LETTING BE VOLUME II We Ourselves The Politics of Us Tristan Garcia Translated by Christopher RayAlexander, Abigail RayAlexander and Jon Cogburn 66646_Garcia.indd646_Garcia.indd iiiiii 110/11/200/11/20 55:09:09 PPMM Contents Series Editor’s Preface viii We Ourselves Book I: Transparencies The fi rst person plural 5 Everyone-we-I 30 Three objections 36 Every we is a system of divisions 50 Confl icts of division 56 The intersection model 59 The transparency model 64 The contour 66 The overlap 70 Transparency and opacity 74 Re-covering 78 The bottom 81 66646_Garcia.indd646_Garcia.indd v 110/11/200/11/20 55:09:09 PPMM vi WE OURSELVES Book II: Constraints 1. The Ground of We 105 2. Dynamic 162 3. Domination 186 4. The End of We 216 Bibliography 230 Index 248 66646_Garcia.indd646_Garcia.indd vvii 110/11/200/11/20 55:09:09 PPMM The fi rst person plural Let us begin by acknowledging that the subject of politics is we.1 In contrast with the fi rst person singular, something about the fi rst person plural grants it a permanent variation of range, since it can just as readily designate only you and me, or the totality of living things, or even what lies beyond. Let us imagine a circle, what we might call the ‘circle of we’. We can picture how its limits encircle those around us, our family, our clan, our tribe, and our community. Or, on the contrary, we can imagine the diffusion of that circle within the social realm. This diffusion increases when the circle is extended to sensate beings, animals, and even certain vegetables. As the circle expands or shrinks, its diameter corre- sponds to a given state of us. Consequently, there are as many political subjects as there are states of us, which we can understand as possible extensions of this imaginary circle. ‘We’ is an ectoplasmic form found in the majority of human languages. It is capable of embracing everything that lies between myself and the rest of the world. Through ‘we’, many subjects situ- ate themselves, limit themselves, negotiate their similarities and differences, and engage in politics. We can’t keep ourselves from saying ‘we’, no matter our degree of engagement, our line, or our camp. We all say ‘we’, regardless of the group: professional activists, mere sympathisers, sceptical citizens with fl uctuating convictions, socialists, social democrats, LGBTQI activists, takfi ri Wahhabists, Trotskyites from the Com- intern, separatists, Pabloites, Third Worldists, neoconservatives, autonomists, indigenists, anti-colonialists, untouchables from the Bahujan Samaj Party, Republicans, Ba’athists, patriotic nationalists, fascists, apolitical people, Christian Democrats, Mormons, pro- moters of the Third Way, defenders of animal rights, Zionist Jews, pan-Africanists, deep ecologists in the tradition of Ecosophy T, suffragettes, Bolivarians, anarchists, neo-Nazis, homonationalists or femonationalists, Labour supporters, degrowthists, liberal libertar- ians, constitutional monarchists, Black Nationalists, Mensheviks, 66646_Garcia.indd646_Garcia.indd 5 110/11/200/11/20 55:09:09 PPMM 6 WE OURSELVES Soka Gakkai Buddhists, abolitionists, civil rights activists, Sunni jihadists, reformists, pro-life activists, and so on. The essence of political discourse lies in defi ning how we understand this ‘we’, what our rights and legitimate claims are, and our conception of society as a whole. However, political discourse also requires us to negatively identify those who oppose us, the ene- mies whom we designate as ‘you’ or ‘them’. Try for a moment to make no distinction between all of the possible groups and asso- ciations to which you feel you belong and those that appear dis- tant, even exotic. Stop separating the collective identities that you consider to be grounded, universal, and serious from those you consider irrational, ridiculous, or dangerous. Suspend your moral judgement. Then, through thought, try to establish a sort of imagi- nary plane upon which you might consider, at once equally and distinctly, everything that speaks in the name of we. Try this now, and you will see that everyone who says ‘we’ speaks as the same person, which is to say that they take on the being of people who speak that way, even when those people have an identity or principles that irritate or repulse them. We say ‘we’ along with them. So let us examine this vertiginous diversity alongside the cacophony of our attempts to portray ourselves. Let us do this even though it might seem to the more sceptical among us as a sign of fanaticism or a proof of the airy nature of all proclamations of identity. However, let us also suppose that the proliferation of divergent and contra- dictory we’s is not irrational, but rather manifests a noble trait of subjectivity: its propensity to organise itself politically. What happens when we say ‘we’? By the grace of language, which allows us to inhabit that pronoun, we can at different times claim to be on all sides, including that of even our fi ercest adversaries. Nothing enunciated in the name of a we is a com- plete stranger to us. However, ‘we’ also signifi es our we, as distinct from your we. We know that you say ‘we’, but you don’t say it like us. We can tell this because our practices, customs, and ideas are different. We is at once the possibility of being everyone, the vague promise within language of universal belonging, as well as the concrete assignation to a particular identity.2 We is some- thing that we are and that you are not, even if you also say ‘we’ in your own way. 66646_Garcia.indd646_Garcia.indd 6 110/11/200/11/20 55:09:09 PPMM TRANSPARENCIES 7 This we is a fl exible entity.3 It is malleable enough to take in beings of all kinds, but still suffi ciently limiting to allow for distinc- tions between camps, depending on who is using the word and how they are using it. We should not naively think that all who cry ‘we’ understand the word in the same way. But we also shouldn’t think that ‘we’ is a meaningless word that we can defi ne however we want. Nor is it a simple indexical term, a mirror word that just refers back to its conditions of enunciation, to who said it and when and where they did so. The truth is that, even if there is only one word to say it, there is not only one we.4 Nevertheless, there are not as many different we’s as there are uses of the term. In order to avoid falling into either opening of this double trap, it is use- ful to consider the we as a structure that is at once both free and determined. We should not think of we as a pure phenomenon of language. We structures the spirit of those who make use of it, and orients that usage without entirely forcing it. One may speak of we with respect to a very small number of people, or in reference to everyone. Nevertheless, there is something within that we – a sort of resistance within its ectoplasmic form – that follows a certain logic. This logic only becomes apparent through the repeti- tion of its variations. Therefore, in order to comprehend what we is, we must go against all the recommendations of the sociological method and treat the masses and the state without distinction. The more we’s that we recognise, the more we abstract from the particularities of the use of the fi rst person plural. Our com- mon traits stand out more clearly. A general understanding of what we is requires nothing more than a moral quality, a certain empa- thetic disposition that allows us to weaken the closed-mindedness of our own convictions and principles in order to strengthen our ability to mentally participate in any community whatsoever. Lis- tening to everything that the people around us say and naively including ourselves whenever we hear ‘our brother’, ‘our family’, or ‘our comrades’ is enough for us to imagine being one of them, sharing their ideas and identity, and counting ourselves as part of their number. But where to begin? First, let us draw an initial cir- cle of we. Then, let us adjust its perimeter, cut it into subsets, and shift its boundaries to try to discover as many manifestations of identity as possible in recent history. 66646_Garcia.indd646_Garcia.indd 7 110/11/200/11/20 55:09:09 PPMM 8 WE OURSELVES We can begin by tracing an imaginary line around all human beings. This yields a more or less circular fi gure, the interior of which consists of endlessly multiplying sections of the circle. The most notable of these, or at least the one that superfi cially seems most important and most present in political discourses, is the section pertaining to individuals described in Woyzeck as ‘poor people like us’, the landless and the disinherited, the proletariat, the workers, the exploited, the small.5 The name changes, and, as it transforms, the circle is no longer exactly the same. At its big- gest, its default defi nition is the we of the Occupy movement: ‘We are the 99%.’6 It is the nameless we, we the many standing in opposition to the minuscule minority that possesses the planet’s economic wealth. Blurring the lines between all who are neither ‘masters’ nor ‘bosses’, the we of the many is the main character of Marxist history. This we is celebrated by the well-known couplet of ‘The Internationale’: ‘We are the law, we are the many. We who were nothing, let us be all.’7 But this we of the many, which has the right to aspire to eve- rything, this immense we of all who feel dispossessed of economic means, robbed of their inheritance, excluded by the telling of his- tory and the curating of cultural knowledge, and cut off from the law and the state apparatus, such a we is weakly determined.