We Are All 15-Year Old Goths Now

August 11th, 2006

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Posted by ChrisG at 1:50 pm

Incommunicability. I remember people of a certain academic stripe not being able to talk to each other about much else in the late 80s and early 90s. Whether it was self-avowed postmodernists trying to get laid by namedropping Beckett and Lyotard and celebrating the ‘fact’ that no-one could really communicate, or gloomily still-adolescent post-adolescents such as myself trying to get laid by only hitting on women who couldn’t describe their lives without referring to The Bell Jar, it was everywhere. ‘No-one can see inside your view’, indeed. A universal theme, if you will – or more like a universal fantasy, prolonging teenage fascinations with the gothic edge of romanticism. Since then, some things have altered: very few people will now avow themselves to be postmodernists, and my taste in women has thankfully also undergone some changes. But the fantasy is no less universal – in fact it’s ever more so.

Israel cannot talk to Hamas, cannot talk to Hizballah, because they are an ‘existential threat’ to it. The ‘majority population’ of the UK cannot talk to the ‘Muslim community’ because of their ‘alien values’. The ‘West’ cannot talk to the ‘Muslim World’ because of fundamental differences in their basic perspectives. Increasingly, people seem to easily accept that ‘they’ want to destroy or convert ‘us’, and that’s it. That’s the world today, counterposed Huntingdonian cultural blocs dotted with cells and cabals plotting to subvert and/or annihilate, with no possibility of compromise. And every major political issue becomes a prism for this same clash of rigid, incommunicable viewpoints. To put it philosophically, the everyday empirical observation ‘I’m not sure what you mean’ gets transposed to the transcendental level: ‘it’s impossible to understand you’ – and therefore there’s no point trying to.

When you’re an adolescent trying to figure out why you’re so locked into your own noisy little head, the consequences don’t tend to go much beyond endless arguments with yourself and general annoyance for your friends and family. When you’re a nation-state, a politician, or a high-level pundit, the consequences of being trapped in there range from impotent calls for the nuclear annihilation of Mecca or Tehran to bona fide all-out war. But in either case, the basic libertarian-individualist assumptions still stand, turning the world into a relativistic (or alternatively, a ‘realist’) stew of bullying viewpoints. Self-interest or national interest impenetrably rule.

If you happened to be a psychoanalyst, you might want to talk to that teenager about the crises induced by the fantasies of omnipotence that begin in infancy and, with variations, bedevil one’s attempts to consolidate personal identity throughout the trials one undergoes in relationships with parents, siblings and friends. The difficulties of being face-to-face with, and intimately connected with, someone who is at the same time not you, who is surrounded by a whole world of their own, tempt everyone, at one time or another, into trying to establish who they are by enforcing separation, and with it, domination of the other. To be invulnerable in the face of the other, to be free of slips, weaknesses and velleities, to be secretly unbetrayable underneath the mask of everydayness, are desires that prickle without end at teenagers, especially boys, who look everywhere for ways of expunging their sense of vulnerability and replacing it with an armature of cool, perfection, mastery.

They are of course also temptations of for States, and politicians, who are both tempted themselves by them and see the value of the political fantasies that serve as false fulfilments of them as means of exercising power. The much-spoken of Manicheanism of the US and UK governments and their media supporters plays out now alongside the Israelis’ pursuit of the fantasy of the unbreakable iron wall of security. In both cases, the fantasy of incommunicability covers everything. The hatred of our values by all those who practice Terror, the existential threat posed by Hizballah.

The fantasy is fed by the belief in the incommensurability of values. I cannot communicate with you because your fundamental beliefs are absolutely at odds with mine. There is undoubtedly slippage, in politicians’ and media talk about the current ‘global situation’ between this hard Manicheanism and the kind of disagreements better represented as cases when ‘you’ don’t agree with ‘me’ about lots of things that I consider to be important. When someone mentions, usually in a racially or ethnically inflected context, ‘alien values’, they often slide very easily – and often hysterically – from a case of the latter to a case of the former.

The only thing that can overcome this situation, generally referred to as something like the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ or whatever, is held to be a reaffirmation of ‘common values’, be they ‘core British’ or whatever. Supplementing the fantasy of incommunicability with one of unproblematic communication is I suppose the natural thing to do. But it’s a highly damaging manoeuvre. Obviously we cannot locate any ‘British’ values, except either at the level of popular culture, or at the most generalist and therefore inclusive level, where their supposed Britishness and purported minimal exclusiveness immediately evaporates. But the whole gesture of trying to solve the problem of communication by commanding those you have defined as alien to subscribe to a set of values is again an affirmation of your separation from them, which simply reproduces it. We rule you, and we shall demonstrate it by defining your world for you.

But the problem with this whole fantasised solution to the problem of incommunicability is that communication doesn’t require ‘common values’ in the first place – not, at least, at the concrete level where disagreements take place. The fantasy of incommunicability mirrors the relativist concept of the untranslatability of languages, a concept effectively criticised by Donald Davidson’s formulation of the principle of charity. Paraphrased, this states that in recognising someone as a speaker of language, we already have understood that they operate with criteria of consistency and truth, and that we therefore already have the capacity to understand them. Without a commitment to consistency and truth, there is no possibility of a ‘perspective’ in the first place. What matters in such situation is not ‘common values’, but the capacity to make a creative gesture of translation, which could be anything from a linguist’s guess at the meaning of a strange word, to a lover’s forgiveness of an insult, to an imaginative diplomatic negotiating tactic. This might have its ground elsewhere entirely. Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition that we do not know through what loves someone becomes a philosopher: similarly, meeting you for the first time I do not know through what subconsious and unconscious gestures of attunement I will start to understand you.

The shift here is in possibility: from a standpoint where the only possibility seems to be separation, sealed-in individuality, the clash of civilisations, to the emergence of another space in which two or more agents are located, not yet as interlocutors perhaps, but now no longer as implacable contraries either. Such movements are always possible (via Lenin). The alternative, as Paul Rogers points out with respect to Israel, is to pursue omnipotence at all costs, to seek to preserve the separation between oneself and the Other at all costs – a strategy that is bound to lead in one direction only.

The mood within Israel remains largely united though some of its more astute military commentators are raising concerns. But the longer the war goes on the greater the tendency towards mutual demonisation. The former Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu represents a considerable body of opinion in Israel and the United States when he talks of a mad Hizbollah leadership at the forefront of an evil Islamist movement bent on the destruction of western civilisation

The fantasies of separation, of incommunicability, of omnipotence only lead a battle against oneself, and the defeats that one suffers as a result are fantasised as being the deeds of a dominant other, constantly poised to destroy, driven by infinite hatred.

The outcomes of these fantasies turn you inside-out, whether you’re a teenage boy frightened of his vulnerability and builds an exoskeleton of impenetrable individuality, or a politican who talks endlessly of security. The hardest thing is to recognise with James Stephens (and Nietzsche) that the truth of our inescapable, essential vulnerability commands we act otherwise,

this being the law of life, that only the weak shall conquer. The limit of strength is petrifaction and immobility, but there is no limit to weakness, and cunning or fluidity is its counsellor.

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