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Wendy Wheeler
© Wendy Wheeler 2007
Grahame Thompson makes a very useful point. It is ironic that the culture of capitalism, supposedly dedicated to individualism and to the rights and value of the individual, in fact tends to the actual production of conformity and sameness. Mass standardisation and uniformity is the hallmark of modernity, which strives to make mass society legible. The not so secret underside of this desire for pure legibility and complete information is, of course, totalitarianism. Anxiety about the growth of the latter in the USA is, incidentally, the topic of Naomi Wolf's most recent book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (see: http://www.alternet.org/rights/68399/).
Massified forms of production and consumption, while appealing to 'the special you' in the latter case, actually produce more and more sameness, and less 'special you' - now globally. As politics becomes perfused with capitalist ideas, methods and aims (markets to be wooed; standardised systems, etc and so on, on the basis of the religion of TINA), it, too, produces more sameness. I'm not suggesting that premodern societies didn't care about legibility (i.e. readable social codes guaranteeing social predictability): all societies do; but in premodern societies these were guaranteed by relatively stable (i.e. slow changing) institutions of rank and religion. As modernity unfixes such fast-frozen relations, and replaces them with the even more fantasmatic codes of money and markets, the question of social legibility becomes ever more fraught (as countless nineteenth-century novels, for example, attest). The idea of 'the individual' depends upon notions of authenticity (I am most 'myself' when free to make rational choices about my self-interest - or so it goes); yet fraud, which is the deceptive manipulation of codes, is the modernity-vice (especially of capitalism) par excellence.
Creative evolution (first natural, then cultural) depends on the interplay of sameness (identity; repetition) and difference. But we need to be able to understand sameness and difference perhaps better than we do. Sameness produces comforting legibility, but too much of it is stultifying. Difference is both difficult and stimulating at the same time (difficult because illegible and demanding - we have to expand our vocabularies, learn new languages, translate; stimulating because new codes and translations lead us to new ways of conceiving the world). Articulate human language (Homo sapiens' latest evolved tool) doesn't always serve us very well here because, sometimes, words themselves have to be subject to difference in the breaking up and refinements of their meanings. 'Reason', for example (Grahame mentions Derrida) used to be opposed to 'affect', but we are learning (courtesy of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, for example) that human reasoning actually depends upon a vital affective life. Affect is, as Derrida put it, a 'supplement' which (deconstructively) turns out not to be supplementary at all. Similarly, 'religion' has been opposed to secular rationality; but it is becoming clear not only that 'secularism' and 'rationality' may be misleading words (because 'secularism' can be a kind of religious belief, and 'religion' can be a kind of politics), but also that 'religion' needs to be separated from the common human experience of spiritual numinosity. The latter finds expression in religion, certainly, but also in environmental politics, and also in the cadences of concerned humanity heard across a wide range of voices.
A language is a living thing, and words and meanings can and do both mutate and die. Jonathan Rutherford says very many things which I agree with, but when he says 'The left will only regain support amongst the disenfranchised working class when it finds the courage to grapple with the injustices and inequalities of class and the economic forces that produce them', I wonder whether the word 'class' can any longer possibly do the work required of it here. Many people will happily identify themselves as working class, but what that self-identification means now in terms of meaning-practices is much less clear. Does it mean 'disenfranchised', a 'loser', not a 'player'? Probably not. It is not so much that the word as used here is inappropriate, more that its invocation in this context draws attention to the huge range of problems associated with its contested meaning and with its history, including its theoretical history.
There is something deeply recalcitrant about being a human being, and about the human use of signs. We need to be able to think much harder, and more clearly, about this semiotic question and about the human recalcitrance in ways of reading. For one thing a rationalist society has some difficulty making proper acknowledgement that what we read (and thus the senses we make) we are often not conscious of. The same society enjoys it very much when magicians (or 'psychological illusionists') such as Derren Brown make use of such unconscious forms of communication, but where does this kind of knowledge get factored into political discussions of our socio-cultural meaning making? 'Class', 'gender', 'race' (and 'racism') are forms of naming which can have different meanings depending on context. They can be used bluntly or more subtly. At worst, their semiotic vagueness as calls to arms simply calls forth either reflex and platitudinous responses (widely identified as 'p.c.') or the sort of resistances that most human beings experience when confronted with signs too diffuse to allow of any certain interpretation.
Amir Saeed's use of the word 'racism' in his contribution to the current Soundings debate risks oversimplifying the range of possible responses to globalisation and the 'war on terror'. He seems to be reducing the very real anxieties generated by terrorist attacks (9/11 and 7/7) on people and land to nothing more than racist 'moral panics'. The meanings of 'a people' and their 'land' go deep and ancient: we are all tied to the earth and to 'our' local parts of it and what it means for us - both real physical resources and also resources as physically and psychically shared meanings: senses and meanings are, themselves, context dependent. Both 'a people' and 'a land' have powerful, if archaic, meanings: we can't throw them off by an act of present conscious will, because so very little of what we humans are is contained simply in conscious racionation. What is the question of Palestine if not a question of 'a people' and 'a land'? Naming chaotic responses to real attacks under the catch-all word 'racism', rather than trying to understand them in their chaotic complexity as confounded readings of real experiences, helps no-one. The meaning of 'a multicultural society' is socially produced, and it is not an illegitimate question to ask about and to try to understand its benefits and difficulties. The forbidding of difficult public discussions is a mark of sclerotic societies. We must be able to explore both our meanings and their limits. We must be able to say when words, and their meanings, have become opaque; and we must be able to explore sameness and difference in all their possibilities for comforting legibility and also uncomfortable, but creative, newness of symbolic expression. What is needed are deep reconceptualisations of what kinds of creatures humans are. These will certainly be found in art, in (a few) films, in some novels, and especially, perhaps, in the best poetry.
But these reconceptualisations, which allow the creation of new forms of symbolisation, new languages so to speak, must also be found in science. Not, precisely, science as it is popularly thought to be, but in dialogues between the sciences and critical thought surrounding them. Nor can politics simply be done by pragmatic means narrowly conceived, because these (as Jonathan notes) will simply repeat the dominant structures and knowledges of the present, or attempt to make sense by reference to languages and creeds outworn.
Class, for example, is not a thing; it's a set of practices, habits, clothes, relationships, economic organisations etc etc which are all signs. We need to understand that languages - the culturo-organic codes of humans - are semiotic systems, and that such systems (natural and cultural) evolve over time. Time and history are contexts; they are the environments in which meanings are made and read. So when we say we know pretty much what class meant for ordinary people's experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain, we must similarly ask what does class mean, in those same semiotic ways, now. Statistics about different kinds of discrimination certainly tell one kind of story about the experience of prejudice, but a politics has to be lived at the popular level if it is to have any purchase. We need to be able to tell new kinds of stories whose sense (and political potential) derives from a sharper and deeper understanding of 'the semiotic animal'. Our experience (and reading) of signs goes much deeper than consciousness and words alone - a fact long (and fraudulently) exploited by advertising, and now being more extensively explored by science (see, for example, 'The Other You', New Scientist, 1 Dec 2007). If left politics are to get a grasp of the present, new left understandings need to be much more deeply informed than they have been about the deep nature of semiotic life, and the way it is encoded in structures of feeling and structures of power, and also often masked and manipulated (as Derren Brown's shows demonstrate) by those in positions of communicative power.
Not everything discovered in such a project will necessarily be congenial to contemporary left thought. But our concerns with social justice, with disempowerment and exploitation, and our sense that capitalism is unhealthy - for us and for the planet - are more likely to be illuminated by such a pursuit than by persistent attachment to old languages and meanings. We are in danger of becoming what the Catholic Church was at the end of the Middle Ages. Once illuminated (the original progressive project of Enlightenment modernity, after all), and however difficult the task of encountering the differences of the present within our own left identity, we will be in a far better position to fashion a just politics which is also capable of grasping modern present imaginations.
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