Following on from my book on life, I am once again tackling a task that is impossible but which I believe to be essential in view of the various political ideologies and projects for social transformation. This is by no means an attempt to provide a complete theory of human sociality, which would require entirely different dimensions, but simply to offer some key insights into how human societies function beyond the myths we have created about them. This minimal anthropology is not a theoretical problem but a highly practical one, in that it allows us to determine against the dreams of a fantasized “new man,” what we can hope for in politics and the limits of human plasticity, beyond the fable of a good nature that has been perverted or the appeal to moral values as well as to men of good will, as if all our problems came from the wickedness of the human heart. The problem is rather that in order to understand societies and their relationship to the individuals who compose them, it is necessary not only to adopt a completely discredited historical and dialectical materialism, but also to integrate highly controversial concepts such as social totality, structure, system or cycle (in macroeconomics), social field, discourse, limited rationality, imperfect information, etc.
Society is not a community, not a people, not a family, not just our relationships or exchanges with others; it is a social organization, rituals and institutions, founding texts, a way of life and coexistence on a territory, with, first and foremost, systems of production ensuring material survival and social reproduction. A whole nominalist tradition has claimed that society does not exist, which is appalling blindness, particularly in relations with other societies, not just in war. This reductionism seeks to explain everything by the self-organization of individuals or their capacity for imitation, whereas general mobilization clearly comes from a higher level over which the individual has little control. What does not exist is the autonomous individual, the self-made man who owes nothing to anyone, whose founding myth was created by Robinson. On the contrary, we must recognize our interdependencies and our sense of belonging, not only a common language and all the culture we inherit, but also productive cooperation, currency, gift and exchange circuits, the state of technology and medicine, material infrastructure and the accompanying traffic rules, etc., the very real existence of society above us. One must be blinded by ideology not to recognize the social utility, the public sphere, and the common goods that legitimize the taxes that finance them and that must be democratically approved, the privileged domain of politics. But this society above us can also make its oppression felt by crushing individuals. We will therefore try to sketch out who these individuals are who make up society even though they are its product, what the main social determinants are, and the system of production in which they participate.
The economic and financial crisis, serious as it may be, will not provoke the end of capitalism which has weathered worse. But if an exit from capitalism has begun, it is for other reasons, which are more profound and more durable, and which are linked to our entry into the digital era and immaterial labor. It is these new productive forces which question the very basis of industrial capitalism, such as payment for wage labor or exchange value.
In artificial biology, a distinction must be made between 1) genetically modified organisms, which are indeed living organisms, even if they are enslaved, 2) synthetic biology, which is limited to synthetically reconstructing a given genome, which has succeeded in effectively recreating a living bacterium (perhaps a mammoth one day), 3) finally, the project of artificial life, i.e., the creation of a living cell from scratch using a minimal genome, or even bases other than DNA or RNA (such as APN).
Between a simple reform of financial capitalism following its collapse and the revival of metaphysical utopias brought about by the apocalyptic nature of the combination of crises, there is only one viable path: that of global regulation and local alternatives. This is perfectly illustrated by local currencies, even though money is so mysterious and difficult to comprehend in its two social and individualizing aspects, testifying to our cognitive limitations but also to a reality that is richer and more contradictory than all our theories.
When triumphant liberalism imposed unbridled individualism on us, with a conception of man reduced to his worst aspects, the urgent need was to affirm our original community and rebuild our social solidarity. But when social movements awaken and we witness the return of the state, the urgent need becomes the affirmation of individual freedom and the avoidance of destructive idealism, while preserving the duality, even the duplicity, of our human reality. Just because there is something universal does not mean that there is nothing particular. There is the collective, but there is also the individual. Of course, there are not only bodies, there are also relationships between bodies, but there is still the part that belongs to the body. There is no dignity outside of belonging to the human community, but this dignity nevertheless resides in our individual freedom and responsibility; freedom constituting the very essence of love and its contradictions, a thousand miles away from the idealized freedom of liberalism.
The veil is torn, the empire is crumbling, fortunes are being lost, powers are being overthrown! The beautiful stories we were told are revealed for what they were: pure ideology justifying the unjustifiable domination of the powerful. This is no reason to believe in nothing anymore, or to believe that ideas rule the world, and to fall back into the same rut by simply switching from one ideology to another, just as blind and barbaric.
We know much less than we think we do. Thought is slow and our rationality is limited. It is difficult for us to be our own contemporaries and understand our current situation. Yet we need only look up from our keyboards to see all the upheavals we are experiencing. There have been others, no doubt, and every era has its malaise, but it is not quite the same every time. For example, we have moved from guilt neurosis to the depression of heightened individualism, which nevertheless indicates progress in our autonomy, in which digital technology has played a role, but we must admit that dematerialization, constant connectivity, and the speed of communication have a disorienting effect, plunging us into a completely different world, which can be quite unsettling.
Since the fall of communism, the lack of alternatives has paralyzed any social movement of any significance, such as the struggle against the CPE, which found no political outlet other than an illusory defense of permanent employment contracts, with no effect on the growth of precariousness. The causes of our failure do not lie in the supposed strength of our opponents, but in the weakness of our proposals and our archaic attitudes toward ecological issues and the considerable upheavals we have experienced since entering the information age!