Category Archives: state

State’s madness and crimes. Notes on Rebellion in the Backlands, Os Sertões (1902), Euclides da Cunha, trans. Samuel Putman

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Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, Rebellion in the Backlands, from 1902, tells the story of the military campaign the government of the young republic of Brazil undertook against the Sertões, a set of rural communities in the Northeastern region of Canudos at the end of the nineteenth century. In an introduction from 1943, the Brazilian homme de lettres Afrânio Peixoto considered da Cunha as Brazil’s “number one-geographer and sociologist” (xxvii). Peixtoto goes as far as to say that if “the Book of Genesis may be said to be, in the symbolism that it holds for the faithful, a biography of earth, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões is a Genesis which in epic accents tells of the meeting of civilization and barbarism; it is a saga of the first flaming days of the earth and of man and of primal man’s first direct contact with other men known as civilized” (xxix). What, perhaps, Peixoto misses in his laudatory “Preface,” is that the da Cunha’s text is the genesis of the Brazilian modern state.

The conflict between the Brazilian state and the sertões is not directly presented. Da Cunha digresses into observations of the landscape and the people of the Backlands. In an environmental determinism key, da Cunha presents a people that is strongly tied to the geographical conditions of the space they inhabit. That is, since the Canudos is a region of extreme climates, in which the dry season is unbearable because of its lack of “natural resources,” and the rainy season is chaotic due to the constant floods, the dwellers of these areas have, as well, an extremist and fatalistic behaviour. Nature, for da Cunha, has an energy “it shares with man” (37). And the people from the Backlands, the sertanejos, are a very particular type of people, for Cunha. They are mestizos, miscegenated individuals, but contrary to other mestizos in Brazil, for da Cunha, the sertanejo is “above all else a strong individual […] he is ugly, awkward, stooped […] He is the man that is always tired” and by the same token is “an amazingly different being, capable of extraordinary feats of strength and agility” (89-90). Between admiration and contempt, da Cunha paints an ambiguous enemy of the Brazilian state.

If the military campaign against the sertões marks the birth of modern Brazil, then, to some extent, the campaign is not only against a particular group of people, but against nature. Da Cunha empathized with the belief that in Latin American nations, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a struggle between civilization (European values and traditions) and barbarism (the values of the peripheries). Just like Domingo Sarmiento in Argentina, da Cunha would champion civilization over barbarism. The rebellion in the Backlands ran for almost two years. And the event that triggered it was a dispute over the purchase of lumber between Antonio Conselheiro, a priest, leader of the sertanejos, and founding father of the settlements where the sertanejos dwelled, and Arlindo Leoni, the magistrate of the Joazeiro. Da Cunha states that Conselheiro had purchased “a certain quantity of lumber which the extremely impoverished caatingas of Canudos were unable to furnish him” (178). The purchase was legal and in good faith, but “when the time agreed upon for the delivery of the material, which was to be used in the completion of the new church, came around, there was no lumber in sight” (179). There was a pre-existing beef between Conselheiro and Leoni, so da Cunha tells us, and by not delivering the lumber, the magistrate was “evening the score” (179). So Leoni sent a telegram to the respective authorities informing of the possibility of an imminent attack from the setanejos. With this, several expeditions and four regular expeditions begun against the sertanejos. And while surely, in early October 1897, the dwellers of the Backlands were fully defeated, how did these enterprises of civilization had such a hard time defeating the poor barbarians of the Canudos?

“Nature protects the sertanejo” (195), tells us da Cunha. And it is not only nature that aids the setanejos. After the defeat of Moreira Cesar, a commander who was supposedly undefeatable, may of the soldiers became disappointed. These soldiers were all “mestizos, of the same racial stock as the backwoodsmen; and in their discouragement over the inexplicable defeat which they had suffered […] they fell victim to the power of suggestion and, seeing in it all an element of the marvelous and the supernatural, were filled with an unreasoning terror —a terror that was further increased by the extravagant stories that were going around” (369). As the campaign continued, the warfare increased its affects. During the last days of the struggle, the state forces used dynamite as a way of fully destroying the sertanejo’s labyrinthic settlements. For da Cunha, this was “fitting enough” because “the sertanejos had inverted all psychology of ordinary warfare; their resistance was stiffened by reverses, and they were strengthened by hunger, hardened by defeat” (464). With the bombing of the houses, the violence of dynamite was bringing hell on earth, and as da Cunha puts it the bombing was both “a recognition and a consecration” (463). From this perspective, then, just like the sertanejos had inverted all “psychology of ordinary warfare,” they had also inverted the dichotomy between civilization and barbarism. If civilization reveals to be destructive and annihilating, then on what grounds can it place itself superior to barbarism? And more importantly, how can civilization offer anything appealing to the barbarian? The Canudos, the sertanejos, da Cunha tells us, “did not surrender” (475). At the very end of the conflict when Conselheiro was already dead, “an old man, two other full-grown men, and a child, [were] facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers” (475). While da Cunha tells us that what happened next “we could not describe” (475), the horror is alluded. The campaign against the sertanejos, then, had the “essential outlines of crime and madness,” and as the last two lines of the text suggest, (“The trouble is that we do not have today a Maudsley for acts of madness and crimes on the part of nations…” [476]), how can one determine that a nation-state is insane or has committed a crime when it is the nation-state who seeks civilization, order and progress?

Notes on Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, a Study in Sociology (1897)

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Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, a Study in Sociology, from 1897, is both method and study. That is, the book is not only presenting a sociological approach to the study of suicide, but it is also teaches what is the use of sociology. As Durkheim’s first lines to the book put it, “sociology has been in vogue for some time” (35). The discipline is on a stage of development, at the stage of “system-building and philosophical synthesis” (35). What sociology attempts, then, is to provide a study of society of philosophical consequences, one is tempted to say of ontological consequences.

Divided in three books, Suicide traces the way different sciences have approached suicide; it revises what physicians and other sociologists have written before Durkheim (notably these perspectives will be refuted); it also offers statistics and data to chart the number of individuals who have committed suicide. The chore of the argument is that suicide is socially caused. That is, while there is a form of suicide that is manifested by purely “personal” reasons, i.e. suicides that Durkheim’s attributes to an unstable mental health, suicide, in general, is prefigured by social forces. To determine these social forces, Durkheim begins by comparing the suicide rate of different areas in a country. In the states of Germany, for instance, he notes that there are notable differences between the suicide rates of the provinces of Rhenish Palatinate and Bavaria. While the latter has the lowest number of suicides between 1867 and 1875 (19 in total) in the German states, the former has one of the highest number of suicides (157 in total). For Durkheim, the number of suicides in a state is relative to the number of Catholics and Protestants in each state. So, Catholicism socially cancels suicide, while Protestantism propitiates it, to some extent. For Durkheim it is the values of each of these religions what determines the predisposition of people towards the act of suicide. That is, while for the catholic all form of suicide is “abhorrent,” the Protestant is more convinced that each individual is “the author of [their own] faith” (158). Since Protestantism embraces the “spirit of free inquiry” (158), then, when one starts thinking for themselves, one quickly realizes that life does not make sense. It is not that Protestantism “kills,” but that by the fact that individualism becomes crucial for Protestantism, excessive individualism results in egoistic suicide. As Durkheim would put it “the more the believer doubts, that is, the less he feels himself a real participant in the religious faith to which he belongs, and from which he is freeing himself; the more the family and community become freeing to the individual, so much the more does he become a mystery to himself, unable to escape the exasperating and agonizing question: to what purpose?” (212). The individual becomes less integrated and regulated by society because individuals can integrate and regulate themselves on their own, and by extension, they can decide if life is worth living.

It would seem, then, that behind the sociological inquiry, at least as presented by Durkheim in Suicide, there is a defence of traditional values, or more precisely to Catholicism. But, far from it, Durkheim also charts the existence of suicide within traditional values. That is, if egoistic suicide is tied to Protestant values of individualism, altruistic suicide would be tied to the excessive presence of the social group. While egoistic suicide is a matter of decision, altruistic suicide will be a “duty” (219). In other words, whereas egoistic suicide results from an individual decision, altruistic suicide depends on a collective decision. Egoistic suicide is no sacrifice, but a refusal to keep living within a particular social context; altruistic suicide is, above all, a sacrifice for the greater good. The former is an excessive manifestation of the self, the latter does not question if life is worth living, they simply give their life for the good of the socius, society. In a society where individuals are both highly regulated and integrated there is a “joy of sacrifice,” because, even with no particular reason, renunciation [to life] in itself is considered praiseworthy” (223). Durkheim proposes a possible history of this type of suicide, from ancient societies to modern ones. If in ancient societies religion was tied to altruistic suicide, in martyrdom, in modern society, it is the army the institution that embraces altruistic suicide.

Durkheim proposes that there is a third type of suicide: the anomic suicide. This suicide seems to appear only in periods of acute crisis. But Durkheim would argue that this form of suicide, at least at the end of the nineteenth century, has become normal, especially in people in the fields of trade and industry. “For a whole century, economic progress has mainly consisted in freeing industrial relations from all regulation” (254). And with this, religion “has lost most of its power. And government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and servant” (255). So, if egoistic suicide derives from the maximization of individual doubt and open inquiry, and altruistic suicide is motivated by the duty to sacrifice an individual life for the good of society, anomic suicide combines both individual duty and individual decision. That is, anomic suicide is tied fully to the revolting forces of capitalist accumulation. While Durkheim does never mention the word capitalism, his diagnosis of the late nineteenth century is akin to Marx’s. Since there has been a “liberation of desires” that “has been made worse by the development of industry and the almost infinite extension of the market” (255), anomic suicide is what comes when both egoistic suicide, the informed decision of kill oneself, coexists and antagonizes with altruistic suicide, the self-sacrifice for a bigger good.

To some extent, Durkheim is already challenging Max Weber’s explanation of the rise of capitalism. It is not the protestant ethic, as described by Weber, that is behind the expansion of capitalism (the liberation of desires by the infinite expansion of the market), but the conflict between traditional (Catholic) and modern (Protestant) values. If capitalism, as described by Engels and Marx, is characterized by the revolting and revolutionary forces of the bourgeoisie, mixing the old and the new, then, anomic suicide lies in-between the intelligibility of both traditional and modern values, anomic suicide is the grammar of capitalism (since grammar is the unseen infrastructure of enunciation). It makes sense, then, that Durkheim has a hard time typifying anomic suicide. He relates it to both egoistic suicide and altruistic suicide (258), but he insists on the radical difference between them. While both altruistic and egoistic suicide “draw their chief recruits from the same social environments [army men, for the altruistic; intellectual careers for the egoistic] […] the other [anomic suicide draws from] the industrial commercial world” (258). What is the industrial commercial world, at the end of the nineteenth century, if not a combination of both militarism and highly educated elites? The anomic suicide is the suicide of the soldiers of capital: individuals who are the byproduct of the intellectualization (Protestantism) and sacralization (Catholicism) of capitalist relationships, a society both modern and traditional, and in perpetual change.

In the last section of the book, “Practical Consequences,” Durkheim tries to solve the problem of anomic suicide, and of suicide in general. He stresses that since anomic suicide goes against society, or more precisely against the forces that guarantee the cohesion between individuals (integration and regulation), a form of socialization should restrain the centripetal force of anomic suicide. While religion, the family, and politics have been key in restraining anomic suicide, in the late nineteenth century, for Durkheim, none of these institutions can restrain anymore the anomy. With the emergence of capitalist relationships (though capitalism is a concept alien to the book, as mentioned before) where can one find a restrainer for the anomy? “The only way to resolve this antinomy is to set up a cluster of collective forces outside the State, though subject to its action, whose regulative influence can be exerted with greater variety” (380).

Durkheim’s distrust of the state derives from what he sees as an ambivalent transformation of political power since the French Revolution. That is, Durkheim believes that since the state was the only institution that survived the ancient regime, the state’s own survival and perseverance made of it an institution that “tended to absorb all forms of activity which had a social character,” and no other social institution was able to challenge this because the rubble of the ancient regime was but “an unstable flux of individuals” (389). Modern society, then, is a state society, “Individuals are made aware of society and of their dependence upon it only through the State [sic]” (389). As a consequence, “While the State [sic] becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them” (389). If the state cannot make of the individual but “liquid molecules,” what can guarantee grip, solidity, restraint and order in society? Durkheim’s proposal is to provide the restitution of autonomy to local groups, he proposes a “decentralization” of society from the state, a decentralization that would “simultaneously produce a greater concentration of social energies” (389). This decentralization then is meant to not loose “the bonds uniting each apart of society with the State [sic], moral powers must be created with an influence, which the state cannot have, over the multitude of individuals” (390). It would seem, then, that Durkheim is appealing for the emergence of an autonomous multitude of individuals, such multitude is open to building bridges for the sake of taming anomic suicide. Since moral power is the only power that holds people together, for Durkheim, then, it is not by abolishing the state, or the market, or capitalism, that one cancels anomic suicide. If one cannot control the flows of the “luquid molecules,” one can at least try to direct their fluidity, one can bet on hydraulics as sociability. But would this end for good anomic suicide? And more importantly, what would happen if moral power become anomic itself?

Representation. A short comment on Multitude (2004), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

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Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude. War and Democracy in The Age of Empire (2004) is the volume that follows Empire (2000). While the first volume offered a description of the reactive regime that followed the years after the end of the Cold War, that is, the formation of Empire, the second volume offers the project of the multitude, the active agent of change, that which precedes and presupposes Empire. If empire works by a flexible regime that expands like a network, but also that eludes easy clear-cut definitions, the multitude is the active collective subject that can dismantle Empire. The biggest challenge is, then, face “the global state of war” (xi) that beats at the heart of Empire. In a way, the book was thought to reflect on events that reply shook the world during the first years of the millennium. While, perhaps, somethings depicted by the book did not aged well —like the prediction that algorithm knowledge production would enable new forms of collective identities or freedoms— some of the main ideas of Multitude are still relevant and important. 

The book’s main project is to describe the “multitude.” This concept was, in a way described in the previous book. But what makes different Multitude from Empire is that the first will focus exclusively on the challenges that the concept of multitude faces today, from both right and left, from war and democracy. This collective subject, early in the book, is defined as an “open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common” (xiv). What this concept offers, then, is openness and expansiveness as means to counter the closure and exclusion present in a world divided in an undividable war of all against all. That is, the multitude is the virtual promise for a world that is in stasis, in a civil war, in perpetual terror. It is not that difference is erased under the multitude, but what is at stake is the possibility of imagining a collectivity that does not serve identitarian means (like the political subject of the “people”) or like the unified collective subject of the “masses,” widely used and abused by work unions and so on. 

In a way, the book offers a radical way out from the politics of the twentieth century. The multitude truly is the way out of the politics of the party, of hegemony (even if the book does not mention this). But, at the same time the book does not go far enough. By focusing exclusively on democracy, as the only mean through which the multitude can expand its project, the book seems limit its own powerful concept. In fact, democracy is also tied to its own diseases, like representation. If as we are told, repeatedly, after the second half of the book, that representation is a mechanism that connects and separates (242-244), then, to what extent does the multitude needs representation? Or to put it differently, why does the politics of desire and positive affects of the multitude still needs a mechanism that, itself, is a trap? To a certain extent, this would imply that politics is unescapable from representation, but to another extent, the book could also suggest that the multitude errs. That is, since the multitude is “a diffuse set of singularities that produce a common life; it is a kind of social flesh that organizes itself into a new social body” (349), and consequently, representation is just one of the toys of the playful and creative forms of politics that the multitude is capable of creating. Then, as any other toy, representation will be no longer fun, but only time and the multitude would tell. 

El suplemento de presidir. Notas sobre El presidente (2019) de César Aira

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El presidente de la Argentina, que César Aira dibuja en El presidente (2019), está lejos de ser un déspota. Al mismo tiempo, algo hay en el anónimo presidente de esta novela de Aira que lo conecta con aquellas figuras infames retratadas por varios autores del Boom en el siglo XX. Sin ir muy lejos eso que une a dictadores y a este presidente es su relación con sus multitudes. Mientras que los primeros aparentan una sólida y marcada distinción entre soberano y masas, el presidente de Aira se confunde entre las muchedumbres. La historia cuenta, así, como por las noches el presidente se pasea por las calles de Buenos Aires, como a su paso “el mundo sobre el que presidía se abría para él” (7). Movido por el amor, “algo tan ajeno a la política” (8), el presidente busca ser común, dejar de presidir para poder ser otro más en las masas. Y aún así, las calles se le presentan siempre como posibilidades de intervenir en su ciudad, en su país. El problema es que aunque el presidente “estaba habilitado para intervenir … hacerlo privaría al destino de sus más bellas inminencias, por lo que se abstenía. Los argentinos tendrían que arreglárselas solos” (9). El problema del presidente, pues, está en presidir, sea ocupar el primer lugar en las responsabilidades del estado, o sea también en asistir a las masas, dejarlas ser, pero también cuidarlas.

El relato que ofrece El presidente no es, pues, una historia grandilocuente. De hecho, la prosa constantemente presenta a un presidente empeñado en vivir como cualquiera. Sus largas caminatas, movidas por el amor, no son sólo una forma de acercarse a las masas sino de acercarse a sí mismo, a ese que fuera antes de ser presidente. Así, los paseos le recuerdan, a tres personajes que marcaron su vida: el Pequeño Birrete, Xania y la Rabina. El primero es un amigo de la infancia, un niño pobre que perdiera el quicio cuando por vez primera entró a la casa de su amigo que años después de convertiría en presidente. El choque de clases traumaría al Birrete, como al futuro presidente. Igualmente, Xania y la Rabina también impactaron al presidente, una por su eficiencia (Xania) y la otra por su sensualidad. Las dos mujeres, luego, se le presentarán al presidente como armando una treta en su contra: construyendo un falso secuestro y pidiendo un rescate muy elevado. Confundiendo ensoñación, delirio e imaginación, el presidente es más un autómata que un agente del estado. Al final de su historia todo le parece ilusorio, transparente, sin consistencia, “Los personajes que lo acompañaban, los que atraía a su órbita para paliar esa soledad, eran imágenes fantasmales provenientes de su pensamiento. No tenían la consistencia que habría querido darles. Eran sólo funcionales a la trama que se había inventado para soportar la carga de la presidencia” (122). Pronto, la ciudad y el país, se le presentan al presidente como un mundo que conspira contra él, que sin motivo aparente lo odia. 

No se trata, pues, de que exista un “pueblo” imaginado por el presidente y que este pueblo deba ser disciplinado. De hecho, las ficciones que se hace el presidente no son impositivas, ni mucho menos resolutivas. Justamente, el final de la novela advierte sobre los peligros de la fabulación presidencial, y en buena medida recuerdan las mismas motivaciones que Benedict Spinoza diagnosticara en el siglo XVI para las cruentas y tensas relaciones político-religiosas en Los Países Bajos. Si hubiera que pensar el estado, o en este caso el presidente, Spinoza diría, habría que pensarlo como un bien contingente y relativo, y no como un mal necesario. Así, el bien contingente y relativo que el presidente de Aira ilustra radica en dejar su fabulación inconclusa, en dejar sin resolver el misterio que el Birrete, Xenia y la Rabina cargan. Dejar el caso abierto es precisamente dejar de presidir, pero al mismo tiempo la única razón por la cual valdría presidir, así la tarea del presidente “consistía en ocuparse de todo y no dar la puntada final a nada,” es que el presidente “Quería ser Presidente como la gota de agua quiere ser mar” (125). 

Notes on The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures of the Collège de France 1978-79. Michel Foucault, trans. Graham Burchen

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Michel Foucault’s seminar of 1978-1979 at The Collège de France explores what “biopolitics” could be. Biopolitics is what explains why governmentality and governance are frugal at the end of XX century. What is at the core of the frugality of governmentality is population, and to understand this Foucault proposes to reconstruct the praxis of the English liberals, the German ordoliberals, and the American Neo-liberals. It is, afterall, that the XVIII century, present in other works of Foucault, was when many of what he calls “transaction realities” were born. To that extent, biopolitics is, like madness, civil society, literature, sexuality, and other notions explored by Foucault elsewhere, contingent technology. Such technologies “have not always existed [and] are nonetheless real, are born precisely from the interplay of relations of power which constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed” (297). The problem, however, is that at the end of the last lecture, Foucault does not conclude with the announcement of biopolitics, but of, simply, politics. 

The disparity between what the seminar wishes to address, and what was addressed perhaps is not a minor detail. That is, the difference between politics and biopolitics is blurry. The concluding lines of the last lecture asks and concludes, “what is politics in the end, if not both the interplay of these different arts of government with their different reference points and the debate to which the different arts of government give rise? It seems to me that it is here that politics is born” (313). Politics, or biopolitics, then, is born when there are several arts of government at game, where there are different reference points. For an interplay to be the way various things affect each other, then, biopolitics is the terrain of affects, of the possibilities of what happens when two bodies interact with each other. While Foucault focuses on the XVIII and XIX centuries, one wonders if what is said about the civil society, that foundation of governmentality and government, could also apply to all forms of social organization. If civil society serving as the medium of economic bond “brings individuals together through the spontaneous converge of interests, [while] it is also a principle of dissociation at the same time” (302), and by extension, individuals do not get together by economic interests only, nor because they are naturally inclined to be together, then, individuals get together by a “de facto bond which links different concrete individuals to each other” (304). Civil society, and by extension biopolitics, is a tool of and for domination. The radical question that Foucault invites us to ask is if it could be possible to rethink domination, or if domination should be considered as something to overcome of the field of social organization. 

While the lectures do not address the problem of cohesion or domination, it is clear that all the reflections on what the market, or the individuals do are part of the supplement of power, of domination. That is, power only exists precisely because it cannot do certain things: it cannot dominate the market and cannot dominate the individuals fully. It happens then, that the homo oeconomicus, for instance, “strips the sovereign of power inasmuch as he reveals an essential, fundamental, and major incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the totality of the economic field” (292). Inability moves power. And things stay, somehow, as the quote Foucault mentions in the first lecture, “do not disturb what is at rest.” In the other hand, things have never been, it seems, at rest. If politics have always been biopolitics, then, biopolitics is born every time something moves the habitual arrangement of that which seems at rest.  

Notes on “The Grundrisse” (1939/1993) by Karl Marx (5)

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Notebook 5

One of the main topics discussed in the Notebook 5 of the Grundrisse is the passage of transformation from the commune to the city. While the commune is, in a too simplified sense, a free gathering together, the city is a mandated and ruled gathering. While the commune “appears as a coming together, not as a being together, as a unification made up of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unity” (483), the city is the place of the sovereign, the walled community that hosts at its center the one who rules. While the distinction between state and stateless societies is important, Marx does not develop this in depth. For Marx land independence, or land appropriation and its usage, presupposes sovereignty and the figure of the sovereign. Something presupposes the nomos of the earth, so to speak. The commune escapes division, since “the land which cannot be divided if it is to serve as means of production in this specific form” (483).

To relate to the land without the necessity of a nomos, or a sovereign, Marx proposes that the individual proprietors refuse union. The fact that since the appropriation of the earth means the appropriation of the “natural conditions of labour […] as well as its workshop and repository of raw materials” (485), signals that the way we immediately relate to the earth presupposes a “relation of the earth […] always mediated through the occupation of the land and soil peacefully or violently, by the tribe, the commune in some more or less naturally arisen or already historically developed form” (485). This means that the first struggle of humankind is the strive for affirming live with and within a territory, a form of living that does not consider private property or private forms of working, but positive and affirmative gestures of existence and coexistence. While all this picture is idyllic, or utopian, the form of relationship that Marx is proposing to understand the organization of the commune signals a threshold where utopianism reaches its limit. Since no individual has any existence or life outside of the commune, because those who live in commune do not exist “for [themselves] except in the assembly of the commune members, their coming-together for common purposes” (486), then, the commune eludes the nomos, the state and its oppression, but it erases, in a way, individuality, difference. At the same time, the assembly of the commons, their coming-together, or movement towards each-other, announces the possibility of a commonality, of a commune, with individuals and groups, a pack a formation like the one of the nomads, for whom “what is in fact-appropriated and reproduced here is not the earth but the herd; but the earth is always used communally at each halting place” (491). The commune, then, is the project without plan that seeks social reproduction in an apotropaic way: eating what kills and haunts, while persisting and affirming existence. 

The task in the times of Marx and today is to work and create the commons. The commons are the necessary presupposition of labour, of the land, for humankind to exist. At the same time, the commons are what humankind is yet to become, a plastic moment that is habitual. There is something magical about “appropriation,” of encountering oneself with an instrument, a tool, a body, something, that is so different and yet so keen with one strives for affirming oneself. While in the bourgeois world the worker sees the realization of their social existence by the way their skill is expressed by the production line, in the commune, skill has no name, but has still a presence. The skill is “what posits [the worker] as the owner of the instrument” (499), if we are all posited in front of our “instruments” as owners, then, “appropriation” has found a way to let something from its magic to flee capitalist territorialization. To be in front of big projects in a capitalist society reaffirms our oppression but also our chance for building the commons. Marx mentions that, when dealing with the construction of highways, for instance, capitalism faces a point of exhaustion, because building a highway escape what capitalism can do, it even exceeds what the state is able to do. Building for the multitude is always “a necessary use value for the commune, because the commune requires it at any price” (526). In a capitalist society surplus time and value to build a road exist, there are the materials, and costs, but without the “concentration” of the masses, the project dies. Concentration is defined by Marx as “always the addition of the part of labour capacity which each individual can employ on road building, apart from his particular work; but it is not only addition” (528 emphasis added). Concentration is an addition that is not only addition of labour. This addition is something that is heaping up in the way the workers present themselves in front of the project. Addition is a concentration of bodies, an assemblage, the surplus of the commons. While, of course, a road, or perhaps any project that requires the presence of the masses, is always what capitalism demands, and not what the commons need, the desire of the masses stays still always subaltern to whatever domination expects from them. Capitalism will always speculate with its constructions as a way of realizing value, while “living labour creates value” (543) in unexpected ways.

Notes on “The Grundrisse” (1939/1993) by Karl Marx

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What follows are a series of posts on Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. 

“Introduction” and “Notebook I”

Perhaps the main topic of the notebooks that today we can call Grundrisse, by Karl Marx, is production. In fact the “Introduction” to the rest of the notebooks focuses on production overall. The question that starts these notebooks is: is production possible without a social structure that presupposes the exchange within individuals? That is to say, if exchange, production, circulation and the other faces of economy relay on capital’s sway. Marx states that “whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development —production by social individuals” (85). This means that whatever we perceive as individual production, the latter relies on a social production that presupposes it. More importantly, production is not something a part, or a step, in the way political economy works. It is then, that Marx states that everything that is related to production “requires an instrument [but not necessarily a machine] […] the instrument could be the body itself” (85). Thus, all human activity, in a way, is but a form of production. Production is everywhere and it can hardly be stopped, at best production is reshaped, dominated, controlled and triggered towards something that is not necessarily production’s target. 

In the “Introduction” to the Grundrisse there is an invitation to rethink production. Marx, after this invitation, proposes to start thinking production through money. If all possession presupposes an act of power, then, the question is to determine how that power was stablished. In a very simple term, from today’s perspective, one can think, why is it that money is so powerful? Why is it that we do things without acknowledging the dangers that might come afterwards? The problem of money, in fact, puts at stake what is really what value tells us when we buy, exchange, or produce things. What is at stake, then, in the first notebook of the Grundrisse is to determine how is it that value is produce and how is it that we all embrace it. 

For Marx all value is to be examined through labour time. A coin, or money, is but accumulated labour. That is, that “what determines value is not the amount of labour time incorporated in products, but rather the amount of labour time necessary at a given moment” (135). It could be argued, then, that value is but an abstraction, something that happened in the past but still, somehow, haunt us until today. The problem is now to examine why is money so special, why is it that money can serve as a third party that exchanges what was produced in another time?, why can money perpetuate the dead, or past, labour? 

When we buy things, we don’t really buy them. Perhaps this is obvious for anyone who reads this post, but what Marx proposed at the end of XIX century is that commodities (merchandises) are but values when they faced a process of exchange. “All commodifies are perishable money; money is the imperishable commodity” (149). What Marx means when he stated the latter is that perhaps what is at stake when buying and selling commodities in the bourgeois system is the reaffirmation of a third party. Everything that cannot be turned into money cannot be a commodity. A commodity, then, carries within a potential to become money and the other way around. Of course, this does not mean that money resolves all the processes that are part of production. That is to say, that money itself does not resolve the problems of circulation or distribution of merchandises. 

What is really at stake with money is another thing, not only the way exchanges are made. If for Marx are value is but an abstraction, and that abstraction comes directly from a head (144), whose head is that? That is, who is abstracting value for everyone else? Marx stablishes that the comparison between merchandises consist in a process of comparison, and this process creates money. Then, this “comparison, which the head accomplishes in one stroke, can be achieved in reality only in a delimited sphere by needs, and only in successive steps” (144). Thus, there seems to be a “head” that presupposes all general exchange. That head, a head of an unknown person, gets whatever it wants in a single stroke, a dull, or hard, blow. The head that presupposes value hits hard. This characteristic, then, is pure affect. Consequently, whoever experiences this hard blow has but no other choice but to replicate the first blow of the aforementioned thinking head. Soon, all idea of the general equivalent seems to be but the habituation of that single stroke, or a process that happens “little by little” (144) in the formation of capitalist society. 

Notas sobre Línea de sombra. El no sujeto de lo político (2021) de Alberto Moreiras

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La reedición de Línea de sombra. El no sujeto de lo político (2021) de Alberto Moreiras comparte con Tercer espacio la importante tarea de revisar libros relevantes y que en su momento no fueron estudiados a detalle. Como en Tercer espacio, en Línea de sombra también se habla de cómo sistemáticamente la academia tradicional norteamericana ignoró los logros y análisis de este libro. En el prólogo de Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott se dice que Línea de sombra es uno de los primeros lugares desde donde se emprendió la ruta por la que ahora conceptos claves como infrapolítica y posthegenomía circulan. Estos conceptos son, ante todo, “un sostenido intento de pensamiento […] una práctica casi corporal de escritura y desacuerdo, que implica sostener el arrojo con una perseverancia orientada siempre hacia la liberad” (15). Aunque el prólogo no desarrolla esa idea sobre lo que implica sostener el arrojo, uno puede pensar que ya el título evoca sutilmente ese trabajo. Es decir, línea de sombra no es sólo una metáfora que evoca aquello que Moreiras ve como la línea que va figurando (y figura) nuestro horizonte de pensamiento, es decir, la línea de la dominación, cuya sombra somete a todo lo que caiga bajo ella, sino que también la línea de sombra vendría a ser eso que Villalobos sugiere, un intento de pensar que sostiene el arrojo pero no lo para. Es decir, si la sombra es la traza sin trazo de todo aquello que se expone a la luz, el pensar de la línea de sombra, en contra de la sombra de la dominación, es un pensar que no detiene el arrojo de lo que existe sino que guarda la sombra de su existencia, su residuo enigmático. 

En cierto sentido, el residuo enigmático es el tema principal del libro. Este término es otra forma de referir se al no sujeto de lo político. Si el sujeto es el que pide que su sombra sostenga y domine, el no sujeto de lo político eso que quiere exponer y exponerse eso que Moreiras dice que “hay en nosotros y más allá de nosotros”, una suerte de exceso y precedencia, “algo que excede abrumadoramente a la subjetividad, incluyendo la subjetividad del inconsciente” (21). Ahí, entonces, se ve que el no sujeto de lo político sería la sombra del inconsciente, algo ineludible y que a la vez elude sobre todas las cosas. Los siete capítulos del libro, y la coda, ofrecen a su manera aproximaciones a ese resto enigmático, a su lugar y a su existencia. A su vez, los primeros capítulos son, ante todo, una lectura de y con otros pensadores sobre el estado de la política a inicios de siglo XXI. Si luego del 9/11 las formas de la guerra, el estado y la política entraron en crisis, ¿cómo es que habría que leer un mundo que rehúsa toda idea de exterioridad y al mismo tiempo reclama la sistemática y comunitaria subjetivación de cualquier cosa que se mueva fuera de sus murallas? 

¿Cómo pensar política si la distinción de amigo y enemigo, donde según Carl Schmitt inicia la política, está completamente desbaratada en nuestro momento histórico? El punto clave de este “fin de la política” radica en la total crisis de la subjetividad. Por las formas de subjetivación es que amigos y enemigos dejan de importar, o más bien, por el sujeto es que se descubre que no hay amigos sino sólo enemigos. Si “el enemigo absoluto, no es el terrorista global, sino que es aquel de quien esperamos eventual sometimiento y colaboración, que en caso concreto significa colaboración con el régimen de acumulación global que mantiene a tantos habitantes de la tierra, en el nomos pero no del nomos, en miseria o precariedad profunda e injusta” (45), se debe a que vivimos en tiempos de política del partisano. Esto es que ahora (a inicios de siglo XXI) “la incorporación del enemigo absoluto dentro del orden moderno de lo político, por tanto ya [es] el síntoma de la descomposición de tal orden desde el siglo XIX” (60). No es gratuito, así, que, por ejemplo, los problemas del narcotráfico en México emulen, en buena medida, los problemas del terrorismo post 9/11. La guerra es indistinguible de su momento detonante, siempre se está en guerra, o en la amenaza, el espacio se hace cada vez el mismo. 

Al mismo tiempo que el nuevo nomos previene y destroza al enemigo, hay un registro salvaje, algo que queda en el doble registro que se queda en el umbral del nomos, fuera de lo que exterior mismo a este orden. Eso que queda es el no sujeto de lo político, “más allá de la sujeción, más allá de la conceptualización, más allá de la captura […] simplemente ahí” (80). Si la subjetividad de la modernidad es igual a la del sujeto del capital, “una totalidad vacía” (59), entonces el “no sujeto es lo que el sujeto debe constantemente abstraer, una especie de auto-fundación continuada en la virtud” (116). Hegemonía, subalternidad, decolonizalidad, multitud y demás avatares de la metafísica, diría Moreiras, se quedan siempre cortos y no son sino máquinas de restas, pues no sólo restan y abtraen al resto enigmático, sin que precisan falsamente restituir algo que de entrada está perdido e irrestituible, aquello que se le sustrae al no sujeto. Ahora bien, el problema del resto enigmático, del no sujeto, es que no se trata de pensar en la inclusión ni en la exclusión. Pensar el resto “no es pensar que traduce, sino cabalmente un pensar de exceso intraducible; no es un pensar ni hegemónico, ni contra-hegemónico, sino más bien parahegemónico o poshegemónico, en la medida en que apunta a las modadlidades de presencia/ausencia de todo aquello que la articulación hegemónica debe borrar para construirse en cuanto tal […] pensamiento de guerra neutra y oscura, capaz, quizá de resituir eventualmente lo político como nueva administración de soberanía” (134). Así, la aparente suma que pretende el capital, o cualquier forma subjetivizante, no es sino una resta, una resta que, parecería, captura la propia resta a la que el no sujeto tiende. Esto es, el no sujeto, para Moreiras, guarda necesariamente un carácter negativo, una forma de resta que abre en su doble escritura contra la suma camuflada de la subjetividad una posibilidad de extenuación de los mecanismos de resta forzada y controlada. 

El problema, por otra parte, es que si el no sujeto de lo político guarda una relación directa con la violencia divina, entonces, es probable que una de las operaciones fundamentales de no sujeto no sea la resta. Si la violencia divina es “la excepción, la substracción radical del regreso infinito, la afirmación de una suspensión no sangrienta pero de todas maneras letal de la cadena signifcante (218), entonces, la violencia divina es una suerte de cero exponencial. Como sólo el agotamiento de lo político puede ser liberado por la violencia, al liberar lo político de lo político mismo (subjetivación), de la misma forma, la totalidad vacía expuesta del sujeto, elevada por su exponente vacío (cero/ el no sujeto) regresa a un uno heterogéneo. Un uno de repetición divergente desde donde el conteo se abre siempre hacia otras partes, lejos tal vez del resto, incluso.

Mitad del cuento, atisbo otro. Notas sobre La cena (2006) de César Aira

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La cena (2006) de César Aira pudiera ser corolario de otra de sus novelas. Mientras esto no sorprende, pues lo mismo se podría decir de buena parte de la obra de Aira, sí lo hace el tono sombrío y lacónico del relato. La cena cuenta la historia de un narrador deprimido, lleva ya siete años sin trabajo y se ha mudado al departamento de su madre en Pringles. Aunque la madre no hace sino amarlo, el narrador se siente fracasado. Así que, a miedo de dejar pasar su última oportunidad de alcanzar el éxito, el narrador lleva a su madre a cenar a casa de su único amigo, un tipo solitario pero sociable. Luego de la cena y de que madre y anfitrión entablaran una amable conversación, pues ambos tenían algo en común —la “pasión por los nombres” (pos. 6118)—, el amigo del narrador alarga la velada y les muestra a sus huéspedes una serie de juguetes viejos. La madre del narrador no soporta la exhibición, y es que madre y amigo “sólo se entendían cuando pronunciaban nombres (apellidos) del pueblo; en todo lo demás, ella se retraía enérgicamente” (pos. 6228). Después, el narrador regresa a casa con su madre y se pone a ver por la televisión un programa en vivo en el que se da seguimiento a un evento terrorífico local: cadáveres que se levantan de sus tumbas para succionar las endorfinas del cerebro de los habitantes del pueblo. La desgracia, que no logra sacar al narrador de su depresión y pasmo, dura poco. Finalmente, el narrador, al visitar al día siguiente a su amigo para proponerle formalmente su idea de negocios, se da cuenta de que la desgracia televisada no fue sino un “mal” programa de televisión, un refrito que ahora recibe los elocuentes comentarios de su amigo, para quien ese negocio televisivo debe cambiar, pues “la prosa de los negocios tiene que expresarse en la poesía de la vida” (pos. 7157). 

Mientras que la narración del programa de televisión concentra la mayor parte del relato, el meollo (o uno de los meollos) de la narrativa es la depresión del narrador y su fascinación por los juguetes antiguos que su amigo le mostrara el día de la cena. El narrador queda maravillado cuando ve el primer juguete de su anfitrión. “Era un verdadero milagro de la mecánica de precisión, si se tiene en cuenta que esas manitos de porcelana articulada no medían más de cinco milímetros” (pos. 6202). En cierto sentido, el juguete, como tantos objetos en la obra de Aira tiene un carácter atuorreferencial respecto a la novela en sí. Es decir, como el amigo guarda un montón de objetos inútiles pero “milagros de una mecánica precisa”, así también el mercado literario guarda las novelas de César Aira, obras de precisión milagrosa, pero que a los ojos de otros observadores, como los de la madre del narrador, no son más que objetos inútiles y chatarras, juegos de niños. Los juguetes, como las novelas del autor del relato, son objetos que se presentan en forma precisa y pura, hasta que uno empieza a ver que sucede otra cosa. A cambios de velocidad y fuerza la forma se expresa. Cuando el juguete en cuestión, el de las miguitas imaginarias, termina su funcionamiento, el narrador observa que tal vez “Los autores del juguete debían de haber querido significar la cercanía de la muerte de la anciana. Lo que me hizo pensar que toda la escena estaba representando una historia; hasta ese momento me había limitado a admirar el arte prodigioso de la máquina, sin preguntarme por su significado” (6206). El asunto es que ni la madre ni el anfitrión se esfuerzan en entender la “narración” del juguete, para la primera es una pérdida de tiempo y para el segundo es sólo un derroche de forma. 

El enredo que se teje entre las perspectivas del narrador, su madre y su amigo pone a unos en concordancia y a otros en discordia. La concordancia no puede englobar a las tres partes. Mientras que el amigo y la madre viven fascinados por los nombres (apellidos) que saben, el narrador no comparte esta emoción. Igualmente, a la vez que el narrador y el amigo tienen una fascinación similar por los juguetes y demás objetos lujosos —pero inútiles—, la madre del narrador no puede verle nada de especial a esos cachivaches. Aunado a esto, el narrador queda fuera de cualquier lugar de concordancia, pues ni los remedios del amigo (reformar la forma en que la televisión en Pringles trabaja, para expresar “la prosa de los negocios tiene que expresarse en la poesía de la vida” [pos. [7157]), ni las desconfianzas y preocupaciones de la madre sobre el futuro de su hijo, lo sacan del pasmo y tedio en el que vive.

Si a la mesa de una cena se sentaran arte, estado y mercado, éste último, al menos para nuestros días, sería el anfitrión. Mientras estado y mercado se atragantan de nombres para verificar sus narraciones, el arte no hace sino ver que, como el narrador al escuchar las razones por las que su madre desconfía de su amigo, “los nombres hacían verosímil la historia, aunque sobre mí provocaban más efecto de admiración que de verificación” (6347). El arte puede ver la verdad, pero no verificarla. No es su “deber”, pues la verificación y —en cierto sentido también— la verosimilitud pertenecen a un tiempo muerto, como el de la televisión y el programa que registra la catástrofe de los muertos vivientes y su resolución. Si al día siguiente de la cena, el estado, como la madre, queda con el estómago revuelto, y el mercado con las últimas palabras que no rehabilitan al arte, entonces, no habría más que la estetización de la máquina y el sistema como triunfo de un totalitarismo que sabe del pésimo, pero eficiente, funcionamiento de las viejas formas de narrar la vida cotidiana (como el programa sobre los muertos vivientes). No obstante, si la última palabra la tiene el mercado, su prosa de negocios no es más que una narración mal contada, pues como al amigo del narrador, al mercado “se le mezclaban los episodios, dejaba efectos sin causa, causas sin efecto, se salteaba partes importantes, dejaba un cuento por la mitad” (pos. 6076). En esa mitad que se abre al final de las últimas palabras del mercado, la poesía de la expresión abre camino para otra vida y su trabajo.

Notas a Esferas II (2004) de Peter Sloterdijk

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Capítulo 3

Si el fuego puede, al menos para Sloterdijk, asegurar la transferencia de solidaridades dentro de un espacio primigenio de inmunidad para las masas —dígase la aldea, la tribu—, el fuego también es vulnerable. Cuando la catástrofe natural aniquila a la aldea, las cenizas no son siquiera resto. La clave para sobrevivir a las desgracias estaría, entonces, en la sublimación del fuego y del agua, del calor y del frío. Un arca, sea la de Noé o la de cualquier mito, es un signo que da inmunidad y cobijo, es la condición de salvación y supervivencia. Para vencer a la catástrofe no hay sino que dejar la esfera primaria y expandirse en la técnica: armar a fuego, sudor y agua un casco protector. Para Sloterdijk, la idea de “arca” tiene una fuerte relación con la aparición de las primeras grandes metrópolis de la antigüedad (Nínive, Babilonia, Ur), pues sólo las arcas están destinadas a ser la prueba de que el suelo del ser puede darse por el ser mismo sin su yo-estar-en-el-mundo. “El arca no es tanto una estructura material cuanto una forma simbólica de cobijo de la vida rescatada, un receptáculo de esperanza” (289). Como los círculos alrededor del fuego inauguran los primeros asentamientos humanos (capítulo 2) luego del crimen originario que sacrifica a lo indeseable del centro (capítulo 1), así también la formación esferológica del arca comienza un nuevo capítulo de la macroesferológica de los seres humanos. 

El dilema de cualquier arca, como el de cualquier ciudad, es el mismo que el de la inclusión. Es decir, “en todos los fantasmas-arca se afirma como una imperiosidad sagrada la selección de los pocos; muchos son los llamados, pocos los que se embarcan” (295). Por consiguiente, se vuelve transparente que a la fiesta del fuego no todos son invitados. Todos sabrán de las danzas alrededor del templo, pero sólo unos pocos verán el desfile de brazos, caderas y pies. Como una ciudad, las arcas manifiestan que su razón de ser radica en una paradoja: “sólo si no entran todos, entran todos; pero si entran todos, no entran todos” (298). Los pocos, los elegidos, los que habrán de salvar, deben excluir para después erigir un milagro. No obstante, ciudades y arcas se diferencian. Mientras las segundas se entregan al impredecible devenir de la catástrofe, las primeras se empecinan obstinadamente a la superficie y también, de cierta manera, a inmunizarse en la llanura de otra imprevisibilidad, sea la del desierto, o la de la estepa. 

Las ciudades antiguas no son testimonios de megalomanías. Ni tampoco sitios de pecado, como las verían aquellos que recién salen de sus arcas. Para Sloterdijk, las ciudades antiguas sólo pueden sentirse “por una angustia especial iniciática” (302), un puente entre lo anterior y lo “de ahora”. Esa angustia es, a su vez, “un éxtasis que produce la sensación de seguridad y cobijo” (302). Habría, entonces, una guerra de afectos frente a los grandes muros de ciudades como las mesopotámicas: 1) asombro y seguridad, para los que viven dentro de los muros; 2) angustia, para los que piensan y saben que fuera del confort no existe nada; 3) recelo y fascinación, para aquellos que deambulan en el desierto y que, aunque saben del confort que hay del otro lado de los muros, no hacen sino pedirle a su dios que castigue a aquellos que se ufanan con alcanzarlo en obras (torres, murallas, estelas). Si el arca es el útero de la madre que nos vuelve a tragar para cargarnos y llevarnos hasta que termine la tormenta, la ciudad será la prostituta, que “está ahí para encandilar miradas, elevar miradas, humillar miradas” (303), un cuerpo que tiene que dejarlo ver todo y a la vez garantizar “el buen ambiente” y “la prosperidad del negocio”, de la mano siempre de una “seguridad con confort”. Mientras la madre sólo nos puede tragar para reconfortarnos, la prostituta promete reparación, como la que tuvo el espíritu del escritor José María Arguedas meses antes de su suicidio.

A diferencia de los círculos alrededor del fuego, las ciudades antiguas ahora se preocuparán por hacer visible y evidente que el calor del centro llega hasta los límites del inmenso poblado. Las grandes murallas no son delirios de paranoia ni nomos de la tierra para la mirada de los enemigos. Antes bien, son cuerpos que “ayudan a los habitantes de la ciudad en su intento de superar la inflamación anímica que les ha causado la asimilación interior del gran espacio” (342). Es decir, si ya todo lo que se puede se quiere y todo lo que se quiere se puede dentro de estas antiguas megalópolis, las murallas se convirtieron en la demostración para las masas de que esos muros son “receptáculos de funciones autorreceptivas” (344). Es decir, cualquiera se podía ver seguro en el sólido muro. La muralla era el retrato de perfil del centro. Con los muros, tanto las masas como los líderes encontraron que era posible “edificar un gran mundo como mundo propio e interior autoincubante” (352). Si el gemelo primigenio, muerto en el parto, nos había dejado solos en el mundo, el proyecto de las viejas megalópolis era hacerle justicia a los abandonados. Por otra parte, estos experimentos morfológicos sólo han cambiado para confundir la megalomanía, la paranoia y la inmunidad que brindan los muros. Hoy, en el mejor de los casos, una muralla es eso, confusión. A su vez, como se vio en estos primeros días del año, con la espectacular y risible alternancia democrática estadounidense, queda más que nunca evidente que los delirios de quienes construyen murallas están dictados para la incubación de lo “superior”. Sólo era posible “Make America Great Again” con muro que incubara, muro que hoy día ya ha sido detenido. Tal vez el loco tenía más de profeta babilónico que de tonto, pues hoy son más quienes aseguran que el mundo está mejor.