political philosophy – Jana Bacevic

You know which photo I am talking about. Yes, the one you had seen, and are now trying to unsee.

Of course, you, I, most of the people we know are objectively much more comfortable. We have water, electricity. We are not being bombed, daily. Half of our population has not been obliterated (well, likely). We have food. We are even, probably, comparatively healthy. I mean, at the very least we are not tethered to an IV while –

I know, I know. You are going to try to accuse me of generalizing individual pain. Nothing could be further from my intention. You can find out his name; you can find all their names. You can repeat them, post them, recite them. List their individual achievements. Think – covertly or openly – about all of the ways in which they are you, and in which they are not like you: for instance, highlight that he was a good student. That she was a mother. Or think that as a white person living in the ‘Global North’ this could under no circumstances be you.

What I am saying, however, is that under that order of moral complexity, outrage, guilt, certitude – all the things that wealthy, educated people in this part of the world have as a consequence of the fact (most of) their worlds had never visibly shattered – lies a deeper sentiment, and it is this sentiment you are now trying to unfeel. That sentiment tells you, with brutal precision of the consciousness of a species, that in addition to being a specific image of a specific person in a specific war in unbelievable agony – that picture is also you. That picture is what humanity is now, and if you are human, this is you.

That picture tells you, with brutal precision, that what you probably thought constituted basic precepts of humanity – that we help the ill and the wounded, that we do not attack unarmed civilians, that we do not under any conditions incinerate people tethered to an IV in a medical tent – is being burned alive, literally and metaphorically, as if there is a difference between the two anyway. That picture tells you that the order you thought protected you – yes, even you as a badass critic of liberalism, or whatever – no longer exists. That picture tells you that common humanity – however strongly or weakly you were invested in it – has no meaning as a term anymore.

That picture tells you that you will be obliterated tethered to a support system you have no recourse but to remain attached to.

Welcome.

Some of us have known that the world looks like this for a long time. But this isn’t about who is smart(er), or priority. It is about how – indeed, if – to go on living after this image. For living is the one thing that currently separates us from the dead. Hence live we must.

Under these conditions, there are about three options:

Try to ignore, or look away, as much as possible. Distract yourself with chats about culture wars, immigration, “the free speech crisis”. Talk about ceasefire, as if what has occurred was a random skirmish that can be smoothed out by some successful diplomacy.
Make the most of your own privilege. Buttress your fortresses, be they Europe’s Schengen zone, the wall alongside the Mexican border, the Mediterranean or the English Channel. Remind yourself, daily, that it-may-be-very-unfortunate-but, you, yourself, have worked so hard to earn a decent living for you and your family, and you deserve a nice car and a salary and a pension and takeouts and anyway all these images are so depressing and there is nothing we can do about it.
Own up to what is going on. Bid goodbye to the international order, the order that gave birth to you and whatever fiction by way of identity you are invested in – class, gender, language, nation – and the institutions that sustain them (state, church, bank, university), and remind yourself that (with few exceptions) they are making this possible. Think very carefully about how you want to live, and how you want to die. Think about the values you would stand by, even as the world bursts into flame.

I’ll see you on the other side.

Dreams are dangerous places. The control and awareness we tend to ascribe to what is usually referred to as ‘dreams’ in the waking state (ambitions; aspirations) is the exact opposite of the absence of control we tend to assume of dreams in the unconscious (sleeping) state, but neither is, strictly speaking, true; we do not choose our ambitions or orientations with full awareness, much like it is ridiculous to fully outsource authoriality when we sleep.

Psychoanalysis, of course, knows this. But, much like other disciplines and traditions that take dreams seriously, it is all-too-often equated with treating dreams as epistemology; that is, using dream logic to deduce something about the person who dreams, as if exiting from the forces generating the unconscious (in Freud’s formulation, following Ariadne’s thread) is ever truly possible. Sociology, needless to say, hardly does a better job, instead placing dreams at the uncomfortable (all boundaries, for sociology, are uncomfortable) boundary between collective and individual, as if the collective (unconscious) somehow permeates the individual, but always imperfectly (everything, in sociology, is imperfect, except its own imperfections).

Bion describes pathology as the inability to dream and inability to wake up; but is this not another (even if relaxed) call for discreteness, ushering in Freud’s Reality principle through the back door? This seems relevant given the relevance of the ability to dream (and dream differently) for any progressive movement or politics. What if elements of reality become so impoverished that there is nothing to dream about? This is one of the things I remember most clearly from reading Cormac McCarthy’s’s The Road – good, happy, and peaceful dreams usually mean you are dying. Reality, in other words, has become so unbearable that there is nothing but retreat into personal, individualized fantasy as a bulwark against this (this is also, though in a more complicated tone, a motif in one of my favourite films, Wenders’ Until the End of the World).

There are several possible ways out of this. One is to see dreams as shared; that is, to conceptualize dreaming as a collective, rather than solitary activity, and dreams as a possession of more than a single individual. Yet, I fear this too-easily slips into platitudes; as much as dreams (and beliefs, and feelings, and thoughts) can be similar and communicated, it is unlikely they can literally be co-created: individual mental states remain (and, in some cases, are indistinguishable from) individual.

(I’m aware that the Australian Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime may challenge this, but I’m reserving that for a different argument).

Instead of imagining some originary dream-state in which we are connected through other minds as if via a umbilical cord, I’m increasingly thinking it makes sense to conceptualize dreams as places; that is, instances of timespace with laws, sequences, and sets of actions and relations. In this sense, we can be in others’ dream(s), as much as they can be in our(s); but within this place, we are probably still responsible to ourselves. Or are we?

How free are you to act in someone else’s dream?

Tag: political philosophy

In dreams begin responsibilities