That every like is not the same, O Ceasar!
The heart of Brutus yearns to think upon!

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Today we live in societies where real interpersonal relations have been replaced by a peculiar form of relationship. It can be read as a swollen ersatz of a bond that is no longer possible, a symptom of irreversible and extreme alienation. Instead of exchanges taking place within the framework of real-life dependencies, we increasingly define ourselves based on a system of virtual adjacencies, a bonding guaranteed by the power of an empty symbol, logo or slogan. So, our societies are desperately searching for belonging, because they have been gradually deprived of everything that could realistically organize it. Instead of ties, we have been assigned affiliations, which is why we are now all forming together (though more separately than ever) a society of affiliations or an affiliated society.

In such a society, not only reality is replaced by a kind of fiction. It is, one might say, an inevitable way of constructing social identities. In this case, fiction is doubled, because it dominates reality instead of constructing a vivid experience along with the latter. Besides, fiction is so dense and impenetrable that it seems almost material. It creates the conditions of possibility for everything else that happens in the real world.

One of the signs of this peculiar reign of thickened fiction is the primacy of performativity over action: as if the act of expression, the sign or symbol, were more important and effective than actually changing reality. In the society of affiliation, which can be considered a continuation, or a segment, of the society of spectacle described by Guy Debord, the most important issues at the level of the production and distribution of wealth, as well as the general organization of the system, have also long since been settled and the actors subjected to this expropriation are left with nothing more than various types of expression as a substitute for actual influence. Anyway, the history of Western critical thought has contributed to this transformation, which precisely in the second half of the twentieth century, when liberal societies were gradually losing their share in the creation of the social system, was preoccupied with discovering the performative, symbolic aspects of action, losing along the way the authentic dimension of self-organization and active struggle to change the order of things.

And practitioners of this society will always say with conviction that it is with words, symbols and slogans that change begins. This is true. But in a society of affiliations, change always stops precisely at these beginnings. One can wave a flag, frame a social profile with an important hashtag and that’s it. The rest is overseen by bodies that invite no outsider to the table. Even politicians hold themselves accountable – and are held accountable – mainly for symbolic, conventional, metaphorical causality, as they themselves find out most quickly that the train with real change has long since departed the platform.

But what is affiliation in essence? Etymologically, it is about belonging, formal or informal, to something: a group, a community, a collection marked with a specific sign. Just today, belongingness is in such deep crisis that affiliation is becoming its substitute. Informal, imagined, largely fictional – it fulfills a substitute for past belongings without the associated burden and consequences of real choices.

However, affiliation also comes from words meaning in Latin the process of recognizing paternity, a formal way of establishing kinship with a child. And this meaning seems no less important than the first. In the absence of lost ties in the society of affiliation, we are faced with an increase in the need for infantile participation, emotional adoption, taking refuge under the mantle of some figure who will confront the complexities of the world on our behalf. The need has remained, but the mature ways of realizing it were taken away from us long ago by stating, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, that “there is no such thing as society.” And today, with that prediction put into practice, instead of a society we have a collection of childish needs met by increasingly infantile mechanisms.

There is yet another meaning of affiliation – mystical. It refers to a kind of mystical participation that combines the other two senses of the word. In this version, we belong to a certain absolute, which at the same time embraces us with supernatural, magical protection. Thanks to this spiritual partaking, we understand each other without words, we simply feel the same thing instinctively without having to get into the meanderings of theological scripts or rational concepts.

In the society of affiliation, these three meanings exist side by side and complement each other.

2.

One of the most spectacular manifestations of the society of affiliation can be clearly seen in the shape of today’s public debate, although the word is long overdue to be replaced by another. What we have today is a public simulation or public performance of affiliation, rather than anything resembling a debate. And this simulation is precisely almost never about “what” one says anymore, but “who” one is, “with whom” one associates and “how” one resembles someone else. It’s not even that we don’t seek the truth anymore – this has long been complicated, as we know. Today we don’t even think about the elementary consistency of our own beliefs not to mention their grounding in reality.  The dynamics of contemporary ideological conflicts resemble a continuous mimetic ritual played out – unlike traditional rituals – in a world of purely abstract symbolic exchange. It is a kind of, to use René Girard’s terminology, permanent sacrificial crisis, in which what is exchanged are almost exclusively candidates for a scapegoat. It can be a person, a symbol, a statement, a gesture – anything that any group identifies as disruptive to its affiliations.

But since what matters is primarily, if not exclusively, where we affiliate, then the coherence, the rationality, the complexity of our views is useless for anything. It may even be an obstacle complicating spiritual adherence to selected communities. After all, within particular ideological packages everything is affiliated: facts, emotions, characters, even whole phrases and expressions. So it’s easy not only to cling to these collectives, but also to break out of them – even inadvertently. The slightest difference, deviation, error can easily become a mark exploited for the purpose of stigmatization.

However, the mystical certainty of one’s affiliation necessary for its effective establishment is false, because it is often determined not by what “we” actually believe, but by what “others” believe, those outside our cult, those who worship the wrong god and believe the wrongly affiliated facts. It is sometimes said that if men got pregnant, abortion – especially in a country as clerical as Poland – would be a sacrament. Unfortunately, this is just an example of the almost universal trend of building identities today – at once non-negotiable, dogmatic in their structure, and completely ephemeral, dependent on the minor fluctuations of social conjuncture.

Few people remember how, during first Donald Trump’s presidency, leading Democratic Party politicians – Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo or Joe Biden – spoke out about the vaccines he was introducing. By their own standards of late, after all, they were preaching anti-science conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine fake news at the time. And I’m convinced that if it had been Trump who won the 2020 election, vaccine refusal would have been a virtue for them, with which respectable middle-class people would have dabbled as proudly as they proudly wore their “anti-Trump” Covid Passports.

Modern societies have often been criticized for succumbing to the primacy of opinion shaped by mass media. Since the beginning of philosophy, doxa has been a negative reference point for anyone who methodically and honestly seeks the truth. In the society of affiliation, even opinions are no longer exchanged, because these can be changed, they do not automatically constitute our identity. This margin of freedom, the gap between me and what I currently think, disappeared long ago. Today society does not exchange opinions, but narratives. And we mutually learn to treat everything, even ourselves, as cogs in these large blocks of narratives that clash with each other day after day without any creative resolution.

It is noteworthy that positive and negative associations are nowadays exchanged in accordance with these general principles, complement and condition each other. You are not ours so you are theirs. You are not theirs so you are ours. You are ours, so you have nothing to do with them. And so on. Except that the sign marking the dividing line, which is an impossible chasm dividing people almost into separate species, can be something very casual and basically devoid of much meaning. Even more, what divides us most deeply are perhaps precisely the most superficial matters, rising to absolutes only because of how the affiliation movement itself works.

3.

To the above-mentioned meanings of affiliation, there must be added one more. Its status is even higher than the others, and it is perhaps because of this that they can be so easily combined. It is about affiliation as a equivalent of branding, a mechanism for building a brand, which by definition is something other than personal character, identity or a deep belief in some vision of reality. The society of affiliation persists through permanent affiliate marketing, in which branding becomes identity. The most abstracted sign captures the system of meaning as such.

The society of affiliation, after all, did not come into being all at once. It is the final stage of a long process in which political views and identities, somehow grounded in the social reality of a family, class, guild, trade union or political party, gradually gave way to political reflexes of consumption. In their case, views have about as much real gravity as a ribbon or flag glued to a Facebook photo. Today, the global petty bourgeoisie, into which, willy-nilly, we have all been transformed, chooses its political alliances just as it personalizes its playlists on Spotify or Netflix. And in this way, by taking care of the good ratings of its own brand of opinion it sustains the whole system at the same time as it closes the process of its political neutralization.