Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom

Three Authenticity in an Age of Satire: Ellison, Sartre, Bergson, and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled

[ ∏≥ ] t h r e e Authenticity in an Age of Satire ellison, sartre, bergson, and spike lee’s bamboozled Could an age riddled by the ironies of postmodern skepticism find a way of grasping anew the ethics of authenticity? In classic existential terms, authenticity entails recuperating a sense of oneself from the threat of absorption into social roles.1 After the demise of the 1960s social movements , and the rise of linguistic philosophy, the call for authenticity sounds sentimental and suspect, and in part for good reason. In a highly mediasaturated , status-conscious, and techno-powered age it hardly seems possible to extract personal identities from the impact of images or the distracting clamor for status and gain. Nor as social creatures could we conceive of identities uninformed by these social forces and the gendered, ethnic, racialized character they lend us. In life as in theater, we are characters with histories and social identities more deeply than we are bare existential subjects. If character emerges through social meanings, these meanings are problematic less because they insist upon receptivity to unauthored sources than because they are often distorted through stereotypical images with degrading histories. The question is how can we reclaim authenticity at a time when the existential slogan of returning to oneself appears more i r o n y i n t h e a g e o f e m p i r e [ ∏∂ ] like a naive escape from, than a sophisticated negotiation of, our complex social lives. The existential call for authenticity might strike mainstream liberal ears as being of little political relevance. The existential rendition of authenticity appears, however, in more modest form already in classic liberalism . Liberalism rests on moral principles that call upon autonomy, selfdetermination , or rational decision to guide individuals through webs of images, desires, and relationships.2 Both liberalism and classic existentialism rest their conceptions of freedom on abstract notions of individualism . Neither is designed first and foremost to negotiate parameters of freedom through the intricate social web that reaches into our libidinal core. The example of racialized social norms demonstrates some of the di≈culties of grounding an ethics of authenticity on individual autonomy or any of its decisionistic and existential variants alone. In our post–civil rights era, no morally sensible person would challenge the principle that individuals are worthy of respect regardless of their race. We agree at least in principle that individuals should be judged on the basis not of their racial (or any other social) identities, but on their merits, decisions, and intentions as agents of self-determination. Freedom lies in this selfdetermination . Yet the pervasive formal commitment to a respect for individuals is not e√ective against the racial expectations that circulate in social norms and that inflect judgments of merit and conceptions of who we are. A moral philosophy that foregrounds the self-determined individual relegates the cultural inflections and troubled relationships of civil society to background phenomena, disengaging them from the full impact that they have on our individual lives. It displaces and risks obscuring the significance of various forms of belonging, and the entitlements, responsibilities and participatory practices of citizenship that follow—what, after Berlin, I have been calling our third concept of freedom. With the moral and existential focus on the individual, racial and other social norms remain far from the philosophical center of ethical inquiry, consigned often enough to what liberal moral philosophers perceive to be the less serious realm of social manners. Perhaps then it is to the realm of manners that we should turn if we are to locate the basic tenets for an ethics of authenticity in our satiric postmodern times. Ironically, the critique of social manners takes center stage not in moral philosophy, but in the literary arts of irony and satire. Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled attributes to Mark Twain (falsely, so it seems) the dictum that ‘‘satire is the way if we are ever to live side by side in racial peace and harmony.’’ Could satire provide normative concepts a u t h e n t i c i t y i n a n a g e o f s at i r e [ ∏∑ ] and basic strategies for counteracting racialized identities in a post–civil rights, racially divided society? Could satire’s ironic and mocking stance toward our social bearing allow us to reclaim what is otherwise in our...