Williams argues that the idea of society as a totality consisting of symbolic and cultural as well as economic practices (which both Ricoeur and Mannheim are employing) has certain advantages in that it represents the complexity of reality. On the other hand, the danger is that any notion of economic or class determination is lost. Only by simultaneously using Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is it possible to grasp both the class character of society and the role of ideas, meanings and values within an essentially dynamic social process. We can then locate a ‘central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived’. This dominant culture is not homogeneous; it contains alternatives within it (so that the much vaunted diversity of choice of both products and life-styles proffered by advanced capitalism may represent both an economic benefit of market segmentation and an ideological advantage). However, there are also ‘practices, experiences, meanings, values which are not part of the effective dominant culture’, which may be alternative or oppositional. The difference between alternative and oppositional modes depends on whether the intention is to be left alone to live alongside the dominant culture or, in the case of oppositional forms and practices, to transform it. This formulation goes beyond Mannheim’s simple dichotomy between ideology and utopia. Moreover, Williams posits the existence of residual and emergent forms as part of a process which cuts across the categories of dominant, alternative and oppositional modes, rather than being elided with them; both residual and emergent practices may be either alternative or oppositional, but are commonly subject to a process of incorporation into the dominant sphere.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.90-91
There is a plurality of realms. Of realms that are all the more real because they are shared. And that coexist.
Politics, in truth, is the interplay between different realms, the alliance between those that are compatible and the confrontation between those that are irreconcilable.
Anonymous, Call, p.7
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Politics, in truth, is the interplay between different realms, the alliance between those that are compatible and the confrontation between those that are irreconcilable.
Therefore we say that the central political fact of the last thirty years went unnoticed. Because it took place at such a deep level of reality that it cannot be called political without bringing about a revolution in the very notion of the political. Because this level of reality is also the one where the division is elaborated between what is taken for reality and what is not. This central fact is the triumph of Existential Liberalism. The fact that it is now considered natural for everyone to have a rapport with the world based on the idea that each person has her own life. That such a life consists in a series of choices, good or bad. That each person can define herself by an ensemble of qualities, of properties, that make her, through her continual balancing of those properties, a unique and irreplaceable being. That the contract adequately epitomizes relations between individuals, and that respect epitomizes all virtue. That language is nothing but a means of arriving at an agreement. That, in reality, the world is composed on one side of things to manage, and on the other of an ocean of self-absorbed individuals, who in turn have a regrettable tendency to turn themselves into things, letting themselves become managed.
Of course, cynicism is only one of the possible features of the infinite clinical diagnoses of Existential Liberalism. It also includes depression, apathy, immunodeficiency (every immune system is intrinsically collective), dishonesty, judicial harassment, chronic dissatisfaction, denied affection, isolation, illusions of citizenship, and the loss of all generosity.
Existential liberalism has propagated its desert so well that even the most sincere Leftists express their utopia with its very terms. “We will rebuild an egalitarian society in which each person makes her contribution and from which each person gets her needs met from it... As far as individual desires are concerned, it could be egalitarian if each person consumes in proportion to the efforts she is ready to contribute. Naturally it will be necessary to redefine the method of evaluating the efforts contributed by each person,” write the organizers of the Alternative, Anti-capitalist, and Anti-war Village against the G8 summit in Evian in a text entitled When Capitalism and Wage Labor Will Have Been Abolished! Here is a key to the triumph of Empire: managing to keep in the shadows, to surround with silence the very terrain on which it maneuvers, the field upon which it fights the decisive battle: that of manipulating feelings, of defining the limits of the perceptible. In such a way it preventively paralyzes any defense at the very moment of its operation, and ruins the very idea of a counter-offensive. The victory is won whenever the militant, at the end of a hard day of Political Work, slumps down in front of an action movie.
Anonymous, Call, p.7-8
There is a social use of language. No one still believes in it. Its exchange value has fallen to zero. Hence this inflationist bubble of idle talk. Everything social is mendacious, and everyone knows that now. It's no longer just the governing authorities, the publicists and public personalities who "do communication," it's every self-entrepreneur that this society wants to turn us into who practices the art of "public relations." Having become an instrument of communication, language is no longer its own reality but a tool for operating on the real, for obtaining effects in accordance with more or less conscious strategies. Words are no longer put into circulation except in order to dis tort things. Everything sails under false flags. This usurpation has become universal. One doesn't shrink from any paradox. The state of emergency is the rule of law. War is made in the name of peace. The bosses "offer jobs." The surveillance cameras are "video-protection devices." The executioners complain that they're being persecuted. The traitors profess their sincerity and their allegiance. The mediocre are everywhere cited as examples. There is actual practice on the one hand, and on the other, discourse, which is its relentless counter point, the perversion of every concept, the universal deception of oneself and of others. In all quarters it's only a question of preserving or extending one's interests.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.9-10
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