 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Introduction
Here we are
In Michael Collins book The Keepers of Truth (Scribner, 2001), Bill lives a life of uneventful, quiet desperation, alone in a mansion on the edge of a decaying town in the mid West of the US. He works as a journalist on the local paper and is bewitched by a desire to speak the truth. It erupts from him and into print, much to the chagrin of his boss and the consternation of the local citizens. 'I got this tunnel vision, felt suddenly buried under the debris of our dead industrialism. We were occupying one of the gaps in history that go undocumented, that long silent stupefaction before some other means of survival comes along to save civilization.'
Here we are in our own gap in history. Old states of life no longer feel tenable, but what is to come in the future? We live in an afterlife of the post-modern and post-industrial. There is little that is tangible to give us our bearings. Zygmunt Bauman characterises this life as liquid modernity. It is a society of increasingly individualised individuals, which cannot easily hold its shape - it neither fixes nor binds time and space. Fluids flow and yield to the slightest pressure. They drip, flow, gush, swirl, disperse into particles, gather into a flood. When we try and grasp the meaning of society, understanding escapes us like water.1
In this liquid modern world our anchor is the culture we can create and which we can share. Bauman argues that we are each instructed to create our own biographical exit from this 'socially concocted mess', but this is an impossible task without recourse to the linguistic tools and cultural artefacts of our interdependency. We need others in order to make narratives which give meaning to our individual selves.
How shall we find the common shared meanings that connect us to others? If they no longer exist, how shall we make them? This predicament is not a new one. At the beginning of the twentieth century Georg Simmel described modernity as a culture of unrest. Individuals are alienated from one another, not by isolation, but because they have become anonymous in the public realm. Things without monetary value are ignored and marginalised. The meaning of life slips through our fingers. For Weber capitalist modernity is an iron cage of 'specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart'. It is a nullity, which nevertheless 'imagines it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved'.
Rainer Marie Rilke struggles with this nullity in his sequence of poems Duino Elegies (1923). He searches for words which will express his feeling that something profound in his life is missing. He wants to grasp life and to express it in his art. He seeks solitude, which will allow him the inward contemplation of his imagination. But to communicate this inner world requires feeling, and his feelings are dependent upon his relationships with others. His need of others threatens his art, and yet his art means nothing without them. He cannot find the words to describe what it is he does want. He is caught up in an ambivalence that slides between need and desire. When Rilke looks at himself it is as an object through the eyes of another. He is a spectator of his life: 'Who, therefore, has turned us around, so that/ no matter what we do, we're in that attitude of someone leaving?'
Rilke's ambivalence resonates with our own liquid modern consumer society. It seduces us with the promise that we can become 'anybody we like'. But this is an impossible freedom. The pursuit of being anybody excludes the possibility of being ourselves. In three decades the size of our economy has almost doubled, we are richer than ever before - and yet this good life of acquisition and desire has not provided a collective sense of well being. Economic growth has brought with it inequality, insecurity and unprecedented levels of household debt. The penetration of market relations into the social fabric of our lives marginalises human need. Dependency is a source of shame. We are beset by social problems that are individualised and hidden away from public view - depression, mental ill health, loneliness. Here we are, free consumers, inundated with choice, 'singing in our chains'.
After Identity is an attempt to find common shared meanings in response to this individualised and increasingly commercialised society. The opening chapter argues that in the last thirty years the influences of markets and neo-liberal ideology have accelerated the historical transformation of the social category of the individual. Identity was central to the liberation politics of the late 1960s social movements. Their collective activity of self-determination and self-realisation was organised around the differences of race, gender and sexuality. Their cultures of self affirmation created social value and political power and were taken up by other constituencies - for example people with disabilities and mental illness. They contributed to transformations in personal and moral consciousness. But the social movements, and the wider revolutionary left politics they sprang from, did not succeed in radically changing society. Today the languages and practices of identity are no longer associated with the emancipatory struggle for political agency and an interdependent individuality. The political expression of association has given way to the commercial market value of individualised rational choice. This ideal of being a consumer - unconstrained, choice-driven and self-reliant - has entangled identity in the exchange value of the market. It has become a more privatised and individualised affair.
Today we face a doubtfulness about what the striving to be ourselves is for. What does it mean to feel a sense of self-fulfilment? Consumer culture and its tantalising promises offers a panacea to fend off this uncertainty. But its effects can be corrosive, because it reconstitutes social activities and relations between people as market relations between individuals and things. The process of commodification leads to an isolating world inhabited by men and women whose social bonds are displaced or depleted. Like shoppers hunting for a bargain, we do not want to be distracted from pursuing our own elusive desire. Consumer culture glamorises and idealises our desire, splitting it off from our emotional need and our dependence on others. Desire is the idiom of our aliveness, but desire without a qualifying and balancing attachment to others casts us into a pursuit of the unattainable. Hovering in the wings are the new social threats of invisibility, meaninglessness, failure.
By entangling identity in market transactions and commodification, consumer culture has turned it against the individual. Identity is mobilised not only to enhance the exchange value of identity-confirming commodities, but also to increase productivity at work. Work has become an intimate part of our psychology as we market our personalities, compete with our peers for recognition, and constantly measure our performance against an ever-shifting and frequently unpredictable set of criteria. In this translucent world, success can be ephemeral. Its achievement lacks clearly defined means and ends. It is no longer simply about accumulating money and purchasing status. Nor is it straightforwardly about being functionally more effective, or more powerful than other people. Success is achieved by the identities we are capable and willing to make ourselves into. The apotheosis of this fabricating of identity is celebrity culture, in which success is about the light of recognition illuminating a person's unique singularity. Failure means a loss of identity - disappearing from the sight of others and becoming invisible.
The first chapter of the book, 'After identity', explores some of the ethical resources that might help an engagement with these current predicaments of identity. It argues that we need a better account of how we define human being, and of the changing dynamic between individuality and society, through which identities are made and remade. It asks what, in rethinking the idea of the individual, might come after identity. The origin of this question lies in the cultural theory of difference and identity. This theory is highly sophisticated in its explanation of the relational nature of identities. It has challenged Enlightenment rationality and its claim to speak for an undifferentiated humanity, exposing its operations of exclusion and opening up spaces for identities that were denied inclusion in its realm. But to ensure its own internal coherence, cultural theory concentrated on the construction of meaning in language and representation. It could not address the economic categories of class, the material nature of the body, or emotional life. To answer the question about what might come after identity we need to look elsewhere.
The chapter on 'Ghosts' examines the way memory and the heritage industry construct historical time and shape our understanding of white English national identity and 'race' difference. The narratives, ideologies, metaphors and fantasies of heritage fuse together the present and past into an undifferentiated union. Heritage becomes the attempt to make sense of the past without disturbing the social and symbolic order of the present. It is like an act of mourning while denying a death. In its attempts to bring the past back to life, heritage represents a loss that cannot be accepted and must continually be returned to. Our subjective sense of self is constructed around a national identity that manufactures ghosts - the dead who cannot settle but who prowl ceaselessly looking for release. This essay asks how we might find a way to face the future with less investment in maintaining differences and with a greater sense of hopefulness.
'Fallen among thieves' is about asylum seekers and how they are treated by the settled population, and it continues the theme of identity and belonging. Refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, by their presence remind us of change and disruption. They need resources and they need help, and so invite envy, rage and suspicion. And yet, for all their apparent strangeness, if we who are settled are willing to look, we will recognise in them something familiar to our own lives. Migrants symbolise the paradox of modernity, the historic opportunity to make a life for one's self, but at the same time the experiencing of a loss of security, familiarity, home. We need not have experienced real homelessness and exile to feel the displacement and disorientation which pervades modern life. Like 'Ghosts', the essay concludes with the ethical impulse of reaching beyond our individual identity toward the other: an ethic of hospitality in which we each make ourselves someone's neighbour.
After Identity draws on a range of theoretical and philosophical resources in an attempt to rethink the nature of the individual and identity: the ideas of group analysis and one of its founding figures, the sociologist Norbert Elias; the philosophical work of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger; the Christian-influenced thinking of Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor; the sociology of Zygmunt Bauman. What these all share in common is an endeavour to understand what it means to be human in society, with all that is problematic about this term. The essays in After Identity have been a process of thinking about a new kind of humanism. It is one which is constituted out of the recognition of our singularity and difference, not in a denial of it. It does not believe in the essential nature of anything. It is a humanism without guarantees, to borrow from Stuart Hall's phrase. As Hannah Arendt describes it, 'the conditions of human existence - life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth - can never "explain" what we are or answer the question of who we are, for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely.'2
It is this 'humanism without guarantees' that informs the final three essays. 'At war' is about masculinity and violence. It gives a brief historical appraisal of the changing relationship of individual males to the social structures that have shaped gendered behaviour and constrained violence. The 1960s and 1970s were a period when changes to men as a gender were encapsulated in a paradigmatic shift from the historical ideal of manliness, rooted in traditions of patriarchy, to the idea of masculinity. This informalisation of conventional behaviour was a response to the rigid demands made on both men and women to constrain, inhibit and modify their instinctual life and emotions. It has had a number of consequences. One of these relates to a pervasive anxiety about mortality. Where once death was feared but invested with a spiritual significance or social function, informalisation has uprooted socially embodied structures of sacred meaning and left individuals alone to their fate. In post-industrial societies, death has been removed to the horizon of living, where it hovers just out of sight. As a consequence, it is lived as a state of perpetual anxiety without beginning or ending. It is this amorphous unfocused fear that has helped to fuel the global militarisation of the War on Terror. The enemy is everywhere and nowhere.
'Earthbound' continues with the question about the value of human life that is raised in the concluding pages of 'At war'. It does this by interrogating our understanding of human biological existence and its relationship to the earth's living systems. Climate change has brought into question the collective future of humanity. Humanism needs an ecological ethic that will reframe the individual as part of the earth's ecology and so create a new relationship to nature. After identity there is the ethical experience of becoming who we are in connectedness with the living and non-living systems that have created us. Individuals are not born free. We make ourselves free, and we do so not in isolation from others but in relation to them, and also in relation to the plants and animals that sustain us. Our life-promoting, mortality-evading consumer societies have come to fear nature as the death which awaits us. The idea of becoming earthbound is to accept mortality, finitude and limitation in our lives.
Ending is the theme of the final chapter on the revolution in longevity. The old suffer from invisibility. They share the same street, live in the same block of flats, but they merge unnoticed into the hinterland of our gaze. Deprived of recognition, the old endure the same silence and invisibility that surrounds the dying. The cultural revolution in ageing is an historic opportunity to begin living well another stage of life. But beneath the growing abundance of promotional gloss and media hype, the future of ageing for the world majority is destined to be a time of financial insecurity, exclusion and poverty. The contemporary reforms to the pension system are examples of a political struggle over which classes of which generations will secure future surpluses of capital. Capitalism sells us an idea of old age that ignores those who can't afford it, and generates a fearful denial of decline, infirmity and death for those who can. We need alternative ways to live the third age, which can provide pleasure and opportunities for all, but are also able to acknowledge that life can only be incomplete. Dreams are invariably unrealised. Such sentiments are the nightmare of consumer culture, which responds to mortality with embarrassed silence. But in accepting the constraints of life, we might achieve the kind of fulfilment and well being that currently eludes us.
After Identity is a series of essays that attempt to look beyond the flux of social forms and identities to glimpse what might emerge in their wake. How do we create cultures and meaning able to bridge Bill's gap in history? We might begin by attending to the 'madness of unshared meanings'. As Wendy Wheeler describes it, these are the disorderly profusion of signs that have not yet been dragooned into the rule-bound semiotic system.3 This is the world of the imagination, which has been expunged from official forms of knowledge. As Giorgio Agamben writes, 'Nothing can convey the extent of the change that has taken place in the meaning of experience so much as the resulting reversal of the status of the imagination.'4 In antiquity the imagination had been the supreme medium of knowledge, the intermediary between the senses and the intellect. Today, he argues, it has been expropriated by modern rationalist forms of knowledge (p25).
There is something more to each of us that cannot easily be defined in language and representation, and there is also within us something that remains unfinished and open to the world. We can never be reduced entirely to sociological explanation. This is the intangible resource that leads us into the unknown, and which enables new kinds of collective political imagination to emerge. Here we are, 'in the manner of someone leaving', unsure of our destination.
Notes
1. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity 2005.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press 1998, p11.
3. Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture, Lawrence & Wishart 2006.
4. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy & History, trans. Liz Heron, Verso 1993, p24.