Buenos Aires, 22 de septiembre del 2004

In a text whose origins we can now no longer properly remember, we recently found an inspiring idea: the step from the power of judgement over an object to registering it, to an index of the forms in which we are affected by its presence. This passage also implies for us the passage of a philosophy of art to an aesthetic. We do not know whether this supports the affirmations that form the emphasis of traditional academic art history. But for ignoramuses, at any rate, the question is : what happens during this passage?

An immediate hypothesis that came almost as a reflex was: the basic pre-constituted nature of the subject that sees (judges) is transformed in the second step. The same movement that unsettles the subject’s self-assertion can also, at the same moment, provide it with new inspiration. This also concerns the aspects of a politicisation of the gaze. This passage suggests going back to the point where we all tend – for reasons that should not be simplified – to be biased: to fight against what can affect us. So let us follow this path to see where it leads us. (…)

As is generally known, the crisis in Argentina did not spring up from nowhere. Nor did it blow over in a short time. There would be no use here in carrying out structural analyses or making inadequate observations about all of this. But it is important to say that, even before the outbreak of the crisis, life experiences had arisen whose common denominator was a new collective pre-understanding of the situation. The state no longer organises meaning; the market dissolves meaning. The desire for coherent ties necessitates a step towards action. Survival (in a direct and broader sense) must be seen as this new way of organisation. The elements of this new social formation must be defended and developed, even if the way they will develop in the future cannot be clearly predicted.

The way these forms of experience unfolded (in their many different meanings: in their distribution, their locations, their population, their subjective perspectives, but also according to luck and coincidence) enthroned certain specific figures of the crisis and gave them a special prominence. Let us name four of these figures: the »piquetero« (member of the unemployed movement), the visitor of »asambleas« (district meetings), the »cartonero« (rubbish collector) and the factory occupier. (…)
It is obvious that this spectrum of figures provoked remarkable interest. And it seems as if the interest is now beginning to recede. What remains is the question: how have we experimented with, what have we done, spoken, felt, written, seen and shown of all of this? And how did we do it? These questions have far more relevance for us than if, for example, Argentina and the rest of Latin America were to be spoken of as a laboratory. (…)

At present, Argentina is experiencing an interest in an anticipation of future global tendencies that are seemingly being tried out on its territory. The crisis and phenomena of resistance can be observed in a particularly extreme and advanced form here. What is being tried out today? New forms of living together in the radical social movements or new forms of the articulation of action on uncertain ground? How does a state develop when it allows the crisis of sovereignty and official political power as a constitutive factor? (…)

This view is not isolated. Its hypothesis is that the crisis in Argentina tells of an existence in future form that shows us where the present neo-liberal tendencies are leading. They show us a dys-utopia. They show us a way of resistance against the reforms of the market. They show us – finally – the enemy we have to defend ourselves against: capital, now hegemonic in its financial modality, its technicians and the politicians that represent it. What happens in this sort of view with the figures we spoke about above? They are included in this context of the neo-liberal crisis. That is why critical intellectuals reflect, more or less happily, on the political workability of each figure – up until the present relative lack of interest, where the impression prevails that these forms of struggle have already given all they can. (…)
Our hypothesis is – as we have already implied – that the Argentinean experience loses part of its politicity if it is reduced to the effect of the crisis, if attention is concentrated on what the scenery of the abyss has to offer but victimises the social richness and above all the questions it poses as merely an illustration of the abyss. This forgetting can also become analytical poverty if it neglects the way in which the crisis itself was, in a certain way, forced, pervaded and worked on by the figures we have mentioned above. What seems to us fundamental is that these figures ask as about the human element and its capacities – much more profoundly than the impossibility of transporting their contextual conditions in mechanical fashion. The figures ask us about the human element as a part that is subjected to a constant updating.

In Argentina, these new conditions (theorized according to concepts of post-Fordism, »general intellect« or post-modern Fascism) have not only been brought up to date in terms of technological progress, but also because the changes in labour go far beyond than that which once could be called the proletariat. These changes have materialized above all in the subjective experiences of these new figures, who manage to achieve an effective increase in intelligence and to produce social relationships in very difficult and contradictory situations. This perspective does not imply any aestheticization of destruction (as produced by neo-liberalism), but the chance to see what has already been achieved on this basis: actions that have a special value. They also perhaps give us valuable information about current forms of fascism, which consist in denying this questioning and desiring its disappearance.

In Buenos Aires and other places in the world, people are talking about autonomy. Over and above the many meanings of this word in its various contexts, what is meant seems to be related to these experiences and not to consist solely in independence from the state and capital. For we know to what point both autonomies themselves assist the actions of the market. Autonomy also denotes an increased enquiry into ways out, subjectivities and new languages. In this sense we can say that the figures of the crisis possess a direct universality: doubly strong in view of the fact that this is not an abstract universality and, at the same time, cannot be reduced to the conditions that produced it (poverty, marginalization).
Hasta siempre

Verónica y Diego, por el Colectivo Situaciones

Berlin/Barcelona, late September 2004

Replying to your letter confronts us with the task of writing a letter from Germany. We already started this letter in November last year. And we stopped writing it – because, without our wanting it, fascist history made its presence so strongly felt in this »letter from Germany«. We were ashamed to reproduce almost folkloric clichés. (And, indeed, the Nazi regime is just as affirmatively present in everyday tourist iconography as lederhosen, sauerkraut and beer. But the presence of this picturesque backdrop is also reflected in the untroubled continuity of the Establishment and companies, which, all the more legitimately now that the temporary status of East and West Germany has ended, makes one forget where their basic capital comes from.) But if this is to be about the possibility of a political picture, it is our task – in this »letter from Germany« - to take the path towards formulating this possibility from its negative side. You write about the passage as a moment when the power of judgement pauses to apply its apriorism (its bias) to the object. This may be the moment where the subject that judges and sees can be affected by something that disturbs it in its usual procedure of inference. You write how a politicity could start or intervene in this passage.

Now we would like to recount three episodes to describe how the steps in this passage are constantly falling into a march. This has a lot to do with fascism, with its presence, with the fact that its crimes are unexpiated, with the openness of its enrichment and the acceptance of domination or identity by those who have not revolted.

In the late summer of 2004, there were protests against the government’s »Hartz IV« reforms. The protestors are supported by Attac, the unions and the PDS, but they do not get much sympathy from anywhere. There are suspicions that they have been infiltrated by the right or the left, and the images presented by the media »prove« all these suspicions, according to the influence of the respective PR agencies on the respective channel. (…) In Berlin, the procession goes through the middle of the city past restaurants and bars to the government district. It consists of people who are never seen in this part of the city or at other demonstrations. They come from the suburbs. People with tired faces full of outrage. We have the impression that they have had to really push themselves to do what they are doing, as if they have pried themselves from their homes, shopping centres and waiting rooms with a huge effort. (…) There are protests at the respective headquarters of the ruling parties. Officials from Attac and VER.DI hold speeches. But we don’t want to listen. (…) We are scared of all the pre-configurations hidden behind the loss of »being allowed to work« - the demand for a state as a guarantor for meaning and work. We remember your story about a young man at a meeting who said he didn’t understand anything of what was being said there. But, he said, it was important to him simply to be there. We feel this »presente« here as well. But it is a »being there« of isolated people.

What is missing is that this picture of individual people who join to form a procession on the street becomes a political picture. These individuals, whose degradation and outrage are much more profound than what they articulate. What could we hear in this gap or break between the outrage and its speechlessness – BEFORE it closes with the statement: »Foreigners are taking our jobs!« What could intervene in this passage and its inevitability? (…) If we now answer: »collectivity«, it is only written there, as though we had taken the word from your experiences and copied it into this scene. Perhaps we should talk about what autonomy, what transcension of one’s own injustice creates the possibility of collectivity?

Another episode particularly concerns us – it is the presentation of the Flick collection in Berlin. (…) Two days before the opening of the exhibition, there is a colloquium at the Free University, where former slave labourers talk about the conditions under which they worked and lived in the Flick factories. We cannot see them, because a phalanx of cameras directed at these witnesses is set up between them and us. One woman, when asked her opinion about this collection, says that guilt cannot be inherited. She makes a small pause and continues: she is however quite sure, she says, that a large marble plaque has been set up in this collection stating that everything on display there was financed by profits gained by means of theft, blackmail and deadly exploitation. You can already guess where the cut was made in the reports sent in by that phalanx of TV stations and newspapers.

There are many small scenes or »slips« connected with the Flick exhibition: in front of the museum, a woman holds up a poster showing a female slave labourer to the VIPs who have been invited to the opening. A man in a dinner jacket wants to push a twenty-cent coin into her hand. The next day, another woman destroys one of the art works. At a public discussion where a group of cultural and political functionaries is endeavouring to find a consensual way of implanting this collection into the image of the new Germany which »deals confidently with its history«, another woman hurls insults at the men on the podium. She utters the same tirades with which the other woman destroyed the art work: irrational, polemical, incompetent, hysterical.

If we emphasize the fact that these people were women and that the people on the podium were men, it is not in order to give victims and »perpetrators« sexual identities, but to underline the form of contempt, of social disqualification, that is connected with the protestors and that – far beyond this – makes them seem, and at the same time become, insane. Don’t people go mad if they cannot express what they feel as just, as profoundly right? Language or speech as a transitory, non-identificatory and at the same time collective organ. (…)

But we must also remind ourselves to what a large extent revolt and pathologization have become connected in a particular discursive tradition – to form a kind of conditio humana of these individuals who cannot communicate their protest to any collective. Participants in the so-called »Monday demonstrations« are interviewed by journalists asking why they had taken to the streets. But they are so enraged they can’t answer. We have rejected the close connection of these two words as essentialist. But, when we write »letters from Germany«, it suddenly seems to us plausible. Leaving it at that would mean – as you put it – analytical poverty with regard to all the efforts that are still being made to bring about another form of social politics. It would also amount to disregarding this form of autonomy, which – as you state at the end of your letter – cannot be reduced to a mere effect »of the system«.

To return to what goes to make up a political picture. We have described episodes showing how articulations are being twisted, cut off, concealed. But even in this passive grammatical form of »X is being…«, there is no doubt who the subject of these episodes is.

A y A

This exchange arose as a preparation for a discussion as part of the exhibition »How do we want to be governed?« (Barcelona, August to November 2004). The letters were part of an ongoing correspondence that had been taking place since January 2003. It was about the politics of visual representation and was a part of the project »ExArgentina« (see the catalogue for the exhibition ExArgentina/Steps for the flight from labor to doing, Cologne/Buenos Aires 2004).

 

 

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