Perspectivas provinciales (1a Parte)

¿Qué lugar ocupa la vida rural dentro de la narrativa moderna, posmoderna, su existencia más allá de etiquetas y su proyección histórica? Esa periferia que suele ser llamada lo rural y suburbano. La respuesta no es estática, son categorías que sufren los avatares de la historia. La asimetría entre lo rural y lo urbano es ya patente en el registro migratorio. Y si bien el transfondo es la desigualdad económica, también hay una asimetría mediática e ideológica. El citadino moderno ve lo rural como inferior, perteneciente a un pasado que precisa distanciamiento. El citadino posmoderno es algo más complejo en su relación con lo rural. Puede llegar a verlo como algo superior pero aún se debate entre una valoración romántica y una de vanguardia, ambas muy distintas. Mientras la primera idealiza lo rural como un regreso a la vida tradicional, la segunda ve un potencial que requiere de proyección y transformación hacia nuevos horizontes. Diferente, este último de la conquista, que transforma hacia lo conocido. En el ideal romántico lo rural es bueno porque no es urbano (sencillez social, aire fresco, ausencia de ruido, etc.), lo que contrasta con las vanguardias rurales de ecologistas y socialistas utópicos, y las vanguardias suburbanas de la clase media industrial, de académicos y visionarios empresariales y políticos (un sector bastante reducido de la población hasta el punto de hacer francamente sospechosa su referencia).

Pienso que la Ilustración y la modernidad de posguerra del siglo XX le deben mucho al ethos del suburbio. Y es que el suburbio no solo es un lugar geográfico, esa es la forma concreta que toma en el siglo XX, ya en épocas anteriores este ethos tenía morada en las reflexiones que contrastaban la vida rural con las nuevas costumbres de la urbe; relatos de viajeros, comerciantes que se nutrían del intercambio entre la ciudad y el campo. La pureza conceptual de la máquina y la integridad de la existencia rural remiten no solo a los pensadores Ilustrados como Rousseau, Diderot o Descartes, pero al mismo Renacimiento, a Brunelleschi, Da Vinci o Miguel Angel. Debo aclarar que mi defensa de la vanguardia no se reduce a la apología del virtuosismo. Para mí este último es acaso una revelación profética. Bien se hace en desafiar la vanguardia solipsista por su realización colectiva.

A veces temo que el habitante rural este condenado a una existencia bovina, un destino absolutamente subordinado a la voluntad del hombre de ciudad. Cómo ignorar el historial de parasitismo, de depredación de las ciudades sobre la producción campesina (alimento y talento humano). Bien parece que la conflictiva relación entre el campo y la ciudad es de nuevo el lugar histórico del colonialismo, la ciudad-estado. Y es que en lo cultural la asimetría es abrumadora; si acaso el citadino consume cultura rural lo hace bajo la ironía kitsch o la nostalgia, nunca como sentimiento de vanguardia y mucho menos de irreverencia. Pero la población rural no siempre ha sido víctima, también ha tenido su momento de victimario, al menos eso es lo que sugiere la idea del fascismo como proyección (modernidad) del ethos rural. Pienso en Heidegger y su vulnerabilidad al encanto fascista; pienso en Mao y su socialismo de sello campesino; pienso en Charles Fourier, de quién Vargas Llosa hace un magnífico recuento I, II; o en ejemplos más recientes como el cinturón bíblico (Bible Belt), parte de la base social de la dinastía Bush. En general la población rural es aún una parte importante del conservadurismo político de muchas naciones. Pero hay que desconfiar de la desconfianza a la modernidad provincial que despiertan las vanguardias planeadas. Esos maosimos terminan por implantar solo simulacros de la vida campesina. También hay que desconfiar del mercado que presenta al campesino como un consumidor de nostalgias (el hombre Marlboro y sus reencarnaciones). Es precisamente la vanguardia colectiva, la promesa no cumplida de la posmodernidad.

Ya se me antoja percibir un incipiente conservadurismo en los habitantes de la metrópoli, que en su turbulento amor por la gran ciudad se vuelven autoreferenciales. Finalmente han encontrado su tierra prometida. Cierran sus ojos o simulan estar abiertos bajo esa digestión de lo rural que es el exotismo. Mientras tanto el ciudadano de la provincia tiene el problema opuesto, es vulnerable a toda influencia, incapaz de desarrollar su propia narrativa. Pero hablar de enamorados de la metrópoli tal vez solo aplique a citadinos de primera generación. ¿Cómo evolucionan las figuraciones de la ciudad a través de las generaciones? Esa ya es otra historia, como también la de narrar los diferentes cosmopolitanismos, porque esta el de marineros, de pioneros y funcionarios imperiales, de inmigrantes económicos y exiliados políticos, de nómadas y errantes, eruditos de la tradición intelectual y hasta de la más moderna cultura popular (esa libertad que aprendió a cabalgar las balas sentada en un sillón).

The Dark Side of the Public Sphere

Introduction

This post explores how a deliberative society can learn to coexist with counterhegemonic practices as to prevent the public sphere becoming a mechanism for hegemonic ruling. In particular we notice the contrast between Habermas deliberative society and that of counterhegemonic activism.

Some key words are: conspicuous silence, action as counter-hegemonic speech, the contraction of logocracy to the private sphere (realm of intimacy?) and the refusal to rehearse the theater of public logocracy, the counterhegemonic role of intimacy (as a right and practice) [1], etc. Some historical examples are to be found in religious insurrections and resistance, ethnic and class resistence, etc. Also important is to inlcude unpopular cases such as the silent politics of corporative lobby and military coups. The former will provide a more realistic assesment of the implications of counterhegemonic rights and practices.

This debate also revisits (eventually, I guess) some ideas developed in the third quarter of the XXth century regarding the legitimate means for power.

Reassesment of Deliberative Dynamics

Within a genetic conception of deliberative action [2], counterhegemonic politics does not constitutes a direct threath to a deliberative society, on the contrary, it provides a key to understanding its configuration. 

Reassesment of Hegemony

The reluctance to public deliberation can be interpreted as antidemocratic behavior but also as a counterhegemonic action denouncing the fallacy of hegemonic freedom. Mechanisms to distinguish one from the other, in case there are, should be developed. This problem demands a careful revision and probably a political stand on the definition of hegemony.

Rights, Ecology and Politics

The right of association is in a way a right to conspire, it allows to create the critical mass to surpass the cognitive inertia of hegemonic representations. This right is not only protecting the conspirators from physical repression but of the more subtle repressions of hegemonic power. Sort of nursery habitat for narratives.

Claiming the Theatre of Politics: Rhetorics and Strategy [3]

Within the pulse between speech and action there might be more pedestrian motives. We can see behind the pulse of one media against the other an individual or subcutural strategy to take advantage of di facto inequalities. Take for analogy prose and lyrics within the opera; those which are better at prose would tend to give it more importance than lyrics, and the other way around. In our case, speech will favor eloquent voices while action will favor executioners.

By no means the multiplicity of voices we find in contemporary society implies a more egalitarian medium than action. Deliberative-Democracy is an animal as mythological as it sounds; after the dust of noise settles, only the eloquent prevails. Perhaps one property of speech which creates a complementary contrast (... I know) with action is that the former gives liquidity to whatever both carry (power?). And in this sense those who are good at action will eventually feel the need to get a form of speech as to give liquidity to their action-capital. I am thinking of the early bourgeoise which despite having a sense of priorities wear objects reflecting their (anti)status or beliefs. They are taking part in speech-action politics by means perhaps not of explicit speech but by the aesthetics of persuasion, allusion or intimidation.

Moreover, the dichotomy between action and speech is increasingly unclear as we approach a world that resembles the words of  Istvan Csicsery-Ronay: "When hallucination and reality collapse into each other, there is no place from which to reflect." Speech is becoming action and action is increasingly configured as speech.

[1] La intimidad juega un papel fundamental en la gestación de una esfera pública. Es como si la esfera pública fuese una condensación de pequeñas burbujas concebidas bajo la noción de la intimidad.

[2] By genetic insight we mean an understanding of the effective action of deliberation limited to congenial views. Is like sexual animals that can only have offsprings with genetically similar peers, nevertheless leading eventually to the formation of new species.

[3] I use the word "Theater" in a two-fold way: as simulation and as "theater of war".

Looking forward: what we can learn from Lance Armstrong's landing

Lance Armstrong's doping affair becomes emblematic within the fin de siècle. It marks the decline of the American myth. A myth about the natural relation between freedom and fairness. There was a time where this was an ethical belief rather than a policy belief. Once written in a paper it started to be unwritten in the heart. Freedom and fairness where attached by the unifying field of conscience. But not any more. They were to take very different paths. A very similar fate is shared by democracy. It is the fetishism of the written law.

Classical economics states that there is no such dichotomy between the ethics and the law. In the characteristic optimism of the enlightened era they embarked on an axiomatic program for economy. Although we cannot neglect many of the successes of such approach, economy was far to be a tractable system. Within enlightenment coexists many conflicting beliefs, notably that between pragmatism and the rule of law, between empirical evidence and axiomatics. Within a tractable system —paradigm of classical economy— there is no conflict between empirical observations and the written laws pretending to describe them. Hence, from this classic perspective, empirical reality doesn't depends on the medium which pretends to reproduce it, whether is culture or law. This paradigm has proven to be insufficient. Evidence is build not only in economic history but also in the wider realm of physics. The often misinterpreted quote from McLuhan might be suitable to describe our actual state of affairs: "The medium is the message." We should not expect from a liberal law the same outcome that from a liberal culture. Policy should be framed as to allow for a liberal culture but should not pretend to replace the liberal culture.

 Beyond the challenges of implementing a complex expression of ethical liberalism we need to reinterpret liberalism in itself. We need to go beyond liberalism as a belief. The lessons from the first half of the XXth century are not to be interpreted as the proof of the success of liberalism, they are to prove the failure of the combined policies from the corresponding historical projects. Liberalism has its own accumulated failures. Both lessons should be taken as an invitation to deconstruct history rather than avoided. To go beyond liberalism as a belief means to question the position of the individual as the absolute reference of history. This is not just some abstract demand, it is a realistic assessment as the power of humanity takes dimensions way beyond the realm of human affairs. Human civilisation has become one of the major (anti)ecologic forces. It is not just the responsibility of humanity to preserve others types of life, it is also about the development of humanity beyond the idea that human civilisation should not cross the dessert but become a casino half the road.

Coming back to our sporting heroes what we see in the doping affairs is the fear and incapacity of liberalism to imagine a world where the human expression no longer corresponds to the liberal individual. I am not justifying Armstrong but I want to show how symptomatic is his case to our times. What to do when humans want and indeed be more than humans? Is not just cheating,  Armstrong is not the only high profile athlete involved. Moreover, is not sophisticated doping an almost canonic practice in modern economy? Where to rule the difference between fair advantage and unfair? Should we rule it according to which structural and/or pragmatic units? Technology has destroy the temple of liberalism, the individual. The skin is no longer a di facto defence. And as doping (as any other corporal extension) deconstructs the physical individual, other forms of technology deconstruct the individual as an ethical, economic or legal unit. As the skin becomes the more superficial, we need to keep asking ourselves, if an ethics where the individual is the starting point has not become an ethics where the individual is the ending point.

Tejiendo red

Ediciones simbióticas es un proyecto de ejercicio crítico de colaboración abierta. Algunos de sus autores, entre ellos Álvaro Cuadra y José Ramón L. Alba, tratan el tema de la hypermodernidad. También tienen ediciones digitales de libre acceso, por ejemplo, Hyperindustria Cultural.

Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos

The struggles behind the multi-scale distribution of sovereignty amid globalization: who defines what is global and what is local?


Globalization, Societies and Education. Vol. 2 (2), July 2004.

Excerpts

"what we call globalization is always the successful globalization of a particular localism" 

[La anterior afirmación merece una crítica desde la perspectiva de transiciones de fase y otros fenómenos de física de multiples cuerpos. También vale la pena establecer una frontera entre la anterior afirmación y las teorías objetivistas de última generación.]

"Once its redistributive functions were neutralized [starting from the 1980s], democracy became the ideal form of government for global capitalism"

"Here in lies also the deepest source of the crisis of left politics. Since whatever is being proposed as a reform (education, health, social security, etc.) is definetly for the worse, the left is often forced to defend the statu quo. And the left have never been very good at defendig the statu quo."

"In my view, we may be entering a period in which societies are politically democratic and socially fascistic. This new fascism is a social regime, not, as in the past, a political regime."

The Domain of Anti-Historic Materialism

Jean-Antoine Watteau's study of soldiers.

We are effectively inverting the relation of reality posed by historic materialism. Well, not strictly, let me put it this way, we are creating a society that at many levels inverts the economy of reality as formulated by historic materialism (Hegemony/Production). Indeed, we do so every time we pretend that someone should drop off his weapon because is not ethical, or when we pretend strong people not to bully the physically weak. In fact, we are, at the micro and not-so-micro levels, creating a society where power is not the direct reflect of physical conditions (and here 'direct' seems to be a key word). Is not just the logic of an hegemonic class, but the hegemony of collective superstructures. In these structural levels (scales of complexity), the effective laws defy the universal laws of historic materialism just as the laws of physics could be 'cheated' effectively in reduced dimensions (nevertheless we hear about the possibilities of feedback between social scales as in Giddens). This aggregated reality takes the form of simulacra and determines, as individuals, our very notions of success, happines, power. We, humans are now living in the guts of who knows which organism. The image of the teenager totally alienated by marketing, is in a way, the most pure form of our times. Sometimes I think that for many people –one by one– is much more useful a guide to power in the simulacra that a guide to power in the hardcore of reality.

Aren't neo-revolutionary attitudes such as "fight fire with fire", "hacking the system", "strike like a virus", symptomatic of this turn? If revolution can be made in terms of the battlefield of simulacra by the strategic use of the hegemonic constructions, then it seems inevitable to confront the question: what then is hard power suppose to assure? perhaps the answer is, to assure the reality of simulacra and by that I mean, to assure simulacra as the battlefield of ultimate power. And even if is not the ultimate power, at least a battlefield of power conflicts which are able to engulf class struggle. This is a thesis which seems to be backed by history: why have the control of mass media become so strategic in modern revolutionary warfare? And for the not-so-radical, it is a sufficient proof the role of mass media in the 'wide' political spectrum of modern democracies. In evolutive biology one may think on the brain, as it used to be a muscle. But to understand the analogy one should think that 'the muscles used to be part of the brain', the muscles used to be active part of decisions in the organism, but then they started to separate, letting the brain take as much decisions as the precedence of a material body allowed to.

Licencia para soñar

La plusvalía es clave en toda forma de desarrollo socio-politico, socio-económico y socio-cultural. Parece absurda vista desde la mentalidad del individuo cartesiano. El capitalismo fundamentalista solo acepta la plusvalía que contribuye al desarrollo económico de la sociedad, el capital; el paroxismo socialista solo acepta la plusvalía que contribuye al desarrollo político de la sociedad, la burocracia; el paroxismo cultural solo acepta la plusvalía que contribuye al desarrollo cultural de la sociedad, la educación de inspiración humanista. Es preciso recordarles a cada uno de estos fundamentalismos, que la sociedad requiere de todas y cada una de estas plusvalías. La plusvalía ajena, siempre se presentará absurda. La plusvalía es el margen de libertad de cada ámbito; libertad que le permite soñar (que no dormir), proyectarse en diferentes futuros probables y ambiciosos, inventar sus propias utopias. Esto es un papel fundamental de la vida, el crecimiento. Todo esto lo digo porque en la actualidad las utopias del mercado de capital reinan, las utopias políticas sobreviven, y la utopia académica ha sido declarada por el capital y por una enrarecida democracia como enemigo público.

Related texts: The Teleology of Education (Ernst Blog).