Complicity

Criticism Between Collaboration and Commitment

Thomas Docherty

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781786601018
• eBook ISBN: 9781786601032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Criticism

Complicity argues that all existing modes of cultural critique are regarded as legitimate and productive if and only if they are complicit with the very ideologies and values that the criticism sets out to undermine. Through philosophical, literary and theoretical analysis, Thomas Docherty shows how easy it has been for criticism to become essentially an act of political collaboration with existing governmental power.

The book explores the various ways in which, both historically and theoretically, critical activity has become complicit with the over-arching social and political norms that it aims to undermine. Philosophically, ethically and politically, criticism's fundamental impulse is too often intrinsically negated. In extreme political form, this places criticism in line with collaborationist activity. Docherty then finds a productive way out of the double-bind in which criticism has traditionally found itself, through an idea of criticism as a mode of 'reserve', a mode of commitment that eschews fundamentalism of all kinds.

1IntroductionOn Being a Bastard

When he considered the world as it stood in 1918, after the Great War, Yeats saw a condition of ‘mere anarchy’. At the centre of a world in which ‘things fall apart’, his sense was that the world was fallen: ‘The ceremony of innocence’, he argued, ‘was drowned’. The consequence was the famous diagnosis of all that has gone wrong at the entry into the modern condition: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of a passionate intensity’.¹ Interestingly, at the close of the Second World War, we find a similar diagnosis. This one is carried out not by a poet but by two historians, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, who discover in their examination of wartime collaboration that ‘most traitors did not have the courage of any conviction’.² Conviction, honesty, and legitimacy—and how they can be corrupted or betrayed—are the issues that need to be explored at the core of this introductory chapter. They will there provoke a consideration of the meaning of ‘responsibility’.

In 1975, Hannah Arendt was awarded Denmark’s Sonning Prize. Every other year, the University of Copenhagen awards the prize to an individual in recognition of her or his contribution to European culture. Arendt used the occasion of her acceptance speech to ponder the very idea of public recognition of the work, thoughts, or value of any individual.

The receipt of an honour, such as the Sonning Prize, raises issues of merit and desert. As with many recipients of honours, Arendt takes a specific stand in modesty. To accept an honour is, in some way, also to endorse those who offer the award in the first place. It is to accept and even to assert a shared position, to acknowledge at least an overlap of shared interests. Thus, to accept an honour is marked by a contradiction: on one hand, ‘who am I to receive such recognition?’ and at the same time, ‘I am of the same standing as those who are able to decide and dispense honour and recognition’. This is the predicament that Arendt teases out, in some philosophical detail, on the occasion of her acceptance speech.

She returns to one of the very well-established themes of the work for which she is being recognized: the relations between the private and public domains. The key figure here to which she turns to help her is the ancient persona. It is this that will allow her to address the fundamentally modest question: ‘who am I to receive this honour?’³

What might ‘public recognition’ entail? That is her question. In ancient theatre, we recognize characters through their masks, which gave them their public face, their ‘personae’. Arendt draws attention to the etymology: the mask or persona was a facial covering that let the sound of the actor’s voice come through (per-sonare, ‘to sound through’, or the act of ‘sounding through’). She then draws attention to the distinction made, in Roman law, between the persona and the homo: the persona is one who ‘possessed civil rights’, whereas homo refers to the person who is ‘nothing but a member of the human species’.⁴ The persona, in this, is a political figure: one who can adopt a public face and whose voice can be heard in the public sphere, even if the voice is that of a quasi-theatrical figure or role. The homo is the more private figure; the individual who has no political existence and whose fundamental being is characterized by the struggle for survival, for what we will later learn to call (after Agamben) ‘bare life’ (la nuda vita).⁵

The key element of the distinction here is that the persona enjoys not only the freedom to assume a role, but also the freedom to change it, as the occasion demands. In other words, the persona is not strictly identifiable with the conscience or consciousness that determines her actions. Our social masks—for those of us who have them, and who are not merely struggling for basic survival—‘are not a permanent fixture annexed to our inner-self in the sense in which the voice of conscience, as most people believe, is something the human soul constantly bears within itself’.⁶ This, in fact, may be a key marker of the distinction between politics and ethics, the latter demanding a more intimate relation between private consciousness and public act.

Given this, the adoption of the mask permits a condition in which Arendt can play a role without being fully identified by it, without fully committing her self to it. In that role, then, she gracefully accepts the honour of the Sonning Prize, but also hankers after the moment when she can unmask and step aside, step aside from ‘recognition’, and return to her ‘naked “thisness”’, as she calls it, a condition in which she is ‘identifiable . . . but not definable’. She resists being seduced, as she puts it, ‘by the great temptation of recognition which, in no matter what form, can only recognize us as such and such, that is, as something which we fundamentally are not’.⁷

Here, she draws a fine and nuanced distinction between being identifiable and being defined. The neat deconstruction from which that distinction emerges raises a fundamental issue around responsibility. ‘Recognition’—if it implies being ‘defined’ by the prize and its values—endorses the idea that there is a straightforward consonance between the self and her actions (i.e. that there is no distinction between homo and persona), so much so that the actions are somehow determined by, and are also a necessary consequence of, the realization of the self’s own historical being. The action, as it were, necessarily derives from an essential selfhood; and our typical tendency is to call that selfhood our ‘identity’ and also (mistakenly, in Arendt’s account) to ‘define’ ourselves thereby. In this, we have an essential self and voice that determines—predetermines—our action. To what extent, then, are we ‘responsible’ for those actions, if they are thus ‘determined’ as a necessary condition of the self simply being itself or expressing itself?

This is a question that has been asked before; and, appropriately enough in this context, it has been asked in theatre. Edmund, in Shakespeare’s King Lear attacks the fundamental idea that our actions are somehow predetermined by condition, which he calls ‘the excellent foppery of the world’. At its extreme, the logic is found in the total negation of personal responsibility for one’s actions, as in the suggestion that ‘I am innocent. I was only acting upon orders of someone else’. Edmund has no truck with such excuses, such attempts to shift the burden of responsibility onto a prior determinant of our actions.

Against this, Edmund asserts a cult of the personal and expresses responsibility for his actions, saying ‘Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing’. The belief that our actions are determined—be it by the stars as in King Lear, by fate, Ananke or ‘necessity’ as in some classical tragedy, or by a fundamental and essential identity or selfhood—is fundamentally consistent not just with a denial of personal responsibility for actions, but also with a belief in myth. In this character, Shakespeare is asserting a kind of proto-existentialist position; and, for Arendt (who of course knew the philosophy in ways that Shakespeare could not, immersed in mid-twentieth-century existentialist thought, with its attendant concern for authentic being), responsibility requires that we do not remain satisfied with an account that excuses our actions as predetermined by some essential precondition.

To suggest that our actions are thus preconditioned would be to say, in cases where our actions are called into question or are seen as reprehensible, that we are merely ‘complicit with’ some rule or law that made us do as we did: we were only obeying orders, and it was the voice of someone else who spoke through our mask.

This has serious repercussions for issues of responsibility. Fundamentally, with the figure of the persona and its non-identification with the homo, Arendt raises the question of whether or how I am ever fully responsible for—recognizable in—my actions and their consequences. In modernity, we have usually needed to subscribe to the view that the self is indeed recognizable in her actions—that, indeed, is the meaning of the proverbial ‘actions speak louder than words’. The action, we suggest, is an explicit articulation of some foundational self, the speaking I or subject, whose real defined selfhood is realized through the action, and no longer able to hide its reality behind misleading words. And we apportion praise or blame precisely because of this assumed identity of person and action: indeed, our entire legal system is based upon it.

Look closely at the proverb, though: ‘actions speak louder than words’, perhaps; but in this, the actions apparently still speak and therefore operate as words. The proverb tries to eliminate the distinction between words freely spoken (free speech) and action freely undertaken, and it gives primacy to action as a form of speech. However, is there really such a tight correspondence—even what we can call a complicity—between the self and her actions, or between what the self says and her actions? To believe this would be to believe, against Edmund, that our actions are somehow predetermined by the essential character of a self or by a necessity. That is to say, it would be to believe in an ideology of purification, of the ‘pure’ and unadulterated self as a determining instance of actions; and Arendt, for one, certainly knew where that kind of belief would lead us in the twentieth century.⁸

Edmund, by contrast, is for the bastard, for the ‘impure’, for the messy impurity that allows us to consider that we might be responsible for what we do. The subscription to purity, to a complicity between action and some predetermining condition of our being, is a position that has serious negative consequences. As Sylviane Agacinski has pointed out, a theorization of action that is grounded in an originating and essential identity has two correlates: first, it establishes quasi-essential differences in kind or in species among individuals (as between the male and the female, say, or between races); and secondly, once such distinctions are established, it engenders hierarchies among such distinguished species (such that the male is seen as superior to the female, and so on).⁹ Once such hierarchies are established, so also is our complicity with certain egregious political positions.

The bastard, of course, is illegitimate: her or his legal standing is compromised, and she or he stands outside the law. Edmund’s point, however, is that it is his actions that are authentic, ‘owned’ by him (as contemporary jargon would put it): proper to him, constitutive of his property and properties. In this character, the bastard stands outside of unearned privilege and beyond the privileges that the law gives to its insiders. In short, he acknowledges that operating in the social and political sphere is a question of the adoption of a persona, a mask that can be changed according to pragmatic and political necessity. He acts, in every sense.

To what extent do we base our demands of justice, say, upon a desired ‘authenticity’, which runs counter to its opposite, ‘hypocrisy’? Hypocrisy is usually characterized in terms of the discrepancy between word and deed. The deed is taken to be more authentic because it is something of substance, something that is materially realized in the world. Its reality or realization in the world is what contradicts the word. The word can now be deemed to be false, precisely in the sense that it lacks material realization or representation in the world. It is lacking in material substance: it is therefore a word that remains unrealized in deed and action, or ‘in fact’, as we would say.

Authenticity, by contrast, depends upon there being a precise relation between word and deed, a deep necessity that links them as but two aspects of the same fact, such that ‘my word is my bond’, or such that the word is really simply a prefiguring of a reality that is about to be enacted or brought into being. The structure in question would be one where we believe that there is an essential self or identity that necessarily speaks in a particular way and that in turn acts out those words in a manner that is a perfect representation, in action, of those words.

The root of this is biblical. In Numbers 30:2, Moses instructs the tribes of Israel that ‘If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth’. Theological thinking such as this is very far from the mind of Edmund in Shakespeare. He is asserting his autonomy; and the consequence of that is that he chooses not to fulfil or realize some fundamental theological word of God, word of truth. Likewise, it is far from the mind of Arendt, whose concern is primarily political, organized around issues of political responsibility, guilt, and justice. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion—at least the provisional conclusion—that, as far as Arendt is concerned, we must be as Edmund, ‘bastard’ with respect to the idea of authenticity, if we are to retain the possibility of being political, of being the persona rather than the individual struggling for bare life, for ‘mere’ survival.

This is only provisional, however: as we know, especially from her concern with Auschwitz and with the trial of Eichmann, even mere survival has a hugely political dimension. Modernity seems to organize itself around the belief in authenticity: genuine, reliable trustworthiness as a condition of our living and being together. When we spy hypocrisy, we expose it in the interests of purgation and the reestablishment of genuine relation. However, if this position rests on some essential falsehood, then to the extent that we subscribe to it, we are as a society complicit with that fundamental lie.

Is it possible, in such circumstances, to avoid such complicity in our critical engagements with culture and politics? Is it the case that we are somehow coerced into collaboration with overweening and unearned or illegitimate authority if we are to be heard and to be effective? And what happens to the idea of a committed criticism, a criticism that is determined to be autonomous and to avoid the taint of any such collaboration?

What might these issues around authenticity and responsibility mean for a consideration of guilt, or of a more general complicity with the actions of others? This is where I will begin.

NOTES

1. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, in Collected Poems (Macmillan, 1933; repr. 1979), 210–11. We have a contemporary image of how ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned’ in our own times, in the figure of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee whose drowned body shocked the world in September 2015.

2. Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris: After the Liberation 1944–1949 (revised edn.; Penguin, 2007), 156.

3. This, of course, is the honourable account of what is at stake in any honours system. In many cases, however, the system is anything but honourable. Not only have there been scandals about ‘cash for honours’ among parliamentary and political parties (especially around 2006–2007 in the United Kingdom), but also ‘honours’ are more or less exchanged among members of various elites. On this, see Seumas Milne, ‘It’s the British establishment that has a problem with democracy’, available at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/23/british-establishment-problem-democracy-jeremy-corbyn. It happens outside of mainstream politics too: one university gives an honorary doctorate, say, to the president of another, with a similar such honour returned after a ‘respectable’ gap in time, perhaps as little as six months—or less. This might be...

Table of contents

• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction: On Being a Bastard
• Chapter 2Diplomacy and Law
• Chapter 3 Accountancy; or, on Being a Bureaucrat
• Chapter 4 Skin in the Game
• Chapter 5 On Democratic Responsibility
• Chapter 6 ‘Open the Doors!’; or, on Commitment and Reserve
• Bibliography