(Solid)arity

One more word, to be dissected and discussed—if adequately labeled a “margarine word”—is Solidarity (A de A, The Impossible, Patience). Notes from dissecting this word stem from a discussion held in "Hamilton", on July 14^th, 2015. If there are conversations missing from this account, or if it sucks, please do not hesitate to critique everything.

1. One might argue thus:

Material solidarity is distinct from lip-service.

Therefore, it is not enough to say one is in solidarity; one must show it.

Some say this latter term “lip-service” functions rhetorically as if one were to distinguish rhetoric from that which has “substance”, words from deeds, the game from the politico-aesthetic.

We prefer genuine solidarity and fake solidarity to mark the difference that is meant, and will go about the matter in this way. But problems arise almost immediately. First, when we say we are in solidarity with Marius, whether we are carrying out an action, the question of whether Marius is in solidarity with us isn’t addressed. It might be the case that he would be in solidarity with us, would he have but known us by what we do.

So perhaps the function of support, material support, visiting, paying for, helping, writing to, whatever, constitutes the prior possibility of the subsequent reality of Marius being in solidarity with us. But isn’t support just solidarity?

One point here is that solidarity is a two way street; it is not enough to say that one is in solidarity; it takes symmetry to undermine asymmetry for the adequacy of the relationship “solidarity”. The one with whom we are in solidarity must accept the gesture!

There is a nest of terms that we utilize to describe the term solidarity that means something (and remember here we are saying, if there is prior support): empathy, allyship, affinity, and complicitity.

Sometimes, in a rather disgusting way, we use the term empathize, as if to suppose (or pretend) we have crossed over into material identity. We try to identify. Obviously, putting oneself in anothers’ shoes is impossible, given contextual differences, to say nothing of differences in identity.—We have fake solidarity here, a pretending to be solid. 

Allyship strikes me as the most honest account, an account of having different interests too, a sense in which doesn’t try to identify, but rather moves towards being solid, perhaps hoping to be supportive, without supposing that one has become identical. The other has to be supported by me, in a direct way, for me to say, nontrivially, that I am in solidarity with them. Of course, not everyone would take ‘allyship’ in this direction. For those of us that do, perhaps we ironically use the term ‘allyship’. I want to note that 'allies' includes the prior implication that one has independent interests. And this is perhaps the reason that affinity and allyship are sometimes seen as synonymous.

Affinity, on the other hand, seems to be willingness to act in tandem with the tendency, or whatever, because ones’ heart is in it; yet this is an individualist implication; that one acts from one’s self. The question of affinity, I want to say, is not so much whether we are willing to be in solidarity with someone else, but rather, that the other must be in solidarity with our motives, first, before we are willing to say we want to be solid with them.

It seems almost too obvious to note that ‘allyship’ is an asymmetrical relationship. We gift our agency to the other. Affinity is reactionary to this, a reclaiming of genuine agency, or perhaps it is a function of parachuting purposes, feigned solidarity, a nihilist maskwearer. Perhaps under the last category we can discern a better sense for allyship, for here too we have a gesture of failing identification, one that avoids empathy and pity. Genuine affinity certainly comes from real mutual support. Perhaps allyship in its best sense presupposes mutual support too.

2. I want to say something about being solid with oneself. Which other? My future self. The self is a community of peoples, future selves and past selves aiming for coherency, perhaps; for just as there is no unanimous community, (with whom to be solid), there is no prior self to whom we (ourselves) are accountable. Yet, despite all this, despite that point that there are rarely unities of agreement across whole swaths of individuals—and perhaps exactly for this reason—we affirm a unity of disunities, one that is in opposition to the unifying feature of alienation. How? By way of practicing becoming solid. For instance, by becoming solid because I’m in it, not because I feel I must be, because I feel guilt—or worse, because I haven’t yet exorcised constitutive structuralist liberal demons, that fitting (however poorly) some intersectional analyis auto-obligates me into allyship. No! As individuals invested in our own freedom, we want affinity and complicity to define allyship, and affinity and complicity to blot out passive nihilism. Because, in these moments of irascible human being, of blemmyes, we find our solidities, our solidarities. It is precisely because we are untied in possibility, that we must bind ourselves, yet only if it comes from us, from below, from our own coeurage. For here we are in it; for here our hearts have achieved coeu(rage). That is, we sense the conspiring others; we are in touch with how they feel, their backgrounds; we have invested our hearts into knowing them; we sense their capacity to be in solidarity with us, and we give ourselves to becoming solid with them and ourselves. Of course finding others is more difficult than finding oneself; yet finding the capacity to be solid with oneself is difficult too, given that nothing coerces. In the least, if I cannot say that I would be willing to be had, as I have the other, perhaps I have no right to claim solidarity. And if I am not willing to say that I can have myself, or that I have myself, I have no right to call myself solid. And if I can't call myself solid, if folks know I'm not, what could it mean for me to say that "Im in solidarity with X"?