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Uconn Future of Bad Collectivity The Future of Bad Collectivity By Ali Aslam Mount Holyoke College Email: [email protected] Presented at University of Connecticut Political Theory Workshop, September 27, 2016 Please do not cite without author’s permission The ability of the political Left to organize a collective response to recent political and economic crises has been a series of failures. As nativist groups on the Right have rallied to close borders on both sides of the Atlantic and pass laws restricting access to bathroom facilities in the United States, citizens in the wake of Occupy have struggled to translate their anger over police shootings and economic ineQualities into meaningful changes. At one level, the worry is that these failures deepen the sense of disenfranchisement that many citizens must already overcome in order to join others in action during an era when the responses to crises that concentrate decision-making in non-democratic bodies that have been justified as “necessary.”1 At another, there is the fear that once the exuberance of episodic democracy passes, Quotidian democratic participation is further discredited because nothing changes. The problem of forming Left collectivities and motivating citizens to join them is one with serious stakes for both activists and theorists. Those on the Left have watched as Right- wing groups have been able to mobilize citizens through affect appeals to their fears, anxiety, and feelings of vulnerability. Citizens hearing these messages do not appear to be listening for or much concerned the truth. Rather as the results of the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s unexpected ascendency to the Republican nomination suggest, citizens are not moved by the power of rational argumentation but fantasy, illusion, and falsehood if these resonate with their feelings of injury and vulnerability. As expressions of public will-formation, these represent forms of collective identification that do not align with the description of public deliberation and will-formation found in theories of justice based upon desires for mutual understanding and recognition. In the work of Axel Honneth public deliberation and will-formation form the normative basis for critical theory. Honneth has turned to the experience of injustice to develop a theory of social recognition that begins with the desire for self-realization. By identifying the ethical conditions necessary for self-realization, Honneth is able to establish a normative standard for social critiQue that is grounded in existing social conditions.2 For Honneth, that normative standard centers on the pre-conditions for social recognition, in which individual self-realization is mirrored in larger societal structures that include the family, market relations, and the state. Undergirding the normativity of Honneth’s theory is an appeal to evidence of social learning and progress over time. He points to the progressive development and use of human reason as well as the expansion of freedom across a range of social relationships to argue that these values and norms reflect our normative commitments. From his perspective, expressions of public will-formation that reflect one- sided, non-reciprocal understandings of individual autonomy by denying the intersubjective conditions of freedom are “pathological” developments. In other words, because these express desires for individual autonomy that involve withholding the conditions necessary for self- 1 For an overview of this shift see Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 2 Axel Honneth, Freedom’s Right. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. The summary of Honneth’s research that appears in the next paragraphs is drawn from this work. 2 realization for others, they misdevelopments that must be corrected through the processes of democratic will-formation and exercise of public reason. But this corrective circuit is compromised if citizens do not accept Honneth’s claims about historical progress and social learning. If they do not agree because they do not feel free, then the communicative pathways to public will formation will feel blocked to them and will not support political action in the ways that Honneth argues they should. In Lauren Berlant’s analysis, contemporary subjects are wary of promises of progress. They have discovered their aspirations and visions of the good life do not represent conditions of individual self-realization, but injury. As promises of post-war prosperity and economic security, intimacy, and political and social eQuality have become more unachievable, Berlant finds feelings of political impasse rather than optimism reflect how citizens feel about their agency. She recommends detachment and silent protest against social conditions that diminish individual flourishing.3 In this paper, I develop an account of collective identification and will formation that not only acknowledges pathological developments that have citizens more isolated and rendered their understandings of freedom more one-sided, but also begins with the experiences of injury that leave them skeptical about claims of progress. I argue that the concept of “bad collectivity” in Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 represents a form of collective identification that is an alternative to both silence and will formation based upon reason and reason-giving. 10:04 reveals individuals alienated from public life, navigating increasingly privatized spaces and fragmented publics and newsources, frustrated in their desires for collective action and belonging, and unsure on how to act on them. Amidst these conditions, Lerner identifies short- term instances of bad collectivity as the only experiences of collective identification that allow subjects to relate to and communicate with one another. Bad collectivities represent forms identification between individuals and other citizens as well as larger imagined communities such as the nation originating in feelings of injury.4 In 10:04, examples of bad collectivities include the Challenger disaster, and the image of American excellence it represented, and the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose participants felt estranged from established political institutions and promises of upward mobility. I turn to these examples along with the Black Lives Matter movement in order to indicate how bad collectivities might be transformed into expressions of democratic will formation that do not minimize injury or rely on notions of historical progress that feel false. In particular, I argue that the Agenda to Build Black Futures and the “I imagine” project represent forms of collective identification that acknowledge injury, anger, and moral outrage, but seek to move beyond feelings of impasse. Both projects offer a future-oriented vision of progress as the basis for collective identification that is not merely expressive but which seek to educate citizens on how existing laws and institutions must be reformed, often from the ground up, so that they reflect futures in which black lives matter. The social nature of freedom is a recurrent theme in these efforts. Black Lives Matter consistently links black freedom struggles to the struggles of other marginal groups; especially those marginalized within the black community such as Queer and transgender individuals. 3 Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 4 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 1983. 3 I. Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition is an attempt to normatively ground a theory of justice in existing social reality. Honneth begins by observing freedom is at the center of modern political orders. The desire for individual autonomy operates across three distinct but overlapping fields, the family, legal rights, and social esteem, and each field contributes to our experience of freedom, according to Honneth. Although justice takes on a different meaning in each field, the feeling of moral disrespect that accompanies misrecognition is common across each of them. The desire for individual freedom informs the normative framework of society-at-large according to Honneth and the moral legitimacy of modern social orders are measured by the degree to which they guarantee individual rights to self-determination. Honneth argues the link between justice and individual autonomy is not merely a historical artifact, it is the product of social learning. Over time, “justice” has come to be defined in terms of that what protects and encourages autonomy for all members of society across the three fields of social experience. This social learning is reflected in the refinement of both the use of reason and reason- giving by individuals to justify their actions and the rationalization of social institutions. For Honneth, this means that freedom has been progressively realized in the family, the market, and the state. In Honneth’s historical reconstruction, the idea of freedom develops from incomplete forms of negative and reflexive freedom to the more complete form of social freedom. Social freedom refers to individual choice that is free of external influences as reQuired by the definition of negative freedom, reflective of the agent’s free will, and which, crucially, is supported by the existing social conditions. Evidence of this shift to the more complete form of social freedom in which desires for individual freedom are mirrored in the institutions of the lifeworld allows Honneth to argue not just that freedom and justice are linked, but that they ought to be linked, too. Honneth’s reconstructive
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