following caricatures effectively deny: 1) That women are oppressed as women 2) That women who are only (or predominantly) oppressed as women are capable of genuine compassion or concern for anyone other than themselves. (Just think about that for a second. Not only is it pretty dubious feminism to think that an individual who is only oppressed as a woman, is not really very oppressed at all, and is necessarily self-serving, but it is massively self-defeating for feminists to adopt a model which decrees that, therefore, any woman who finds herself with the power to challenge injustice – and who is thus ‘privileged’ – should be immediately disqualified from exercising that power).