Description
In analysing contemporary social and political dilemmas, Slavoj Zizek refers to the demise of symbolic efficiency, Ulrich Beck to the loss of trust and the excoriating effects of “linear doubt” and Julia Kristeva highlights the political and related risks entailed in human subjects remaining “strangers to ourselves”. All three recognise how globalisation and/or the world risk society have heightened anxiety by destabilising established ways of life and forms of identity - especially as these have derived from ideologies of nation, class and ethnicity. While the details of their analyses differ, all three converge in recognising the declining capacity of cultures and institutions to quell anxiety. In turn, all three implicitly recognise an increased incidence of ontological insecurity. Beck (and Giddens) understand this transformative social and political process as one of dis-embedding without re-embedding. As with the demise of symbolic efficiency, dis-embedding from established cultural norms and identities throws a burden of choice upon human subjects. In turn this individualising process burdens human subjects with anxiety that arises from the very obligation to choose and construct an individualised life narrative, without the supportive constraints of stabilised cultural norms and the authority they can command. In this dystopian desert of cultural abandonment, Beck discovers a potential upside in reflexive doubt, Kristeva counters repression, abjection and splitting and projection with sublimation in which anxiety transforms into intensity, creativity and a meditative welcoming of strangeness as the one universal quality that disarms all exclusivist particularisms and Zizek observes a collapse into narcissism. All three implicitly raise the issue of how the anxiety occasioned by a growing sense of ontological insecurity may be defended against. Reflecting upon these three theorists, this paper will argue that the manner in which anxieties are culturally and psychically responded to becomes the leading political issue. Is a cosmopolitanism that welcomes strangeness a redemptive possibility at the level of whole societies? Can Beck’s reflexive doubt displace the hazards heaped upon us by the achievements of linear doubt? Is the demise of symbolic efficiency necessarily the source of “the corrosion of character” and a collapse into the profound misrecognitions of narcissism?
