Inventing a Life Beyond Narratives (parts 1 & 2)

Politics

I can’t find a better way to talk about politics than talking about my own life and the lives of those around me.

I have just moved in with my new housemates. We are four in a house now, and it is taking us a long time to understand how to make things work. Take the fridge, for example. How are we going to share the space there?

And what if we decided to share the food itself, instead? One of my housemates remained silent when I proposed to have a cupboard full of shared clothes in the corridor, while two others smiled in excited approval. The fourth housemate also proposed something else: what if we buy one membership card each for a cinema or art institution and share them, so that we can all go everywhere? After a quick chat about possible legal problems, without even having to vote, his idea was accepted.

What am I talking about? House administration? Not at all, but I would understand the reader’s amazement if I honestly said that I am just talking about politics.

Words are important, and – as the film director Nanni Moretti used to say – ‘those who speak bad, they live bad’. So, if there is one word today that desperately needs a new meaning, that word is ‘politics’.

I said this to one of my housemates, while we were moving our clothes to the shared cupboard, and he grinned, shaking his head. ‘I’m not into politics – he said – I don’t vote, don’t campaign, nothing’. Well, it was weird to hear that from someone who was performing a political act at the same time.

It has been a long time since the meaning of ‘politics’ has been distorted. Since the beginning of our ‘age of spectacle’, this has become increasingly evident. Politics does not necessarily have to do with demonstrations, elections or parliaments. Politics does not need thousands of worshippers, nor impressive ceremonials, nor epic struggles. What is more, politics is not necessarily about power or power struggles: this is just one aspect of politics, or, rather, power politics is just one form of politics. So, what is it really about? In a few words, politics is just the art and practice of living together. As the feminist writer Nawal el Saadawi puts it, as soon as there are two people in a room, there is politics. This is why concerns about the recent disengagement of the young people from politics are utterly ungrounded: it is not today’s youth that is moving away from politics (how could they, as they keep living together?) Rather, it is the meaning of the word politics that is shifting away from the real political practice.

This growing distance between the meaning of the word politics and the actual political practice could be traced back to two fundamental moments. On the one hand, the triumph of representative democracy as the ‘best of all possible worlds’, as opposed to the natural practice of direct democracy, disregarded as utopian and ineffective.

On the other hand, the introduction of the idea of global politics. Such a concept has an obvious – and yet unspoken – disempowering political effect on those who embrace it: it is evident how a human being cannot live on a global scale (as opposed to abstract entities such as financial capital), as he can only live and act within that ‘world’ that is his natural living space/time. What is a person’s possibility of acting politically on a global (or even national) scale, then?

One does not need to be Koprotkin to understand this. And, in an age that is increasingly post-parties and post-parliamentary, this is and will become more and more evident to an increasing number of people. After all, as Aristotle would say, we are naturally ‘political animals’ and there is no way that politics will be removed from our life. Rather, our challenge is now that of giving a new meaning to an old and corrupted word.

This is not a small challenge, and it is of great importance: it is exactly by giving names to things that we make them understandable to ourselves. Once we will have done this, maybe, our political life will reach a new level of quality and depth. Finally, we will have become conscious of what we are actually doing at any moment while we are together, sharing our food, talking to each other, making love.

Identity

A strong identity is just what we need. Ask anyone entering an evangelical church, and that is exactly what you will hear back as an answer. The train of thought behind this is quite straightforward: people feel lonely, lost, unable to deal with their own lives. If they want to be empowered, they will have to ‘know who they are’, and the easiest way to do so is to join an identity and to believe in it as much as they can. Ask this to an activist or to the Nike marketing manager, and that is exactly what you will hear back as an answer.

In the troubled years of the 20th century, this was labelled this as conformism. Nowadays, though, in this accomplished post-modern era, we call this longing for a new meaning a ‘struggle for one’s own identity’.

It is useful to go back to the original meaning of the word ‘identity’, in order to understand its implications for those who join one. Identity comes from the Latin ‘idem’, meaning ‘the same’. Adopting an identity upon oneself means to enter into a relationship of ‘similarity’ with the core of the chosen identity. The core, being the central narrative which all the characters that are part of an identity have to stick to. Nietzsche used to call this submission to a narrative as ‘nihilism’: despite its popular misinterpretations, in fact, ‘nihilism’ is nothing but the act of restraining life, of caging it within a narrative to the point of reducing its multiform nature to nothing.

Take the identity of a metropolitan gay scene, for example, and its exterior camp aesthetics, which is very successful especially amongst young people. In the attempt to grasp their own meaning and to escape their individual marginalisation, many young gay people decide to give up their uniqueness as human beings and to put themselves under the umbrella of a shared identity. Ironically, those who wear the camp aesthetics are doing exactly what Christian priests have been doing for centuries with their holy robes: they present themselves to the world as firstly bearer of an identity, and only later as human beings.

It is impressive how similarly identity and power work. Both of them set cages of prescriptive behaviours that the individual must or must not enact. Power calls its set of norms ‘legitimacy’ (like that of a man in uniform to arrest a man without uniform), while identity calls it ‘justification’ (thanks to which groups of people feel comfortable doing some things, while not doing others). Actually, what they are both doing is building sets of truths within which the individuals can find their own spaces of living. Or, in other and sexier words, they are both constructing sets of meanings. The only difference between the two processes is that, while power imposes its norms from the outside (through coercion or persuasion), identity makes the individual accept such norms as his/her own, to the point of physically embodying them.

It is little surprise that such a process has not passed unobserved by the propaganda departments of today’s capitalism. Looking carefully at this matter, in fact, we can realise that the game of meaning and identity is also at the core or today’s most advanced marketing techniques: a meaning (and preferably a ‘new meaning’) is becoming increasingly the main selling point of a brand and of its products. This is why the work of a creative marketing person inside a corporation today resembles more that of a novel writer than that of a businessman: his job is to invent new meanings, new narratives within which people could easily insert themselves.

Am I thus proposing a life without identity or meaning? How is that possible? I am just saying that if there is one identity to which I belong, that is the human identity, the only meaning of which was beautifully expressed by the Latin poet Terence, who wrote ‘I am a man, I regard nothing which concerns man as foreign to my interests’. This was, for example, the attitude of Pierpaolo Pasolini, a great intellectual who never joined any church or narrative: not communism (although he shared its principles), nor that of gayness (although he practised homosexuality), nor that of national identity or of contemporaneity.

How is it possible to live such a life? The answer, once again, can be found in Pasolini’s own life. Despite the fact that he is well known as a film director and a writer, in fact, Pasolini was essentially a poet, in the original meaning of the word. ‘Poetry’ comes from the Greek word ‘poieo’, meaning ‘to make, produce, create’.

It is indeed possible to live a life free from the obsession of a (new?) meaning, if one is able to be the poet (that is, the maker) of his own life. As Nietzsche used to say, everyone should destroy all values and meanings, so that it can be possible for him/her to express the natural flow of his/her life and – in doing so – creating behind him/herself a wake of sense resembling that which is left by behind a sailing ship. Any meaning or narrative should only be something that follows one’s own path through life: those who try to do the opposite, only end up walking on existing routes.

I can now imagine a strong objection to my argument, and I must admit that I feel it myself: how is it possible to give up meanings and identities, and to still be able to live and work with others?

Ernst Junger used to talk about the necessity to withdraw from the world of nihilism into our own, absolutely private, ‘inner woods’. Maybe, the answer could be a continuation of his thought towards a social direction. Once we have found our individual inner woods, once we have given up the cage of meanings and identities, it could be the time for us to build a ‘shared wood’ where we can finally meet without the need for a central god-like narrative that keeps us together. This should be a poetic meaning, once again in the original meaning of the word: a meeting of makers, that, sailing together, can leave behind themselves a beautiful wake of sense.