In Search of Solidarity -- In These Times

Link: In Search of Solidarity -- In These Times. (Thanks to Craig and Ken for the link.)

The real story of the strike is not the epic hassle it created. It is the fact that despite universal condemnation from opinion makers, millions of New Yorkers were in solidarity with the strikers.

Solidarity. Now there's an anachronism. The news media doesn't talk about solidarity; it employs the assured and peppy tone that speaks to the individual consumer: After the break: We'll tell you how the strike will affect your morning commute. Solidarity is the opposite of news you can use. No wonder the local media missed the real story. It hinged on a concept that is not part of its vocabulary.

The word "solidarity" may seem the sole provenance of the "left" and the "dying" labor movement, but the strike showed that whether we give it a name or not, people still feel it.

In Which Side Are You On?, Tom Geoghegan writes that solidarity is "the only love left in this country that dare not speak its name." Enter the word into Google news and you'll find that in English-language papers from Lahore to Leeds, the word pops up frequently. Not so here. In American publications it appears, if at all, only in neutered form--the simple presence of group cohesion. A company sponsoring a retreat for its employees does so to encourage "corporate solidarity." Bloomberg's appearance on the Brooklyn Bridge on the strike's first morning is described as a "show of solidarity" with stranded commuters.

Yet the word retains a specific moral force. I remember the thrill I felt when I received a correspondence from a union organizer who signed off, "In solidarity." It felt, at once, a generous invitation to fellowship, and a moral call to arms.

Right now, our politics are atomized and transactional: we send checks, we sign petitions, we forward articles. We buy sweat-free clothes, recycle and look for vocations that don't collude too egregiously with evil. But we've unconsciously circumscribed the boundaries of political action. What is MoveOn's equivalent of a strike? As union membership and urban ethnic machines decline and the "netroots," overwhelmingly white and affluent, comes to represent the progressive movement, the left is in danger of becoming, as Thomas Frank wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique in February 2004, "a charity operation." That is, "people in sympathy with the downtrodden, not the downtrodden themselves."

As the American right offers that redundant canard "moral values" as its lodestar, the left should offer solidarity. Not retrograde brotherhood, or faith-specific fellowship, but something more robust and difficult and rewarding. The uplift of collective enterprise.

Comments

[Marc Lombardo]

Jodi,

Thanks for posting this. I heard Zizek give an early version of this paper in Aug. 2004, and at the time I asked him if he could perhaps specify the character of the third. I was very interested in the subject, as I'd written in my master's thesis on the relation between Dewey's notion of the public and Levinas' face-to-face (it intrigued me that Dewey uses the term as well). In fact, following the account he gives in the first chapter of The Public and its Problems, it seems that what Dewey means by the public is the same thing (and quite possibly a richer account) than what Levinas speaks of as the Third or the Stranger or the Other's Other. I was encouraged to see that Zizek also placed an emphasis upon the Third in his reading of Levinas (which did not go so far as to destroy any pretentions to an ethics of the other, as Z had naturally claimed). However, when I asked him to specify the Third, he responded by suggesting that it could quite possibly be thought of as the Lacanian Big Other.

What do we think of this claim? Is it too easy? Would Zizek himself even still offer a similar suggestion?

[Jodi]

Hi Marc--I wondered about the big Other as an option and am not surprised by the answer. But, I don't think that would be my answer; in other words, I don't think it is very satisfying. After all, the big Other doesn't exist, one; and, the big Other is another term for the Symbolic--this is a problem because part of Zizek's emphasis elsewhere is on the other as Real. Actually, let me put this differently. I would say that if we are thinking about the law and the third in relation to justice through the law, then, the abstraction of the big Other makes some sense. But if we want to think about solidarity (not a concept Zizek uses) then we need to emphasize that the Third is the Real other (or the Real others) the exclusion of which enables/produces/can't be accounted for in terms of the big Other. And this gets nifty if we recall that the Zizek also notes that the Real is the Symbolic as non-all. So, then we can have both, understanding that each emphasis involves a parallactic shift.

[Marc Lombardo]

Sorry, guess I responded to the wrong post... you commies and your obsession with solidarity.

[Adam Thurschwell]

Jodi, great article -- thanks for posting it. Solidarity certainly is in the air (or at least the air in this neighborhood of the blogosphere) these days . . .