right to say that it is fake civility, not a true form. Pippin is right to link the crucial role of civility in modern societies to the rise of the autonomous free individual—not only in the sense that civility is a practice of treating others as equal, free, and autonomous subjects, but in a much more refined way: the fragile web of civility is the “social substance” of free independent individuals, it is their very mode of (inter)dependence. If this substance disintegrates, the very social space of individual freedom is foreclosed.
The properly Marxist notion of the “base” (in contrast with the “superstructure”) should not be understood as a foundation which determines and thus constrains the scope of our freedom (“we think we are free, but we are really determined by the base”); one should rather conceive it as the very base (frame, terrain, space) of and for our freedom. The “base” is a social substance which sustains our freedom—in this sense, the rules of civility do not constrain our freedom, but provide the only space within which our freedom can thrive; the legal order enforced by state apparatuses is the base for our free-market exchanges; the grammatical rules are the indispensable base for our free thought (in order to “think freely,” we have to practice these rules blindly); habit as our “second nature” is the base for culture; the collective of believers is the base, the only terrain, within which a Christian subject can be free, and so on. This is also how one should understand the infamous Marxist plea for “concrete, real freedom” as opposed to the bourgeois “abstract, merely formal freedom”: this “concrete freedom” does not constrain the possible content (“you can only be truly free if you support our, Communist, side”); the question is, rather, what “base” should be secured for freedom. For example, although workers in capitalism are formally free, there is no “base” that would allow them to actualize their freedom as producers; although there is “formal” freedom of speech, organization, and so forth, the base of this freedom is constrained.
The theoretical point of civility is thus that free subjectivity has to be sustained by feigning. Contrary to what we might expect, however, this is not feigning to perform a free act when one is simply doing what one is under pressure or obliged to do (the most elementary form of it is, of course, the ritual of “potlatch,” exchange of gifts, in “primitive” societies). How, then, does civility relate to the set of unwritten rules which de facto constrain my freedom while sustaining its appearance? Let us imagine a scene in which, to be polite and not to humiliate the other, I formulate my order to him (since I am in the position of authority towards him, so that he has to obey my orders) as a kind request: “Could you perhaps be so kind as to . . .” (Along the same lines, when powerful or famous people receive an unknown individual, one of the polite forms is to pretend that it is the unknown individual who is doing them a favor by visiting them—“Thank you for being so kind as to pay me a visit . . .”) This, however, is not true civility: civility is not simply obligation-feigned-as-free-act; it is rather its exact opposite: a free act feigned as an obligation. Back to our example: the true act of civility from someone in power would be for him to feign that he is simply doing something he has to do when, in reality, it is an act of generosity on his part. Freedom is thus sustained by a paradox that turns around the Spinozan definition of freedom as conceived necessity: it is freedom which is feigned necessity.
To put it in Hegelian terms, freedom is sustained by the ethical substance of our being. In a given society, certain features, attitudes, and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked, they appear as “neutral,” as the non-ideological common-sense form of life; ideology is the explicitly posited (“marked” in the semiotic sense) position which stands out from/against this background (like extreme religious zeal, dedication to some political orientation, etc.). The Hegelian point here would have been that it is precisely this neutralization of some features into the spontaneously accepted background which is ideology par excellence (and at its most effective)—this is the dialectical “coincidence of the opposites”: the actualization of a notion (ideology, in this case) at its coincides with (or, more precisely, appears as) its opposite (as non-ideology). And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for violence: social-symbolic violence unadulterated appears as its opposite, as the spontaneity of the milieu in which we dwell, of the air that we breathe.
This notion of civility is at the very heart of the impasses of multi-culturalism. A couple of years ago, there was a debate in Germany about Leitkultur (the dominant culture): against abstract multiculturalism, conservatives insisted that every state is based on a predominant cultural space which the members of other cultures who live in the same space should respect. Although liberal leftists attacked this notion as covert racism, one should admit that, if nothing else, it offers an adequate description of the facts. Respect of individual freedoms and rights, even if at the expense of group rights, full emancipation of women, freedom of religion (and of atheism) and sexual orientation, freedom to publicly attack anyone and anything, are central constituent elements of Western liberal Leitkultur, and this can be used to respond to those Muslim theologians in Western countries who protest against their treatment, while accepting it as normal that in, say, Saudi Arabia, it is prohibited to practice publicly religions other than Islam. They should accept that the same Leitkultur which allows their religious freedom in the West, demands of them a respect for all other freedoms. To put it succinctly: freedom for Muslims is part and parcel of the freedom for Salman Rushdie to write what he wants—you cannot choose the part of Western freedom which suits you. The answer to the standard critical argument that Western multiculturalism is not truly neutral, that it privileges specific values, is that one should shamelessly accept this paradox: universal openness itself is rooted in Western modernity.
And, to avoid any misunderstanding, the same applies to Christianity itself. On May 2, 2007, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper, accused Andrea Rivera, an Italian comedian, of “terrorism” for criticizing the pope. As a presenter of a televised May Day rock concert, Rivera attacked the pope’s position on evolution (“The pope says he doesn’t believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved.”) He also criticized the Church for refusing to give a Catholic funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a victim of muscular dystrophy who campaigned for euthanasia and died in December 2006 after a doctor agreed to unplug his respirator (“I can’t stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but that wasn’t the case for Pinochet or Franco”). Here is the Vatican’s reaction: “This, too, is terrorism. It’s terrorism to launch attacks on the Church. It’s terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life and love for man.” It is the underlying equation of intellectual critique with physical terrorist attacks which brutally violates the West European Leitkultur, which insists on the universal sphere of the “public use of reason,” where one can criticize and problematize every-thing—in the eyes of our shared Leitkultur, Rivera’s statements are totally acceptable.
Civility is crucial here: multicultural freedom also functions only when it is sustained by the rules of civility, which are never abstract, but always embedded within a Leitkultur. Within our Leitkultur, it is not Rivera but L’Osservatore Romano which is “terroristic” with its dismissal of Rivera’s simple and reasonable objections as expressions of “blind and irrational rage.” Freedom of speech functions when all parties follow the same unwritten rules of civility telling us what kind of attacks are improper, although they are not legally prohibited; civility tells us which features of a specific ethnic or religious “way of life” are acceptable and which are not acceptable. If all sides do not share or respect the same civility, then multiculturalism turns into legally regulated mutual ignorance or hatred.
One of the Lacanian names for this civility is the “Master-Signifier,” the set of rules grounded only in themselves (“it is so because it is so, because it is our custom”)—and it is this dimension of the Master-Signifier which is more and more threatened in our societies.
Gift and exchange
So what is a Master-Signifier? Apropos school exams, Lacan pointed out a strange fact: there must be a minimal gap, delay, between the procedure of measuring my qualifications and the act