An Ambiguous ‘Present’
Universalism and difference, equality and otherness have, for some time now, formed a strange couple not only within political and moral philosophy but in sociology as well. One of the leading reasons for the revival of ethics in recent years appears to be due to the concomitance between processes of globalisation and the proliferation of intercultural conflicts deriving from the resurgence of logics of identity. But opinions are divided regarding the nature of relations within this apparently opposed couple, opening the way for the most varied and heterogeneous interpretations, and for improvised and incoherent hermeneutics. To be able to tackle this sensitive issue directly, we must begin with a philosophical reflection upon the present – on our present.
However, to approach the present as a philosopher does not necessarily mean talking about philosophy, about strictly philosophical subjects. Since the whole set of experiences which can be classed as ‘Modern’ have gradually developed, the words of the philosopher have exited their orbit and started to invest that dimension we refer to as ‘actuality’, which is at once involving and fleeing, demanding and transient. From that moment on it is also possible – and, indeed, in a certain sense necessary – to be ‘untimely’ (in Nietzsche’s sense of a discrepancy that is in advance of its time). It is precisely for this reason that we cannot avoid referring – even if only in a polemical or radically negative fashion – to the present.
We will approach the present from the specific point of view delimited by the concept of difference, without losing sight of the longitudinal split that seems to mark our epoch – not to mention the extremely rapid obsolescence and semantic rarefaction of the slogans coined by the academic-advertisement exercises of the Postmodernists. We define this longitudinal fracture in terms of a double injunction, of a conflictive co-existence or co-habitation of two imperatives: the imperative of atopicality (the ‘non-places’ discussed by the anthropologist of everyday life Marc Augé) and that of belonging (the compensatory need for community identity manifested in the claiming of stable places and dwellings). As we have seen in the previous chapter, this is not an alternative but an interfacial relation: two sides of the same coin.
This is what we shall shortly attempt to demonstrate. Before doing so, we shall dwell a little longer on the question of places and non-places. In assessing the problems that confront us, it would be as well not to neglect the scale of the morphological-historical differences exhibited by the great geo-cultural areas of the planet. Michel Serres once observed:
North America has roads but no places. I mean manmade places: it is a space where one passes through. China has places engulfed in loam without even tiny paths, it is a land where one remains, a boundless place. In Europe we have places, roads and paths. At least, as long as paths which create places are not replaced or destroyed by thoroughfares.1
But there is still a general aspect which should be borne in mind if we do not wish the debates on the ‘decline of ideologies’, the ‘crisis of foundations’, ‘drifting’ and the ‘loss of centre’, which have characterised the atmosphere of recent years in Europe and the United States, to degenerate into pseudo-sociological banalities. This aspect affects the constant that traverses all the phases, all the innumerable metamorphoses of the conceptual vocabulary of power in the Occident, and that is represented by its symbolic space (and by its code).
The essential lexicon by which power is indicated in the Occident is composed of two elements: violence and perimeter, vitality and geometry, energetics and topology. From this standpoint, the history of power and the history of metaphysics really do coincide, albeit in a much more prosaic sense than that suggested by the path of thought that can be traced from Heidegger to Derrida. The two histories overlap only insofar as they are variants of the same logic of identity; only inasmuch as they are complementary ways of denominating the centre, different ways of bringing together two constituent coordinates of self-reference: identity and borders [confini], vitality and spatiality, ‘soul’ and ‘form’. The determination of a turning point, of a fracture within metaphysical substantialism, has suggested that the centre is not a fixed point but a ubiquitous function that cannot be located: an á-topon, precisely a non-place, a central meaning which is never present in an absolute way, outside of a system of differences.
We must now ask what the consequences are of such a breach in the logic of power and identity. This question throws us immediately into the heart of the problem that we have set out to address.
This problem is formulated from the viewpoint of difference. This is a category we intend to uphold not only with respect to the logic of identity, to identity-based logos of hegemonic universalism, but above all against the differences emphasised by the multiculturalist climate today. I shall reflect upon four areas in quick succession: borders [confini], values, language and technology. We shall examine them each in turn, attempting in each case to give an idea of their network of connections and internal concatenations.
Borders
How can the question of borders be viewed today, since the collapse of the mechanisms of threat and protection (mechanisms which are, therefore, symbolically ambivalent) of the bipolar world system?
Let us immediately declare that we are in agreement with those (from Claudio Magris to Hans Magnus Enzensberger) who have characterised the problem in the following terms. With the falling of the visible external walls, the strategic bastions, inner walls have sprung up, the invisible walls from which are produced not only crises of conscience or new friend/enemy aggregates, but from which the tormented ghosts of ancient hostilities also arise – as if they arise from archaic stratifications, from the remote depths of history. Ethnic hatreds which are keen, irreducible and – I fear – have been repressed for too long.
How, then, might we consider the two contrasting diagnoses of our time: the diagnosis which today sees the fulfilment of universal homologation and the ‘end of history’ under the heading of the pensée unique of ‘possessive individualism’, of an omnivorous and undifferentiated market economy, and that which emphasises diversity, centrifugal forces, and the processes of differentiation?
It is not a case of an either/or of mutually exclusive alternatives. Rather, we find ourselves faced by two half-truths: the two sides of the present’s coin. The characteristic of our present, or of that-which-we-have-before-us, may be defined in terms of the glocal, that is, of the short-circuit of the global and the local. The phenomena of globalisation, facilitated by modern technology, and the growing interdependence and tendential homogenisation of the various geocultural areas of the planet under the imperatives of competitiveness and innovation imposed by the world market, induce new phenomena of localisation. Therefore, the same vector of deterritorialisation gives rise – in a seemingly vicious circle – to the proliferation of phenomena of reterritorialisation, which increase exponentially the demands for autonomy and identity-based belonging.
Thus, we experience a return of the community, of the ‘little homeland’ in all quarters. This ‘return’ appears differently in the two halves of the West, in the old continent and the new. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this return has found its concrete expression in Europe in the upswelling of ethno-politics and in North America it is manifested in the ‘politics of difference’ (the secular arm of which is that of ‘political correctness’). In both cases the notion of the individual – as a value and as hard-won historical achievement – is considered to be a fetish to be overthrown.
In order to grasp the nature of the phenomenon, we must not forget that what we refer to as the ‘in-dividual’ – that is, an undivided subject possessing the sovereign virtues of self-determination – is an event that is not only Western but also specifically Modern. It is the product of the long and bloody religious civil wars which prepared for the advent of the ‘great Leviathan’ in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the advent of the secular state based on an apparatus of sovereignty and strictly ‘neutral’ legal procedures. We must therefore agree upon the meaning to be attributed to the expression ‘the return of the community’. Although it is expressed as a nostalgia for origins, this ‘return’ – precisely insofar as it takes the form of a demand for ‘compensation for damages’ from Modernity and of a search for a compensatory warmth from the community against the ‘Big Chill’ of the purely procedural institutions of our democracies – is not really a repeat, a pure and simple rerun of the past, but is a claim which is subsequent to the modern individual, after the Leviathan, which follows the neutral styling of political association into a ‘large body’ composed of atomised individuals, of indivisible monads isolated from one another.
If we wish to adopt more technical formulae, such as those familiar in the contest between the ‘liberal’ camp and the ‘communitarian’ camp which dominated the scene of political philosophy throughout the 1980s (or in the ambiguous debate which followed it around ‘multiculturalism’, or in the mounting populist revival), then we would have to specify that the essential content of all these challenges signifies, in the current crisis of the Leviathan, the return to the fore of the conflicts of identity – and of those irreducible values – that originally paved the way for the advent of the modern state; despite the fact that the latter subsequently managed to neutralise them, declassifiying them as mere conflicts of interests.
This brings us to the second part of my argument.
Values
Our present is not a time of ethics in dialogue but a time of ethics in conflict. The conflict-breeding – and thus, necessarily, far from edifying – implications that the current centrality of the ethical dimension bears with it, are played out on two levels: on the level (a) of philosophy and on that (b) of the political government of complex societies that are both multimedial and multicultural. It is a good idea to stop, if only for an instant, and examine these two aspects in turn, viewing them in their specificity and autonomy. Then – and only then – will we be able to measure the extent of their interdependence.
(a) At a strictly philosophical level, we may now see the growth not only of widespread dissatisfaction with utilitarian models of rationality, but also of the idea of an exclusive ‘incommensurability’ (to take up the expression of Bernard Williams, a well-known critic of utilitarianism) between value imperatives which are tragically incompatible, however rationally consistent they may be in themselves.2 This idea strikes at the heart of the utilitarian paradigm, insofar as the latter necessarily presupposes the axiom according to which there is a single, exclusive model of rational behaviour of ‘social agents’ – with the consequence that any conflict of value might in the last analysis be reduced to a case of logical inconsistency. In short, for utilitarians it is really difficult to imagine that a rational subject might remain rational without following the ‘economic’ criterion of rationality based on the calculation of costs and benefits. An agent who does not proceed according to this strictly strategic and instrumental logic is logically inconsistent, or sic et simplicter irrational, perhaps insofar as his vision of reality (and of his own interests) is fundamentally flawed by, for example, prejudices, ideologies and false beliefs.
(b) But the consequences of this anti-utilitarian position are no less decisive on the political level. Here we have the acknowledgement of the presence, in our Western societies, of mutually conflicting but equally plausible ethical imperatives or normative standpoints which – most important – cannot be lumped together under a single (rationally and universally valid) parameter of procedural fairness or justice. The irreducibility of the conflict of values to some ‘metric of interests’ or other undermines the model of the contract as understood by modern political philosophy. This has been noted by John Rawls himself, who, twenty years after A Theory of Justice, 3 radically revised his neo-contractualist programme in Political Liberalism4 by advocating a theory of ‘overlapping consensus’.
In an important discussion with Jürgen Habermas,5 Rawls openly declares his own renunciation of the claim to derive the model of the ‘well-ordered society’ from the hypothesis of an ‘original position’ and attempts to circumscribe the notion of ‘justice as fairness’ within the realm of the ‘Political’, understood as an area necessarily removed from the ideological and emotional storm of controversies between different ethical options and Weltanschauungen (visions of the world). The strictly political conception of justice, i.e. – crucially – ‘non-metaphysical’, is therefore specified – in conformity with a maxim which is more classical than even Rawls seems inclined to admit – as a sphere of neutralisation of those ‘substantive’ questions which are still used as a basis for a pluralism that is finally ‘taken seriously’.
The conception of political justice in Rawls’ Political Liberalism can and must be formulated independently of all ‘comprehensive’ doctrines (whether religious, philosophical or moral): even if a Weltanschauung or a metaphysical version always and in any case constitutes its background.6 However meaningful it may be, Rawls’ new framing of the question nevertheless neglects some crucial questions – as Habermas has also noted, albeit from a different perspective to ours – both at (i) the level of practical proposals and on (ii) the more strictly theoretical plane.
(i)At a practical level: if the pluralistic-conflictive nature of the different perspectives of value and Weltanschauungen is such as to render problematic the question of the order of a democratic system (and such – let us add – as to impose a reframing of Rawlsian theory), then on the basis of what miraculous virtues might ‘political liberalism’ be able to neutralise them in the no-man’s-land of a ‘reasonable’ cooperation?
(ii)At a theoretical level: granting, for the sake of argument, that political liberalism can limit itself to the category of the political, leaving philosophy just as it finds it, will it not then be necessary for us to justify this claim in terms of an argument and a ‘comprehensive conception’, according to which the constitution of the Political can avoid any and all philosophical foundation?
These are questions that cannot be easily avoided if we are to construct a theory of democracy which is effectively equipped to tackle the challenge of our times.
Another influential American political philosopher has recently spoken of two powerful centrifugal forces which are now at work in the United States. One is separating whole groups of the population from a supposedly common centre. The other is affecting single individuals by isolating them. Both these movements of diaspora and distancing from the centre have their critics, who accuse the former of chauvinism or of regressive/reactionary fundamentalism and the latter of pure and simple egoism. The argument between ‘liberals’ and ‘communitarians’ plays itself out in a crossfire of accusations. While the liberals regard the separate cultural groups as closed, intolerant tribes, the neo-communitarian critics regard the separate individuals as lonely, rootless egoists. Michael Walzer’s conclusion (the above observations are his) is that neither of these two criticisms is completely erroneous, nor are they completely exact. The reasons the two tendencies should therefore be made to interact is in order to aid a democratic politics which is open to centrifugal forces and capable of contemplating a plurality of ‘spheres of justice’.7
This solution is acceptable, but on two conditions. The phantasm of a ‘Third Way’ must not be allowed back into circulation. This solution had already been tested between the two World Wars and – as we Europeans know only too well – was strewn with dead bodies. And we cannot avoid the politically more arduous problem of the split, which is in my opinion irrevocable, between citizenship and belonging. The modern democratic idea – of Jacobin origin – of belonging as being fully resolved in citizenship is no longer able to tackle the challenges of contemporary society. We know that there are needs for symbolic identification that can never find full realisation in the sphere of citizenship – not even in its broadest imaginable or conceivable form. The possibility of answering social demands with a broadening of the horizon of citizenship (and the corresponding reinforcement of its apparatuses of inclusion) exists as long as one is dealing with political conflicts (over rights of equality) or with economic and social conflicts (over interests or status). But such possibility no longer exists once one enters the field of ethical conflict, the conflict of values.
The idea of a ‘moral citizenship’ can certainly be affirmed in the abstract or be the subject of academic conjecture. But in reality it leads to the forcible imposition of a mutually exclusive choice between the universalism and relativism of values. Accepting the first horn of the dilemma means assuming one set of morals as universally valid. This is obviously possible only in the presence of a culturally homogeneous population firmly anchored to its own mores. Conversely, accepting the other horn of the dilemma means ‘flexibilising’ the public sphere in order to render it more hospitable and open to the different groups, once the unsuppressible ethical and cultural heterogeneity of the ‘citizens’ has crystallised. This is something that inevitably involves a radical revision of claims to universality via a pragmatics of order aimed at resolving conflicts between imperatives and points of view – which are periodically destined to recur – on each occasion that they arise. And to do so in a manner which is balanced but, for that very reason, unstable as well.
So can we conclude tertium non datur? It would seem so. However, the decisive point is another. On neither of the two horns do we really have a broadening of citizenship in a moral direction. On the contrary, we have a limitation and relativisation of its ethical nature, whether implicit or explicit. As a consequence, the presumed or hoped-for broadening of citizenship into moral citizenship leads to the opposite effect in both of the alternatives considered: either due to its anchoring in the ‘customs’ of the dominant majority group (understood in the double sense of moral styles and standards of behaviour) or through a relativistic readiness to accept the ‘rationales’ of the different cultural groups present in the population, compensating and neutralising them reciprocally. This situation of theoretical and practical stalemate would seem to be the conclusion of a strictly political and logical consideration of relations between universality and difference. We may, therefore, exclude any examination of the premises (cultural, ethical and, in the last analysis, metaphysical) of politics itself.
Another path might be that of beginning from metaphysical foundations in order to get to the root of the symbolic conflict between citizenship and belonging. But taking this path would necessarily mean being ready to address the theme of the irreducibility of difference, which Western universalism has never managed to conceive of until now – either in philosophy or in politics – outside of the metabolic apparatuses of neutralisation offered by the dialectic or by relativism.
A further problem arises underlying this same set of themes. Is it really possible to elaborate the edifying idea of a multicultural citizenship without passing through the great aporia of difference – beginning, of course, with sexual difference understood in the anti-essentialist form of gender, i.e., according to the most recent terms of feminist thought, as a ‘sociocultural construction’ of the differences between the sexes?
In even more general form: is it possible to reframe the question of being-in-common (as suggested by one line of anti-metaphysical French thought on the ‘inoperative’ or ‘unavowable’ community) without getting to the bottom of those paradoxes of universalism that appear to be inextricably linked with that Western event by autonomasia that we call ‘politics’?
At stake in the conflict that seems to threaten the roots of democratic theory – and that in the United States resonates in an unprecedented crisis of the ‘American Dream’ – is our capacity to answer this question (and the ways in which we answer it). It is no coincidence that we are now witnessing the return to the limelight of a whole series of decisive ethical questions raised by the Enlightenment in its late phase and emerging in the last part of the eighteenth century through the conflict which places Herder, with his attention to the historical dynamic of languages and cultures, in opposition to Kant’s ethical universalism.
Kant’s moral idea – Herder objected – is an ideal which is existentially poor. It is a transcendental universal, precisely insofar as it transcends the specific forms of life of individuals, who are in reality always immersed in cultural contexts, in linguistic and symbolic networks that no single individual or group can do without. We may, therefore, certainly postulate a universal idea, but the way in which concrete individuals acquire experience of those values is always culturally determined and – above all – mediated by language.
The different ways of saying, of naming an idea (such as the idea of the good) or a value (like, for example, the values of freedom, of justice, of equality or of ‘equal opportunity’), do make a difference with respect to the meaning of ideas and values. But they usually refer to irreducibly different experiences and symbolic nuclei.
This brings us to the third aspect that I proposed to address.
Language
Insofar as it is constituted by and in language, the self is not in-dividual but is a multiple self. ‘The idea that the individual person may be seen as – or actually is – a set of sub-individual, relatively autonomous “selves” has a long history’.8 We thus find the bold reassertion, by contemporary postanalytic thought, a motif that is dear to the historical adversaries of methodological individualism: the subject is always a social event, and each individual is like a theatrical cavity [cavità teatrale] that acts as an echo chamber for the diverse motifs and languages of society. Indeed, the common denominator of diverse contemporary philosophical tendencies such as communitarianism, deconstructionism and hermeneutics is precisely this critique of the metaphysical, substantialist premise of the modern subject. For the currents of thought we have just mentioned, this premise is translated politically into a supremacist presumption that lies at the bottom of the emancipatory ideal of universal individualism.
But we cannot do in politics what we deny in philosophy. That is what regularly happens to those communitarian and (albeit to a lesser extent) deconstructionist or hermeneutic critiques of Modernity, which sometimes – with their denunciation of homologation and Anglo-Saxon cultural and linguistic imperialism – appear to pursue the chimera of an ethics of authenticity entrusted to the incommensurable autonomy of ‘forms-of-life’.
And yet, it is precisely the anti-substantialist idea of an intrinsically multiple constitution of subjectivity through language that should have suggested the useless or pathetic character of the claim to criticise the worldwide imperialism of a language by ‘unmasking’ the corruptions which it introduces into other languages. It is now many years since the publication of A Thousand Plateaus9 – a work rich in points of interest but much neglected – in which Deleuze and Guattari laid bare the poverty of the critique of the purists against the influence of the English language – the academic or Poujadiste denunciation of ‘franglais’. No language – they stressed – can be ‘majoritarian’ at a global level, except at the price of being vernacularised or creolised by all the minorities of the world. That is what happened to Latin in late antiquity and it is now happening to English. American itself was not constituted, in its differences from English, without this linguistic work of minorities; for example, the differences that Gaelic and Irish English make to American, or the differences wrought by black English and many other ghetto idioms, to the point that New York is now a city without a language. Anyone familiar with German literature knows that Kafka, as a Jew from Prague, submits German to a treatment that results in the creation of a minor language. In what way? By creating a continuum of variations, negotiating all the variables in order to restrict the constants and extend the variations. By stretching vectors throughout the language so as to achieve heights, durations, timbres, stresses, intensities or even shouts and cries unknown to classical German Hochdeutsch. Why should what was true for the German of Prague not be true today of black English or of Québécois? And yet …
And yet it would be as well to go back to the trajectory of our discussion. The visible results of communitarianism include the emergence of one of the most insidious risks for our democracies: the threat of a fundamentalism indigenous to the Occident. Multicultural logic, if abandoned to its own pseudo-natural spontaneity, ends up crystallising into a system of armour-plated differences that, in spite of the celebrated ‘politics of difference’, act like identities in miniature: monads or insular self-consistencies interested exclusively in tracing sharp borders of non-interference. How is it possible to dissolve this rigid noninterference clause, which apparently extends but in reality confounds the idea of difference by turning it into the mechanical fragmentation and proliferation of a logic of identity?
To attempt to respond to this question, it is necessary to project oneself beyond the present, beyond the complicity of two positions that are only rhetorically contrasting: the position of the technophobes and the position of the technophiles; that of the new apocalyptics and of the new apologists of the thaumaturgical virtues of the new communication technologies.
This brings us to the last phase of our argument.
Technology
The polarisation between those who see in the new technologies of multimedia communications undreamed-of promises of irenic horizontality, of a liberatory interactive diffusion of information, and those who see in them a new dimension of domination, fragmentation and generalised control of subjects, repeats – in its paralysing specularity – the traditional ambivalence of the Western attitude towards technology.
In order to escape from the vicious circle, it is certainly not enough to limit ourselves to repeating the distinction between the level of ‘pure’ technology and the range of its possible ‘impure’ uses. This is certainly a long-standing distinction but in some of its aspects it is far from being obsolete. In a democratic regime, as we have noted, nothing is more risky than the transparency of social relations. The telephone itself, a horizontal means of communication par excellence, may turn into the most thoroughly permeating instrument of control. Nevertheless, we must make an effort in order to shift the focus of our attention to a further point, which is actually the really decisive one: the way in which technology is constructed, even before the way it is used. Technologies are not just prostheses, but languages, symbolic universes. As such they contain in themselves a metaphorical power: in the literal sense of meta-phérein, trans-ferre, to carry across, to transport experience from one form to another. At every ‘transportation’ – from the wheel, the real Big Bang in the evolutionary history of homo faber, to sub-atomic particle accelerators, and from the handwritten manuscript to the printed book and the internet – the metaphorical virtualities of a technology sharpen some sides of the human sensorium, marginalise others and reduce them to a state of latency.
If we now examine the new technologies of multimedia communications, we cannot deny that they contain an extraordinary metaphorical power. The universe that they generate is the universe of a ‘reticular’ technology, the power of control of which becomes effective only if all the given hierarchies are dismantled and deconstructed. It is therefore a power which, by definition, depends on its ability to reproduce itself in a process of incessant self-innovation.
The discussion of the juridical and political consequences of these ‘reticular’ technologies (in which the so-called human factor is destined to play an ever-growing role: i.e., the ability of the human mind to adapt itself and conform to them) are certainly quite important. But they are secondary (in the sense that they have a secondary-order importance) compared to the crucial, ‘primary’ problem of the question of codes. Where is the power of ‘performativity’ to be found? Who establishes the codes? How (and to what extent) is it possible to negotiate them?
With the proliferation of edifying hermeneutics, of apologies for uninhibited translation and irenic theories of communicative action ‘free from domination’, never has the need been felt more sharply for a critique of communication. In the present world, in the Kakanic multiverse in which we happen to live, our salvation cannot be entrusted to a (transcendental or hermeneutic) ideal ‘communication community’10 understood as the ‘exchange’ of values, projects or models of argument. To think that would be an example of unpardonable ‘arrogance of the learned’ (Vico). Nor can we be saved by the ‘eccentric’ self or the ‘nomadic’ subject, which are currently being debated by Postmodernists and deconstructionists. If it is true – as the most recent products of the same postanalytic thought now suggest – that the individual self is, in spite of its etymology, a ‘divided self’, and that the conceptual apparatuses developed in the study of inter-personal conflicts can – therefore – be applied to the analysis of intra-personal conflicts, it follows that in order to be able to interact effectively, we must be willing to risk the encounter – the dépaysement, the unheimlich experience with alterity – in spite, even, of dialogue. Does not that peithó – the persuasive reason at which the Occident has always excelled – emerge as primary already in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, where he attributes it to Odysseus as the most refined and subtle form of bía, of violent stratagem? But in order for this to happen, in order for the encounter, the decentring and disorientating friction with alterity to take place, it is necessary for each to assume – not with regard to others but with regard to oneself – the standpoint of difference. It is always a Stranger who ‘makes me feel at home’, who gives rise to myself as identity.
It is not enough, however, to say that every identity – whether individual or collective – is made possible by a constitutive difference. It is not enough to take refuge in the formula ‘I am a stranger to myself’.11 It is necessary, on the other hand, to banish all temptation (so widespread in the ‘post-philosophical’ spiritual exercises of our times) to resolve the critique of the identity-based logos in a generic ‘heterophilia’ or – worse still – in a paradoxical ‘xenocentrism’, by attributing to the figure of the Other or of the Stranger all the redeeming prerogatives which metaphysical ontotheology once assigned to the all-too-familiar Subject. To classify oneself as marked by difference means taking a much more radical step. It means assuming the ideas of ‘limit’ and ‘contingency’ as positive – as an existential condition for the opening up of the range of possibilities.
The encounter with radical otherness can produce a comparison of effective experiences only insofar as each identity (from that of the individual to that of a political association or culture) is aware of its own contingency. Saying ‘contingent identity’ is not equivalent to saying ‘situated existence’. It is not equivalent to substituting the metaphysics of the One with the post–Metaphysics of the Multiple. The very optical-political power of the present technological apparatus – as highlighted by the postfeminist thought of Donna Haraway – should be enough to show how the passage from the old monological order, structured by ontic isolationism, to the new pluralistic and ‘relational’ order of semiotically, sexually and culturally situated differences is very far from guaranteeing the defeat or weakening of the dominance of the ‘neutral’. To start from identity as contingent means, first, assuming contingency in the strictly philosophical sense of non-necessary existence; existence not justified by anything but nevertheless not impossible. Existence situated, then, in a kind of metaxy, in a precarious ontological interlude between being and nothingness, necessity and impossibility. Second, it means carrying out that change of perspective whereby existence includes the possibility that it could not also not be, or that it could be completely ‘otherwise’. In this way, and only in this way, the threshold is opened for that transvaluation of values that consists in connoting as positive the notions of precariousness and limit, transforming them from ‘lack’ and ontological deficit into conditions of possibility of freedom. Only the contingent has essentially constitutive freedom: the freedom of choice. Even the present identity of each of us is nothing but the result of unrepeatable, or at least highly unlikely, selections and bifurcations. Had we, at certain points in our lives, been faced with other opportunities, or had we, in the face of crucial options, made a different decision from that which we actually made, then we would certainly be different from the people we are today. It is precisely because of this constitutive fragility manifested by each identity (whether of a person or of a collective subject, of a language or of a culture), precisely insofar as it is the result of a cum-tangere, of a non-linear series of particular and unrepeatable conjunctions, that it represents a precious asset to be safeguarded and treasured. Indeed, to destroy it or let it die would mean forever extinguishing a light, a viewpoint, a window on the world. Postanalytic thought, therefore, limits itself to dissolving the question of identity in the simultaneous strata of the ‘multiple self’ (as in Elster) or in the successive series of a ‘self’ which diversifies itself over time (as in Derek Parfit), thus inadvertently making itself vulnerable to retaliation from the deconstructionist adversary. Instead, we aim to reconstruct the logic of identity as a historical contingency rendered finally accessible from the viewpoint of difference.
Only once we have grasped that freedom is the exclusive prerogative of contingent identity, and that the ‘otherwise’ is the ontological modality proper to our very existence, to our ‘being in the world’, does an encounter between different experiences become possible under the aegis of difference. This result also ends up decisively affecting the sense of our existential relation with the event and with the universe of technology. Only through the cipher of the ‘otherwise’ are we made aware of the paradoxical status of normality that characterises the hypermodern period, permeated by the metaphorical power of global communication technologies and marked by ‘cosmic exile’, by the experience of a-topia and by universal uprooting.
If it is true, as so many philosophers of Heideggerian descent repeat ad nauseam, that technology is a ‘destiny’ – i.e., that it represents a point of no return and that no problem can be resolved by simply bringing its development to a halt – it follows that the moral position that conforms to the modality of the ‘otherwise’ certainly cannot be that ethics of authenticity advocated by so many once again today. In every ethics of authenticity, whose logical outcome is the extremism of ethnic cleansing, there lurks not only an uncrossable frontier between ‘us’ and ‘them’ but also the explanatory key of the identitarian logos as symbolic apparatus of appropriation. The logic of the authentic coincides wholly and perfectly with the proprium, i.e., the domination of the Identical, which is related to the other only in strictly patrimonial terms.
‘If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word “authentic”’.12 Thus, our task, our responsibility towards the present consists of going back to experience, to the increasingly paradoxical and ‘inauthentic’ languages with which our experience is interwoven.
In technology as in science, and in politics as in ethics, this means no longer to pursue the woeful illusion of realising the virtual, but to attempt, on the contrary, to virtualise the real and, thereby, to open up a new array of possibilities.
1Michel Serres, Detachment, p. 22.
2Bernard Williams, Moral Luck.
3John Rawls, A Theory of Justice.
4John Rawls, Political Liberalism.
5This appeared in the Journal of Philosophy 92:3 (March 1995), pp. 109–80. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism’, in The Journal of Philosophy 92:2 (February 1995), pp. 109–31; and John Rawls, ‘Political Liberalism: A Reply to Habermas’.
6Ibid.
7Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice.
8Jon Elster (ed.), The Multiple Self, p. 1.
9Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
10Karl Otto Apel, The Transformation of Philosophy.
11See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves.
12Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 60.