Ref. :  000001344
Date :  2001-07-12
langue :  Anglais
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Desocialisation and resocialisation

Desocialisation

Source :  Wolfgang Kaempfer


The quest for identity, in which we are currently involved, a more or less feverish quest, risks spreading itself like an epidemic over the whole planet, by adapting itself involuntarily to the laws of the global market. It is highly possible that it truly has as its aim, an objective, never to loose - lost rightfully over the course of a disintegration and deterritorialisation of men, families, clans, peoples, ethnicities, disintegration and deterritorialisation ongoing for a long time and arising from the activities and the mind of a capitalism which has never known and recognized, in truth, people nor nation, nor country, nor borders.

All identity, even the most modest, functions as a sort of screen. Being the other of man, by being his shadow, his echo, his partner, it ensures the sign and symbol of what we might call his world. Contemporary man lives without a real world, and so is without 'screen', without solid protection, without skin. Violence, exerted by a regime, being more future than present, more sensation than tangible experience, seems on the contrary to express the vulnerability of man pushed to the extreme. Liberalism of liberal societies carries with it some sort of democratic totalitarianism, denounced by Alexis de Tocqueville in his work Democracy in America. In the liberalism movement - a scientific and analytic movement, movement of the times, of the markets - it relativises all concept, all faith, all 'identity' in a quasi-automatic fashion. In this sense, it does not produce, but destroys, following the line of a circle, of a sort of rotating disk, having always already arrived at its virtual and mechanical goal: the dissolution / relativisation / neutralization of everything, of all 'production', of all 'identity'.

All search for identity, even the most authentic, most traditional, most 'normal', runs the paradoxical risk of finding itself one day at its point of departure, at the point of its initial experience, marked by complete isolation at the heart of mass society. Resocialisation and desocialisation link up, and it is there that a fundamental contradiction inherent in all concept of identity can be seen. We do not realize that identity such as it is, pure and absolute identity, is not just a simple abstract and theoretical concept, a poor generality, imposed by a society, itself abstract and general, a real 'general society' for all and for none. As with all pure and absolute concept 'identical to itself', identity actually casts a shadow, the shadow of itself, the other of itself, the alterity of identity.

The mechanism that is inherent to it, described by Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Mind, is simply the result of a movement of thought which cannot be conceived the one without the other, identity without alterity. This mechanism, blindly applied to a given set of circumstances, can only stop that which, for Hegel, would have been dialectical movement which does not stop voluntarily or arbitrarily, but which seeks to follow real and historical movements. So, remaining linked to the initial stage of dialectical movement, to the pure and simple identity/alterity opposition, an entirely theoretical opposition, mechanism of a banal identification, fixed and definitive, leads us straight down the well known dead end of a binary code, a choice between Yes and No, identical and non-identical, according to the laws of philosophical logic, going back to the philosophical logic of Antiquity.

The real consumer demands the real non-consumer, the poor, the victim. Here we fall into the same stagnant dialectic, the same closed circle, only designed for circularity, an ever-turning circle without end between man and sub-man, between the favoured and the non-favoured, which characterizes totalitarian regimes. This society continually orbiting the sun of its preservation/self-preservation unlimited seems textually to have renounced all possible history. As such, as a society, devoted without reserve to preservation/self-preservation, to the status quo of its pure and simple existence, to its flat, material survival, it will no longer be capable of caring for those who are - and who will be - the manifest victims of the halt in all 'historical progress'. It only knows how to exclude them, to the profit of good functioning of the system and its status quo, to the profit of the eternal movement of the enormous rotating disc of business and the global market. The sub-man, of our days, is no longer capable of helping himself, as Jacques Poulain observed, to even the most basic human rights. These rights remain for him purely and simply formal. They do not exist.

We are going along, at the present time, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly two opposed tracks : the track of unequalled globalisation and planetarisation, and the track of individualisation and identitarian closure. These two paths are not 'fake' as such. The flag of individual liberty, strong and proud, flying next to the flag of an at last reunited, peaceful and tolerant humanity, would be more than desirable. But the condition for such a state of affairs - a somewhat paradisical state - would be to free itself from the dead end, the trap of stagnant dialectics, which renders our ambitions for tolerance more often than not empty, as theoretical as our real experiences of intolerance. Tolerance and intolerance in fact also go hand in hand. To tolerate everything is at heart no less dangerous than to tolerate nothing. Why not declare our sensibilities, our aversions, our 'allergies', our real differences and divergences? It is simply not true that they exclude each other. The stagnant dialectic is a false sickness. Probably arising from the multiple and cluttered constraints of the daily economic battle, invading the entire planet, it completely forgot that formerly nothing was considered more normal than cohabitation of people, of races, of ethnicities, of families, of religions. And not by presupposed tolerance and constraint, but by recognition, through the respect of the other, being not already considered as the alterity of identity, as the negation of a presumed position. This method of 'automatic' exclusion/inclusion is only itself the very sign, it seems, of a loss in identity and in profound identification of present day man.


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