Alessandro Ferrara
Rehabilitating authenticity: why agency, self-identity and community presuppose purposive unity.
1. One "post" too many?
We have been living in times of "post" now for decades. One need only mention "post-histoire", as the advent of an epoch when no historically significant turning points are any longer possible but only chronicles of irrelevant incremental iterations of unchanging patterns;[1] or "post-industrial" society, as the new kind of social formation representing the acme of Western development;[2] or "post-modernity", as a cultural configuration that breaks free of the spell of grand narratives, Archimedean points, views from nowhere and similar foundationalist myths;[3] or "post-secular" society, where a mutual learning process enables secular reason to learn from the insights of religious consciousness, to refrain from the imperialist claim of translating religious insights into its own language, and where historical religions have learnt to cohabit with modern science;[4] or "post-national" citizenship and "post-national" democracy, as the sequel to the modern merging of the democracy and the nation-state;[5] or "post-avangarde" art, as thekind of art practiced with the awareness that what once counted as transgressive "avant-garde" experiments are now far from counting as transgressive, are plainly accepted and even encouraged by critics, by the public and by academic and funding institutions.[6]
Among the latest additions to this already long list is the notion of a "post-authentic" kind of individual agency, self-identity and community. "Post-authentic", along with the "metonymic" or "post-identitarian" agency and community, is one of the defining concepts, coined by Thomas Claviez for the Sinergia Project "Theory and Practice of Authenticity in Global Cultural Production" and is designed to capture in just one poignant phrase the distance that various French- and Italian-speaking critics of subjectivity -- Rancière, Nancy, Blanchot, Agamben, Esposito -- as well as theorist of views of subjectivity based on hybridity (Bhabha), or on ritual (Seligman), urge us to take from contemporary views that in spite of their rejection of the modern notion of atomistic self-autonomy, nonetheless remain fixated on the modern myths of the unity, self-transparency, authenticity of the individual and the community. As examples of such views the Project takes Taylor's reconstruction of an ethic of authenticity and, undeservedly to be sure, also my own view as presented in Reflective Authenticity.
Among such philosophical positions is Rancière's critique of the suppression of the contingency typical of the formation of communities and its replacement with an imaginary, i.e. socially constructed, sharing of a destiny: "the politeia of the philosophers is the exact identity of politics and the police".[7]Similarly, what is known as the rule of law, is always "the rule of a law, that is, of a regime of unity among all the different senses of the law posited as a regime of the community. Today, the identification between democracy and the legitimate state is used to produce a regime of the community's identity as itself, to make politics evaporate under a concept of law that identifies it with the spirit of the community".[8]
In his celebrated work The Inoperative Community,Nancy starts out with a standard critique of modern individualism: "one cannot make a world with simple atoms. There has to be a clinamen. There has to be an inclination or inclining from one toward the other, of one by the other, or from one to the other. Community is at least the clinamen of the 'individual'. ... An inconsequential atomism, individualism tends to forget that the atom is a world. This is why the question of community is so markedly absent from the metaphysics of the subject".[9] In a move which has been anticipated by Hegel and later by Mead -- who time and again emphasized that a self does not exist except in the context of a relation with an alter -- Nancy points out that "community means that there is no singular being without another singular being, and that there is, therefore, what might be called, in a rather inappropriate idiom, an originary or ontological 'sociality' that in principle extends far beyond the simple theme of man as a social being".[10] However, in such a "community" "there is no communion of singularities in a totality superior to them and immanent to their common being".[11] What is then the relation of singular individuals to a community? According to Nancy, it is not a relation of communion but of communication, in which participants relate as finite singularities to one another. In a linguistic tour de force, Nancy tells us that the participants' finitude "co-appears or compears (com-paraît) and can only compear".[12] The participants' relation of "communication" with one another thus "consists before all else in this sharing and in this compearance (comparution) of finitude: that is, in the dislocation and in the interpellation that reveal themselves to be constitutive of being in common -- precisely inasmuch as being-in-common is not a common being".[13] Communityis then nothing else than the "compearance of finitude", which logically and ontologically precedes the so-called "social bond". With a different terminology Nancy, repeats an age-old commonplace of sociological theory since Durkheim: compearance "does not emerge among already given subjects" but rather "consists in the appearance of the between as such", a "between" that links "you and I" not via "juxtaposition", but via "exposition".[14] Thus "the being of community is the exposure of singularities".[15] Community so understood cannot be the product of work or intentional design: "one experiences or one is constituted by it as the experience of finitude".[16]Needless to say, community cannot not exist: "it could not happen that in the social desert there would not be, however slight, even inaccessible, some community. We cannot not compear".[17] The point is taken up again in Being Singular Plural: "being singular plural means the essence of Being is only as co-essence. In turn, coessence, or being-with (being-with-many), designates the essence of the co-, or even more so, the co- (the cum) itself in the position or guise of an essence".[18] Thus the "we" that sometimes is used to refer to a community should neither be understood as a "subject in the sense of egoistic self-identification and self-grounding" nor should be understood as composed of subjects, and yet "the 'we' is not nothing; it is 'someone' each time, just as 'each one' is someone ... 'we' says 'one' in a way that is singular plural, one by one and one with one".[19]
Similar themes undergird Blanchot's The Unavowable Community, a text inspired by Nancy's Inoperative Community and in dialogue with it. In agreement with Nancy's point that community is not produced or in any sense connected with the dimension of work or sovereignty -- in this sense Nancy's community is totally "inoperative" and reflects what Bataille, a hero for both authors, called the "negative community" or "the community of those who have no community" -- Blanchot points out that community has no other purpose than "the service to others unto/in death, so that the other does not get lost all alone, but is filled in for [suppléel just as he brings to someone else that supplementing [suppleance] accorded to himself".[20] Finding its raison d'être in the experience of the death of the dear ones, community for Blanchot (no less than for Nancy) "exposes by exposing itself" and, being "always already lost", "creates no work and does not glorify itself in that loss".[21] In its exposing us to the death of the other, of the dear one -- in the second part of the book Blanchot explores the nexus of love and death in the community of lovers -- community "proposes or imposes the knowledge (the experience, Erfahrung) of what cannot be known; that beside-ourself (the outside) which is abyss and ecstasy without ceasing to be a singular relationship".[22] Only community allows the individual to escape abstractness: "the isolated being is the individual, and the individual is only an abstraction, existence as it is represented by the weak minded conception of everyday liberalism".[23]
Again, the same theme can be found in Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, the Italian philosophers who took inspiration from Nancy and Blanchot and echoed their themes, much in the same way as in the 80's and 90's Gianni Vattimo and his fellow adherents of "weak thought" echoed Rorty's and Lyotard's postmodernism and later Derrida's version of deconstructionism. Giorgio Agamben, for example, drawing on Blanchot's "negative community" and Nancy's "inoperative community", has suggested the idea of a "coming community", disjoined from the predication of identity, both at the level of the individual and of the collectivity. In a kind of post-modern remake of Diderot's immortal "Rameau's nephew", Agamben suggests that "tricksters or fakes, assistants or 'toons are the exemplars of the coming community".[24]More generally, a "community" of the kind envisaged by Agamben could come about if only "humans could not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face". Once de-subjectified, humans would give rise for the first time to "a community without presuppositions and without subjects" or "to a communication without the incommunicable".[25] Such a community, according to Agamben, would exhude a radical, albeit in my opnion slightly mysterious, antagonism: "What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)".[26]
Along similar lines, Roberto Esposito reiterates Nancy's and Blanchot's point: "Community appears to be definable only on the basis of the lack that characterizes it. It is nothing other than what history has negated, the non-historic backdrop from which history originates in the form of a necessary betrayal".[27] This view is presented as an alternative to an allegedly "communitarian" view that really belongs to no one. Echoing a style common to all these authors, Esposito accuses an unidentified "political-philosophical discourse" of forcing community "into a conceptual language that radically alters it, while at the same time attempts to name it: that of the individual and totality; of identity and the particular; of the origin and the end; or more simply of the subject withits most unassailable metaphysical connotations of unity, absoluteness, and interiority".[28] Even worse, "neo-communitarian philosophy" is accused of inflating or "swelling" the self even more than its supposed adversary, i.e. atomistic individualism, when it theorizes "the hypertrophic figure of 'the unity of unities'".[29] All of these philosophical traditions -- liberal individualism, the communitarian critique of liberal individualism, the sociology of Gemeinschaft (by which Esposito basically means Tönnies), the "various ethics of communication" (Apel and Habermas) and the communist tradition -- presuppose a wrong view of community as a "fullness" or a "whole", in any event as a property of the subjects that it binds together: "community is conceived of as a quality that is added to their nature as subjects, making them also subjects of community".[30] Ironically, Esposito emphasizes the etymological and then conceptual nexus of "community" and "munus", gift -- perhaps ignoring that in so-called communitarian thinkers such as Taylor and MacIntyre community is linked with the idea of a duty to society, originating in the gift received by each of us from the social milieu that makes us what we are, not to mention the republican literature that emphasizes virtue as the disposition to give priority to the common good over the particular advantage. Equally vague as his polemical target -- even Hobbes' state of nature becomes a version of community[31] -- is Esposito's alternative notion of community. Community is constituted by its relation to death, as signified by its central symbolic element, the munus. Of the munus, or the gift that enjoins reciprocation,we are told that it
"is the non-being individual of therelation; the continuum that originates out of and to which we are drawn by a force that is directly counterposed to the instinct for survival; the wound that we cause or from which we emerge when we ourselves are changed when we enter into a relation not only with the other but with the other of the other... This meeting, this chance, this contagion, more intense than any immunitarian cordon, is the community of those that manifestly do not have it, when not losing it, and losing themselves in the very same process of flowing away from it".[32]
The same theme is echoed also within a number of traditions other than deconstructionism, for example in fields as diverse as post-colonial studies and the religious neo-Goffmanian theory of the ritualistic constitution of subjectivity. As Homi Bhabha has suggested,[33] the antagonist, anti-hegemonic notions of "mimicry" and "hybridity" empower subaltern actors by offering them a subversive strategy "that negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative 'unpicking' and incommensurable, insurgent relinking". Whereas hegemonic colonial discourse revolves around metaphor, according to Bhabha mimicry brings to the force the axis of metonymy: drawing on Lacan, he claims that "mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization or repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically".[34]
Finally, a similar train of thought can be found in Adam Seligman's reflection on the import of ritual, as opposed to the quest for authenticity, in the shaping of the human self. Jointly taken, rituals of politeness and of all other sorts, according to Seligman, constitute the fabric of social life.[35] The intrinsic performativity of ritual -- what matters is one's doing the appropriate thing, not one's inner state -- generates an entirely different picture of the constitution of the subject, a picture which runs against the grain of the modern emphasis on sincerity and authenticity. What contributes to this process of coming into being is not so much the other person's recognition of my inner states but the other person's perception of my ritual acts in the space of the subjunctive, the "as if" world created by the joint performance of ritual acts. In Seligman's view, this self-constituting capacity of rituals allows more leeway for the subject's freedom than the modern paradigm of self-autonomy premised on atomism or its authenticity version, premised on expressing inner motives through outer conduct: when "getting it right is not a matter of making our acts conform to inner beliefs",[36] Seligman argues, "the self is left more 'room to wander' than in one [conception of subjectivity] where the self has to be firmly identified with its role - where the matrix of social order is in sincerity".[37]As in Goffman's view of the unsubstantiality of the self, as an effect of a well-staged impression management, so for Seligman ritual (including religious practice, etiquette, music, dance, some forms of play) has the advantage (over the modernistic emphasis on sincerity and authenticity, ie the alignment of outer conduct and inner states) of conveniently side-stepping "questions of belief or truth",[38] of enabling us "to live with ambiguity and the lack of full understanding", of avoiding the closure inherent in binaries like "thought and action, structure and agency, values and interests" and finally to create a world of "representations", "fragile but not false", a world where, if we do not demand too much in terms of sincerity and authenticity, then "differences can be accommodated, tolerance enacted ... and openness to the other maintained".[39]
Despite the diversity of the underlying vocabularies -- some draw on Heidegger's distinction of the being of beings from the being of Being, others on the dichotomy of contingency and necessity, others on that of metonymy vs metaphor, on that of ritual and sincerity/authenticity -- all these accounts of agency, identity and community nonetheless share two basic assumptions and one implication.
1. The first assumption is that the self cannot be understood as a center of unified agency: internal heterogeneity, fragmentation of motives, impulses, incompatible drives are the norm and agency follows suit, it unfolds under the sign of hybridity and fragmented, occasional motivation, at best under the aegis of shared rituals. Instead, récit, narrative, coherence, continuity and similar constructs all distort the basic experience of subjectivity just as the old plot of the realist novel of the 19th century would present an unlikely and disturbingly consolatory picture of the world where every cause leads to an effect and every effect has a cause, and time is a unidirectional arrow. Authenticity, even when it rejects all postulation of an essentialistic "true self", epitomizes this distorting approach: ironically, all reference to authentic subjectivity sounds as fake as the realist novel after the inception of the avant-garde. This assumption has a coda, which is irrelevant here, namely that the self cannot be conceived atomistically, as a self-contained and self-sufficient center of autonomy that seeks to establish some relation with others. I call this assumption (present in Esposito and Nancy) irrelevant because it targets a strawman that few would identify with. Modern 20th century liberalism from Dewey to Mead, to Rawls and Dworkin, has nothing to do with atomism à la Hobbes or Locke. It is only lack of familiarity with one's polemical target that explains this recurrent accusation against liberalism as such.