(a)
Michelle Tokarczyk (2014: 865-867), writing from Goucher College, Baltimore, points out that ‘solidarity’ is a core term in working-class literature and culture. While middle class culture emphasises individual identity and achievement, working-class culture values collective identity and action.
Nevertheless, solidarity based on worker identification is frequently undermined by divisions along racial and ethnic lines; and, indeed, gender lines. The demographic diversity of the USA, and increasingly in some European countries, limits the potential of worker solidarity.
The tensions between working-class solidarity and ethnic and racial (and gender) identity pervade the history of the USA. Labour literature, which enjoyed its heyday in the USA in the 1930s, often addressed these tensions through depictions of workers coming to class consciousness by recognising affinities with workers of others races and ethnicities.
Political and social developments since the 1980s have prompted some writers to examine workers’ conditions and to uncover new forms by means of which to do so. As Janet Zandy makes clear, since the 1980s, the conditions of American workers, have deteriorated significantly due to downsizing, globalisation, automation and reliance on contingent labour. The situation is not radically different for many European workers.
If the working classes are to regain lost ground, they will have to recognise their common interests, by moving from filiation (tree-like, hierarchical structures) to affiliation (rhizome-like, open alliances), from identification with race or ethnicity to identification of shared conditions (common conditionality) and grievances (subjectivation and subjection).
While the USA is increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, many working-class and ethnic communities are close-knit and suspicious of outsiders. Given such ethnocentrism, distrust comes first, until ‘the other’ is accepted as ‘one of us’, at which point welcome is extended; and given the limited and often negative interactions that marginalised people have with outsiders, under conditions of exploitation and dehumanisation, some xenophobia emerges and, while understandable, is nonetheless destructive.
For Tokarczyk, solidarity can only be imagined. Nevertheless, she argues, this imaginative creation is important at a time, in the early 21st century, when there are few organisational fora, in the USA or in Europe, which can serve as vehicles for establishing and articulating solidarity, given the weakening of trades unions and their prior capacity to undermine solidarity along national, industrial, racial, ethnic and gender lines: an inter-subjectivity, as working-class consciousness, already self-divided.
(b)
For this imaginative creation highlighted by Tokarczyk to be of importance, and not simply be a consolation, one would have to consider further the status of the inter-subjectivity in question. In this context, one might benefit from bearing in mind Wendeline Hardenberg’s (2014) comment that literary ‘selves’, as fictional characters, or, rather, as actants, have more in common with readers’ ‘selves’, i.e. ‘real persons’ selves’, than many people are comfortable to countenance.
Hardenberg takes as her ground for this assertion Jacques Lacan’s argument that the primordial form of ‘the I’ situates the agency of the ego in a fictional or Imaginary [1] direction, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being of the socialised or Symbolic [2] subject asymptotically, setting up a discord between one’s conceptions of oneself, as a fictional or Imaginary identification, which must then be defended against the onset of the Symbolic order of society, itself a continual re-working of the real. The subject performs an inter-subjective negotiation of the tensions among the imaginary self as ego, the subject roles articulated by the symbolic order of the society and the chaotic (networked, rhizomic) accidence of the real.
Given the fictional or imaginary status of the ego, as already an alter ego, while this is far from simple, it is nonetheless feasible to move among imaginary identifications, other alter egos, articulated in different media. In this way, while people have identities, they may also change as they become different others-to-others, none of which alterations (becoming alter or other) is basic while the others are departures.
While fiction can be interpreted from the position of the ego’s struggle with the symbolic order of society and the chaos of reality (whether as fullness or as void), it may also be interpreted from the perspective of the symbolic order: how to effect change, given the formation of embodied subjects, to consider the conditions for solidarity, for example.
It becomes crucial for understanding the articulation of the literary, the ethical and the political to grasp the ‘actantial’ status of the ‘personal’, as imaginary ego, as subject, as inter-subjective, as inter-corporeal, as inter-active; as networked; as environed.
Notes
[1]“The Imaginary is the domain of dual relationships, the domain of the either/or. In Lacan, the term derives from the mirror stage which occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months in child-development. … This results in a specular identification with the image of another, an alter ego, which involves the constitution of the ego as an ALIENATION of the subject. The Imaginary is thus constituted on the double bind inherent in the word IDENTITY: identical to what and to whom, for what and for whom?” (Wilden, 1980: 260) [Emphases in original]
[2] Wilden (1980: 264-265) summarises his discussion of Lacan’s concepts of Imaginary and Symbolic in the following way:
“The Symbolic is the domain of similarity and difference; the Imaginary that of opposition and identity. The Symbolic is the category of displaced reciprocity and similar relationships; the Imaginary that of mirror-relationships, specialisation in symmetry or pseudo-symmetry, duality, complementarity, and short circuits. Neither Symbolic nor Imaginary can do without the other, and neither can be defined except in terms of and in differentiation from the other.The Symbolic function is collective and the domain of the Law; the Imaginary creates the illusion of subjective autonomy.”
Given these distinctions, Wilden (1980: 265) continues,
“The Imaginary is the domain of adequacy; the Symbolic is the domain of truth. Desire is to the Symbolic as demand is to the Imaginary, as are the subject and the ego respective;y. Imaginary debts can never be paid; Symbolic debts can never not be paid. The separation of the organism from the environment is Imaginary; the ecosystem is Symbolic. The cogito is an Imaginary ‘I’; loquoris the next step towards a potential Symbolic 'we’. The being of the Imaginary is either/or; the being of the Symbolic is both-and."
References
Hardenberg, W.A. (2014). The Breath of my life: constructing the self in Chen Ran’s A Private Life. Women’s Studies. 43 (7), 930–945. DOI:10.1080/00497878.2014.938187 [Accessed 30 December 2014].
Tokarczyk, M.M. (2014). Toward imagined solidarity in the working-class epic: Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire and Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom. Women’s Studies. 43 (7), 865–891. DOI:10.1080/00497878.2014.938189 [Accessed 29 December 2014].
Wilden, A. (1980). System and structure: essays in communication and exchange. London, UK: Tavistock.
Notes
[1]“The Imaginary is the domain of dual relationships, the domain of the either/or. In Lacan, the term derives from the mirror stage which occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months in child-development. … This results in a specular identification with the image of another, an alter ego, which involves the constitution of the ego as an ALIENATION of the subject. The Imaginary is thus constituted on the double bind inherent in the word IDENTITY: identical to what and to whom, for what and for whom?” (Wilden, 1980: 260) [Emphases in original]
[2] Wilden (1980: 264-265) summarises his discussion of Lacan’s concepts of Imaginary and Symbolic in the following way:
“The Symbolic is the domain of similarity and difference; the Imaginary that of opposition and identity. The Symbolic is the category of displaced reciprocity and similar relationships; the Imaginary that of mirror-relationships, specialisation in symmetry or pseudo-symmetry, duality, complementarity, and short circuits. Neither Symbolic nor Imaginary can do without the other, and neither can be defined except in terms of and in differentiation from the other.The Symbolic function is collective and the domain of the Law; the Imaginary creates the illusion of subjective autonomy.”
Given these distinctions, Wilden (1980: 265) continues,
“The Imaginary is the domain of adequacy; the Symbolic is the domain of truth. Desire is to the Symbolic as demand is to the Imaginary, as are the subject and the ego respective;y. Imaginary debts can never be paid; Symbolic debts can never not be paid. The separation of the organism from the environment is Imaginary; the ecosystem is Symbolic. The cogito is an Imaginary ‘I’; loquoris the next step towards a potential Symbolic 'we’. The being of the Imaginary is either/or; the being of the Symbolic is both-and."
References
Hardenberg, W.A. (2014). The Breath of my life: constructing the self in Chen Ran’s A Private Life. Women’s Studies. 43 (7), 930–945. DOI:10.1080/00497878.2014.938187 [Accessed 30 December 2014].
Tokarczyk, M.M. (2014). Toward imagined solidarity in the working-class epic: Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire and Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom. Women’s Studies. 43 (7), 865–891. DOI:10.1080/00497878.2014.938189 [Accessed 29 December 2014].
Wilden, A. (1980). System and structure: essays in communication and exchange. London, UK: Tavistock.
