Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Histories of Violence: The Violence of Absent Emergencies
Adrian
Parr interviews Santiago Zabala
THIS IS THE 32nd in a series
of dialogues with artists, writers, and critical thinkers on the question of
violence. This conversation is with Santiago Zabala, who is ICREA
Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
Santiago is the author of many books, including, most recently, Why
Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017). He
has written for the Guardian, The New York Times, and Al Jazeera.
His forthcoming book is Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative
Facts (2020).
ADRIAN PARR: In your work on
emergency, you formulate an important distinction between emergencies and the
absence of emergency. Can you explain what you mean by this and how some
“emergencies” function as a displacement activity away from addressing the most
pressing emergencies of our time?
SANTIAGO ZABALA: First of
all, Adrian, thank you for inviting me to participate in this great series of
interviews that Brad Evans began years ago. Speaking of violence is, as I will
try to explain, also an absent emergency, itself considering how framed our
world has become, how predetermined by the politics of control. The distinction
you point out is vital to understand both the daily, now almost commonplace
emergencies as well as the greatest emergency, which literally concerns our
existence. In order to illustrate the difference, it is useful to recall how
states of “exception” or “emergency” become a central concept in contemporary
culture, especially after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In State of
Exception, Giorgio Agamben, using the previous investigations of Carl Schmitt
and Walter Benjamin, manages to elucidate a central concept for understanding
and interpreting global politics after President George W. Bush’s invasion of
Iraq.
The declaration of a state of
exception, according to Agamben, not only discloses the performative expression
of state power but also forecloses any possibility of meaningful democratic
politics. Almost 20 years later, another American president embodies the
political predicament of our epoch. Donald Trump will not be remembered, as
Bush is, for exercising extralegal powers to transform the “state of emergency”
into routine political measures but rather for denying pressing emergencies
altogether. Trump incarnates a condition where “the greatest emergency has
become the absence of emergencies.” Among the numerous emergencies that Trump
conceals, climate change is certainly the most shocking, as your own work illustrates,
but his indifference toward civil and human rights has also created outrage.
But how are we to interpret this shift, from “states of emergency” to “absence
of emergency”?
The problem is that the
ongoing and repeated invocation of a state of emergency “blocks the
representation of what is unintelligible or resistant to political
theorization,” as Emily Apter recently suggested.
But it also creates an inability to respond to an ongoing global call to order
and a return to “realism,” which is promoted by right-wing populist politicians
(Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini), and “new realist” intellectuals (Jordan
Peterson, Christina Hoff Sommers). The difference between Agamben’s and my
theory is that I find that the absence of emergencies is not simply the result
of particular sovereign decisions but rather of our framed global order, which
is a system of control over the emergence of emergencies into the sphere of
popular and political action. This does not imply that the world is not full of
emergencies that we hear of and watch government responses to every day.
Rather, the greatest emergency today is that despite being the focus of mainstream
news and popular alarm, many of these are still ignored, overlooked, or
rejected from the arena of action. The “absence of emergency” does not refer to
the “sovereign who decides on the exceptional case” (as Agamben would have it)
but rather to the abandonment of Being or existence in favor of beings and
calculation (though this does include the decisions of a sovereign). If a
sovereign can declare a state of exception or emergency, then the epoch’s
metaphysical condition — the abandonment of Being — is its greatest emergency.
For too long we have been “rescued from emergencies,” told that we
are saved by temporary fixes that ignore the greatest emergency, when in fact
we ought to be “rescued into emergencies.” This should be our
intellectual responsibility in the 21st century.
The ongoing refugee crisis is
a good example as it is intrinsically related to climate change. We are told in
Europe that mass migration is a result of political instability in the Middle
East, but its increase in the 21st century is caused by climate change, which
has become the
leading cause of migration. The greatest emergency is not the refugees
approaching Europe now — though this humanitarian crisis must certainly be
addressed, contrary to the policies of many right-wing European governments —
but rather the absence of a plan to address its causes, which ultimately lie in
the global capitalist system that has caused and refuses to address climate
change. As you can see, there is a substantial difference between the stated
“emergency” (the arrival of refugees) and the absent emergency (the causes: the
environmental crisis and global capitalism).
PARR: How might the Gianni
Vattimo’s idea of pensiero debole, or weak thought, equip us with the
theoretical resources needed to critically address the myriad forms of violence
taking place in the world today — violence against immigrants, women, nonhuman
species, the natural world, the economic violence global capitalism inflicts,
and the multiple wars being waged between both state and nonstate actors? Can
the concept of pensiero debole, provide us with new ways of imagining
and living life, a life that is more inclusive and caring?
ZABALA: The concept of
violence is central to understanding weak thought, which emerged as a response
to the Italian Red Brigades’ violence of the 1970s. Actually, 2019 marks the
40th anniversary of Gianni
Vattimo’s idea, which he first presented in a conference in 1979 and
later developed with other thinkers, such as Pier Aldo Rovatti, Umberto Eco,
and Richard Rorty. As Vattimo explains in his autobiography,
at the end of ’70s — when the Red Brigades were “killing people at the rate of
one per day” and also threatened to kill him — some of his arrested students
wrote letters from prison that were, in his view, full of a “metaphysical and
violent rhetorical subjectivity” that he could accept neither morally nor
philosophically. This is when he noticed that the “Nietzschean superman
revolutionary subject,” who was central for many French and Italian
philosophers at the time, had been misinterpreted and could not be identified
with the students’ “Leninist revolutionary subject.” Weak thought came to life
not out of fear of terrorism but as a response to the terrorist interpretation
of the emerging Italian democratic left, in other words, as a recognition of
the unacceptability of the Red Brigades’ violence.
If weak thought can equip us
with theoretical resources to critically address the myriad forms of violence
taking place in the world today, it’s because — unlike other philosophical
positions, such as analytic philosophy or new realism — it has not developed
into an organized system. Systematization always entails and expresses violence
through metaphysical impositions, aiming to submit all phenomena to the
measures, standards, and agendas of the thought system. The duty of the
philosopher, according to weak thought, no longer participates in the
metaphysical agenda of guiding humanity to understanding the Eternal. Rather,
it is to follow a logic of resistance meant to promote a progressive weakening
of the strong and violent structures of metaphysics. Thus, weakening, like
deconstruction, does not search for correct solutions wherein thought may
finally come to a halt but rather seeks theoretical emancipation from absolute
truth and other concepts that frame and restrict the possibilities of new
existential horizons.
The “more inclusive and caring
life” you refer to is manifest in weak thought’s attention to the weak, that
is, everything that is discharged from and exists at the margins of our framed
democracies. These democracies have been building walls — not just the ones on
borders (of the United States, Israel, India) but also, as Mike Davis explains,
“epistemological walls” — in order to increase indifference toward the weak.
This indifference is simply a symptom of fear, fear of the possibility of
emancipation that the weak imply. I’m certain this is the reason why George W.
Bush honored John
Searle — a thinker who calls for philosophy’s submission to science. The
“thought of the weak” is always striving for interpretation, that is, to resist
the annihilation of existence.
PARR: Why do you turn to
hermeneutics, a philosophy of interpretation, and in particular the combination
of a hermeneutic communism, as one way to effectively challenge the many
emergencies taking place around the world?
ZABALA: Hermeneutics is the
philosophy of weak thought. It is through interpretation that we weaken the
forces that promulgate the violence I mention earlier. In order to explain
this, it is necessary to understand that hermeneutics in the 21st century
cannot be reduced to a philosophical discipline, such as aesthetics, nor to a
philosophical school, such as phenomenology. There is more at stake in the
process of interpretation, which transcends Hans-Georg Gadamer’s disciplinary
parameters and school ambitions. The world of hermeneutics is not an “object”
that can be observed from different points of view and that offers various
interpretations. It is a thought-world in continuous movement. If this world
does not reveal itself to the perceptions of human beings as a continuous
narrative, it’s not simply because this is an age of alternative facts. Rather,
this reticence emerges because we are not passive describers. As engaged
performers, we must always strive — through interpretation — for freedom. We
have inherited from Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur a philosophical stance that is
continuously overcoming itself, whose applications and consequences these
thinkers could not have foreseen. While some philosophers consider the
recent feminist,
political, and environmental developments
in hermeneutics to be foreign to their philosophical projects, others find
connections to their thought. I believe the revolutionary role that
interpretation had in major social and political events (Luther’s translation
of the Bible, Freud’s psychoanalytic approach, or Kuhn’s theory of scientific
revolutions) did not emerge from its dialogical ambitions but rather from its
anarchic vein, which is present throughout its history. Interpretation is like
a virus, a spreading and self-replicating antagonistic resistance to those who
would impose universal “methods” or “ideals.” This is why we came up with the
idea of “hermeneutic communism.”
Unlike other contemporary
Marxists, we sought (in Hermeneutic
Communism and Making Communism
Hermeneutical) to outline a “weakened communism,” one free of the violent
connotations of historical communism in its Russian-Soviet realization. With
the global triumph of capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, communism
lost both its effective power and any ability to justify those metaphysical
claims that characterized its original Marxist formulation as the ideal of
development, which inevitably also draws toward a logic of war. Today, these
same ideals and a logic based on eternal growth characterize and guide our
framed democracies. The weakened communism we are left with in the 21st century
does not aspire to construct a perfect state — another Soviet Union — but
instead proposes democratic models of social resistance outside the
intellectual paradigms that dominated classical Marxism. Unlike other
contemporary Marxist theorists, we do not believe that the 21st century calls
for revolution because the forces of the politics of descriptions (as opposed
to interpretation) are too powerful, violent, and oppressive to be overcome
through a parallel insurrection: only a weak and weakening thought like
hermeneutics can avoid violent ideological revolts and therefore protect the
weak from violent suppression.
Hermeneutic communism can challenge
the global emergency because it refers to an emergency, the idea of communism,
that should not have returned. Slavoj Žižek is right when he suggests that
communism “today is not the name of a solution but the name of a problem.”
When social movements in South America elected their own representatives
(Morales, Chávez, and many others) in order to defend the weak and apply
much-needed social reforms, it became clear that an alteration of classical
Marxism was possible. Although the progressive Latin American leaders never
called themselves “communists,” much less “hermeneutic communists,” they put in
place communist initiatives that proved much better at defending their
economies, as Oliver Stone, Tariq Ali,
and many others reported. And they supported hermeneutic pluralities, such as
the recognition of indigenous and environmental rights. What is extraordinary
today is that this inception of radical hermeneutic democracy and social
communist initiatives has a chance to reach Europe and the United States. I do
not mean the Indignados or Occupy movements but rather the possible
instantiations of these movements into political parties, such as Podemos in
Spain and what Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are trying to
do with the Democratic Party in the United States.
PARR: You have developed a
powerful argument for why only art can save us, in a book
by the same name. In what way do you think art practices are well positioned to
expose the very absence of emergency that you speak of?
ZABALA: If, as Friedrich
Hölderlin said, “[W]here the danger is, also grows the saving power,” we must
find ways to experience this danger, that is, the greatest emergency. Art, like
communism, can thrust us into absent emergencies. I consider art and communism
attempts to disclose what I like to call the remains
of Being. This does not mean that visual art and communism have lost their
traditional semantic meaning as aesthetic and political concepts, but they are
vital for the emergence of Being, which is philosophy’s goal. While I think the
idea of communism has much to offer, art practices today are closer to our
emergencies, in particular the greatest emergencies. This is evident in the
ongoing turn from “relational” to “emergency” works of art or aesthetic
theories and in artists’ inevitable participation in global matters. Although
the art world, like religious and political establishments, is also a system
with hierarchies and frames, it has been affected by globalization in a
different way, one that through actual exchange lets works emerge for different
purposes and in unusual settings.
This is evident in the
different experiences of art in art fairs and in biennials: in the rigid art
fairs, the viewer contemplates valuable objects, but in the biennials the
members of the audience all take responsibility for an experience that concerns
everyone. As Caroline Jones recently explained,
it “is the emphasis on events and experiences, rather than objects, that
constitute[s] the surprising legacy of biennial culture.” The fact that the
latest trend in biennials, which have increased markedly in these past decades,
is to offer these experiences in such remote places as
Antarctica and the Californian desert is an indication
that globalized art demands global interventions from artists and
audiences. The “globalization of the art world,” as Arthur Danto once said, “means
that art addresses us in our humanity,as men and women who seek in art for
meanings that neither of art’s peers — philosophy and religion — in what Hegel
spoke of as the realm of Absolute Spirit, are able to provide.”
The artists who seek to expose
these meanings today are the ones whose works demand our intervention in masked
and hidden global emergencies, emergencies that are concealed in the idea of
their absence. This is evident in Pekka Niittyvirta and Timo Aho’s installation of
rising sea levels, Josh Kline’s Unemployment exhibition,
or Eva and Franco Mattes’s “dark web” installations.
These artists demand we intervene in environmental, social, and technological
emergencies that we have not been able to confront because of the commonplace
emergencies cited by the political return to order and realism I mentioned
earlier. The same work of thrusting us into emergency is present in such
aesthetic theories as Malcolm Miles’s “eco-aesthetics,” Jill Bennett’s
“practical aesthetics,” and Veronica Tello’s “counter-memorial aesthetics,”
where environmental, terrorism, and refugee emergencies play central roles. The
goal of these works is not to rescue us from emergencies but rather to rescue
us into absent emergencies, an absence that is at the origin of violence today.
Adrian Parr is an
Australian-born philosopher and cultural critic, a professor, and the dean of
the College of Architecture, Planning, and Public Affairs at the University of
Texas, Arlington, in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, and serves a UNESCO water
chair. She is the author of a trilogy that is composed of Birth
of a New Earth: The Radical Politics of Environmentalism (Columbia
University Press, 2017); The
Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics (Columbia
University Press 2014); and Hijacking
Sustainability (MIT Press, 2009). Her webpage can be found here.
Lula tells world he’s back in the game from jail
Meanwhile, fires rage in the
Amazon and Brazilian President Bolsonaro has become a target of global
indignation
PEPE ESCOBAR, BRAZIL
Brazil has always been a land
of superlatives. Yet nothing beats the current, perverse configuration: a world
statesman lingers in jail while a clownish thug is in power, his antics now
considered a threat to the whole planet.
In a wide-ranging, two-hour,
world exclusive interview out of a prison room at the Federal Police building
in Curitiba, southern Brazil, former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva not
only made the case to global public opinion for his innocence in the whole Car Wash
corruption saga, confirmed by the bombshell leaks revealed
by The Intercept, but also repositioned himself to resume his status as a
global leader. Arguably sooner rather than later – depending on a fateful,
upcoming decision by the Brazilian
Supreme Court, for which Justice is not exactly blind.
The request for the interview
was entered five months ago. Lula talked to journalists Mauro Lopes, Paulo
Moreira Leite and myself, representing in all three cases the website Brasil247
and in my case Asia Times. A rough cut, with only one
camera focusing on Lula, was released this past Thursday, the day of the
interview. A full, edited version, with English subtitles, targeting global
public opinion, should be released by the end of the week.
Lula is a visible embodiment
of Nietzsche’s maxim: whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Fully fit
(he hits the treadmill at least two hours a day), sharp, with plenty of time to
read (his most recent was an essay on Alexander von Humboldt), he exhibited his
trademark breadth, reach and command of multiple issues – sometimes rolled out
as if part of a Garcia Marquez fantastic realism narrative.
The former president lives in
a three-by-three-meter cell, with no bars, with the door open but always two
Federal policemen outside, with no access to the internet or cable TV. One of
his aides dutifully brings him a pen drive every day crammed with political
news, and departs with myriad messages and letters.
The interview is even more
astonishing when placed in the literally incendiary context of current
Brazilian politics, actively flirting with a hybrid form of semi-dictatorship.
While Lula talks essentials and is clearly recovering his voice, even in jail,
President Jair Bolsonaro has framed himself as a target of global indignation,
widely regarded as a threat to humanity that must be contained.
It’s all about the Day of Fire
Cut to the G7 in Biarritz: at
best a sideshow, a talk-shop where the presumably liberal West basks in its
lavish impotence to deal with serious global issues without the presence of
leaders from the Global South.
And that brings us to the
literally burning issue of Amazon forest fires. In our interview, Lula went
straight to the point: by noting the absolute responsibility of Bolsonaro’s
voter base.
The G7 did nothing but echo
Lula’s words, with French President Emmanuel Macron stressing how NGOs and
multiple judicial actors, for years, have been raising the question of defining
an international statute for the Amazon – which Bolsonaro’s policies,
single-handedly, have propelled to the top of the global agenda.
Yet the G7’s offer of an
immediate $20 million aid package to help Amazon nations to fight wildfires and
then launch a global initiative to protect the giant forest barely amounts to a
raindrop.
[Brazil, after this article
was written, rejected the proffered aid from G7 countries, with a top official
telling France’s President Macron on Monday to take care of “his home and his
colonies,” AFP reported. “Maybe those resources are more relevant to reforest
Europe,” Onyx Lorenzoni, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, told the G1 news
website. “Macron cannot even avoid a foreseeable fire in a church that is
a World Heritage site. What does he intend to teach our country?” He was
referring to the fire in April that devastated the Notre-Dame Cathedral.
“Brazil is a democratic, free nation that never had colonialist and imperialist
practices, as perhaps is the objective of the Frenchman Macron,” Lorenzoni
said. -eds.]
Significantly, US President
Donald Trump did not even attend the G7 session that covered climate change,
attacks on the biodiversity and oceans – and Amazon deforestation. No wonder
Paris simply gave up issuing a joint statement at the end of the summit.
In our interview, Lula
stressed his landmark role at the Conference of Parties (COP-15) climate change
summit in Copenhagen in 2009. Not only that, he told the inside story of how
the negotiations proceeded, and how he intervened to defend China from US
accusations of being the world’s largest polluter.
At the time Lula said: “It’s
not necessary to fell a single tree in the Amazon to grow soybeans or for
cattle grazing. If anyone is doing it, that is a crime – and a crime against
the Brazilian economy.”
COP-15 was supposed to advance
the targets established by the Kyoto Protocol, which were expiring in 2010. But
the summit failed after the US – and the EU – refused to raise their
projections of CO2 reduction while blaming Global South actors.
In a sharp contrast with Lula,
Bolsonaro’s project actually amounts to a non-creative destruction of Brazilian
assets such as the Amazon for the interests he represents.
Now the Bolsonaro clan is
blaming the government’s own Cabinet of Institutional Security (GSI, in
Portuguese) – the equivalent of the National Security Council – led by General
Augusto Heleno, for failing to evaluate the scope and gravity of the current
Amazon forest fires.
Heleno, incidentally, is on
record defending a life sentence for Lula.
Still, that does not tell the
whole story – even as Bolsonaro himself also kept blaming “NGOs” for the fires.
The real story confirms what
Lula said in the interview. On August 10, a group of 70 wealthy farmers, all
Bolsonaro voters, organized on WhatsApp a “Day of Fire” in the Altamira region
in the vast state of Pará.
This happens to be the region
with the highest number of wildfires in Brazil – infested with aggressive rural
developers who are devoted to massive, hardcore deforestation; they’re invested
in land occupation and a no-quarter war against landless peasants and small
agricultural producers. “Day of Fire” was supposed to support Bolsonaro’s drive
to finish off with official monitoring and erase fines over one of the “Bs” of
the BBB lobby that elected him (Beef, Bullet, Bible).
Lula was evidently well
informed: “You just need to look at the satellite photos, know who’s the
landowner and go after him to know who’s burning. If the landowner did not
complain, did not go to the police to tell them his land was burning, that’s
because he’s responsible.”
On the road with the Pope
A vicious, post-truth,
hybrid-war strategy may be at play in Brazil. Two days after the Lula
interview, a fateful paella took place in Brasilia at the vice-presidential
palace, with Bolsonaro meeting all the top generals including Vice President
Hamilton Mourao. Independent analysts are seriously considering a working
hypothesis of the sell-out of Brazil using global concern about the Amazon, the
whole process veiled by fake nationalist rhetoric.
That would fit the recent
pattern of selling the national aviation champion Embraer, privatizing large
blocks of pre-salt reserves and leasing the Alcantara satellite-launching base
to the United States. Brazilian sovereignty over the Amazon is definitely
hanging in the balance.
Considering the wealth of
information in Lula’s interview, not to mention his storytelling of how the
corridors of power really work, Asia Times will publish further specific
stories featuring Pope Francis, the BRICS, Bush and Obama, Iran, the UN and global
governance. This was Lula’s first interview in jail where he has felt relaxed
enough to relish telling stories about international relations.
What was clear is that Lula is
Brazil’s only possible factor of stability. He’s ready, has an agenda not only
for the nation but the world. He said that as soon as he leaves, he’ll hit the
streets – and cash in frequent flyer miles: he wants to embark alongside Pope
Francis on a global campaign against hunger, neoliberal destruction and the
rise of neo-fascism.
Now compare a true statesman
in jail with an incendiary thug roaming his own labyrinth.
Capitalists contra workers
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2019/08/27/capitalists-contra-workers/
from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan
Over the past 139 years, the total return on U.S. equities (capital appreciation plus reinvested dividends) grew 905 times faster than the manufacturing wage rate.
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