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THIS BOOK is a report from a battlefield—the battlefield on which we wage our struggle to find the new and adequate ways of thinking of, about, and for the world we live in, and our lives within it.
The ongoing effort to understand the world—this world, here and now, apparently familiar yet sparing us no surprises, denying today what it yesterday suggested was true, while giving little assurance that what we hold true at sunset today won’t be refuted tomorrow at dawn—is indeed a struggle. One would say an uphill struggle—and surely a daunting and unending task—always unfinished. Final victory in the struggle remains obstinately beyond the horizon. And vexingly, the hope of coming to some understanding of the world seems even more unattainable now than it did in the not-so-distant past—as older people remember but the young find difficult to imagine.
Life appears to be moving too fast for most of us to follow its twists and turns, let alone anticipate them. Planning a course of action and sticking to the plan is an endeavor fraught with risks, whereas long-term planning seems downright dangerous. Life trajectories feel as if they are sliced into episodes; any connections between the episodes, not to mention the causal, determining connections, are discernible (if at all) only in retrospect. Worry and apprehension about the sense and destination of the journey are as abundant as the pleasures promised by this world full of surprises, this life punctuated by “new beginnings.”
Our plight, once cast into such a setting and obliged to act in it, is not made any easier by the “conceptual nets” we have inherited or learned to use to grasp the elusive realities, or by the vocabularies we commonly deploy to report our findings. So many concepts and words intended to convey our meaning to ourselves and others now prove unfit for the purpose. We desperately need a new framework, one that can accommodate and organize our experience in a fashion that allows us to perceive its logic and read its message, heretofore hidden, illegible, or susceptible to misreading.
In this book I offer a preliminary and tentative attempt to assemble such a framework. I cannot pretend that it is anything more than a “career report”: no more than an attempt to catch the shape of a world on the move, a world that, infuriatingly, keeps changing faster than we—our ways of thinking and talking about it—can adapt. Rather than suggesting solutions to our quandaries, I ask how our quandaries tend to be shaped (by what sort of experience), where their roots lie, and what questions need to be asked if we are to uncover them.
My ambition is merely to help myself and my readers sharpen our common cognitive tools; perfecting the cognitive products must remain a do-it-yourself enterprise. It is undoubtedly true that, whether big or small, improvements in our thinking about the lived world will not suffice to ensure fulfillment of the hope to improve the world and our lives in it, yet it is no less true that without such improvements, that hope will not survive.
Just to clarify what the proposed reshaping of our cognitive framework would involve, and what obstacles it is likely to face along the way, let us look at the intellectual adventure of a group of researchers from the Zoological Society of London who went to Panama to investigate the social life of local wasps. The group was equipped with cutting-edge technology, which it used over the course of 6,000 hours to track and monitor the movements of 422 wasps from 33 nests.1 What the researchers found out has overturned centuries-old stereotypes of the social insects’ habits.
Indeed, ever since the term “social insects” (a category embracing bees, termites, ants, and wasps) was coined and popularized, learned zoologists and the lay public have shared a firm belief, hardly ever questioned: that the “sociability” of insects is confined to the nest to which they belong—in which they were hatched and to which they bring the spoils of their regular foraging ventures, shared with the rest of the hive’s inhabitants. The possibility that some working bees or wasps would cross the boundaries between nests, abandon the hive of birth and join another one, a hive of choice, was seen (if it was ever contemplated) as incongruous. It was axiomatic, rather, that the “natives,” the indigenous and therefore “legitimate” members of the nest, would promptly chase the maverick newcomers away and destroy them if they refused to flee.
Like all axioms, that assumption had never theretofore been questioned or tested. True, technically it could not have been: electronic equipment for tagging individual wasps had only quite recently been invented. More important, however, the thought that tracing the traffic between nests or hives might be called for did not occur in the first place—either to ordinary folks or to the learned experts. For the scholars, the assumption that the instinct to socialize is limited to “kith and kin,” in other words to the “community of birth and therefore of belonging,” stood to reason. For the ordinary folks, it made sense. Instead, a lot of research energy and funds were dedicated to the question of how social insects spot a stranger in their midst: Do they distinguish it by sight? By sound? By smell? By minute nuances of conduct? The intriguing question was how the insects manage what we humans, with all our smart and sophisticated tools and weapons, only half succeed in achieving—that is, how they keep the borders of “community” watertight and maintain the separation between “natives” and “aliens,” between “us” and “them.”
What passes for reason (in its role as the supreme authority when it comes to making judgments and recognizing them as beyond dispute), like what is taken to make “good sense” (in its role as doxa or paradigm), tends, however, to change over time.2 It changes together with the human condition and the challenges it presents.
All or most currently held views of reason and good sense tend to be praxeomorphic. They take shape in response to the realities “out there” as seen through the prism of human practices—what humans currently do, know how to do, are trained, groomed, and inclined to do. Scholarly agendas are derivatives of mundane human practices, whereas it is the sociocultural agenda, dictated by problems of daily human cohabitation, that sets the topical relevance of issues and suggests the hypotheses that research projects seek subsequently to confirm or disprove.
We are therefore entitled to surmise that if no effort has been made to test received popular wisdom, it is not so much for lack of research tools as from the absence of suspicion that such a test was needed because the credibility of such common wisdom was at issue. Consequently, we may also suppose that if for most of modern history nothing in the commonsense view (no belief formed and reinforced daily by common experience) had cast doubt on the “naturalness” and universality of the “inborn” limitations on sociality, the research escapade of the Zoological Society team hints that this may not be the case any longer.
Contrary to everything known (or believed to be known) for centuries, the London team found in Panama that an impressive majority, 56 percent, of “working wasps” change their nests in their lifetime, and they move to other nests not just as temporary, unwelcome visitors, discriminated against and marginalized, always suspected and resented, but as full and rightful (one is almost tempted to say “card-carrying”) members of the adoptive community, collecting food and feeding and grooming the native brood just as the native workers do. The inevitable conclusion was that the nests the Londoners researched were as a rule “mixed populations,” inside which the native-born and the immigrant wasps lived and worked cheek by jowl and shoulder to shoulder—becoming indistinguishable from one another, at least for the human outsiders, except through the help of electronic tags.
What the news from Panama points up above all is the astonishing reversal of perspective: beliefs that not so long ago were imagined to be reflections of the “state of nature” have been revealed now, retrospectively, to have been but a projection onto the insects’ habits of the scholars’ own human, all-too-human, preoccupations and practices (though practices of a kind now dwindling and receding into the past). Once these scholars of a somewhat younger generation brought to the forest of Panama their own experience (and ours) of the life practices acquired and absorbed in their newly multicultural home of interlocking diasporas, they duly “discovered” the fluidity of membership and perpetual mixing of populations to be the norm also among social insects: and a norm apparently implemented in “natural” ways, with no help from royal commissions, hastily introduced bills of law, high courts, or asylum seekers’ camps. In this case, as in so many others, the praxeomorphic nature of human perception of the world prompted the scholars to find, out there in the world, what they have learned to do and are doing here at home, and what we all carry in our heads or in our subconscious as an image of how things truly are. In confrontation with the unexpected evidence from social insects, something clicked: the intuitive, half-conscious, or unconscious premonitions were articulated (or perhaps articulated themselves); and then the intuitions were recycled into an alternative synthesis of that different reality corresponding to the novelty of the researchers’ own reality. But for this recycling to take place, there already had to be an accumulation of raw material waiting to be recycled.
“How could that be?!” asked the Londoners on their research trip to Panama, at first hardly believing their findings, which were so different from what their professors had told them to expect. Feverishly, they sought a convincing explanation of the Panamanian wasps’ bizarre ways and, as might be expected, found it in the warehouse of tested and familiar methods for recycling anomalous evidence to conform to the image of an orderly world. The scientists declared that the newcomers who had been allowed to settle in the hives “were not truly aliens”—strangers no doubt, but not as strange as the other, genuine strangers. Perhaps they joined the nests of closely related wasps—cousins, maybe. Indeed, such an explanation might have sounded foolproof to the human researchers: it seemed incontrovertible, precisely thanks to being pleonastic. The right of close relatives to visit and to settle in the family home had been for them, since time immemorial, a birthright; as we all know, this is exactly what sets close relatives apart from all other visitors. But how do we know that the alien wasps were close relatives of the natives? Well, they must have been, mustn’t they? Otherwise, the insiders would have forced them to leave or killed them on the spot—Q.E.D. Circular reasoning is infallible even if not exactly logical, and this is why so many of us so often resort to it—not so much to resolve baffling problems, but to be absolved of the obligation to worry about them.
What the London researchers clearly forgot or failed, for the sake of convenience, to mention is that it took a century or more of hard work, sometimes sword brandishing and other times brainwashing, to convince the Prussians, the Bavarians, the Badenians, the Württembergers or Saxons (just as it takes now to convince the “Ossis” and “Wessis,” until recently East and West Germans) that they were all close relatives, cousins or even brothers, descendants of the same ancient German stock animated by the same German spirit, and that for this reason they should behave the way close relatives do: be hospitable to each other and cooperate in protecting and increasing the common welfare. Or similarly, that on the way to the modern centralized nation-state and the identification of nationhood with citizenship, revolutionary France had to include the slogan of fraternité in the call it addressed to “locals” of all sorts—now appointed les citoyens—to people who had theretofore seldom cast a glance, let alone traveled, beyond the frontiers of Languedoc, Poitou, Limousin, Burgundy, Brittany, or Franche-Comté; fraternité, brotherhood: all Frenchmen are brothers, so please behave as brothers do, love each other, help each other, and make the whole of France your common home, and the land of France your shared homeland. Or for that matter, that since the time of the French Revolution all movements bent on proselytizing, recruiting, expanding, and integrating the populations of previously separate and mutually suspicious kingdoms and duchies have been in the habit of addressing their current and prospective converts as “brothers and sisters.” Or that, as any anthropologist will tell you, all known cultures habitually link individual rights and the duties and norms of mutuality to the areas outlined on mental maps of kinship, even though the substance of those rights and duties varies considerably from one culture to another, such variation being one of the principal reasons to consider them different cultures.
But to cut a long story short: the difference between the cognitive maps the older generations of entomologists carried in their heads and those acquired or adopted by the youngest reflects the passage from the nation-building stage in the history of modern states to the multicultural phase in their history—more generally, from “solid” modernity, bent on entrenching and fortifying the principle of territorial, exclusive, and indivisible sovereignty, and on circumscribing the sovereign territories with impermeable borders—to “liquid” modernity, with its fuzzy and eminently permeable borderlines, the unstoppable (even if bemoaned, resented, and resisted) devaluation of spatial distances and the defensive capability of territories, and the intense flow of human traffic across all and any frontiers.
Human traffic goes both ways; frontiers are crossed from both sides. Britain, for instance, is today a country of immigration (even if the successive home secretaries go out of their way to be seen as trying hard to erect new barriers and stem the influx of foreigners); but also, according to the latest calculations, almost a million and a half native Britons are currently settled in Australia, almost a million in Spain, several hundred thousand in Nigeria, even a dozen in the North Korea. The same applies to France, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Italy, Spain; in one measure or another, it applies to any bordered-off territory on the planet, except a few remaining totalitarian enclaves that still deploy the anachronistic panopticon-style techniques designed more to hold the inmates (state subjects) inside the walls (state borders) than to keep the aliens out.
The population of every country is nowadays a collection of diasporas. Every sizable city is now an aggregate of ethnic, religious, and lifestyle enclaves in which the line dividing insiders from outsiders is a hotly contested issue, while the right to draw that line, to keep it intact and make it unassailable, is the prime stake in the skirmishes over influence and battles for recognition that follow. Most of the states and left their nation-building stage behind—and so are no longer interested in assimilating the incoming strangers (that is, forcing them to shake off and forfeit their separate identities and to dissolve into the uniform mass of autochthons); and so the settings of contemporary lives are likely to remain protean and kaleidoscopic, and the yarn of which the life experience is woven is likely to remain variegated, for a long time to come. For all that it matters and for all we know, they may well keep changing forever.
We are all now, or are fast becoming, like the wasps of Panama. But more precisely, it fell to the lot of the wasps of Panama to make history, as the first social entity to which the emergent, precocious cognitive framework (still waiting to be recognized and endorsed) was applied—a framework derived from our novel experience of an increasingly and probably permanently variegated setting of human cohabitation, the fuzziness of the line separating inside from outside, and the daily practice of mixing with and rubbing elbows with difference. Immanuel Kant predicted more than two centuries ago that designing, elaborating, and putting into operation rules of mutual hospitality must at some point become a necessity for the human species, for we all inhabit the surface of a spherical planet, and that prediction has now been realized. Or rather the necessity has become the seminal challenge of our time, the one that calls for the most urgent and most thoroughly considered response.
No place on the planet is spared a point-blank confrontation with that challenge. If any is seemingly exempt from the universal rule, it is for the time being only. The challenge faces every direction at once, and from the point of view of any place it simultaneously prompts inward and outward tensions and urgencies. However self-confident it might currently be or pretend to be, and however resourceful, each ostensibly sovereign territorial enclave on the planet is bound to be weighed down by the sheer magnitude of the global challenge and sooner or later lose its defensive battle (if it wages that battle, as it most often will, alone, resorting solely to the internally available resources and internally feasible measures). At the same time, a fully authoritative planetary center that could set the rules for a universal alliance for a proper response to the challenge, and that could make those rules universally binding, is today conspicuous by its absence.
The composition of the more than two hundred “sovereign units” on the political map of the planet is increasingly reminiscent of that of the thirty-three wasps’ nests investigated by the research expedition of the London Zoological Society. When trying to make sense of the present state of human cohabitation, we could do worse than borrow the models and the categories that the researchers in Panama were obliged to deploy in order to make sense of their findings. Indeed, none of the nests they explored had the means to keep its borders watertight, and each had to accept the perpetual exchange of its population. At the same time, each seemed to manage quite well under the circumstances: to absorb newcomers without friction and suffer no malfunction because of the departure of some residents. Furthermore, there was nothing in sight remotely reminiscent of an “insect center” able to regulate the insect traffic—or, for that matter, anything else amenable to regulating. Each nest had to cope with the tasks of life more or less on its own, though the high rate of “personnel turnover” probably ensured that the know-how gained by any one nest could and did travel freely, and contributed to the survival success of all other nests.
Moreover, the researchers seem, first, not to have found much evidence of internest wars. Second, they found that the internest flow of “cadres” appeared to compensate for the locally produced excesses or deficits of nest populations. Third, they realized that the coordination and indirect cooperation among social insects of Panama were, it seems, sustained without either coercion or propaganda; without commanding officers and headquarters in sight; indeed, without a center. And whether we admit it or not, whether we relish it or fear it—we, the humans scattered among more than two hundred sovereign units known as the states, have also managed for some time now to live without a center—even though the absence of a clear, unquestionably authoritative, and uncontested global power at the center creates a constant temptation for the mighty and the arrogant to try to fill that void themselves.
The centrality of the center has been decomposed, and links between intimately connected spheres of authority have been broken, perhaps irreparably. Local condensations of economic, military, intellectual, or artistic power and influence no longer coincide (if they ever did). Maps of the world on which we painted political entities in various colors to mark their relative share and importance in, respectively, global industry, trade, investment, military power, scientific achievements, or artistic creation would not overlap. And the paints we use would need to wash off easily, since the rank of any land in the pecking order of influence and impact is by no means assured to last.
As we try desperately to grasp the dynamics of planetary affairs today, our old and hard-dying habit of organizing the balance of power with the help of such conceptual tools as center and periphery, hierarchy, and superiority and inferiority serves more as a handicap than, as before, an asset; more as blinders than as searchlights. The tools developed and applied in the research on Panama wasps may well prove much more suitable for this task.
The absence of a clear-cut and stable division between planetary center and periphery, coupled with the new multidimensionality of superior-inferior relations, does not augur the planetwide “leveling” of human conditions; most certainly they do not mean the advent, or even gradual advance, of equality. In the present constellation of global conditions necessary for a decent and agreeable life (and so also of the global prospects of living such a life), the star of parity shines ever brighter, where once the star of equality shone. As I will argue in Chapter 3 of this book, parity is, most emphatically, not equality; or rather it is an equality stripped down to the equal or at least equitable entitlement to recognition, to the “right to be” and to the right (if needed) to be left alone. Being left alone means, first and foremost, the right to self-definition and self-assertion, and having a realistic chance to act effectively on that right. It is that so-called self-governance (attained and enjoyed, postulated or putative), rather than the material boundaries, that holds together the totalities striving to achieve or retain parity. The totalities of our time are more reminiscent of hard-pitted avocados than hard-shelled coconuts.
The ever more frequent substitution of the metaphor of “network” for the terms most commonly used in narrating social interactions of the past (terms like systems, structures, societies, or communities) reflects the gathering realization that social totalities are hazy at the fringes, remain in a state of constant flux, are always becoming rather than being, and are seldom meant to last for the duration. It suggests, in other words, that the totalities struggling today for recognition are more fluid than they used to be or were believed to be when the terms we now yearn to replace were designed and adopted.
In Chapter 3 I argue that the most consequential feature of a network is the formidable flexibility of its contents—the extraordinary facility with which its composition may be, and tends to be, modified. If structures are all about comprising and enclosing, holding, keeping, restraining, containing, a network, in contrast, refers to the perpetual interplay of connecting and disconnecting. The process of “identity formation” becomes primarily an ongoing renegotiation of networks.
I also suggest that identities exist today solely in the process of continuous renegotiation. Identity formation, or more correctly their re-formation, turns into a lifelong task, never complete; at no moment of life is the identity “final.” There always remains an outstanding task of readjustment, since neither conditions of life nor the sets of opportunities and threats ever stop changing. That built-in “nonfinality,” the incurable inconclusiveness of the task of self-identification, causes a lot of tension and anxiety. And for that anxiety there is no easy remedy.
There is no radical cure, at any rate, because the efforts of identity formation veer uneasily, as they must, between the two equally central human values of freedom and security. These values, indispensable for decent human life, are difficult to reconcile, and the perfect balance between them remains still to be found. Freedom, after all, tends to come in a package with insecurity, while security tends to be packed together with constraints on freedom. And as we resent both insecurity and “un-freedom,” we would hardly be satisfied with any feasible combination of freedom with security. Hence, instead of following a path of linear progress toward more freedom and more security, we can observe a pendulumlike movement: first overwhelmingly and staunchly toward one of the two values, and then a swing away from it and toward the other. Currently, it seems, in perhaps most places on the planet, the resentment of insecurity prevails over the fear of not being free (though no one can tell how long this tendency will last). In Britain, for instance, a vast majority of people declare that they would be willing to give up quite a few civil liberties in order to reduce the threats against them. Most are ready, in the name of more personal safety, to accept identity cards, until now stubbornly rejected in Britain in the name of individual freedom and privacy, and most want the state authorities, again for the sake of security, to have the right to tap private telephone lines and open private mail. It is in the realm of security, and under the banner of “more security,” that the link between the political authorities of the day and the individuals, their subjects, is forged and mutual understanding and coordinated actions are sought.
The dismembering and disabling of the orthodox, supra-individual, tightly structured, and powerfully structuring centers seem to run parallel with the emergent centrality of the orphaned self. In the void left behind by the retreat of fading political authorities, it is now the self that strives to assume, or is forced to assume, the function of the center of the Lebenswelt (that privatized, individualized, subjectivized rendition of the universe). It is the self that recasts the rest of the world as its own periphery, while assigning, defining, and attributing differentiated relevance to its parts, according to its own needs. The task of holding society together (whatever “society” may mean under the liquid-modern conditions) is being “subsidiarized,” “contracted out,” or simply falling to the realm of individual life-politics. Increasingly it is being left to the enterprise of the “networking” and “networked” selves and to their connecting-disconnecting initiatives and operations.
All that does not mean that the normal, weekday conduct of the individual has become random and uncoordinated. It means only that the nonrandomness, regularity, and coordination of individually undertaken actions can be attained by means other than the solid-modern stratagems of enforcement, policing, and following the chain of command—those means preferred and deployed by the totalities of the past in their bids to be greater than the sum of their parts and to force/train/drill their human “units” into repetitive, routine, and regulated conduct.
Having pondered all that, we can note another striking similarity between the way the wasps of Panama live and the way we live. In a liquid-modern society, swarms tend to replace groups, with their leaders, hierarchies, and pecking orders. A swarm can do without all those paraphernalia without which a group could not exist. Swarms need not be burdened by the group’s tools of survival: they assemble, disperse, and come together again from one occasion to another, each time guided by different, invariably shifting relevancies, and attracted by changing and moving targets. The seductive pull of shifting targets is as a rule sufficient to coordinate the swarm’s movements—and so commands or other means of enforcement “from the top” are redundant (in fact the “top” itself—the center—is redundant). A swarm has no top, no center; it is solely the direction of its current flight that casts some of the self-propelled swarm units into the position of “leaders” to be followed for the duration of a particular flight or a part of it, though hardly longer.
Swarms are not teams; they know not of the division of labor. They are (unlike bona fide groups) no more than sums of their parts, or rather aggregates of self-propelled units, linked only by the mechanical solidarity manifested in similar patterns of conduct and movement in a similar direction. A swarm can be visualized best as being like Warhol’s endlessly copied images without an original, or with an original that was discarded and impossible to trace and retrieve. Each unit of the swarm reenacts the moves made by the others, while performing the whole job, from beginning to end and in all its parts, alone (in the case of consuming swarms, that job is the job of consuming).
In a swarm, there is not much division of labor. There are no specialists—no holders of separate (and scarce) skills and resources whose task is to enable or assist other units to complete their jobs. Each unit is expected to be a jack-of-all-trades, in possession of the complete set of tools and skills necessary for the jobs to be done. In a swarm, there is no complementarity and little or no exchange of services—just physical proximity and roughly coordinated movement. In the case of humans, feeling, thinking units, the comfort of swarming comes from the security of numbers—the belief that the direction of action must have been properly chosen, since an impressively large number of people are following it: the supposition that so many feeling, thinking, freely choosing humans couldn’t all be fooled at once. As for imparting self-assurance and a feeling of security, the coordinated movements of a swarm are the next best thing to, and no less effective than, to the authority of group leaders.
Jorge Luis Borges famously suggested in one of his short stories that, given the randomness of good or bad luck that befalls human individuals, and the all-too-frequent lack of causal connections between a person’s fortune and his deeds, merits, and vices, one could hypothesize that the fate of individuals is decided by drawing numbers in some clandestine lottery office. Judging from individual experience, one could not either prove or disprove the existence of such a lottery. I wonder whether a similarly insoluble mystery haunts the issue of center and periphery in the liquid-modern setting.
Indeed, when watching a swarm in pursuit of a target, we might well guess that it was following a command—though we would be hard put to locate the headquarters from which the command was issued. Watching any individual “unit” in the swarm, we might suggest that it was moved by its own desires and intentions, though we would find it daunting to explain the twists and turns it followed, and even more daunting to grasp the secret behind the amazing similarity and synchronicity of moves made by the great number of individual units. I suspect that if we want to comprehend the world as it currently presents itself to us, and to acquire the skills needed to operate in such a world, we need to learn to live with this dilemma.
Everywhere, interhuman bonds, whether inherited or tied to the course of current interactions, are losing their former institutional protections, which are increasingly viewed as irritating and unbearable constraints on individual freedom of choice and self-assertion. Liberated from their institutional frame (now censured and resented as a “cage” or “prison”), human bonds have become tenuous and frail, easily breakable and more often than not short-lived.
Our lives, whether we know it or not and whether we relish the fact or bewail it, are works of art. To live our lives as the art of living demands, we must—just as artists must—set ourselves challenges that are difficult to confront up close, targets that are well beyond our reach, and standards of excellence that seem far above our ability to match. We need to attempt the impossible. And we can only hope, without benefit of a trustworthy prognosis, let alone of certainty, that with long, grinding, and often exhausting effort we may still manage to meet those standards and reach those targets and so rise to the challenge. Uncertainty is the natural habitat of human life—although it is the hope of escaping uncertainty that is the engine of human pursuits.
In a remarkable synthesis of the life experiences most common in our individualized society, François de Singly lists the dilemmas that tend to cast individual practitioners of the art of life into a state of acute and incurable uncertainty and perpetual hesitation.3 Life pursuits continually oscillate between mutually incompatible, even starkly opposite goals—such as joining and opting out, imitation and invention, routine and spontaneity—all oppositions that are but derivatives or exemplifications of the meta-opposition, the supreme opposition in which individual life is inscribed and from which it is unable to free itself: the opposition between security and freedom—both ardently coveted in equal measure but also excruciatingly difficult to reconcile and virtually impossible to satisfy at the same time.
The product of self-creation, the process operated by the art of life, is supposed to be the “identity” of the creator. Given the oppositions that self-creation struggles in vain to reconcile, and the interplay between the constantly changing world and similarly unstable self-definitions of the individuals trying hard to catch up with the changing conditions, identity can’t be internally consistent, nor can it at any point exude an air of finality, leaving no room (and no urge) for further improvement. Identity is perpetually in statu nascendi, each of the forms it assumes suffering from more or less acute inner contradiction, each to a greater or lesser extent failing to satisfy and yearning for reform, each lacking in the self-confidence that could be offered solely by comfortingly long life expectancy. As Claude Dubar suggests, “Identity is nothing else but a result simultaneously stable and provisional, individual and collective, subjective and objective, biographical and structured, of diverse processes of socialization which at the same time construct the individuals and define the institutions.”4 We may observe that “socialization” itself, contrary to once universally held and still frequently expressed opinion, is not a one-directional process but a complex and unstable product of the ongoing interplay between yearning for individual freedom of self-creation and the equally strong desire for security that only the stamp of social approval, countersigned by a community (or communities) of reference, can offer. The tension between the two seldom subsides for long, and hardly ever vanishes altogether. De Singly rightly suggests that in theorizing about present identities, the metaphors of “roots” and “uprooting” (or, let me add, the related trope of “disembedding”), all implying the one-off nature of the individual’s emancipation from the community of birth as well as the finality and irrevocability of the act, are better abandoned and replaced by the tropes of dropping and weighing anchor.5
Unlike “uprooting” and “disembedding,” there is nothing irrevocable, let alone ultimate, in weighing anchor. While roots torn out of the soil in which they were growing are likely to desiccate and die, anchors are drawn up only to be dropped again elsewhere, and they can be dropped with similar ease at many different and distant ports of call. Also, roots are part of the plant’s design and predetermined shape—there is no possibility that any other type of plant will grow from them—but anchors are only tools that facilitate the ship’s temporary attachment to or detachment from a place, and by themselves they do not define the ship’s qualities and capabilities. The times between when an anchor is dropped and when it is drawn up again are but phases in the ship’s trajectory. The choice of haven in which the anchor will be dropped next is most probably determined by the kind of load the ship is carrying; a harbor good for one kind of cargo may be entirely inappropriate for another.
All in all, the anchor metaphor captures what the metaphor of “uprooting” misses or keeps silent about: the intertwining of continuity and discontinuity in the history of all or at least a growing number of contemporary identities. Just like ships anchoring successively or intermittently in various ports of call, so the selves in the communities of reference to which they seek admission during their lifelong search for recognition and confirmation have their credentials checked and approved at every successive stop; each community of reference sets its own requirements for the kind of papers to be submitted. The ship’s record and the captain’s log are more often than not among the documents on which approval depends, and with every next stop, the past (constantly swelled by the records of preceding stops) is reexamined and revalued.
There are of course ports, as there are communities, that are not at all particular about checking credentials and that care little about the past, present, or future destination of their visitors; they would allow virtually any ship to drop anchor (or any “identity”), including such ships (or identities) as would probably be turned away at the entrance to any other port (or at the gates of any other community). But then visiting such ports (and such communities) is not wise and would be better avoided, since given the haphazardness of the company there, the offloading of precious cargo there might be an imprudent (risky) decision. Also, visiting such ports (or communities) could be an unreasonable step to take, or at best a sheer waste of time, since those visits would carry little weight when it comes to gaining recognition and confirmation of self-created identities, the principal objective of the voyage.
Paradoxically, emancipation of the self and its effective self-assertion need strong and demanding communities. Self-creation is a must, but self-affirmation feels like a figment of the imagination (and tends to be widely decried for that reason as a symptom of autism or a case of self-delusion). And what difference to the individual’s standing, confidence, and capacity to act would all that effort invested in self-creation make, were the confirmation, its finishing act and purpose, not to follow? But confirmation capable of completing the labor of self-creation can be offered only by an authority: a community whose admission counts because it has, and uses, power to refuse admission.
“Belonging,” as Jean-Claude Kaufmann suggests, is today “used primarily as a resource of the ego.”6 He warns against thinking of “collectivities of belonging” as necessarily “integrating communities.” They are better conceived of, he suggests, as a necessary accompaniment to the progress of individualization, or, we may say, as a series of stations or road inns marking the trajectory of the self-forming and self-reforming ego.
The idea of an integrating community is a notion inherited from the now bygone panoptical era: it refers to the organized effort to fortify the borderline separating the “inside” from the “outside,” to keep the inmates inside while barring the outsiders from entry and the insiders from deviating, breaching norms, and scheming to escape the grip of the routine. It refers to the enforcement of a uniform, monotonous, space- and time-ascribed code of conduct. That notion is associated with restrictions imposed on movement and change: an integrating community is essentially a conservative (conserving, stabilizing, routine-imposing, and preserving) force. It is at home in a strictly administered and tightly supervised and policed setting—which hardly describes the liquid-modern world, with its cult of speed and acceleration, novelty, and change for the sake of changing.
Today, panoptical instruments in their traditional form inherited from the solid-modern past are deployed mostly at the social periphery in order to bar the excluded from reentering the mainstream—that preserve of bona fide members of the society of consumers—and to keep the outcasts out of mischief. Elsewhere, what is deceptively similar in form to the orthodox panoptical tools, and is often mistaken for an updated version of Big Brother, that prison warden supreme, has been redeployed in the service of exclusion instead of confinement, or “keeping in” and “keeping in line.” It monitors the movement of unwelcome and undesirable outsiders to keep them out—so that the insiders can be relied upon to stay in line, without having to resort to the tools of surveillance, policing, and enforcement.
The supraindividual “totalities” to which the mainstream individuals offer their allegiance at some stage of their life (only to withdraw it at the next stop or a stop after the next), are anything but integrating communities: they do not monitor the human traffic at their fringes, they do not register those who cross borders in either direction, and are hardly aware of the individual decisions to “join” or “leave”—and they do not run the offices that could seriously engage in all that monitoring, registration, and recording. Rather than integrating those currently “belonging,” these entities are being “integrated” (though in an admittedly loose and easily arrested and reversed manner) by individual offers of allegiance—from the moment the offers begin to flow in, that is, and until the start of a massive desertion.
There is another seminal difference between the references to contemporary-style “belonging” and the orthodox “integrating communities.” To quote Kaufmann once more—“a large part of the identification process feeds on rejection of the Other.”7 There is no access to a group, and there can’t be, without the simultaneous opting out or retirement from another group. The act of selecting a group as one’s site of belonging in fact constitutes some other groups as alien and, potentially, hostile territory: “I am P” always means (at least implicitly, but often explicitly) that “most certainly, I am not Q, R, S, and so on.” “Belonging” is one side of the coin, and the other side is separation and opposition—which all too often evolve into resentment, antagonism, and open conflict. Identification of an adversary is an indispensable element of identification with an “entity of belonging”—and, through the latter, also a crucial element of self-identification. Identification of an enemy construed as an incarnation of the evil against which the community “integrates,” gives clarity to life purposes and to the world in which life is lived.
What has been said thus far applies to all instances of “belonging,” access, and offers of allegiance. But in the course of the modern era, with the passage from “identity building” to the ongoing, lifelong, and for all practical purposes infinite process of identification, this universal feature undergoes significant modifications.
Perhaps the most important modification is the fading of the monopolistic ambitions of the “entity of belonging.” As signaled before, the referents of belonging, unlike the orthodox integrative communities, have no tools to monitor the strength of the members’ dedication; nor are they interested in demanding and promoting the members’ unswerving loyalty and undivided allegiance. And they are not jealous in the manner of monotheistic deities. In its contemporary liquid-modern rendition, belonging to one entity may be shared and practiced simultaneously with belonging to other entities in almost any combination, without necessarily provoking condemnation or repressive measures of any kind. Accordingly, attachments have lost much of their past intensity. Much of their vehemence and vigor, just like the partisan pugnacity of those attached, are as a rule tempered by the parallel allegiances. Hardly any belonging engages the “whole self,” as each person is involved, not just in the course of her or his life but at any moment of life, in multiple belongings, so to speak. Being loyal only in part, or loyal “à la carte,” is no longer viewed as necessarily tantamount to disloyalty, let alone betrayal.
Hence the present recasting of the phenomenon of (cultural) “hybridity” (combining traits derived from different and separate species) as a virtue and a sign of distinction, rather than, as it was viewed until quite recently, as a vice and a symptom of either cultural inferiority or condemnable de-classment. In the emergent scales of cultural superiority and social prestige, hybrids tend to occupy top ranks and the manifestation of one’s own “hybridity” becomes the prime vehicle for upward sociocultural mobility. Being condemned in perpetuity to one self-enclosed and invariable set of values and behavioral patterns is, at the same time, increasingly viewed as a sign of sociocultural inferiority or deprivation. The old-style jealous and monopoly-seeking integrative communities are now to be found mostly, perhaps even exclusively, on the lower rungs of the sociocultural ladder.
For the art of life, this new setting opens unprecedented vistas. Freedom of self-creation has never before achieved a similarly breathtaking scope—simultaneously exciting and frightening. Never before was the need for orientation points and guidance as strong and as painfully felt. Yet never before were firm and reliable orientation points and trustworthy guides in such short supply (at least in relation to the volume and intensity of need). Let me be clear: there is a vexing shortage of firm and reliable orientation points, trustworthy guides. That shortage (paradoxically, yet not at all accidentally) coincides with a proliferation of tempting suggestions and seductive offers of orientation and with a rising wave of guidebooks amid swelling throngs of counselors. This circumstance, however, makes yet more confusing the task of navigating through the misleading or deceitful propositions in order to find an orientation likely to deliver on its promise.
To sum up the seminal departures discussed thus far: The presently emergent human condition augurs an unprecedented degree of emancipation from constraints—from a necessity experienced as coercion and therefore resented and rebelled against. This sort of emancipation tends to be experienced as the reconciliation of Sigmund Freud’s “pleasure principle” with the “reality principle,” and therefore as the end of the epoch-long conflict that in Freud’s view made civilization a hotbed of discontent.
All that does not mean, however, that the changed human condition has been cleansed of the hardships endemic to its previous form. It means only that the hardships are of a different kind, that they are experienced in a different way, and that they escape the cognitive frames created to serve the old hardships and therefore need to be articulated anew. The purpose of the new articulation ought to be, first, consideration of the ways in which the current human condition could be improved and rendered more inviting and hospitable to a “good” (or “better”) life; and, second, the designation of the range of options that contemporary men and women must confront if they contemplate the achievement of such a condition and such a life. Those two intimately connected tasks were in the past the mission and vocation of the intellectuals. The big question, therefore, is whether that mission is likely to be taken up once more by the “knowledge classes” of our time.
The immediate or foreseeable future prospects for this, one is inclined to admit, are not encouraging. The “historical pact” between intellectuals and the people looks today like an episode related to the first, solid phase of modernity—the era of intense nation building and the modern state’s authority-building effort. That era also saw the territorial enclosure of the knowledge classes and the working classes in the same space, confined by the territorial sovereignty of the emergent nation-state—a time when both classes remained, for all practical intents and purposes, glebae adscripti. But these conditions bind no longer. “Knowledge classes” (including the intellectuals) increasingly inhabit the extraterritorial cyberspace, emancipating themselves to a steadily growing extent from local dependencies and local populations. A new encounter and reunion, this time on the planetary scale, seems for the moment still some way ahead—and a new reunion must and can be arranged on the planetary, global level.
Indeed, globalization looks now inescapable and irreversible. The point of no return has been reached—and passed. There is no way back. Our interconnections and interdependence are already global. Whatever happens in one place influences the lives and life chances of people in all other places. Calculation of steps to be taken in any one place must reckon with the responses of people everywhere else. No sovereign territory, however large, populous, and resourceful, can single-handedly protect its living conditions, its security, long-term prosperity, preferred form of life, or the safety of its inhabitants. Our mutual dependency is planetwide and so we are already, and will remain indefinitely, objectively responsible for one another. There are, however, few if any signs that we who share the planet are willing to take up in earnest the subjective responsibility for that objective responsibility of ours.
At the moment, the knowledge classes (and most intellectuals in their number) seem to settle in the planetary “space of flows” (to borrow a concept from Manuel Castells) and thereby to keep their distance from “the people,” who are left behind in the “space of places.” But what about a somewhat more distant future? In the long term, so to speak?
To Marx, as Theodor Adorno suggested, the world seemed ready to turn into a paradise then and there. The world appeared to be prepared for an instantaneous U-turn, as “the possibility of changing the world ‘from top to bottom’ was immediately present.” However, noted Adorno, this is no longer the case—if it ever was (“only stubbornness can still maintain the thesis as Marx formulated it”).8 The possibility of finding a shortcut to a world better fit for human habitation has been lost. Instead, one would say that between this world, here and now, and that other world, hospitable to humanity and “user friendly,” there are no visible bridges left, whether genuine or putative. Neither are there crowds that would be eager to stampede across the length of the bridge if such a bridge were designed, nor vehicles able to take the willing to the other side and deliver them safely. No one is sure how a usable bridge could be designed and where the bridgehead could be located along the shore to facilitate smooth and expedient crossings. Such possibilities, one would conclude, are not immediately present.
Drawing the maps of utopia (represented as the model for “good society”) that accompanied the birth of the modern era came to the intellectuals, their draftsmen, easily; the draftsmen just filled in the blank spots or repainted the ugly parts in the public space whose presence was, and with good reason, taken for granted and seen as unproblematic. The pursuit of happiness was understood as a search for a good society. Images of a good life were matter-of-factly public and social, since the meanings of “social” and “public” were not in doubt—they were not yet the essentially contested issue they became in our day, in the aftermath of the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal coup d’état. Who would implement the blueprint and preside over the transformation was not a problem: it could be a despot or a republic, a king or the people; whoever it was, the seat of “public authority” was never empty. One or the other authority was firmly in place, waiting, apparently, only for enlightenment and the signal to act. No wonder that it was this public or social utopia that fell as the first casualty of the dramatic change in the public sphere.
Like everything else once securely located in that sphere, models of a good life have now become the game and prey of lone rangers, hunters, and trappers—and have become some of the many spoils of deregulation, privatization, individualization, of the conquest and annexation of the public by the private. The grand social vision has been split into a multitude of individual and personal, strikingly similar but decidedly not complementary portmanteaus. Each one is made to the measure of consumers’ bliss—meant, like all consumer joys, for utterly individual, lonely enjoyment even when relished in company.
Can public space be made once more a place of lasting engagement rather than casual and fleeting encounters? A space of dialogue, discussion, confrontation, and agreement? Yes and no. If what is meant by public space is the public sphere, wrapped around and serviced by the representative institutions of the nation-state (as it was through most of modern history), the answer is, probably, no. That particular variety of the public stage has been stripped of most of the assets that enabled it to sustain the dramas staged on it in the past. Those public stages, originally constructed for the nation-state’s political purposes, remain stubbornly local, whereas contemporary drama is a humanity-wide production, and so is obstreperously and emphatically global. An answer of yes, to be credible, would require a new global public space: genuinely planetary (as distinct from international) politics and a suitable planetary stage. Also a truly planetary responsibility: acknowledgment of the fact that all of us who share the planet depend on one another for our present and our future, that nothing we do or fail to do is indifferent to the fate of anybody else, and that no longer can any of us seek and find private shelter from storms that originate in any part of the globe.
The logic of planetary responsibility is aimed, at least in principle, at confronting the globally generated problems point-blank—at their own level. It stems from the assumption that lasting and truly effective solutions to planetwide problems can be found and made to work only through the renegotiation and reforming of the web of global interdependencies and interactions. Instead of aiming to control local damage and local benefits derived from the capricious and haphazard drifts of global economic forces, it would pursue results in a new kind of global setting, one in which economic initiatives enacted anywhere on the planet are no longer whimsical and guided by momentary gains alone, with no attention paid to the side effects and “collateral casualties” and no importance attached to the social dimensions of the cost-and-effect balances. In short, that logic is aimed, to quote Habermas, at the development of “politics that can catch up with global markets.”9 We feel, guess, suspect what needs to be done, but we cannot know in which shape and form it eventually will be done. We can be pretty sure, though, that the shape will not be familiar. It will be different from all we’ve gotten used to.
Not that long ago I took part in the celebration held in Prague of the seventieth birthday of Václav Havel, one of the most active and effective intellectuals of the past century. How come Havel left such a powerful trace on the shape of the world we inhabit? Havel is on record as having stated that “hope is not a prognostication.” Indeed, hope pays little if any respect to statistics, to pedantically calculated trends and fickle majority opinions. Hope, as a rule, looks and stretches itself beyond today and tomorrow (and, to the amazement of most practicing politicians, even well beyond the next elections!)—and this is why most seasoned politicians wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. Havel, who almost single-handedly managed to topple one of the most sinister barracks in the Soviet-communist camp, had no bombers, aircraft carriers, smart missiles, or marines—all those weapons that (as we are repeatedly told) decide the course of history. He had only three weapons: hope, courage, and stubbornness. These are primitive weapons, nothing high-tech about them. And they are the most mundane, common weapons: humans all have them, and have since at least Paleolithic times. Only we use them much too seldom.
And this is why I believe that the obituaries of the intellectuals are grossly exaggerated. This is also why I believe that the rupture between their concerns and those of the rest of the people will be healed, their dialogue with human experience will continue, and the changing human condition will be taken hold of again, with all the threats and chances it presents to our shared humanity.