diumenge, de gener 29, 2012

[ es ] Eastwood, Hoover y el State-building norteamericano


[ AVISO: este post adelanta algún contenido de la película ]

[ versión 0.0 ]

La última película de Clint Eastwood es una impresionante lección de política e Historia. Más en concreto, en este biopic sobre el celebérrimo jefe del FBI, Eastwood nos expone con su ya habitual brillantez cinematográfica, una compleja e incisiva tesis sobre el "proceso de construcción estatal" (State-building) que siguen los Estados Unidos durante buena parte del siglo XX. Una lección, sin duda, más que oportuna para estos tiempos que corren en los que las calles se vuelven a agitar a lo largo y ancho del planeta, de Tahrir a Sol, de Catalunya a Wall Street.
 
La temática, sin embargo, es menos novedosa de lo que pudiese parecer a primera vista. En otras podrían destacarse Sin perdón (la frontera exterior y la subsunción formal), El intercambio (el biopoder y la administración de la locura) o Gran Torino (el racismo y la inviabilidad del gobierno etnocrático en la sociedad multicultura), por poner sólo tres de los ejemplos más destacados. En estas obras Eastwood ya nos había demostrado una inusual habilidad para ligar los procesos políticos a las historias personales; una destreza infrecuente para comprender la lógica del poder en toda su encarnada realidad.

En esta ocasión, la tesis política fuerte del director nos explica la manera en que se ha configurado el mando en una democracia liberal tan particular, pero al tiempo tan paradigmática, como son los Estados Unidos. Eastwood nos muestra el Estado como una arena abierta en la que diversos poderes en pugna se enfrentan por asegurar, cada uno a su manera, un mismo mando sobre el cuerpo social, y donde los mayores grados de eficacia y eficiencia en el control de la ciudadanía son, en última instancia, los indicadores últimos y únicos válidos en la configuración del poder soberano. Recurren para ello a diferentes estrategias y entre éstas, claro está, a la guerra sucia, a la suspensión y/o erradicación de garantías constitucionales, a la violación de derechos y libertades fundamentales.

Pero a un tiempo, la base de ese mismo cuerpo social que se aspira a gobernar es, en toda su irreductibilidad al mando, la tensión en que se constituye y vive el soberano moderno. Sin ella perecería. Nadie mejor que Hoover para encarnar las aporías que se derivan de este querer gobernar al cuerpo social cuando uno mismo es, como no puede ser de otro modo, parte de ese mismo cuerpo al que se teme, se desea, se odia, se quiere domeñado. Y esto de manera tanto más sintomática y relevante por cuanto que el propio deseo del protagonista (sus orientaciones afectivo-sexuales) apuntan, precisamente, fuera de la norma, al campo sobre el que se proyecta la represión.

He aquí, pues, el terreno que DiCaprio ha interpretado como trágico, y que, en cualquier caso, es el eje sobre el que se organiza, de manera lúcida, la interpretación del proceso histórico en que se imbrica la paradójica figura de John Edgar Hoover. Un entorno familiar severo, una socialización primaria patriótica, autoritaria; la experiencia y el recuerdo de la represión homófoba que se convierten en epicentro de la maquinaria siempre contradictoria en que se constituye el mando biopolítico; más aún cuando se organiza bajo una declinación democrático liberal que recurre de manera permanente a la suspensión de garantías como única forma de salvaguardarse de los efectos a que abocan su propias aporías existenciales.

Sucede así que Hoover, en su deseo homosexual se nos presenta a un tiempo como el campo de batalla sobre el que aspira a gobernar el mismo paradigma de gobierno de excepción que él mismo instituye por medio de la creación y desarrollo del FBI. Para gobernar necesita gobernarse; desde fuera de si, en el control absoluto del otro (y de ahí su consiguiente incapacidad de amar). No tiene otra alternativa que el horizonte totalitario que lo consume hasta la muerte, de manera inexorable, mientras su vida es un ver como se suceden las mutaciones que una y otra vez adopta el cuerpo social en su imparable progreso emancipatorio y democratizador, siempre desbordante de las configuraciones reactivas y luego desbordables del mando.

Al fin y al cabo, Hoover encarna, en términos histórico-concretos, una mutación necesaria en la ciencia del control social o "ciencia policial" (Polizeiwissenschaft) que el mando reclama en su pervivencia; de entrada frente a la amenaza del movimiento obrero, migrante, libertario y feminista que encarna la figura de Emma Goldman. Más adelante, tras el ocaso del "bolchevismo", exitosamente logrado por la siniestra historia de represión que organiza el mando en los EE.UU., se suceden, primero, el crimen organizado (la paradójica reaparición del deseo en tiempos de crisis como respuesta a la tentativa de ilegalización del alcohol como droga de evasión) y, después, el movimiento por los derechos civiles que encarna el Dr. Martin Luther King.

Y es que de acuerdo con la acertada tesis de Eastwood, la configuración del mando siempre ha sido reactiva, represiva y contraria al valor de toda norma: el gobierno de emergencia que requiere permanentemente del concurso de la excepción para hacer posible el mantenimiento del orden; de un orden, como no, al servicio de su propio perfeccionamiento, de su propia reproducción, del beneficio espurio de quienes se benefician de él, por más que, en las paradojas de sus tristes existencias, no dejen de constituirse como campos mutilados del deseo, personalidades demediadas, engendros de obsesión autocrática que sucumben, por cobardía, vileza y, sobre todo, miedo, al terror que instituye el soberano moderno.

dissabte, de gener 14, 2012

[ en ] The day after: the movement beyond the protest

As our movement transforms from a protest into a new social climate, promising signs are emerging of a new cooperative form of social organization.


Carlos Delclós and Raimundo Viejo for ROARMAG

In his famous speech at Occupy Wall Street, Slavoj Žižek offered the people in attendance (and curious internet users around the world) an important warning in the form of friendly advice: “don’t fall in love with yourselves. We’re having a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?” For the indignados of the 15-M movement in Spain, the general election results of November 20th marked the start of the metaphorical day after.

That the right-wing Partido Popular would take an absolute majority of the government with only a minor increase in votes due to the spectacular disintegration of popular support for the outgoing Partido Socialista was no surprise to anyone, especially the indignados. What may have surprised some, however, is the relatively low intensity of mobilizations since the right wing took office and, slowly but steadily, announced that they would implement the same neoliberal policies and violent austerity imposed by technocratic regimes in Greece and Italy.

As Amador Fernández-Savater recently put it, the questions on a lot of peoples’ minds seem to be: “where are all those people who occupied the plazas and neighbourhood assemblies during the spring? Have they become disenchanted with the movement? Are they incapable of making lasting compromises? Are they resigned to their fates?”

Fernández-Savater doesn’t think so. “With no study in hand and generalizing simply based on the people I know personally and my own observations of myself, I think that, in general, people have gone on with their lives … But saying that they’ve gone on with their lives is a bad expression. For once you’ve gone through the plazas, you don’t leave the same, nor do you go back to the same life. Paradoxically, you come back to a new life: touched, crossed, affected by 15-M.”

And as he so eloquently puts it, 15-M is no mere social organization, but “a new social climate.” But how does a social climate organize itself? What new possibilities have revealed themselves after months of self-management, cooperative civil disobedience and massive mobilization, and what remains to be done?
Over time, the wave of mobilizations that first hit the shores of the Mediterranean and extended outwards over the course of 2011 has overcome its initial, expressive phase. This phase managed to substitute the dominant narrative with our own. We now know that the problem is not some mysterious technical failure we call a crisis, but the intentional crimes of a cleptocracy.

This distinction is crucial: while the first suggests a management dilemma that opposes left- and right-wing approaches to the crisis, the second draws a line between the 1 percent who abuse power in order to steal from the people and those who refuse to consent and choose to resist in the name of the other 99 percent.
Having reached this point, the obvious question becomes, “Now what?” Of course we should continue to protest together, especially if we choose to do so intermittently and massively, favouring a general critique of the system over particular causes. And at the smaller scale, that those specific struggles continue to take the streets is also desirable.

However, it is fundamentally important that these struggles are not overly disconnected from one another or the more general movement; that they unfold beyond their own spaces (hospitals, schools, factories, offices and so on) and into the broader metropolitan spaces of cleptocratic dominance. These processes serve to keep the questions that guide the movement alive and, therefore, adapting to the always changing situations in which they operate. Yet the question of what alternatives we can provide remains.

The conquest of political power, particularly in liberal democracies, is not the most important task of social change. Political change tends to occur once social changes have already taken place. Thus, if what we desire is to change existing social relations and inequalities, it makes little sense to prioritize a change of political power with the hope that social change will be installed from above.

Instead, the first challenge, as John Holloway once put it, is to “change the world without taking power”, to build and strengthen the alternative institutions of the commons. By institutions, of course, we are not referring to the institutions of a political regime such as parliaments, executives and the like. Nor are we referring to those which may lie between the regime and the movement, such as political parties, unions or other organizations.

We are referring to institutions which provide a foundation for the movement and are defined by their own autonomy: social centers, activist collectives, alternative media, credit unions and co-operatives. Institutions like these constitute no more and no less than material spaces in which we can articulate the values, social practices and lifestyles underlying the social climate change taking place all over the world.

In many places, these alternative institutions are already under construction. In Catalonia, the Cooperativa Integral Catalana, which serves to integrate various work and consumption co-ops in the region through shared spaces, education, stores, legal services, and meetings, already has 850 members, thousands of users and has inspired more “integral co-ops” all over Spain.

Meanwhile, in the United States, 130 million Americans now participate in the ownership of co-operatives and credit unions, and 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions. Over the coming weeks and months, we hope to explore some of these alternative institutions and the possibilities they open up for the 99 percent.

In their seminal work Empire, political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri examine the way in which a cleptocratic empire controls people through what Michel Foucault called biopower: “a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself.” In many ways, this is the force we are defeating when our experiences together in the streets, the plazas and the assemblies inform our daily lives and our decisions in the long run.

The spectacular moments we share are an exhilarating, fundamental source of energy for the movement all over the world. They are also fodder for a sensationalist mainstream media which devours events to leave us with the superficial scraps of headlines, sound-bites and riot porn.

But the revolution is not being televised precisely because it is happening inside and between us. We are moving too slowly for their sound-bites because we are going far, wide and deep. And, if we play our cards right, we will be in control of our time, our work and our lives before they know it.