It is extraordinary that citizens of the contemporary West could imagine that overlooking the changeability of things is one of our greatest perils. On the contrary, there is far too much change around, not too little. Whole ways of life are wiped out almost overnight. Men and women must scramble frantically to acquire new skills or be thrown on the scrapheap. Technology becomes obsolete in its infancy and monstrously swollen corporations threaten to implode. All that is solid – banks, pensions schemes, anti-arms treaties, obese newspaper magnates – melts into air. Human identities are shucked off, reshuffled, tried on for size, tilted at a roguish angle and flamboyantly paraded along the catwalks of social life. In the midst of this perpetual agitation, one sound middle-aged reason for being a socialist is to take a breather.
The body, that inconvenient reminder of mortality, is plucked, pierced, etched, pummelled, pumped up, shrunk and remoulded. Flesh is converted into sign, staving off the moment when it will subside into the sheer pornographic meaninglessness of a corpse. Dead bodies are indecent: they proclaim with embarrassing candour the secret of all matter, that it has no obvious relation to meaning. The moment of death is the moment when meaning haemorrhages from us. What seems a celebration of the body, then, may also cloak a virulent anti-materialism – a desire to gather this raw, perishable stuff into the less corruptible forms of art or discourse. The resurrection of the body returns as the tattoo parlour and the cosmetic surgeon’s consulting-room. To reduce this obstreperous stuff to so much clay in our hands is a fantasy of mastering the unmasterable. It is a disavowal of death, a refusal of the limit which is ourselves.
Capitalism, too, for all its crass materialism, is secretly allergic to matter. No individual object can fulfil its voracious appetite, as it hunts its way restlessly from one to the other, dissolving each of them to nothing in doomed pursuit of its ultimate desire. For all its love affair with matter, in the shape of Tuscan villas and double brandies, capitalist society harbours a secret hatred of the stuff. It is a culture shot through with fantasy, idealist to its core, powered by a disembodied will which dreams of pounding Nature to pieces. It makes an idol out of matter, but cannot stomach the resistance it offers to its grandiose schemes.
It is, to be sure, no crime to tattoo your biceps. The West has long believed in moulding Nature to its own desires; it is just that it used to be known as the pioneer spirit and is nowadays known as postmodernism. Taming the Mississippi and piercing your navel are just earlier and later versions of the same ideology. Having moulded the landscape to our own image and likeness, we have now begun to recraft ourselves. Civil engineering has been joined by cosmetic surgery. But there can be more and less creditable reasons for piercing your navel. The creditable reason is that it is fun; the discreditable reason is that it may involve the belief that your body, like your bank account, is yours to do what you like with. There may be excellent reasons to sport a vulture on your chest or a steel bolt through your nose, but this is not one of them.
‘Personalizing’ the body may be a way of denying its essential impersonality. Its impersonality lies in the fact that it belongs to the species before it belongs to me; and there are some aspects of the species-body – death, vulnerability, sickness and the like – that we may well prefer to thrust into oblivion. Even then, there is no very coherent sense in which my body belongs to me. It is not a possession, like a scarlet fez or a mobile phone. Who would be the possessor? It sounds odd to call a ‘possession’ something which I never acquired and could never give away. I am not the proprietor of my sensations. Having a painful twinge is not like having a tweed cap. I could give you my cap, but not my twinge. I can call my body ‘mine’, but this is to mark the distinction between my body and yours, not to indicate that I am the owner of it. There is no private entrepreneurship when it comes to flesh and blood.
The body is the most palpable sign we have of the givenness of human existence. It is not something we get to choose. My body is not something I decided to walk around in, like a toupee. It is not something I am ‘in’ at all. Having a body is not like being inside a tank. Who would be this disembodied ‘I’ inside it? It is more like having a language. Having a language, as we have seen, is not like being trapped in a tank or a prison house; it is a way of being in the midst of a world. To be on the ‘inside’ of a language is to have a world opened up to you, and thus to be on the ‘outside’ of it at the same time. The same is true of the human body. Having a body is a way of going to work on the world, not a way of being walled off from it. It would be odd to complain that I could come at things better if only I could shuck off my flesh. It would be like complaining that I could talk to you better if only this crude, ineffectual stuff called speech did not get in the way.
The fact that my body is not one of my possessions does not give you carte blanche to muscle in on it. You cannot possess it either. But this is not because I got there first, like a piece of lucrative land to which I staked the first claim. Part of the point of bodies is their anonymity. We are intimate with our bodies, but we cannot grasp them as a whole. There is always a kind of ‘outside’ to my body, which I can only ever squint at sideways. The body is my way of being present to others in ways which are bound in part to elude me. It slips through my grasp, just as it does when it asserts its own stubborn material logic in the face of my hubristic schemes. In all of these ways, its mortality is revealed – for nothing is at once more intimate and more alien to us than death. My death is my death, already secreted in my bones, stealthily at work in my body; yet it leaps upon my life and extinguishes it as though from some other dimension. It is always untimely.
The impersonality of the body is related to the anonymity of love. Love here has its traditional sense of agape or charity, not the impoverished meaning which narrows it to the erotic or Romantic variety of the stuff. We need a term somewhere between the intensity of ‘love’ and the rather cooler ‘friendship’, and the fact that we lack one is probably significant. Love is no respecter of persons. It is remorselessly abstract, ready to attend to the needs of any old body. In this, it is quite indifferent to cultural difference. It is not indifferent to difference in the sense that it is blind to the specific needs of people. If it was, it would not be attending to them at all. But it is quite indifferent as to whose specific needs it attends to. This is one way in which it differs from friendship, which is all about particularity. Friends are irreplaceable, but those we must love are not. Love is also indifferent in the sense of being unilateral and unconditional. It does not give on the assumption that it will receive. It is unresponsive, too, in the sense that it does not repay injury with injury. This is one reason why it is sometimes hard to distinguish from cynicism, which is so detached from what it sees as the whole farcical business of human value that it does not even see much point in retaliation.
All this is why the paradigm of love is not the love of friends – what could be less demanding? – but the love of strangers. If love is not just to be an imaginary affair, a mutual mirroring of egos, it has to attend to that in the other which is deeply strange, in the sense of being fearful and recalcitrant. It is a matter of loving that ‘inhuman’ thing in the other which lies also at the core of ourselves. We have to love ourselves, too, in all of our squalor and recalcitrance, if self-love is to be more than self-admiration. This is why loving others as oneself is by no means as simple as it sounds. Indeed, both activities are perhaps beyond our power. They are, however, what it would take to redeem the ravages of desire, which is likewise impersonal, and which installs itself like a monster at the heart of the self. Desire is nothing personal. Only a correspondingly impersonal force would be capable of undoing the frightful damage which it wreaks.
Aristotle’s man of virtue is notoriously self-centred. He enjoys friendship as part of the good life, but it is the life of contemplation he finds most precious. What Aristotle does not fully appreciate is that virtue is a reciprocal affair. He sees, to be sure, that it can thrive only in politi
cal society; but he does not really recognize that virtue is what happens between people – that it is a function of relationships. His so-called ‘great-souled man’ is alarmingly self-sufficient. Friendship matters to the man of virtue, but it is more mutual admiration than genuine love. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it: ‘For the love of the person, as against the goodness, pleasantness, or usefulness of the person, Aristotle can have no place.’7
The opposite of self-sufficiency is dependency. Like some other key terms, as we shall see in a moment, this hovers somewhere between the material and the moral. It is a material fact that we are dependent on others for our physical survival, given the helpless state in which we are born. Yet this material dependency cannot really be divorced from such moral capacities as care, selflessness, vigilance and protectiveness, since what we are dependent on is exactly such capacities in those who look after us. Nor, according to Freud, can it be divorced from the dawning of moral feeling in the dependent one, in the form of gratitude. We shall literally not become persons, as opposed to being human animals, unless those whom we bank on share something of their affective and communicative life with us. To this extent, the moral and material are sides of the same coin.
Aristotelian Man, remarks MacIntyre, is a stranger to love. Yet love is the very model of a just society, even if the word has these days become faintly ridiculous when used in anything but interpersonal terms. Love means creating for another the kind of space in which he can flourish, at the same time as he does this for you. It is to find one’s happiness in being the reason for the happiness of another. It is not that you both find your fulfilment in the same goal, like hitting the open road clasped together on a motor-cycle, but, as we have seen already, that you each find your fulfilment in the other’s. There is already a politics implicit in this notion, as we have noted. The liberal model of society wants individuals to flourish in their own space, without mutual interference. The political space in question is thus a neutral one: it is really there to wedge people apart, so that one person’s self-realization should not thwart another’s.8
This is an admirable ideal, nurtured by what is in many ways a deeply honourable political tradition. The ‘negative’ freedoms it cherishes have a vital place in any just society. But the space involved in love is rather more positive. It is created by the act of relationship itself, rather than being given from the outset like a spare seat in a waiting-room. To be granted this kind of freedom is to be able to be at one’s best without undue fear. It is thus the vital precondition of human flourishing. You are free to realize your nature, but not in the falsely naturalistic sense of simply expressing an impulse because it happens to be yours. That would not rule out torture and murder. Rather, you realize your nature in a way which allows the other to do so too. And that means that you realize your nature at its best – since if the other’s self-fulfilment is the medium through which you flourish yourself, you are not at liberty to be violent, dominative or self-seeking.
The political equivalent of this situation, as we have seen, is known as socialism. When Aristotle’s ethics of flourishing are set in a more interactive context, one comes up with something like the political ethics of Marx. The socialist society is one in which each attains his or her freedom and autonomy in and through the self-realization of others. Socialism is just whatever set of institutions it would take for it to happen. One can see, too, why equality is a key concept for socialist thought. For you cannot really have this process of reciprocal self-realization except among equals. Strictly speaking, equality is not necessary for love. You can love your children, for example, or your hamster. Some people even love their bedroom slippers. But equality is necessary for what Aristotle calls philia, or friendship; and this, rather than love, is perhaps the more appropriate political term. There cannot be full friendship between non-equals. We may feel too constrained in the presence of a superior to express ourselves fully and freely, while the superior may be stymied by his need to preserve his authority. Only a relationship of equality can create individual autonomy. It is not that there are two autonomous individuals who then enter into an equal relationship. Rather, it is the equality which allows them to be autonomous. Friendship frees you to be yourself.
In his early Paris Manuscripts, Marx was seeking for a way of moving from how it is with the human body to how it ought to be. He wanted an ethics and politics based on our species-being or shared material nature. But this is a notoriously perilous enterprise. Philosophers have generally placed a ban on such attempts to derive values from facts. A straight description of a situation will not tell you what you should do about it. Human nature can be described in a rich diversity of ways, and there can be all sorts of competing versions of it to back up different ethical theories. ‘Nature’ is a slippery term, gliding between fact (how it is with something) and value (how it should be). It shares this ambiguity with the word ‘culture’, which some see as the opposite of Nature. We have, in fact, a whole vocabulary which links bodily states with moral ones: kind, tender, unfeeling, touched, touchy, thick-skinned, insensitive and the like. This language seems to imply a connection between how it is with the body and how we should or should not behave. But it is a connection plagued with problems. Being ‘kind’, in the sense of being of the same species as another, is often enough a reason for killing or being killed, dominating or being subjugated. If we were not ‘kind’, we might be treated a lot better. Nobody is particularly interested in subjugating beetles.
Or take the idea of human sociality. It, too, is suspended somewhere between fact and value. It is a fact that we are naturally political animals, at home only in society. Unless we co-operated with each other, we could not survive. But sociality can also mean an active, positive form of co-operation, something which is desirable rather than just biologically inevitable. Marx sometimes seems to imagine that sociality is always positive in this way. But a fascist society is also a co-operative one. The death camps were a complex collaborative project. There is a good deal of solidarity between the members of the World Bank. There is no virtue in human co-operation in itself. It depends on who is co-operating with whom for what purpose. Marx sees how some men and women can hijack the social capacities of others for their own selfish purposes. For him, indeed, this is a description of class society. In class society, even those powers and capabilities which belong to us as a species – labour, for example, or communication – are degraded into means to an end. They become instrumentalized for the advantage of others. One can say much the same about sexual life. Sexuality is a medium of solidarity which in patriarchal society becomes a means of power, dominion and selfish satisfaction.
But what if you are not co-operating over anything in particular? You need, of course, to work together to survive economically. Sexuality is necessary if the species is to be reproduced. Co-operation generally has some sort of practical goal. But what if it is enjoyed at the same time as an end in itself? What if the sharing of life becomes its own purpose, rather as in the activity we know as art? You do not need to find an answer to why human beings live together and enjoy each others’ company -some of the time, at least. It is in their nature to do so. It is a fact about them as animals. But when it becomes ‘fully’ a fact – when it exists as an activity in itself, not simply as a means to an end beyond it – it also becomes a source of value. A socialist society co-operates for certain material purposes, just like any other; but it also regards human solidarity as an estimable end in itself. As such, it is beyond the comprehension of a good deal of contemporary cultural theory, for which solidarity means tepid consensus or baleful conformism rather than a source of value and fulfilment.
7
Revolution, Foundations and Fundamentalists
We have seen that for some cultural thinkers, ethics should be hoisted from the banal realm of the biological into something altogether more enigmatic and mysterious. From this viewpoint, there cannot really be a materialist ethics. Yet Derrida, Lyotard, Badiou and the
ir colleagues are also in a sense right. The ethical is indeed about momentous, life-changing encounters as well as about everyday life. It is clouds of glory and feeding the hungry. It is just that these thinkers opt on the whole for the sublime rather than the sublunary. But the two go together, since fashioning a world in which the hungry could be fed would require a dramatic transformation. As Theodor Adorno remarks: ‘There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one should go hungry any more.’1
Take, for example, a revolutionary document like the Book of Isaiah. The poet who wrote this book opens with a typically anti-religious bout of irascibility on the part of Yahweh, the Jewish God. Yahweh tells his people that he is fed up with their solemn assemblies and sacrificial offerings (‘incense is an abomination to me’), and counsels them instead to ‘seek justice, correct oppression, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow’.
This is standard Old Testament stuff. Yahweh is forever having to remind his pathologically cultic people that salvation is a political affair, not a religious one. He himself is a non-god, a god of the ‘not yet’, one who signifies a social justice which has not yet arrived, and who cannot even be named for fear that he will be turned into just another fetish by his compulsively idolatrous devotees. He is not to be bound to the pragmatic needs and interests of the status quo. He will be known for what he is, so he informs his people, when they see the stranger being made welcome, the hungry being filled with good things, and the rich being sent empty away.
Words like these were to become a set-piece chant among some of the underground revolutionaries of politically turbulent first-century Palestine, and Luke puts them into the mouth of Mary when she hears that she is pregnant with Jesus. The people, for their part, prefer the solace of organized religion to the business of feeding the hungry. This is why they are denounced by prophets like Isaiah. The role of the prophet is not to predict the future, but to remind the people that if they carry on as they are doing, the future will be exceedingly bleak.
After Theory Page 17