Mayan Priest Sees Conquistadors in Future – Mural in Municipal Council Building, Valladolid, Yucatan, Mexico. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.Krystian Woznicki (KW): Movement, embodied or
disembodied, unfolds in space and time towards something more or less uncertain
and therefore is directed towards the future. What types of movement relate to
a general sense of crisis of the imagination and future production?
Marcia Cavalcante (MC): This question presupposes a definition of
movement that should be questioned. Movement is not only or mainly related to
the future or to the production of the future.
Movement can be also be related to the past and to the production of the
past, to the present and to the production of the present. Indeed, the idea of
movement that seems to have prompted this question is one that understands
movement only from a demand for production, from a certain demand for
development that directs production in a certain direction and moves movement
toward a certain goal. But movement moves both forward or backward, such as in
whirling, turmoil, or a spasm.
And there is also the point of intensification
of the goal-oriented movement in which the movement moves everything except the
movement itself. This movement that moves everything but does not move movement
is the movement proper to the status quo, to a state of no way out, to a
stasis, a word that in ancient Greek means both status quo and civil war.
Aristotle coined the term “unmoved mover” to describe the principle that
governs the universe. Karl Marx recognized the “unmoved mover” as the principle
of capitalism. The type of movement that is related to what you are calling
“crisis of imagination” or “crisis of future production” – seeming to imply
lack of vision of an “open” future – this is the movement that keeps everything
in movement only in order to keep this movement unmoved, that is, unchanged.
To move the movement would mean instead to
challenge this signification of movement as related to production, to challenge
the movement of production, and thereby to move towards another sense of
movement, to the movement of sensibility.
KW: Whether it concerns the movement of people,
goods or data – what sorts of threats arise in the context of movement
control?
MC: The threats are many and quite visible.
Indeed they are no longer threats, I would say, but already facts: the fact of
exclusion, of segregation, of inhuman inequality, of reduction of all reality
and ideality to the logic of money.
But the most visible invisible fact is the one
of rendering ambiguous. Ambiguity is the most “productive” move in capitalistic
production. Ambiguity is the big result of the production of big-data
technologies and its mediatic treatment. Ambiguity works in terms of ‘maybe
this or that’, it works in terms that mix together the “maybe” and “be what
may”, i.e, that mixes all meanings, values or positions, negations appearing as
affirmation, opposites as endorsements. It mixes possibility with probability
and mere calculus of alternatives.
The logic of ambiguity is the logic of
destruction of meaningful contents by means of preserving empty forms of
meaning. It is the logic of destruction of relations by means of substituting for
them new kinds of relations without relation, (networking!). It is the logic of
a destruction of values, by means of exchanging and transferring values from
one realm to the other, so that values become empty forms to be filled in with
whatever kind of ‘value’ content. At stake is the preservation of forms voided
of content so that they can be filled whenever and wherever with whatever
content. There is a huge need today for learning how to read the grammar, the
syntax, and above all the tones of ambiguity.
KW: What forms of control of movement are most
effective?
MC: The movement of control itself. There are
many strategies being developed in order to control movements. But they must be
understood from the viewpoint of how control is itself a movement and how the
movement of the unmoved mover is what engenders both the internalization and
projection of control over and within all instances of life and death.
Control’s own movement can be attested everywhere. This everywhere attestation
appears clearly in every kind of language, from mediatic to
academic-scientific, from artistic to private language, when people begin to
speak the language of management, the language of the management of language.
It appears when the language of passion speaks
the language of the market. This can only happen because today money has
nothing to do with numbers; money is language, circulation of discourses, of
words. It is not something to admire, as it was when Plato used the word logos,
i.e. language, also in the meaning of money, for instance in his book The
Laws.
KW: What concerns you most when it comes to the
democratic deficit with regard to the control of movement by humans, data and
waste alike?
MC: Democratic control of movement, democratic
participation in decisions regarding the “need” to control movement, such a
claim is deeply ambiguous. It sounds to me very like claims for a more just
capitalism; capitalism is a system based on injustice and inequality and even
if we must fight for more justice and equality within capitalism, we have to
keep in mind that capitalism is based on unjust inequality and unequal justice.
Of course, it is important to fight for more
transparency, and against technologies of decision-making. We cannot not do it.
But this fight is not enough. We cannot afford to forget that democratic
control is unfortunately always entangled with the control of democracy. How to
control election processes in order to avoid the election of a Hitler without
controlling and thereby undermining democracy? Democratic control of movement –
if I understood correctly the question – cannot be a reaction to the demagogy
of fear, because it relies upon the same logic of fear.
The political logic of fear is quite old. One of
the oldest known Maya testimonies of colonization tells that the “dzoules”, the
conquistadores, have taught them (the Mayas) fear and have castrated the sun.
The logic of fear – its educational politics is the logic of control that shows
its most devastating energy when it has to control control itself – is aimed at
enhancing control. It seems that this is the main question that is being asked
here. But asking how to control worldwide, ubiquitous control, we necessarily ask
for a control that is even more controlling than the control itself. However,
not asking how to control the control, we must remain hostage to the
apocalyptic logic of uncontrolled control destroying itself. In this situation
of no way out of the logic of control, the very simple fact of the possibility
of remaining alive, alive to resist, indicates another line of questioning
altogether.
How is it possible that a singular life resists?
For isn’t singular life in itself, as such, already a resistance? Such a
question may sound rather unproductive, but moving the question from the one
about the need to control control towards the question about how life resists
control, resisting both in the sense of ‘counter-acting’ and ‘not following’
the logic of control, it becomes possible to reengage with the need for
developing today what John Keats, the romantic poet, once called “negative
capability”.
To your question about what “concerns me most” I
would say that it is how everyone is concerned only with him/herself. What
concerns “me” most is how everyone is only concerned with self-centred concerns
or interests, never reflecting upon what ‘concern’ means when this same word is
used, in German at any rate, in the sense of “a single economic unit under unified
management”. “What concerns me most” is the need to change our questions,
rather than to find new answers.
KW: Is there a particular need to re-think and
re-imagine movement at the intersection of net politics and migration politics?
If so, why?
MC: The intersection between net politics,
migration politics and the claim for democratic control of movement belong
together, insofar as they share the logic of ambiguity that controls politics
and that becomes the main source of political control. The democratic need is to
admit that democracy as we now know it is not democratic enough. In this sense
we could recall Derrida’s appeal for a democracy to come, not in the sense of a
program to be accomplished in the near future, but in the sense of a site of
problematicity and questioning, which we recognise as a difficult and not
comfortable place to live in.
Freedom of speech is of course a condition qua
non for democracy. But it is not enough, for it is furthermore necessary to
feel the obligation to listen. The democratic need is for the movement of
openness and not for the movement of control controlling movement.
KW: What should we be fighting for?
MC: The first thing to fight for is the cultivation
of “negative capabilities”, those that resist the movement of control, the ones
saying no, the ones giving up privileges. But while negative capability, the
capacity to resist, to say no, to give up privileges are absolutely necessary,
they are not enough. There is on top of this a need for a change in thought, in
language.
KW: Which practitioners and theoreticians in
that fight do you find most inspiring and relevant?
MC: There are many, many practitioners,
theoreticians, artists all over the world screaming, writing, thinking; there
are the popular, the mediatic, the opinion-builders, and many working in
class-rooms, doing the invisible work of critical education despite all the
pressures that are due to the movement of control, both where people suffer dictatorships,
autocracies, and also in more or less democracies.
But there are millions of practitioners suffering
the politics of ambiguity, the politics that make it impossible to have the
right to have rights, to use Hannah Arendt’s expression. It is important to see
that ways of resistance are being practiced despite theoreticians of practices
and practitioners of theory. They are being practiced by excluded, segregated,
expulsed existences. It is important to learn to see how singular and shared
life resists the strategies for killing and exterminating life. There are still
small flowers growing in crannied walls. In order to face the politics of
ambiguity, we need a politics of attention.
KW: What is best practise for an
emancipatory politics of movement?
MC: I have to insist that the fight must be
against the movement of all-control. Brazil is facing now this fight, when the
big media concerns in alliance with the system of corruption work to destroy
the beginnings of a modern democracy, that had to wait so long to get started due
to centuries of colonization and decades of dictatorship.
The fight in Brazil is the one against the
movement of control that aims to sustain the system of corruption by
sacrificing the government that made possible a juridical fightback against the
sediment of corruption down the centuries.
This fight is difficult because decisions,
indecisions and repression are all made in “the name of… the people”, or of
whatsoever serves their class, economic, social and political interests. The
fight is difficult because of the light of ambiguity that the politics of
control throws over the facts. When it come to control, this blending light of
ambiguity is far more effective than the simple concealing of facts.
The fight must be against the flash of
ambiguity, a fight that must be carried on at every level of existence, in both
the intimate and the common sphere. Indeed, the fight must be for a common
sphere that can press the public sphere towards a politics of sharing, a common
sphere that could make clear the difference between a politics of division
(segregation, exclusion) and a politics of sharing (inclusion, openness).
KW: Which projects or initiatives are most
creative in this field?
MC: Adorno was very clear in his analyses of the
cultural industry when he showed how institutions are able to neutralize
critique either through “self-critique” or by eliminating all critical voices
for their own benefit. But what still needs to be better grasped, thought through,
and discussed is how ambiguity is the most destructive weapon of control and
the most effective weapon of destruction. What we need is culture, in the sense
of critical culture, remembering that any critique worthy of the name must be
“destructive”, “deconstructive”, because what is at stake is to show how the
movement of control moves, and to work against ambiguity, to work for
resolutions rather than “solutions” (partial or “final”), to work for a “sense”
rather than for a meaning of the world.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s distinction between sense and
meaning, sense and signification is very relevant in this context. When
scientists publish the “results” of their “scientific researches” showing that
the brain “genetically” tends to xenophobia, this implies that xenophobia is
something quite “natural”. But human beings, being so technically developed,
can control nature and hence even xenophobia, and thereby develop a sense of
morality. When this kind of “thought”, we should say, this racist ideology,
that pretends to be neutral since it is “scientific” and “data-based”, becomes general knowledge, we
are conceding to the generalization of xenophobia. Then we see the death of
culture and of knowledge. We are inside a process of internalization of the
grammar, of the language, of the syntax of segregation, exclusion and
injustice, a process by which technologies of injustice are being naturalized.
This process describes the movement of control we live in.
Only “culture”, “art”, “thinking practices”,
that is, practices of the languages of sense and sensibility, of the languages
capable of saying “no” – this “wildest word” as the American poet Emily Dickinson
wrote once – are capable both of showing the movement of control operating in
our bodies and souls, and of speaking another language, the language of
becoming other. Thus to speak about “other” and “the other” is still to speak
the language of segregation (“you are the other”). We need to learn the
language of becoming other.
KW: What is the role of the state in this
context? And what the challenge for civil society?
MC: The need for ‘culture’ I referred to, in
thinking practices, has to be differentiated from the politics of knowledge carried
on at the basis of the neo-liberal idea of “global-knowledge society”. It has
to be differentiated from the politics of research, with its demands for
efficiency, profit, applicability, that today is produced more and more to legitimate
economic decision-making “in the name of” knowledge, based on evidence, on
data, on statistics.
State and civil society are experienced today in
“quotation marks”. We need to unquote them or even better, to translate them into
the experience of a commons that accepts as its condition the need to share
what cannot be shared, and thereby to move towards openness.