The
countercultural movements that have flourished all around the world since 2008
represent a new instance of a very old paradox of political metaphysics: the
defense of a private realm of rights within a social structure of stratification.
The paradox is produced by the fact that it is precisely the structure of
stratification what created the conditions of possibility for the genesis of
the private realm represented by the social persona of the citizen, and such
structure is not compatible with the implications of those rights. The present
formulation of the paradox within the narrative
of the human being, an abstract
social persona which is the subject of some ideal social rights, is just the
latter development of a very old religious story. It is obvious that the root
of the paradox intermingles with the roots of social stratification which lies
at the foundation of urban settlements, but it is not only explained by this
phenomenon, and needs to be understood in relation to the creation of a very
unique social persona, depositary of a transcendental and private emotional
sphere, that I will call the lyrical citizen.
In a passage
from Aeschylus’s Oresteia [1983, 65] we
find what may probably be the first register of the psychological condition of
individuation in social terms: I hold my
own mind and think apart from other men. It is not surprising that such a
proclamation appears within the religious context of Attic theatre, for it is
the harmonization of the tension between the social personae, the regulation of
social homeostasis, what drives Mythico-Ritual performances. The fact that we
can understand the sentence of Aeschylus shows that its content is false,
because a mind isolated from the others could not make itself understood. This
is the paradox:
1. I
cannot think or express my individuation without a language.
2. Language
is the construction of an historical group not an individual.
Therefore, I cannot express my
individuation on individual terms (unless -of course- I introduce
transcendental postulates, which, as we will see, has been the case).
Furthermore, individuation is only thinkable in social terms, or what is
equivalent: individual identity is a question of communication and social
action.
Such paradox was
the point of departure for the theory of the development of personality in
relation to social structure, as treated by Durkheim [1964], Mead [1934],
Parsons [1964] or Habermas [2010]. Composing their conclusions in terms of
contemporary affective neuroscience [Panksepp, 1998] we could say that he
individual person is the result of the particular set of ideas developed by a
human group [Durkheim,1964], acted through the body individuation as a reply to
the expectations of social behavior that are generalized through linguistic
interchange and serve to the purpose of social homeostasis. Social personae are
created in these communicative actions [Habermas, 2010] through mimetic
narrative processes conditioned by the particular economic action which
constitute the homeostatic structure of the community.
The person of
the lyrical citizen, or the individual persona, is the result of the
intersection of the narratives of the economic actions of the ancient city with
the ideological development of the narratives of immortality in the direction
of an individual soul. The concept of individual
persona appeared linked to that of anima
as a transpersonal entity, as an explanatory substratum for the economic
actions and of the social personae that are derived from it. It has its source in
the pre-urban, or anima mundi
societies, whose personae differentiation is still pre-individual, a tension
between the individual body and the collective narrative, for there is not yet
a difference between the economic identity of the subject -whether mother,
hunter or any other group persona- and a private identity beyond the one given
by the community and the particular economical action. The personae of the
narratives of the anima mundi are not
individuals as much as types, whether economical, of kinship, of age, or, like
the totem-ancestor, linguistic and metaphysical. The survival of the ancestors
in oneiric experiences as well as in the narratives and Mythico-Ritual ceremonies,
extends the active personal community to the world of the dead, which is present
in social life, explicitly remembered and implicitly incorporated in the memory
of the group through the narratives and rituals that passed on to the new
generations. The linguistic hypostatic dimension of both the ancestor-totem and
the world of dreams give the grounds for the concept of anima. As a general concept, it is not the direct result of an
economic determination, but of a self-reflective explanation of life that
includes in its bosom the phenomenon of death. The soul is a simple hypothesis
that explains at the same time the persistence of the memory of the dead, the
world of dreams, and a spontaneous valuation upon nature by which we are able
to understand it immediately and feel part of it.
The notion of an
individual anima implies a
contradiction of terms, for the concept anima,
inherited from the narratives of the anima
mundi, refers to the most general apprehension of life, whereas its
simultaneous assignation to an individual body takes as referent the most
particular. The concept is therefore always fuzzily understood, but draws its
praxiological meaning from the individuation of the body acting semantically as
a synonymous for individual life.
However, an individual life does not express a private realm of emotions, for these
are general protocols of mammal behavior for survival and communication developed
during evolution, not individual traits. Since our emotional life is organized
around the basic social emotions [Panksepp], a private emotional realm could
only be the result of an extra-life development, as a dissociation of the
economic life of the individual in relation to the group and a hypothetical
existence beyond the economic activities. In anima mundi societies, such dissociation does not even exist, for
their mild (or non-existent) stratification harmonizes the economic and the
transcendental social personae, but urban societies, with their division
between rulers and ruled, favor the development of transcendental personae. The
rupture had a double engine, for the transcendental development of the anima mundi figure of the ancestor went
hand in hand with the economic developments of the city which created the
conditions for leisure (non-economical) time of the citizen. The concept of
immortality of the totem-ancestor, once applied to the early kings and the
noble, introduced a double realm of experience which provided the suitable
conditions for the progressive weakening of the actual life experience in favor
of another world. As we can observe in the examples provided by the classical
studies of James Frazer,[1] in
the early stratified societies, the immortality was a privilege of the rulers,
but the conditions of possibility for an emotional realm beyond life experience
where solidly founded.
The generalized
narratives of immortality will not take place until the development of the
myths of the universal law [Munoz, 2013]. Particularly influential were those
elaborated by the Osiris’ priests of the 16th Century before zero
(b.z.) in the New Kingdom, following the convulsion of the Hyksos interregnum,
narratives of immortality that served as paradigm for those which came after
them, not only in the form of the cults, but in the extension of immortality to
ordinary men [Edwards, Gadd, Hammond, 2008]. It is interesting to notice that
the progressive ascension of Osiris to the Egyptian pantheon at the end of the
Old Kingdom (XXII b.z.) was parallel to the development of the secular
literature (in the Middle Egyptian dialect) during the period of the IX-XII dynasties
(2160-1800 b.z. aprox.). It also coincides with the appearance of some sort of
Egyptian middle class formed by craftsmen, tradesmen and small farmers
[Edwards, Gadd and Hammond. 2008, 506], that had the time for the development
of a private realm of emotions. We read in the text Dispute of a Man with his Soul, the dialog of a man weary of life
with the full blown persona of his soul in which otherworld considerations
condition human emotional life, n-aryzing at the same time the basic emotions.
It seems reasonable to think that in uncertain times, in liminal situations,
the Osiris myths of afterlife would find a more receptive audience that under
steady periods of changeless social order. The weakening of the authority of
the King produced the strengthening (and progressive independence) of the
universal law that he was supposed to represent, and specially, of the priestly
caste that controlled the techniques of such law (the techniques of
civilization) as well as the emergent metaphysical knowledge of the narratives
of identity, and which included the myths of immortality.
The
transcendental dimension of the personal identity derived from the tales of
immortality was completed with the development that lyric made of the
psychological sphere thus inaugurated. In early Babylonian literature
(2120-1800 b.z), in the works of the king Shulgi, the son of Ur-Nammu, we see
how the development of the private realm occurred first among the noblemen. The
Kings and the Noble, the rulers of Mesopotamia (the Anunaki that we read in the
Enuma Elish), experienced the tension between their social economic persona and
the ideological one which resulted from their mythical role. It was in the
liminal realm between ritual poetry and its courtly developments where
germinated the notion of a private citizen. The shift from the public narratives
of the fertility rites (which contained the immortality intuitions of urban
communities) to a narrower courtesan sphere turned the models of the ritual
Epithalamion (like the Mesopotamian of Dumuzi and Inanna[2])
into courtesan love poetry. Ritual emotions were thus enaryzed (made n-ary),
and then enaryzed further in the lyrical expression of this new private emotional
dimension made by the middle classes of Egypt and Mesopotamia, writings that
towards the 12th Century b.z. were already a widespread practice in
the Middle East.
On the other
hand, if we observe Chinese poetry of the Chou period, in the Classic of Poetry or The Book of Odes (Shijing) that collects
poems of the 11th to the 8th Centuries b.z.we do not find
the voice of a lyrical citizen, but rather group emotions. In ode 27, we read: I think of the ancient men, and then truly I
find my heart [Karlgreen,1950,16)] a declaration which implies that the
meaning is in the past, not in the idea of the unique present of the poet where
the lyrical epiphany takes place. We
observe throughout the whole book an analogous absence of the private realm
found in Mesopotamia: the descriptions and observations of economic and
aesthetical nature are protocolized in the manner of proverbs, with a moral
content which is always in relation to the group customs, to the economic
action of economic personae. China had a middle class of merchants equivalent
to the Mesopotamian one (especially in the Spring and Autumn Period (722-481
b.z.), but lacked the myths of immortality for the general population of Egypt,
or the immortal Anunaki persona of the Mesopotamian cities. In fact, we have to
wait until Qu Yuan’s poetry in IV b.z., to hear the voice of a lyrical citizen,
fully blossomed in the narratives of immortality of Taoism. Something similar
happened with the birth of Greek lyric in the 7th Century b.z., when
the emotions expressed in the myths and rituals were redirected towards a
reflection about human existence from the perspective of the common citizen,
whose emotional private sphere, a transformation of the type offered by
mysteric rites (Orphic, Eleusinian, etc.), was declared and reclaimed as the
kernel of an individual persona.
If the general
population is immortal, the political State that is derived from it is trans-historical
and trans-personal in a very concrete economic sense: the debt-guilt (in
relation to civilization) over which the power of the elites was built has the
counterpart of an inalienable right, eternal life. When only the elites were
immortal, the masses (including any possible middle class) were irrelevant in
the civilizing drama. The notion of immortality makes the masses members of an
stable ideal community, for it implies the creation of a persona –a symbolic
complexified variant of the anima mundi-
which underlies their active economic social personae and, to the extent that
it is none of the others (but a mere metaphysical narrative of identity), a
persona which is relatively independent of the general Mythico-Ritual actions,
and has a private sphere of action. The political expansion of these ideas will
not take place until the limitation of national identities that resulted from the
Greek-Persian synthesis of Alexander. The Cynics contributed to create them
with their critique of the social order and the desacralization of the territory, something which prepared the
terrain for the Stoic ideology of the universalism of the law, whose foundation
is the universalism of the Logos.
Even though the
contents of the elites’ first personal lyric will be similar to the lyrical
compositions of the common citizens, like the ones we find in Greek poetry, or
later on in the China of the time of the Six
Dynasties (222-589 a.z.),[3] it
will be the perspective of the common citizen, not bound to any caste, the one
capable of providing a dimension of universality that characterizes the lyric
(a universality of privacy) as the expression of a social persona independent
of the structures of the king-god.[4] Curiously
enough, this perspective of the private emotional sphere, by being severed from
the Mythico-Ritual axis where it belonged, achieved self-consciousness through
this difference, although it did not discovered itself as a narrative of
immortality but precariously anchored to the transience and futility of
individuation. Immortality will be for the lyrical citizen an ideal requirement
of the trans-personality of his emotion, of a form of self-consciousness for
which he identifies himself with wider life cycles, with the trans-personal
symbolic construction of the individual
soul. This self-narrative tension between the universal and the
transitory, the group and the individual, the immortality and the individual
death, will traverse lyric poetry from its origins to our days as its reason
for being. Such tension constructs the specific social persona that today we
call the human individual. The lyrical person understands the tie of civic
structure, his link to some economic social persona within the Mythico-Ritual web,
and will search for a sphere in which his personal emotive individuation may be
able to prosper, a domain that could be no other than an idealized image of
nature as that which is opposed to the city, the place of stratification and of
the economic personae that negates the intimate and lyrical voice. From Virgil
to the Green utopias of today, passing through the final dreams of Alonso
Quijano or the healthy mindedness of Whitman’s outdoors, the lyrical citizen
wishes to wander, like Wang Wei, in the blue lights of ideal and eternal
mountains, away from a foreign and imposed stratification alien to its inner
emotional realm.
The creation of
the lyrical citizen gave the conditions of possibility for the invention of the
Greek political citizen which culminated in the Hellenistic idea of cosmopolitanism.
The individual was thus created in paradoxical terms as a consequence of the
universalism of a law of human immortality, which in economic terms was
expressed in the notion of a ius naturale,
which was always more the pragmatical setting of a political scenario for the
ruling of vast empires than a fact which established equivalence among Mythico-Ritual
axes and equality in the control of the means of production. In this sense, it
was always a narrative of domination, which reached its climax in the Christian
metaphysical narratives of a Celestial Jerusalem, an imaginary transnational
and transcendental community whose doors were jealously guarded by the
political elite of the Terrestrial Jerusalem.
The narrative of
the human being of the revolutions of the 18th Century A.Z. will
emerge[5]
out of the fusion of the cosmopolitan and transcendental elements of Antiquity
with the humanist elements of the Enlightenment. In the 19th
Century, the scientific humanism of the evolutionism will be added to these
previous elements to later culminate the process in the narrative found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of
1948.[6]
The cosmopolitan Greek narratives -as those recovered by the philosophy of the
Enlightenment- and the scientific materialism, introduced a critical element
that will reproduced the old paradoxical tensions between economic and
metaphysical actions present at the heart of the lyrical citizen narratives. The
tension between the legal and the lyrical citizen is today a tension that
occurs between the narrative of the human being, inheritor of transcendental
myths, and the economical legal citizen, or professional citizen, a pawn in the
structures of stratification. The contemporary picture is completed when we add
the narratives developed after the second industrial revolution, with the
developments of the meta-theoretical personality favored by the philosophy of
the late 19th Century, and then by psychoanalysis and the
avant-garde movements, which produced two new epistemological narratives of
identity: the ludico-aesthetic ones and those of the meta-theoretical identity
of gender.
The tension of
identity of the social persona is, therefore, the result of a progressive
unfoldment of paradoxes, linguistic and metaphysical, and of metaphysical
tensions of political narrative. The linguistic metaphysical tension between
the individual body and the collective narrative expresses the basic form of
the paradox of communication, due to
the individual centralization of something common. From this paradox was derived
the linguistic trans-personality and the basic representations of immortality
of the communal persona, the totem, and later those of the specific ritual
figures (like the shaman and later the king and the elites). The narratives of
immortality transform the paradox of
communication into the paradox of the
immortality of the individual soul. This last paradox, expressed in the metaphysical
terms of the universal law is the already mentioned paradox of Aeschylus, whereas in the economic terms of this very
same universal law it is the paradox of
the lyrical citizen: the proclamation of a transcendental identity
non-economical, non-civic, when it was this civic economical persona the one
who generated the conditions of possibility for the lyrical citizen. The
narratives of transcendentalism took the shape of the narratives of the Homo sapiens
in the plane of the human law, from which the paradox of the universality of the human was derived.
After the mythic
plane of the king-god, with the stratified urban communities, the linguistic
paradoxes contributed to the specific formation of the tension of narrative
identity derived from the economic actions, a tension that by being carried
into a metaphysical plane will feedback the entire productive system. In the
narratives of the human law, once the transcendentalist narratives partially yielded
against the anthropological ones, the identity tension adopts meta-theoretical
forms, whether as a tension of purely epistemological content, or as the
narrative tension of the industrial and postindustrial citizen, in which meta-theoretical
and ludic social personae are already formed. In this tension, however, are
still present the contradictions that nourished the paradoxes of the lyrical
citizen, now in the form of the concept of human
being. It is interesting to observe that common to all these paradoxes
there is a very basic form of narrative tension, or better put, anti-narrative,
which seems unsurmountable as long as there may be cities and division of
labor, in which there is a category of social persona, whether it may be called
slave, servant, proletarian or governed, whose identity is negative, or in the
best of cases, residual.
In what sense is
the idea of human rights a narrative of domination? In the sense that it
justifies the status quo of unequal control of the means of production and
unequal control of the means of State violence. The problem is not in the
content of the Declaration of 1948,
which, in fact, expresses an ideology of cooperation and diversity which is
well harmonized with the strength of intelligence in its evolutionary
development, but in the hypocrisy for its implementation, for it requires a new
economic order, and with it, a new ontological narrative for the human being.
How can we
transform a transcendental narrative of domination into a human cosmopolitical
constitution? We cannot, for our Western Mythico-Ritual axis is based in the
transcendental persona represented by the lyrical citizen, and we should need a
new economic and metaphysical narrative capable of creating meaningful human
lives on this earth, otherworldliness-free. But how could we renounce the only
relief from the stress imposed by social stratification? How could we renounce
the wonderful dream of a paradoxical but nirvanic private identity amidst the
suffocating pressure of the social communities created by our sleepwalking
species?
References
Aeschylus. Aeschylus tragedies. (London and Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard-Heinemann.
1983)
Durkheim,
Emile, The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life, Trans. Joseph Ward Swain, (London: Geoge Allen & Unwin
Ltd., 1964).
Edwards, I.E.S., Gadd,
C.J., Hammond, N.G.L. eds. The Cambridge
Ancient History. Volume I. Part 2. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Habermas, Jürgen, Teoría de la acción comunicativa. Trad. Manuel Jiménez
Redondo. (Madrid: Editorial Trotta. 2010)
Karlgreen, Bernhard.
Translator and Editor. The Book of Odes.
(Stockholm. The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 1950)
Lawall, Sarah, and
Mack Maynard, Editors. The Norton
Anthology of World Literature. Volume B. (New York and London: W.W. Norton
& Company. 2002)
Meade, George, Mind, Self and Society. Edited by
Charles Morris. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press.1934)
Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions.
(New York: Oxford University Press. 1998)
Parsons, Talcott. Social Structure and Personality. (New York: Collier Macmillan
Company. 1964)
[1] See
Frazer, for example among the Tonga, who maintain aristocratic ideas of
immortality, for only the chiefs are immortal (and later gods), whereas the tooas, the common persona, has a
perishable soul. Ibid. p.p. 79-84.
[2] Texts
directly related to the divine figures or linked to them, such as Love in the Gipar, The Ecstasy of Love, The
Bliss of the Wedding Night. See these text in The Ancient Near East. Vol. II. Ed. Cit. p.p. 195-199.
[4]
Expressed through some verses of Tao Chien (365-427 A.Z.): No use discussing immortality /When just to keep alive is hard enough.
/Of course I want to roam in paradise, /But it’s a long way there and the road
is lost. (Substance, Shadow, Spirit. In Lawall, Sarah, and Mack Maynard,
Editors. The Norton Anthology of World
Literature. Volume B. W.W. Norton & Company. New York and London. 2002.
p.p. 1363-1364.)
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