We know, but nevertheless...

In another contribution to the discussion of solidarity, Jon Posthegemony writes.

It is not that we do not know. It is that we do not do anything about our knowledge.

The difference between Sarajevo in the 1990s and Madrid in the 1930s, then, is properly posthegemonic. The issue is not ideology or truth, but affect and habit. For some reason, Europe in the 1990s is no longer affected by what happens at or within its borders. The problem is not doubt--if only it were--or the unreliability of the media. It is a question of habituation.

Finally, then, if we lack solidarity, it is not because we lack imagination. What's required, rather, is an affective rapport, a resonance that is felt physically. We need to be moved, immediately if without resort to ideologies of authenticity.

Jon's post is provocative, raising for me a number of questions. First, why would one claim that doing what seems the opposite of what one knows is the opposite of ideology rather than the very workings of ideology? For me, Zizek's insights that ideology works at the level of what we do when know nevertheless are quite compelling--particularly as they get beyond ideas of false consciousness. So, the issue is truth--the truth that underlies our actions, the truths that inscribe themselves into our practices, the truths that we believe insofar as we believe that others believe them. So, habituation, yes, because ideology functions at the level of practices.

Second, on solidarity: should this concept be understood affectively, at the level of a bodily reaction? I'm not sure. To my mind, solidarity is not the same as the Act; that is, it is a commitment to continue as if one were Acting; it involves a sense of what one ought to do because of one's commitments, because of one's fidelity to the truth event of a party, even when one might want to do otherwise. Solidarity then is the virtue of members of political collective that persists after the act, empowering their retroactive politicization of revolutionary violence. It is also the allegiance uniting the group, inspiring it to wait, to assess the situation, to prepare, and to undergo the subjective destitution (self-abnegation) necessary for them to become a proper collective. It is the ethos of the cell.

To be clear, at this point, I am interested in solidarity as the political virtue, a virtue of those united in political struggle. Appeals to solidarity, then, will not be appeals to a general audience or people outside a collective or to groups based on positive or empirical attributes. An appeal to solidarity is necessarily divisive and partisan: stand firm, you are one of us. The constitution of such an 'us' is another matter altogether.

Comments

[Jon]

Jodi, thanks for the response. A few thoughts in return, though I'm still very much working through this...

ideology functions at the level of practices.

This is a terminological issue, I think. Zizek terms this ideology, but I think (and he points out) that it's enough of a reconfiguration of what has previously been thought of as ideology that it'd be worth calling it something else. It's certainly a very different sort of ideology than the one familiar to the Marxist tradition, or indeed to the workings of hegemony.

On solidarity...

it is a commitment to continue as if one were Acting

This I don't understand.

More generally, one could imagine a variety of different social bonds (to use as neutral term as possible). Each imagines the other members of the group that the bond constructs in different ways, and each produces a different form of group--or even, non-group. But as a first step might we not note that each is also affective in a particular way? And as a second step, could we not think about the different ways in which affect unites or divides? And then also, third, about the relations between (broadly) the discursive and the non-discursive elements of those bonds?

That's part of what I'm trying to do, at least.

And then there's the specific case of one's relation to the subaltern. Here the relation between discursive and affective is quite particular: the subaltern is a discursive construction, after all, the inevitable remainder of all and any identity construction. In that sense, the only bond imaginable with the subaltern, the only possible desubalternization, would have to be affective.

[Alain]

Jodi, I like this discussion of solidarity. In some ways it seems to point to an alternative commons. But I wonder what is the difference between reactionary solidarity and a more progressive kind (for lack of a better term)? Is it simply the lack of the obscene supplement, the indifference of the group toward its enemies?

[Jodi]

That's a good question and I doubt that I have a good answer. The obscene supplement point, I think, is strong--it mitigates displacing responsibility onto something outside of oneself, against treating solidarity as a duty that justifies, say, exterminating those who disagree. It also means accepting that there are no guarantees, that there are risks. This seems to me quite a demanding requirement.

I'll add, however, that it may well be impossible to make some kind of absolute distinction between reactionary and non-reactionary solidarities; so, the concept would not be universalizable or generalizable but tethered to a partisan universal truth.