Somehow, the silence had to be broken. No one made a move, and everyone was becoming terrified that the living lie demanded by propriety would somehow be shattered and be seen by everyone for what it was.
The construct is itself both internally complex and incredibly adhesive to apparently different registers, and for this reason, it cannot be simply denounced without thereby activating the very same mechanism. Therefore, it might prove beneficial to analyse how it works, particularly for those who are subjected to denunciation, manipulation, or placed under duress within radical groups. Beginning with the integrity of the construct, we find that it depends upon the maintenance of a sort of an internal affective-conceptual pressure, just as a submarine is sustained as a metalised bubble of conscious planning. In turn, this pressure is derived from the theoretical given of a contradictory relation between the ‘living lie’ and the ‘truth’ which the construct retrieves.
However, Tolstoy’s narrator makes the categorical error of identifying his presentation of the truth with the truth. He is prepared to be convinced by this identification because he has already been persuaded, at some earlier point, of the efficacy of the gesture of unconcealment. He assumes, according to the principle of trial by ordeal, that if the veil of the surface may be rent asunder then this act of rending proves the surface to be a lie. He also believes that if there is something beneath, then whatever has depth is therefore ‘truth’. He thinks that if ordinary social intercourse is found to contain lies, then social intercourse must be nothing but lies. Whomsoever is infected is nothing but infection. As a consequence of this, he strongly believes in the ‘truth’ of that material of human existence which is not directly referenced by ordinary social discourse... for him, everything is reducible to 'death', 'sex', 'power'.
The narrator of The Death of Ivan Ilyich believes that that which is revealed is false and that that which is hidden is true. The false conceals the true, the false is weak and shallow, the true is strong and deep. Therefore, the false must be ‘shattered’ and the truth exposed. The truth must, by act of forceful unconcealment, be instituted as the content of social discourse, whilst the ‘living lie’ must be banished from the world.
And yet. And yet, by implication, ‘the truth’ that is revealed by act of unconcealment, thereby becomes the content of the domain of that which is ‘revealed’ and thus may only be revealed as a ‘living lie’. The true, by the narrator’s own logic, remains true because it is deeply concealed. And, also by implication, if ‘truth’ is instituted as the content of social discourse (as in all theocratic, rationalising utopias or other totalitarian regimes where principles are implemented), then this truth will only serve to obscure other, and even more true, contents.
Whilst the narrator, anticipating Simone Weil, seems to locate something socially profound in the sufferings of the self in the context of the indifference of others, it does not follow that this suffering may either be carried as a content within some discourse of truth or that the indifference of others is truly a living lie. We are all already persuaded that empathy and not indifference is the most appropriate approach to the suffering of others. We are all also convinced that ‘death’ is a proper content for polite discussion. However, this neither implies that the principle of empathy should be generally enforced, nor that death should be the only proper content of the life-world.
Tragically, for the narrator, and for all the tolstoyan/brechtian descendants of radical consciousness, the conceptual tools then available caused him to personalise his insights - thus, the exemplary figure worthy of empathy may only appear before him by way of contrast with those who perpetrate a lack of empathy. The supremely ironic consequence of this is that the call for empathy must appear by means of denunciation of those who lack empathy, and only in the form of a ‘truth’ that must be imposed upon them by terrorising them with the thought of their own mortality. The narrator cannot extend the concepts of either suffering or empathy to those who are condemned by historical process to exist within the discursive domain which excludes these emotional registers. Within the confines of the tolstoyan mindset, the necessity for empathy may only be expressed where it is stripped of its practice and applied selectively.
A paradox is thus located within radical subjectivity, as a result of its conserved tolstoyan component, and continues to hold fast even today. The paradox, or bind, is activated wherever the idea of liberation appears in the form of moral denunciation of others that is justified by a gesture of truth unconcealment. In this way, the spuriously universal category of ‘solidarity’ is reserved for those who are considered worthy but withdrawn from all others. Within radical consciousness, this pressure wave (comprising moral imperative with truth unconcealment) which impacts upon intersubjective relations supplies the necessary energy both for binding informal groups together (‘you must see what I see’) and for the reproduction of actual internal relations within formal organisations.
If it is necessary to consider an example, then let us consider those other tolstoyans, the SI. For the situationists, the pole of ‘the lie’ is structurally articulated by spectacular passivity whilst ‘the truth’ appears in the guise of direct participation. The situationist revolution demands that the false state of human relations be supplanted by the true state of participation... and yet, there remain several passivities, or falsenesses, at the heart of situationist participation: where participation is the rule, passivity denotes a radical response; where participation is the rule, nobody can truly participate; where participation is the moral imperative, morality continues to dominate. Thus, the ideology of participation expresses a dependency upon that which it denounces. It seems that the tissue of lies, the reizschutz if you will, within which human culture is located, plays a necessary function after all.
For such reasons, whilst I am almost wholly convinced, of the ‘lie’ of capitalism, I am not at all persuaded by the ‘truth’ that is thereby exposed as the tenets of marxism. To illustrate, and if I might make so bold and break the fourth wall of convention, dear reader, I am now about to address you directly in a hectoring tone, merely to prove this point. It seems you have made the mistake of confusing the limited content of your opinions with the general category of either social reality or eternal truth, but without having sufficiently reflected upon the antisocial consequences that are inherent to the institutional transformation of opinion into rules.
Ideological inflation of categories, by which the subjective ‘principles’ of the revolutionary party are inflated into social rules, is the real source of the cliché, the revolution must devour its own children. Society is more healthy where opinion remains self-limiting to its own scale, i.e. where any unconcealed truth is kept at least partially veiled by its relative non-applicability. The social generality ought never result from direct subjective imposition but must emerge, percolated, from the aggregation of indirect social intercourse that is derived from and between, the vast multiplicity of embodied individual differences - needless to say, much of this content is always and forever both frivolous and untrue.
