Camille de Toledo’s advocacy for a “lucid romanticism” in his book Coming of Age at the End of History is a deeply impassioned quest for an alternative to the distant ironic veneer which goes for social engagement these days. While his rhetoric falls a little too firmly in the French existentialist vein of experiencing social problems as a physical sickness within one’s own body (Nausea was inspiring at 20, but a bit old hat to me now) the intent is squarely directed in the right direction.
Through the dissolving and decentering of power in the contemporary age any attempt at revolt, revolution, or rethinking, becomes dissipated. Unions have no power because factories simply move to another country. Governments are so compromised by their entanglements with private concerns like banks, insurance companies, and the like that with any push they recede into nothingness. There is no there there having already fragmented its existence into a multiplicity of nonexistent actors. Mortgages are bundled, chopped, and sold while the displaced homeowner can’t tell if it was the original lender, the investment bankers, the lack of government oversight, or their own greed that should have a finger pointed at it.
Perhaps the time of finger pointing has ended.
The idealism of the 19th and 20th centuries ended in brutal totalitarian misery or dinseyfied antiseptic wastelands. The failures of the past have made us unable, or more likely unwilling, to engage in enterprise that necessitate hope as fuel. Even elections won on the idea of hope are fast seen as the sloganeering and false promises for which they truly are. We are so desperate for hope in the world that anyone who comes by offering a way out of this capitalist misery is immediately followed with all our enthusiasm and vigor. We embrace fundamentalists because we hear in their voice a possible antidote for the reckless totalizing effects of post-industrial capitalism.
We have grown afraid in our comfortable settings of new gadgets from China and the latest plastic monstrosity of design. We are afraid both of where we are, that somehow this life as consumer has robbed us of our basic human potential, and also afraid that any attempt to break free of its stronghold would upset the precarious balance of our comfort and land us in an even deeper misery. So we choose a misery of the soul over a misery of the body in an attempt to find some semblance of sure footing in a world increasingly geared towards the well being and care of corporations and institutions.
But even our fundamentalists have failed us. For they do not want to toss out the whole order. They do not want a revaluation of values. What they advocate is the exact same world with a different rhetoric. The Christian fundamentalists want the same world we have now, but in the name of Jesus. The Muslim fundamentalists want the same world we have now, but in the name of Allah. The Atheist fundamentalists want the same world we have now, but in the name of Science. Just as the fascist movements of the early 20th century failed to reformulate society, but rather reinforced the status quo this time in the name of race or industry, so too do our modern fascists and our contemporary fundamentalists not want to truly upset the sitting order.
The sickness lies much deeper than any of these movements would be willing to acknowledge. Deeper even than Toledo is willing to admit. The fracture point does not lie at the day or night that one goes to religious services. The fracture point does not lie at the choice to protest or stay home. Rather, the fracture point lies at the basic unit of human interaction. Too easily do we let ourselves off the hook in our interpersonal relationships. Too easily do we allow our fellow human to be determined and defined by epithets ascribed to them rather than existing in their true being. We are an artist, or a parent, or a child, or a boss, or a worker. We are never a being. No wonder then that we live in a world which caters to objects (multi-national corporations, consumers) and gives only passing lip service to subjects.
In short we have given up our very core existence for the comfort of self as adjective. Once we reduce the human experience to easily definable boxes we no longer have to concern ourselves with the complexity of human Being. Once the social Other has been defined and ascribed with understandable attributes we can sit back and relax at our understanding. This causes us to continually be surprised when the individual acts in a way counter to the labels we, or they, have placed upon them. We end up in a continual state of shock at our fellow beings and must, out of necessity, shut down and distance ourselves.
The process begins so simply. With a question and an answer: “What do you do?” “Well I am a doctor.” And there the door has been both opened and shut. Action has been translated into adjective. Being, the infinite questioning of existence, has been replaced with definition. When asked “what do you do?” we rarely, if ever, reply with “I spend as much time as possible with the woman I love while working in an art form that I feel passionately connected to.”
I am as guilty of this as anyone. More than three decades of socialization has taught me to define and limit myself within the social sphere. I have been trained through various channels of social power to behave, even when rebelling, in a mode appropriate to social functioning. For even rebellion is necessary to define the social order and thus make it understandable. The anti-consumerist punk makes safe, secure, legitimate, and possible the consumerist middle-class. The peace, love, unity, and respect espoused by the raver is like a sad inverted mirror held up to a culture based on war, division, recklessness, and solipsistic egotism.
Perhaps true resistance to the totalizing effects of contemporary capitalism are, like Toledo suggests, not in the field of physical open revolt. Perhaps true revolution is an inner revolution. Perhaps we need a social revolution, not on the superficial order of the fundamentalists, but rather on the deep and real level of the interpersonal. Toledo sees revolt and revolution occurring in the world of ideas. But it must be brought one degree closer. A step before language. Authentic interrelating of two beings. In a world increasingly mediated by technologies that give the appearance of connection, while fostering distance and misunderstanding, perhaps the most radical act we can take is to carve time out of our schedules to meet another being face to face and find out who they truly are.
