The importance of ambivalence

Modernity, for science and for our society, has been a project of eliminating ambivalence, clarifying differences, conceptually separating parts of reality, interpreting them as polarities that take the form of oppositions, almost always forcing us to take sides. The great Polish social thinker Zygmunt Bauman wrote in The Modern World: Modernity and ambivalence.

Today, reason and politics live on the elimination of ambivalence, as if truth would triumph over error. Yet this truth contains an error of another nature. We eliminate ambivalence when it matters. There may be others, but I think of three interrelated ambivalences in the political sphere.

The opposition between left and right about whether they are revolutionary or conservative. The opposition between the local and the global about whether they are emancipatory or not. And preferences about whether the territory we live in has borders or not. In all these issues, the question of the meaning of political action is not resolved through ambivalence, as is often believed, but in ambivalence, with no way around this mixture and the possibility of finding ourselves in places where we thought we would not be.

As for the left and the right, despite the simplifications of both perspectives, there is no revolutionary right that desires a sudden structural transformation of society, production relations, and power relations. Some fascism desires revolution. Some fascism believes in progress.

Even in Portugal, in its history of authoritarian regimes, there were times when there was a pretension to development and modernity, for example in institutions related to public works, before turning to traditionalism as a source of legitimacy. This is not democracy, it is not liberal, but it is also not a right-wing turn to the past.

On the other hand, there are also conservative manifestations of the democratic left movement. In fact, today, the political organization of the left seems to rely more on nostalgia for past narratives of social transformation than on a shift in the way society is transformed. The political imagination is transformative, but the political imagination is conservative.

The left needs to be less dependent on the organization of meanings that it has formed in the past and entangled in ambivalence, that is, not to rely on the polarizations that it has created, which make it absent from the concrete experience of the full reality, its thickness. Above all, the left that wants change must imagine itself starting from scratch when faced with the ideals that drive it forward and the choices that make political action.

The difference between the local and the global is a key example of this need to overcome ambivalence. There is a liberating force in the local’s resistance to an insensitive globalization that swallows up all distance. But the local can also be a closed site that excludes and entrenches notions of authenticity and identity, in effect an expression of the forces that globalization brings with it to oppress others.

Nearby, Lisbon experiences a tension between, on the one hand, the liveliness of new places, the coexistence of space and time, and on the other hand, the right to stay, with a certain immunity to what surrounds us. Living in ambivalence is not about being lost, but about exercising political imagination, making it possible to be both a stable and affordable city and a cosmopolitan city friendly to the tourist experience. If this seems impossible, it is because the most important thing is missing: political imagination in terms of management.

A third example of ambivalence is borders. They can be realities that block passage or they can be realities that provide the experience of passage. Modernity will resolve ambivalence by either clearing the meaning of the concept of borders to what it does not want to read, or by letting it fall, assuming that what it does not want dominates its meaning. But the struggle is not really in the literal sense, much less in washing them clean until there is no sweat, but in the reality. It is not the concept of borders, but every border we cross that is the proper site of the meaning of political action. A world without borders for the movement of capital and consumer goods is just as destructive as a world without borders for the movement of people.

Neither of these recipes work. Distance and proximity must constitute relationships, not just obstacles to be overcome. The same thing happens with borders. It should not be understood as an obstacle that some people admire and some people hate, as a matter of whether there is a border or not, but as a relationship of distance as well as proximity. The inhabited border is an institution of change, an invitation to passage through which we can achieve individual and collective self-realization. It is also a concrete form of ecology of near and far.

Ambivalence is ignored. These and others. They presuppose the separation created by conceptual work without losing the ground that preceded the separation. Rather than being separated without disconnecting, they are connected despite the separation. They separate, but they do not disconnect. Thus, while maintaining that communication is always possible between the separated parties, they return to modernity and wash the discourse of modernity to the ground.

The author wrote according to the old spelling.