livro conferência china - ucam - parte i

Beijing, China, May 23-25, 2012

REFERENCE TEXTS

XXV Conference of the Academy of Latinity

Humanity and Differencein the Global Age

Centered on the theme “Humanity and Difference in the Global Age,” the Beijing Conference allowed for a level of response in itself elucidative of this limit-question of our days, implying as well the loss of the universals for the understanding of the so-called contemporaneity as a plunge into the discourse of the fracture of the social times in the universe of the assertion of identities released from the western general horizon.With China as scenery, the critical consciousness of multiculturalism becomes more acute in the face of a new questioning on the emergent subjectivity. From the beginning, we proceed to the search of these extreme conditions in which the task of social recognition will require the heuristic of what could be the very idea of globalization.As a final awareness regarding the inner meaning of difference nowadays, the conference asks about the real dimension of technology as indeed one of an ontological nature in strict relation to what we call “Being,” truth or value.Living a historical momentum, so far from our beliefs at the turn of the century, the search still for a dialogue in the verge of a “war of religions” outstretches even an epistemological framework, bound by the concern of human rights far beyond a “western ideology.”

ISBN

Candido Mendes UniversityAcademy of Latinity

Hum

anity and Diff

erence in the Global A

ge

Academy of Latinity

Humanity and Difference in the Global Age

REFERENCE TEXTS

XXV Conference of the Academy of Latinity

Humanity and Difference in the Global Age

Beijing, China May 23-25, 2012

Academy of Latinity

Rio de Janeiro, 2012

© Academy of Latinity, 2012

Published byEducam — Editora Universitária Candido Mendes Rua da Assembleia, 10, 42º andar, Centro 20010-010 — Centro — Rio de Janeiro — Brasil Phone: 55 (21) 3543-6500 Email: [email protected]

Editorial CoordinationHamilton Magalhães Neto

ProofreadingAnne Marie Davée and Luiz Carlos Palhares

CoverPé de Limão Agency / Vitor Alcântara

Desktop PublishingPé de Limão Agency / Vitor Alcântara

Cover IllustrationVanguards of Xian. Soldiers (Pit 1) in their original position (200 B.C.). The Qin Dynasty Terra-Cotta Army. Emperor Qin’s Terra-Cotta Museum, Xian, China.

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Table of Contents

IntroductionHumanity and difference in the global age

Candido Mendes .......................................................... 11

1 Occidentalism and Post-Occidentalism

Globalization, cultural translation and the construction of multicentric modernities

Wang Ning .................................................................... 21

The role of BRICS countries in the becoming world order: “humanity,” colonial/imperial differences, and the racial distribution of capital and knowledge

Walter D. Mignolo ....................................................... 41

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Table of Contents

2 Technology and World Civilization

The question concerning technology todayGianni Vattimo ............................................................. 93

The Freudian robot: rethinking the human and the machineLydia H. Liu ............................................................... 105

A contemporary significance on Chinese traditional mode of thinking

He Xirong ....................................................................127

3 Reinventions and InteractionsHumanism at the sight of contemporaneity

Candido Mendes .........................................................147

Politics after indignationDaniel Innerarity ........................................................167

The only emergency is the lack of eventsSantiago Zabala ..........................................................211

4 Spaces of Difference (Part I)

La “clôture” européenneFrançois L’Yvonnet .................................................... 227

Contemporary creativity and the redesign of relations between author and work: the exhaustion of the creative burst

Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida .............................. 241

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Table of Contents

5 Spaces of Difference (Part II)

Seeing GlobalSusan Buck-Morss ..................................................... 293

Humanisme créole en AfriqueMario Lucio Sousa..................................................... 337

6 Mapping the Global Age (Part I)

Brazil, China, and the emergence of the SouthRenato Janine Ribeiro ................................................351

Sciences et technologies: des représentations modernes aux images postmodernes

Gilbert Hottois ............................................................375

Mariátegui and the Andean revolutionarismJavier Sanjinés C. ...................................................... 405

7 Mapping the Global Age (Part II)

Lessons from Mount Lu: China and cross-cultural understanding

Zhang Longxi ............................................................. 429

“Small” countries and “large” countries: the case of Uruguay in Mercosur and Unasur

Gerardo Caetano ....................................................... 447

Virtue in human practice: a comparative perspectiveYang Guorong ............................................................ 507

Participants ...................................................................... 531

Introduction

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Humanity and difference in the global age

Candido Mendes

Centered on the theme “Humanity and difference in the global age,” the China Conference allowed for a level of response in itself elucidative of this limit-question of our days, implying as well the loss of the universals for the un-derstanding of the so-called contemporaneity as a plunge into the discourse of the fracture of the social times in the universe of the assertion of identities released from the western universalism.

With China as scenery, the critical consciousness of multiculturalism becomes more acute in face of a new questioning on the emergent subjectivity. From the begin-ning, we proceed to the search of these limit-conditions in which the task of social recognition will require the heu-ristic of what could be the very idea of globalization. And,

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in this work of foundation, we pay attention to the rupture of the dialectics itself, which, in Mignolo’s approach, con-fronts the limit challenge represented by the advancement of the concepts of de-westernization and decolonization. In the same sense, the first requirement of such heuristic is the phenomenological dislocation of subjectivity itself, involv-ing, at the same time, the new prospective “social place” of the cybernetic instance, in face of the anthropological and biological ones, in the view presented by Gilbert Hottois. Or, in a first founding configuration of humanity vis-à-vis the Freudian robot, in the intuition of Lydia Liu. In such turning point, we face, initially, the extreme critical anal-ysis of the “organic totalities,” proposed by Sanjinés, who shows that the westernizing assumptions obliterated the re-covery of the ethnicity and the identity matrices in the Lat-in American continent, including in the postcolonial stage. Concepts as those of subalternity and people are indispens-able to the perception of the Andean America, as viewed by Mariátegui. In addition, in the prospective of the techné, we are warned by Lydia Liu about the need to distinguish between its prosthetic extension and its dimension proper-ly interactive, which allows for the transformation and, fol-lowing the path of Minsky, the new synthesis between the human psyche and the computer.

We will certainly be in debt with Longxi for his epis-temological caution in the confrontation West-China. Ap-pealing to the metaphor of Mount Lu, that we cannot en-tirely evade an inner view when referring to other, Longxi faces the theoretical dilemma of the “China centered” ver-

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sus “Western centered” approaches in contemporary sinol-ogy. In this heuristic limit, Longxi may remember us of Gadamer’s warning on how much the a priori of homoge-neity represents the real epistemological problem of his-tory. The search for a critical framework for understand-ing the differences in a time of essential diachrony, and in the same prospective required by the Conference, François L’Yvonnet will be taken—along with the territorial dis-card and based on the French example—to the discussion of the statute of the intrinsic acceleration of this new “com-ing-to-be.” Following Paul Virilio’s analysis on the dik-tats of the instant, and turning it into a prospective focused on the survival of cultural identities, L’Yvonnet discusses the question of the emergent Latinity, asking whether one could find in it a universe rather of expectancy than of pas-sive waiting. It is also in accordance with these extreme requirements that Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida asks whether the references of sense remain or not within the new relational configurations of modernity. Or, converse-ly, on how is it possible, in an extreme intent of deconstruc-tion, observe a genuine creativity and its outburst in our days. A whole investigation about the impersonal produc-tion of identities rises on the discussion presented by Bru-no Latour on Viveiros de Castro’s relationalism. A whole mesh of a new subjectivity is examined in the network of aggregate collaboration, still in the scenery of the control-ling societies, confronting, as well the ever more rhizom-atous logic of capital, following the path of De Certeau, Boedanski or Lazzarato. It is in this dimension that Mario

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Lucio Souza has discussed the question of a Creole identity in Africa, as detached from a true matrix of the deep-root-ed Portuguese influence in Cape Verde.

Still in the frame of the emergent epistemological phe-nomenology, the loss of homogeneity in contemporary cul-tural vis-à-vis involves as well the discussion of the effec-tive importance of the “event” in the Baudrillardian sense. This leads also to the discussion presented by Santiago Za-bala, in which is suggested that the prominence of the event today would be in fact the lack of it. In the axis of such new set of questions, current reflections also involves the Arab Spring and the new tensions unexpectedly arisen from by the democratic interplay in the assertion of the Islamic re-turn marked by growing fundamentalism. Hélé Béji’s con-siderations make us aware of the contextual frame of such tension, escaping from the obvious visions of the process of bringing down secularism in Tunisia or Egypt. She induc-es us to an approach towards what could be—in the histor-ical paths that abandoned the convergence of western uni-versalism—the game of excesses and of counter-hegemo-nies affecting rather the emergent than the residual culture.

He Xirong works on the vis-à-vis between the West and the Chinese culture, elaborating on the matrix of the Zhang Tao thought that characterizes the subcontinent since the Quim period and has remained as the panel of the arrival of modernity. This was made clear by the first deconstruc-tion of what was the mind of the Chinese intellectual elites exposed to the nineteenth century imperialism, and of its inevitable counterpoint, the “reversion of expectations” in-

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volving the problem of the centrality, western or Chinese, affecting the specific reality of the subcontinent. In his pre-sentation of the tradition of the Chinese though, through the Zhang Tao and the reflexions of Confucius and Men-cius, Xirong argues about the intrinsic maintenance of the centrality and perennial adhesion to the “medium course” of any thought. It is no other the assurance of impartiali-ty that would be commanded by the Zhang Tao, followed by the reasonability and of the unity of the oppositions and their intrinsic interdependence. In this very sequence, Xirong proposes a heuristic of the contemporaneity, advo-cating for a multidimensional interaction of cultures, put-ting emphasis on their effective innovation.

Yang Guorong goes to the foundations of the Chinese way of thinking, paying attention to the ethical-phenome-nological counterpoint in such specific foundations. What would be the notion of virtue, as equivalent of the aretê in the western matrices? And in the same framework pre-sumes the formation of value accorded to the individual and to the others. He stresses specially the extent to which all the metaphysical emphasis in the affirmation of the reality is replaced, in the Chinese case, by the strict exemplarity of the wise men, what implies the necessary immanentism of all virtue. On the other hand, Innerarity proceeds to the most rigorous prospective in the quest for difference and universality in our days. He inquires about the emergent subjectivity implied in the appearance of the “communi-ty of the indignant,” putting into question the very intrin-sic principle of representation. From the very beginning,

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he shows caution on whether revolution, or the complete rupture of the of contemporary reference codes concern-ing change, is or is not at stake. He goes further to the criti-cal reason in the investigation of protest, discussing, in this sense, whether such phenomenon could be considered as a sign of depoliticization or as a kind of hyper-response al-ready marking an idealization in the discards between the institutions and the civil society. No other is the impasse characterizing the search for the universal maintaining, at the same time, the old democratic congruence in political conducts.

Susan Buck-Morss goes to the extreme counterpoint of identity and difference, allowing for its literal reversion. The technological advancement in photographies of the Earth serves as metaphors to what existed of predetermi-nation of the inclusiveness, in what comes to the percep-tion of the involvement, for instance, between nationality and collective identity, in a kind of response to the greatest challenge of George Lukács, that what characterizes mod-ern society is its loss of any image of totality. In the affir-mation of the radicalness of the prospective, such intrin-sically fragmentary view has also multiple affinities and multiple constellations of senses, in what comes to the cre-ation of the endless task of the transnational expropriation, an objective that can only be captured by the new heuris-tic of a “communist yield,” proposed by Husserl. The new representation of the global universe requires the detach-ment of its circular mapping and a dialectical rupture, hav-ing in mind the permanence of the presumption of a con-

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tinuum in contemporaneity, as revealed by the history of the arts in our days.

The Innerarity’s extreme questioning of democracy has its rebuttal in the analysis of Janine Ribeiro of its configu-ration in the diachronies and the mimesis of Latin America, as well as of the semantic perplexities imposed to sover-eignty within the history of its domination. Focused on the Brazilian case, Janine advances the hypothesis that, in that cultural frame, progress will not depend so much on dem-ocratic rationality, but rather on the effectivity of the inter-twining and enlacement through which civil society would succeed in imposing itself to public power.

Always within the view of de-territorialization within the true cardinal points of the new globalization, Gerardo Caetano goes deep into the vis-à-vis of what is the notion of a small country in this new geography. Uruguay is the ca-nonic example in this emergent subjectivity that relativiz-es territoriality. And, at once, Caetano proceeds to the dia-lectic consideration of the neighborhoods, in the context of the new continental protagonisms. It is along this line that it follows a prospective already opened by Samuel Pinhei-ro Guimarães, precisely through the first vis-à-vis, that is, of Uruguay in its relation with Brazil. This is the context in which takes place the emergent consciousness of the link-ages or the “radial relationship,” implied by the relations with the Mercosur and the Unasur.

In this same approach, Walter Mignolo deconstructs de-colonization along a line of time, in order to project it into the core of the BRICS, discussing the extent to which the

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mark of this nation building would counterpose Brazil to South Africa and to India—and also to their contrasts—to Russia and China, immune to this historical experience and also to the vis-à-vis in their national coexistence.

As a final awareness regarding the inner meaning of difference nowadays, Gianni Vattimo asks about the real dimension of technology as indeed one of an ontological nature in strict relation to what we call “Being,” truth or value.

Living an historical momentum, so far from our beliefs at the turn of the century, the search still for a dialogue in the verge of a “war of religions” outstretches even an epis-temological framework, bound by the concern of human rights far beyond a “western ideology.”

1Occidentalism and Post-Occidentalism

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Globalization, cultural translation and the construction

of multicentric modernities

Wang Ning

In the age of globalization, the meaning and function of translation have largely changed beyond one’s recognition, especially the translation of different cultures. According to Susan Bassnett, translation from a cultural perspective should be viewed as a sort of cultural mediation.1 If it is true, I will in the present paper deal with the function of cul-tural translation in the age of globalization which has helped construct or reconstruct different forms of modernity. I still hold that there is no such thing as the so-called “singular

1 In the conference on cultural transmission organized by the University of Cambridge on May2-4, 2008, Susan Bassenett was invited to give a keynote speech entitled “Translation as a cultural mediation,” which aroused a considerable critical attention among the participants.

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modernity,”2 for modernity itself has become multicentric, or modernities in plural form.3 Even in China, different re-gions, in the process of their modernization, have different forms of modernity. In this way, the unique form of Chi-nese modernity will contribute a great deal to global mo-dernity while deconstructing the singular modernity.

Cultural translation in the age of globalization

Globalization, like other Western things, has finally set-tled down in China, exercising a strong influence on Chi-na’s economy and finances. China could not but make its own choice although it was at first reluctant to do so: whether to involve itself in this world-wide historical trend or resist it with its own national mechanism. Obviously it takes the former attitude since China intends to put itself in the severe world-wide economic competition in which to develop its national economy. As a result, China has made tremendous achievements in its economic reform with its GDP ranking the second immediately after the United States. As a direct consequence of economic globalization, cultural globalization has also been more and more con-fronting scholars of both humanities and social sciences.

2 In the 22nd conference of the Academy of Latinity, “Globalization and emerging differences,” on November 17-19, 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, I gave a plenary speech entitled “Deconstructing singular modernity: the modernization of China’s past and present.” The present speech is aimed to further elaborate my ideas in that speech.3 As for the modernity in plural form with regard to its Chinese practice, cf. Wang Ning, Translated modernities: literary and cultural perspectives on globalization and China, Ottawa and New York, Legas, 2010.

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Globalization, cultural translation and the construction…

Although many of my colleagues are opposed to the pro-cess of cultural globalization, I still think it necessary to adopt a dialectical attitude toward such a phenomenon. That is, cultural globalization has certainly brought us with both negative and positive effects: its positive aspect lies in that, domestically, it enables our cultural industry and academic research to be manipulated by the rules of market economy rather than the previous government’s political intervention, thereby linking up economic con-struction to cultural construction more closely; while its negative aspect obviously lies in making the production of elite culture or non-market oriented cultural produc-tion more and more difficult, as a result of which, a new sort of hierarchy is formed. Internationally, it is true that cultural globalization has brought more cultural prod-ucts and academic ideas from the West and Japan thus strengthening the established “overall Westernization” in China, but on the other hand, it has helped Chinese cul-ture and humanities studies move toward the world and have equal dialogues with our international counterparts. During the past decade, we have found that China has be-come one of the very few countries which are most ben-efited from globalization in an overall way: not only has Chinese economy become the second largest economic entity in the world, but also has Chinese culture moved from periphery to center enjoying more and more popu-larity among world people. The Chinese mode of devel-opment and modernization has attracted world wide at-tention. What is the function of translation in promoting

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Wang Ning

China’s modernization? That is what I will deal with be-fore exploring a Chinese mode of modernization.

I should say that translation has indeed played an indis-pensable role in promoting the process of China’s modern-ization. In speaking of translation from a linguistic point of view, it has long been viewed as a sort of change from one language into another. But from an inter-cultural perspec-tive, it is actually a change from one culture into another largely by means of language. As either literal translation or cultural translation is associated with two cultural con-texts in which their cultural content is conveyed in two dif-ferent languages, these two types of translation can both be regarded as cultural translation in its narrow sense as well as in its broad sense. Undoubtedly, one of the basic princi-ples of translation is that the translated version should be faithful to the original, namely, reaching the plane of the so-called “xin” (faithfulness) as was defined by Yan Fu over a hundred years ago and heatedly debated about in the field of Chinese translation studies for a century. According to this principle, translation should first of all be faithful to the content of the original, with literal translation laying more emphasis on formal fidelity and cultural translation on how to convey in an adequate way the original cultural connotation and how to interpret it or even rewrite it more or less from an inter-cultural perspective. In this way, it is not the fidelity but variation that functions more dynami-cally. Furthermore, cultural translation, different from the traditional linguistic rendition, usually brings about cul-tural transformation, which finds particular embodiment

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in the birth of the new Chinese culture and literature which are largely different from their tradition but which could carry on effective dialogue with the latter while dialoguing with their international counterparts. Of course, both sorts of translation are significant to China’s cultural modernity, but to me, cultural translation is more important and nec-essary even today when we Chinese intellectuals want to translate our ideas and works into the world.

Since Chinese culture and Western culture have entirely different traditions, either of the two is more or less “mys-terious” to the other. It is true, according to sinologist and comparatist Eugene Eoyang, that such a “mysteriousness” has been in existence for quite a long time: “In survey-ing the history of translation, one encounters so many tra-ditional misconceptions, shibboleths, and half-truths that no systematic analysis is possible before these “weeds” of confusion are cleared away. Yet these “errancies” are not blatant “vulgar” errors, for they cannot be accurately char-acterized as weeds to be cleared away or destroyed, since each of them contains a kernel of truth that must be recog-nized. It is for this reason I call these anomalies “myths” rather than errors, because “error” would presuppose a pri-or original “truth” that is contravened.”4 Obviously, it is from the cultural perspective to arrive at the above conclu-sion since Eoyang himself is an “inter-cultural” scholar or a Chinese-Western comparatist. But if we want to commu-

4 Cf. Eugene Eoyang Chen, The transparent eye: reflections on transla-tion, Chinese literature, and comparative poetics, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1993, p. 3.

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nicate with our Western colleagues on an equal plane, how could we overcome the block of such a “myth”? To me, we should neither cater favor to the taste of Western scholars nor express our own view without paying any attention to the Western audience. For neither of the approaches will lead to effective dialogues. Then what we should do is to find a topic which is of common interest and which will arouse theoretical discussion and even debate in our inter-cultural comparative studies. In this way, the dialogue will be of certain significance.

If we say that Eoyang’s view of translation has already gone a bit far from traditional linguistic rendition, then Homi Bhabha’s concept of cultural translation is typically characterized by cultural transformation and cultural me-diation. In Bhabha, translation should not necessarily be faithru to the original since it appeals to something new. In his essay “How Newness Enters the World: Postmod-ern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation,” he endows cultural translation with complete-ly new significance. Bhabha, in dealing with the contrast between Lucretius and Ovid, points out:

Living in the interstices of Lucretius and Ovid, caught in-between a “nativist,” even nationalist, atavism and a postcolonial metropolitan assimilation, the subject of cultural difference becomes a problem that Walter Benjamin has described as the irresolution, or liminality, of “translation,” the element of resistance in the process of transforma-tion, “that element in a translation which does not lend itself to trans-lation.” This space of the translation of cultural difference at the in-terstices is infused with that Benjaminian temporality of the present which makes graphic a moment of transition, not merely the continu-um of history; it is a strange stillness that defines the present in which

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the very writing of historical transformation becomes uncannily vis-ible. The migrant culture of the “in-between,” the minority position, dramatizes the activity of culture’s untranslability; (…).5

Obviously, to Bhabha, translation in the age of global-ization is no longer confined to the translingual practice, but rather, points to a sort of transcultural practice. In this way, it is correct to view translation in today’s global con-text as a sort of cultural mediation: relocating one culture and different cultures in a broad transcultural and global context, in the process of which center moves to periphery and periphery moves toward center in an attempt to decon-struct the monolithic center. This is also true of China’s do-mestic practice.

Toward multicentric modernities: the case of Shanghai modern

Starting from Bhabha’s cultural translation, we could observe the case of Shanghai modern which was construct-ed as a consequence of such cultural translation and repre-sentation. Of all the Chinese metropolises, Shanghai is per-haps the most modern, most cosmopolitan and most West-ernized, with unique characteristics of Shanghai culture, partly for its past colonial legacy, and more importantly, for its open and embracing characteristics. That is, it is open to a sort of ubiquitous modernity, in the process of which Shanghai has become a world-renowned metropolis, or an-other center in China only next to Beijing. And in econo-

5 Homi K. Bhabha, The location of culture, London and New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 224.

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my and finance, it is even more important to China’s mo-dernity project. In this megacity, everything, both mod-ern and postmodern, both colonial and postcolonial, and sometimes even premodern, could be found among peo-ple of different walks of life. It is also politically hybrid-ized: it used to be a financial center under the National-ist regime, which is still the very financial center in social-ist new China. It has all the imperialist concessions and buildings of European colonial architectural styles, and it is also the very cradle of the working class uprising with the country’s biggest contingent of industrial workers in it. It is the birth place of the Communist Party of China, and it is also the very place where its worst enemy Chiang Kai-shek and his clique rose. All the progressive and reac-tionary forces came here, now coexisting each other, and now fighting against each other in this megacity with the Communists finally winning in 1949. But after the birth of New China, along with the political and cultural central-ization in Beijing, capital of new China, and the political and administrative decentralization in Nanjing, capital of old China, Shanghai still keeps its unique metropolitan sta-tus and modern characteristics, even becoming more and more modern toward the replacement of Hong Kong as an-other more forceful financial center and shipping center.

Since Shanghai has all the above unique characteristics as a cosmopolitan metropolis, various writers and human-ities scholars express their interest in it and some of them have even written about it. In the history of modern Chi-nese literature, the so-called new sensationalist school rose

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in this city and became well known throughout the coun-try. It should be recognized that the status of modern me-tropolis of Shanghai was formed historically, politically, economically and culturally. Just as Leo Lee, who is both interested in the issue of modernity and in this modern me-tropolis, in describing the modern cosmopolitan character-istics of Shanghai, writes:

By 1930 Shanghai had become a bustling cosmopolitan metropolis, the fifth largest city in the world and China’s largest harbor and trea-ty port, a city that was already an international legend (“the Paris of Asia”), and a world of splendid modernity set apart from the still tradi-tion-bound countryside that was China. Much has been written about Shanghai in the West, but the corpus of popular literature which con-tributed to its legendary image bequeathed a dubious legacy….At the same time, the negative side of this popular portrait has been in a sense confirmed by Chinese leftist writers and latter-day communist schol-ars who likewise saw the city as a bastion of evil, of wanton debauch-ery and rampant imperialism marked by foreign extraterritoriality, and a city of shame for all native patriots.6

Such is the mixed and hybridized image of Shanghai. It is certainly correct of Lee to have the above descriptions as he has made long and careful investigations into this city from his unique perspective of a Chinese American scholar. But what does Shanghai modern mean to us Chi-nese humanities intellectuals today? Will it still be satis-fied with its colonial legacy or has it got rid of all the colo-nial and traditional legacies looking completely new to the world? This is a question hard to answer. But still, I think it

6 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai modern: the flowering of a new urban cultu-re in China, 1930-1945, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 3-4.

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necessary to confront it. Obviously, Leo Lee here observes Shanghai from the perspective of an outsider rather than an insider, while we just observe it from that of insiders as we are engaged in building Shanghai into a modernized cos-mopolitan metropolis, or another cultural center in China. In this sense, we have actually pushed forward his ready-made research.

Undoubtedly, the modernity of Shanghai lies in the fol-lowing three fields: first, as an economic and financial cen-ter whose position has long been established and univer-sally recognized; second, as a shipping center whose im-portant role has been made more and more manifest in the present era along with the recent expansion and modern-ization of the city itself; and third, as one of China’s cul-tural centers whose role has somewhat controversial as the city is not the capital of the country, far from the geograph-ic central areas but whose characteristic is also apparent. Frankly speaking, the first two roles of center have long been formed historically, economically and geographical-ly. The last role of center, although existing in history as well, is currently in the process of coming into being.

Historically speaking, Shanghai was, from its very be-ginning of Chinese modernity, not built as a political cap-ital, but rather as a financial capital. It is close to the old capital Nanjing, but closer to the sea which was more con-venient for overseas transportation and shipping. Thus it certainly has its geographical advantage. Since Shanghai is closer to the sea, symbolic of the oceanic civilization of global capital, it attracted great deal of foreign direct in-vestment more easily. Thus numerous foreign empires oc-

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cupied parts of the city as their concessions and built the headquarters of their transnational corporations. By and by, Shanghai’s role of both the financial center and ship-ping center of China was established. After the founding of the PRC, the central government also realized the im-portant place of Shanghai in world economy and finance. It immediately re-established Shanghai, in the new national administrative divisions, as a special municipality directly under the leadership of the central government.

Since the administrative and economic means did play an important role in putting Shanghai as an important po-sition in China, then how shall we explain the role of cul-tural center of Shanghai in China? People might well raise the questions: why could Wuhan and Zhengzhou, two of the provincial capitals which have a splendid cultural heri-tage and solid foundation for the central plains civilization, not become cultural centers? Again, due to the disadvan-tage of these two cities which were not developed so fast as Shanghai, they could not attract cultural and intellectu-al talents who might well help modernize them both cultur-ally and intellectually. But Shanghai did, even before the founding of the PRC, attract lots of eminent writers, artists and humanities intellectuals, and establish quite a number of prestigious universities. Even now, we have noticed that there are 83 universities and colleges in Shanghai, while there are 81 in Beijing. Furthermore, according to statistics of international publication, the numbers of articles pub-lished by Shanghai’s scholars of humanities and social sci-ences are immediately after those from Beijing.

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In view of the above historical, geographical and eco-nomic advantages, Shanghai has certainly formed its unique culture: the so-called Shanghai Culture (Haipai wenhua) as opposed to the so-called Beijing Culture (Jing-pai wenhua). They co-exist and contend each other form-ing different characteristics of Chinese national culture. If we say that Beijing culture represents traditional Chinese culture, then Shanghai just plays a role of cultural trans-lation and cultural mediation between different cultures. And the phenomenon of Shanghai modern also plays the role of multicentric modernities in the Chinese as well as global context.

Centralization and decentralization in culture

Since Shanghai, as a megacity in present day Chi-na, plays a very unique role in today’s Chinese society and people’s life, it cannot be replaced by any other Chi-nese cities, not only because of its past colonial history but also because of its present condition of modernity. The reason why Shanghai could become such a world re-nowned cosmopolitan metropolis in China is largely due to the following two facts. Or we should say that it has undergone the processes of both centralization and de-centralization.

Firstly, I will deal with its centralization. Due to Shang-hai’s unique geographical, colonial and economic advan-tages, various Chinese governments from the beginning of the 20th century have tried to centralize this city placing it in a very important position in the mapping of China. And

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lots of eminent writers and artists, such as Lu Xun, Xu Bei-hong, Fu Lei, Ba Jin, etc, settled down here or viewed it as their bases, thus helping to form another cultural center in China. Some influential newspapers and literary maga-zines, such as Wenhui Bao (Wen Wei Po), Shouhuo (Har-vest), and Shanghai Wenxue (Shanghai Literature) are all published in Shanghai, not only enriching the cultural life of the city, but also influencing the orientation of develop-ment of entire Chinese literature and culture. If we say that the first so-called Marxist-Leninist Dazibao (big character poster) was released in Beijing in June 1966 which official-ly launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, then we can certainly date it back to the publication of Yao We-nyuan’s critical article on Wu Han’s Hai Rui Baguan (Hai Rui Dismissed from Office) in late 1965. Although the pro-ducing of the article was firmly supported by Mao Zedong at the time, it was still prevented from being published in Beijing. In this way, Mao could not but think of Shang-hai, another cultural center which would influence the entire country. Another important event should be men-tioned here is the development of Pudong which was lat-er than that of Shenzhen but which is now proved much more modernized and global with Shanghai’s late-com-ing advantages. Although Shenzhen is also quickly devel-oped and modernized from an economic point of view, it is still far from being a cultural center as compared with Shanghai. In this sense, we should say that the formation of Shanghai modernity is also a result of administrative and cultural centralization.

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Secondly, let us look at the process of its decentraliza-tion. As we all know, China used to be called a “Middle Kingdom,” or a sort of central empire, viewing all the oth-er countries, be they developed or under-developed, “un-civilized,” and all the other peoples “barbarians.” Chinese people have long had a very stubborn consciousness of hierarchy or centrality. In this sense, democracy in Chi-na should be realized in a gradual and long process. Any democratic movements in modern Chinese history have finally caused big turmoil and even achieve contrary re-sults. The same is true of Shanghai which suffered a great deal during the Cultural Revolution when the “grang of four” were in power.

But since Shanghai has a unique position in the coun-try, the formation of Shanghai modern is also due to its decentralizing efforts, as a result of which the city is be-coming more and more indispensable not only economi-cally and financially but also culturally. The above-men-tioned facts, such as the settlement of eminent writers and artists and the function of influential media, have certain-ly centralized Shanghai, but they have also helped decon-struct the monolithic center of Beijing. If we say that the successful running of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 is to a great extent a political and cultural success, then we shall affirm that the successful organization of the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 is more an economic and cultural success: the former announced to the world that gone are the days when Chinese people are viewed “the sick of east Asia” (dongya bingfu), and the latter largely

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contributed to the increase of China’s GDP and its cultur-al influence world wide. In speaking of culture, the former put more emphasis on promoting a sort of traditional Chi-nese (Confucian) culture with lots of Confucian ideas high-lighted during the opening ceremony, while the latter tries to emphasize a truly pluralistic cultural atmosphere in this modernized city with people from different countries and cultural backgrounds feeling quite at home. Thus Shanghai modern means in today’s global context both cultural de-centralization and cultural recentralization, with the latter more and more conspicuous in the years to come. In view of the above-mentioned facts, a sort of multicentric moder-nities has come into being even within the country. Here, translation plays the role of cultural mediation: it not only mediates between a cosmopolitan culture and a regional culture, but also mediates between centralized great (tradi-tional) Chinese culture and a decentralized schizophrenic (modern) Chinese culture.

Cultural translation and the de-marginalization of Chinese culture

It is true that, like cultural studies, cultural translation is characterized by deconstructing the artificial binary op-positions, such as the opposition between elite culture and popular culture, that between strong culture and weak cul-ture, that between Eastern and Western culture and that be-tween global culture and regional culture, enabling differ-ent cultures to have equal dialogues. To realize this aim, translation is no doubt an indispensable means. But unfor-

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tunately, there has been an unbalance in China’s cultur-al and literary translation, with the number of translations of foreign culture much more than that of Chinese culture, the simple reason of which lies in the fact that Chinese peo-ple know much more about the West than Western peo-ple know about China. But even so, Occidentalism has be-come a mysterious concept or phenomenon among quite a number of Chinese people, especially those young people who do not have much knowledge about the West and its culture. As far as translation itself is concerned, we have stronger and more translators in introducing Western cul-ture into China than vice versa. Particularly in recent years, affected by contemporary commercializing trend, many of the young translators do not spend much time laying a solid foundation in foreign languages and accumulating as much knowledge as possible, so they find difficulty translating Chinese culture into the major Western languages, espe-cially into English, which is more and more hegemonic in the age of globalization playing the role of lingua franca. In this sense, the significance of cultural translation in to-day’s Chinese context lies in that we should translate the essence of Chinese theory, thinking and culture into the major Western and international languages so that Chinese culture and scholarship will move from periphery to center in an attempt to deconstruct the monolithic center of Euro-centrism or Westcentrism.

In the past, China, in the Western people’s eye and the means of Western representation and cultural translation, was both poor and backward far from the center of world

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civilization. Due to the distorted descriptions and trans-lations either by the sinologists or non-sinologists, China and Chinese people long appeared inferior to the West and Western people. Such is the direct reason caused by the so-called orientalism, or more specifically, a sort of “Sinolog-ical-orientalism.” According to Daniel Vukovich, this sort of “Sinological” form of orientalism is characterized by taking “as its object an “Other” that has since the 1970s oc-cupied an increasingly central place within the world sys-tem and Western intellectual-political culture: the People’s Republic of China.”7 But now, along with the rapid devel-opment of Chinese economy, China appears much differ-ent in the Western means of representation and translation:

Why China, then? Let us begin by assuming the antagonisms and epis-temological challenges—such as orientalism—that have subtended the China-West relationship for, say, three hundred years. Let us as-sume these exist and that they have something to do with China in the-ory (…). So, too, let us recall that “our” relationship to China is over-whelmingly an economic (and political) one. China’s rise, its status as the “next” superpower, the manufacturer of the world, the new Asian hegemony, the world-historical consumer market, the buyer of last re-sort for U.S. dollars, the second largest economy—and so forth.8

But even so, we should say that China is developing in an uneven way with the striking difference between the rich and the poor and that between city and countryside and between the coastal areas and interior regions. Sim-ilarly, Chinese culture, like the Chinese modernity, is by

7 Daniel F. Vukovich, China and Orientalism: Western knowledge production and the P.R.C, London and New York, Routledge, 2012, p. 1.8 Daniel F. Vukovich, China and Orientalism: Western knowledge production and the P.R.C, p. 142.

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no means in singular form since China is one of the larg-est countries with the biggest population in the world. The above description of Shanghai modern proves that even within the Chinese context, there are multicentric moder-nities. The task of translation is to mediate between these different cultural modernities making them harmonious without erasing their differences. This is perhaps the very force where Chinese culture lies.

Then people might raise another question: there once appeared an “overall Westernization” in China, is transla-tion responsible for it? Yes, it is. That is why today’s intel-lectuals of nationalist sentiment often offer their critique of such large-scale (cultural) translation in modern Chinese history. As for this, I would say a few words.

As we all know, Chinese culture which is profound in content and splendid and rich in heritage cannot be “col-onized” although it has been “Europeanized” or “West-ernized” since the beginning of the 20th century through a large-scale translation. It is true that we lack our own criti-cal discourse and has borrowed a lot in our cultural and lit-erary criticism according to some scholars. Also it is true that we have to publish our research results in the inter-national language—English—which is said to have “col-onized” the Chinese language and Chinese culture largely due to the advent of globalization and the popularity of In-ternet. But it is an inevitable stage through which Chinese culture will become more mature approaching the main-stream of world culture. So it is unnecessary to launch a campaign to “decolonize” Chinese culture and its lan-

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guage, which may well give rise to a new state of isolat-ing China from the international community. We should not, however, neglect another fact: of world culture, Chi-nese culture is still in an inadequate position of marginali-ty, whose value has by no means been fully recognized by the world with the exception of very few sinologists who usually have a deep understanding of certain aspects of Chinese culture but lack a comprehensive grasp of Chi-nese cultural and aesthetic spirit. Therefore, it might help Chinese culture to move from periphery to center and de-construct the monolithic center if we set off to “de-mar-ginalize” and “de-territorialize” Chinese culture by start-ing with a new cultural translation. If it should be done in an adequate manner, it would put Chinese culture in a fa-vorable position of carrying on equal dialogues with West-ern culture as well as international scholarship. Hence the function of cultural translation in the present era known as that of globalization can never be replaced by any other means of communication.

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The role of BRICS countries in the becoming world order: “humanity,” colonial/imperial

differences, and the racial distribution of capital and knowledge

Walter D. Mignolo

Summary

My oral presentation will be based on this summary. The narrative that follows the summary substantiates the main points I am putting forward to debate.

In this paper I made two interrelated arguments and present it in three parts. Members of Academy of Latinity are already familiar with the ideas exposed in Part I, so you can go directly to Part II. New participants in this confer-ence may be less familiar with some of the concepts, chief-ly that of “coloniality” as a constitutive and darker side of “modernity” and would like to read Parts I and II. This is the first draft, please read it as such.

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In Part III I develop the main argument that connects “humanity,” “difference” and the politics of “BRICS coun-tries.” The argument is this: BRICS countries have an im-portant role to play—and they know it—in balancing the polycentric world in which we are already living and will further unfold in the near future. BRICS appear to be at the point of no-return. These countries have embraced the economy of growth, development and accumulation (that is, economic coloniality). That aspect is certainly a prob-lem. The politicization of the civil society that is already manifested in several spheres, from the World Public Fo-rum to the “Indignados” of Spain and the Occupy Wall Street, is mounting. At the same time, the decolonial lega-cies of Bandung are reviving in the uprising of Tunisia and Egypt, in the students movements in Chile and Colombia, among decolonial organizations among migrants in Eu-rope from the ex-Third World; among Latinos/as and Afro-Caribbean in the US; in the organization denouncing and stopping the open pit mining in South America and Africa; the continuing work of La Via Campesina and Sovereignty of Food, etc. etc. Dewesternization may or may not be able to change the course of history. This is an open question.

For it is not clear how BRICS states will deal with the limited resources of the planet and the increasing competi-tion for natural resources of Western states (and their sup-porters) and BRICS states (and their supporters). Further-more, exploitation of labor and the drive toward consum-erism is an essential component of the economy of growth and development. To maintain a society upon the promises

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The role of BRICS countries in the becoming world…

of constant growth and that happiness consists in living to consume rather than in consuming to live, people not only need money and commodities to buy; they have to be con-vinced that this is the only way to live. There is faith in-volved in maintaining a market based on economic coloni-ality (“capitalism” in the liberal and Marxist vocabulary).

The economic success of the BRICS countries comes from the fact that the leadership is engaged in epistemic economic disobedience vis-à-vis the IMF and the World Bank, two institutions of global scope and, until now, of lo-cal management. Secondly, the economic affirmation leads to the second step taken recently at the Delhi Summit in-dicates that the group is taking a leadership in global gov-ernance and global political coherence. In this respect, the fourth BRICS summit in Delhi was a turning point and a point of no return, in the evolution of a group that had fo-cused on global economic governance issues, but the Del-hi Declaration stated that the goal is also to achieve great-er political coherence. The Declaration of the Summit, that touches and recommended dialogue to solve the problems in Syria and Iran, at the same time recommended that Iran should continue its peaceful nuclear investigations:

We agree that the period of transformation taking place in the Middle East and North Africa should not be used as a pretext to delay resolu-tion of lasting conflicts but rather it should serve as an incentive to set-tle them, in particular the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Part II is devoted to the second argument. I argue that the commonality of BRICS countries goes beyond econom-ic and political interests. Although, to my knowledge, this

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issue has not been made explicit, there is an ethical factor supporting economic and political orientations and deci-sions: the five BRICS countries are of and ruled by “people of color.” This is one of the legacies of the Bandung Con-ference and Sukarno’s clear statement: “This is the first international conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind.” The statement is true with the clarification that before 1500 there were people with different skin col-or and different communities of beliefs, ethical and/or spir-itual, but there was not “people of color” in the sense that expression has meant since sixteenth-century, and main-ly, since Linnaeus. In that regard, it was the first interna-tional meeting on planet earth since “people of color” were invented by Western men of knowledge and their inven-tion became hegemonic. Colonial and imperial differenc-es were precisely invented around “purity of blood” first, skin color later to which more recently language, religions and nationalities have been added to define the profile of “people of color.” Thus the bottom line, the non-said but I suspect deeply felt, is the colonial/imperial wound that connects the five countries in the history of the modern/colonial world. Nevertheless, and whatever you count, all BRICS countries carry the “stigma” of “people of color,” of non-Western people, even if their skin is white like Slavs in Russia or European migrants to Latin America from the second half of the nineteenth-century. I am myself a result of that migration.

In Part I I set the stage and offer the frame for the two arguments I just outlined. I address the topic of this meet-

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ing of the Académie de la latinité by assuming that there are “different kinds of difference.” And there is one kind that is crucial to understand the Western concept of “hu-manity.” I describe it as colonial and imperial difference. These differences do not exist in the world but have been invented in the process of Europeans building knowledge and classifying the world. Colonial and imperial differenc-es are epistemic and ontological. They consist in describ-ing certain people as ontologically and rationally less hu-man. The epistemic difference establishes that certain peo-ple are less rational than the norm, and the norm is the con-cept of rationality of who is making the classification and the ranking. And because some people are rationally defi-cient, they are ontologically inferior. Colonial and imperi-al differences are the foundation of modern/colonial racism and the concept of “humanity”: the standard that serves the reference to classification and ranking.

Part I — Different kind of “differences”

“Difference” is a word that carries several meanings. One among many refers to human affairs like a quarrel in a dispute; it refers also to the foundation for making dis-tinction and classifying. Interestingly enough, both mean-ings are interrelated for people quarrel about classification. I will focus on “difference” and “classification” as they en-croach on the concept of “humanity.” “Humanity” rather than a universal concept to name what certain living or-ganism have in common, it refers to a system of classifica-tion controlled by certain organism that see themselves as

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part of “humanity” while creating “difference” to identi-fy lesser humans (e.g., Saracen, pagans, barbarians, prim-itives, communists, underdeveloped, etc.): he who controls knowledge controls classification.

Thus, the very concept of “humanity” rests on differ-ence. Two foundational differences are of my interest here. One is historical and the other is logical. “Humanity” is not universal but a historical concept. Or, if you prefer, it is universal only for the people who invented it and consid-er it to be universal and representative of everybody on the planet. It so happens that most of the people on the planet did not benefit from the concept of “humanity.” Its univer-sality is only regional: it is a Western concept. Its historical foundation rests on the European Renaissance: “humanity” as difference with non-Christian religions and with less-er humans, like “Indians” in the New World and Africans who were enslaved and exploited. “Humanity” served well Renaissance Men to set themselves apart from “anthro-pos.” “Humanity” and “anthropos” are two Western con-cepts. There is nosuch entities beyond Western vocabulary. “Anthropos” is a general term to designate all the “differenc-es” upon which the concept of “humanity” has been built: pa-gans and Saracens, barbarians and primitives, “white, black, yellow and brown” races, underdeveloped and the rest, etc. “Humanity” is a concept of Western cosmology and Western cosmology has been built on the grounds of two classic lan-guages (Greek and Latin), and six modern European imperi-al languages: Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (Renaissance)

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and English, German and French (from the Enlightenment to the European Union).

What is crucial to understand here is that both, “human-ity and anthropos,” are Western concepts. There is no onto-logical anthropos beyond a system of classification that in-vented it as ranked difference. What there is, is the enunci-ation: actors, institutions and categories of thought that in-vented both categories and find themselves in a position to make them pass as “reality.” Those who invented the terms did not place themselves among the anthropos but, obvious-ly, among the humans who were in control of knowledge (categories of thoughts, imperial languages, institutions). And if you control knowledge, you can allocate meaning; and if you control meaning you can also control the econo-my and allocate money. I will argue in Parts II and III that one of the consequences of the “humanity/anthropos” dis-tinctions (which is imbedded in the rhetoric of modernity/logic of coloniality), was and is the planetary distribution of capital, labor and knowledge.

“Humanity” is the Western version of the self-con-sciousness that certain living organisms have of them-selves and can express in sign systems. What is common to all known communities on the planet, past and present, is precisely the self-consciousness of themselves as a group, as a community and as an individual within the group that share the memories of the group. When a community at certain stage of its organization reaches the point of collec-tive self-consciousness, the community builds narratives of a common heritage. What is “universal,” then, is not the

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concept of “humanity” but the self-consciousness of com-munities themselves as “people:” what could be consid-ered universal (I would better say “global”) is the self-con-sciousness and the enunciation upon which the classifica-tion is enacted. I have been talking with my colleagues at the Advanced Institute about the topic and asked how Chi-nese describe themselves, how the self-consciousness of a common heritage is built. I was informed that in Mandarin, there is a concept “Ren” (just in passing, in Quechua there is the concept of “Runa” equivalent to “Ren” and “Human-ity”), visibly expressed as

“Ren” was the self-consciousness of people who inhab-ited the center of the nested rectangles, according to terri-torial imagination in Ancient China (Incas modeled the ter-ritory as diagonal of an open square. There is more to say about the five nested rectangles and who inhabited them. But I will not go there. The point is to note that the nested rectangle was invented by people who inhabited the center. That is also a “universal” or global features of communi-ties building narratives of their heritage and spatial organi-zation of their territoriality.

� “Dongyi,” referred to people outside the center, in-habiting the lands where the sun rises (dong);

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� “Nanman,” referred to people outside the center who inhabited the land to the left from where the sun raises (nan);

� “Xirong,” referred to people outside the center who inhabited the land where the sun sets (xi means);

� “Beidi,” referred to people inhabiting the lands to the right from where the sun sets: barbarians in the north (bei);

We could go around and make similar observations based on ancient Arabic language, Nahuatl and Aymara, Hindi and Bengali, Wolof and Bambara, etc. etc. I won’t pursue these analogies here. I wanted to name them to re-mind you that “humanity” is one among many regional con-cepts that communities built to express the consciousness of themselves as people and their genealogy). The problem is that “humanity” is the only concept that is at once local and became global (or universal) and in so doing demoted the “centrality” that other civilizations have of themselves. The point is that once “humanity,” as the self-referential concept of the newest civilization on the planet (Western Civilization is only 500 years old) came into the picture, it managed to project its own regional self-consciousness into a planetary one. The “success” in universalizing the concept of “humanity” was devastating, for it is upon it that modern/colonial racial classification was founded. As we know, racial classification is tantamount to racism. Why I am saying that the concept of “humanity” was the founda-tion of racism? Because racism is not a question of skin col-or or the purity of your blood, but a classificatory system

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that takes a definition of the “human” and “humanity” to rank “lesser” beings in need of be lifted up: Christianized, civilized, developed, organize themselves in multi-party system and built a civil society that votes, etc. etc. West-ern “humanity” became the exemplar of the species at the same time that was set up to classify and rank people of the world taking the idea and the ideal of “humanity” as point of reference. Thus, the global age and the concept of hu-manity are two sides of the same coin: the historical foun-dation of global coloniality.

There are of course in every community, large or small, the ones who classify and those who are classified. But, for the moment, I am talking about a classification that became planetary (imperial) and that the people on the planet had to deal with since 1500 of the Christian era, even if they had their own system of classification, like Chinese, Quechua and Nahuatl, Islam, Africans, etc. The polycentric and plu-riversal enunciations (the first nomos of the earth if you are familiar with Carl Schmitt), was colonized by the mono-centric (second nomos in Schmitt’s terminology)1 univer-sality of the Western concept of “humanity.” Thus, “ren” in Chinese or “runa” in Quechua were subordinated to “hu-manity.” The colonial and imperial differences operate un-der the same logic. The “difference” between both is in form and content, rather than in logic, whether people clas-sified in reference to “humanity” were directly colonized

1 I analyzed Schmitt at length in The darker side of Western modernity: global futures, decolonial options, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011.

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or they were subjected to the logic of coloniality. Africans were not colonized until the late nineteenth-century, but coloniality and the colonial difference, demoted them in the chain of “human” being to naturalize them as “slave” when, in reality, they were “enslaved”: meaning, captured because classified as “lesser human.” The New World was colonized and so later on India, for example, but not Chi-na and Japan. Neither of them however escaped the log-ic of coloniality under the guise of the progressive logic of modernity. Thus, it means also that they did not escape the “colonial difference” of being a lesser human; but this time not through direct colonization but through coloniality and “imperial difference.”

The idea of the “global age,” like that of “difference” and “humanity,” depends on the universe of discourse in which it is being used. Neoliberals exploited the term “glo-balization” to advance the goal of breaking away barriers that were cumbersome to free trade. Postmodern thinkers were also enthusiastic about the “borderless world” (Miy-oshi), and liberal cosmopolitans were also celebrating the overcoming of nationalism and nation-state restrictions (Nussbaum). The “global age” could be also dated back to 1500. That is what Mexican thinkers of Irish descent, like Edmundo O’Gorman and Catholic Germans like Carl Schmitt did in the 50s at “different” ends of the colonial dif-ference. O’Gorman belonged to the one classified; Schmitt to those who classified. Both saw the Eurocentered char-acter of the European regional claim to universality. It was back there and then (toward 1500) when the globe was for

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the first time in the history of human kind, explored and mapped. And those who mapped the world were not Afri-cans, Asians or New World people. There are two types of narrative that accepts this starting point. One is Eurocen-tered (literally: centered in Europe). This is the narrative provided by Carl Schmitt in his The nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Ius publicum Europaeum (1950). The term “eurocentered” is used by Schmitt to un-derline the fact that global linear thinking and internation-al law divided the planet according to European interests. The people involved in global linear thinking were not only “humanists” but they defined themselves as “humanity.” Global linear thinking was not only a legal and geograph-ic way of thinking; it was also the self-legitimization of a self-consciousness that legitimized the global linear think-ers to create law to their own interests because they con-ceive themselves as “humans” and “humanity” and at the top of the species. From that self-ontological and epistemic enunciation, it was then possible to classify the rest of the “humanity.” O’Gorman unveiled the fact that “America” was never discovered because it did not exist as an entity to be discovered, but was a European invention. There you have already one strong pillar of “colonial differences.”

“Colonial differences” were drawn with people directly colonized. Not O’Gorman, of course. He was embodying the legacies and the consequences of such invention. “Imperi-al differences” were drawn with people, places and cultures that were not colonized; however, no one could escape the Western logic of coloniality. Today, dewesternization and

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decoloniality are responding by delinking from imperial domination—more specifically from colonial and imperi-al differences at all levels of the colonial matrix of power. However, dewesternization—which is delinking at the lev-el of international relations—has not been able yet to avoid the reproduction of the same logic within the frame of na-tional-states.

Colonial and imperial differences—it shall be remem-bered—were not created and fixed forever in the sixteenth-century. The logical principles remain constant, but the form and content changed. The changes could be detect-ed in the mutation of Western imperial leadership: Chris-tian catholic in Spain, Protestant in England, secular scien-tists in in France, England or Germany, liberals and neolib-erals in the US, etc. For example, in the sixteenth- and sev-enteenth-centuries, Indigenous people in America and Af-ricans were cast at the bottom of the human chain of beings. The difference here was not just cultural (as popularized by the vocabulary of multiculturalism). It was racial. And that is what colonial and imperial differences were and are for: to justify racial classifications. The visual imaginary of the colonial difference appears in much of the cartogra-phy of the seventeenth-century: Africans and American In-dians appear at both lower corners of the printed map. On the two top corners, you find Europe on the upper left and Asia on the upper right. The distribution is not casual. In a cosmology where alphabetic writing is the norm, the most important element on a flat square or rectangle appears on the upper left. Whatever appears in the lower corners is less

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relevant. Once the colonial and imperial differences were created and implemented, directly or indirectly, it imping-es on people around the planet in relation to their ranking and in relation to how their ranking over-determined the behavior of those who ranked. So the question is not only how Aymaras, Iranians, Chinese or Indians respond to how they have been allocated in the ranking of “humanity” but, above all, how those who ranked act and react in relation to them.

Part II — The Bandung Conference: “people of color” take the field and respond to planetary racial classification

The concept of “humanity,” forged during the Euro-pean Renaissance to distinguish Christians from Moors and Jews, from New World Indigenous and Africans and from Asians, became hegemonic; and when not hegemon-ic mutated into domination. If Nahuatl speakers named “Chichemecas” (people who did not spoke) good Nahuatl and were outside the confines of Anahuac; and Chinese dynastic elite named “Dongyi,” “Nanman,” “Xirong” and “Beidi” the people who did belong to the center of the nest-ed rectangles, Europeans named “Saracen, pagans and bar-barians” the people who did not fit the mold of the cen-ter: human and Christian. To start with, the division of the planet into four continents, which came into place in the sixteenth-century, was built on an already hierarchical di-vision of the planet based on Christian cosmology. It was for Christians and for Christians only that the planet was

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divided into Asia, Africa and Europe and each continent “belonged” to one of each of Noah’s son. You can guess to what son each continent was assigned. I give you a hint: Europe was a Phoenician woman of high lineage that in-habited the pantheon on Greek mythology. The etymolo-gy carries on the meaning of “wide” or “broad” or high in-telligence, qualities that also were in the profile of Japheth. Europe was the region to the West of Jerusalem assigned to Japheth.

From the sixteenth- to the nineteenth-centuries, the ra-cial distribution of the planet (for were not only people ra-cialized but continents as well) went hand in hand with the geopolitical and racial distribution of capital and knowl-edge. It was not in the classification but in the ranking of the classification where the colonial and imperial differ-ences were at work, while the consequences of the classi-fication rebound on the changes in the implementation of both. Indeed it was in the ranking that colonial and impe-rial differences were built, at the same time the classifica-tion became dependent itself on colonial and imperial dif-ferences. Both were simultaneous processes that contribut-ed to establish imperial ontology and epistemology: people of color were ontologically inferior and therefore less ratio-nal, and because they were rationally deficient they were ontologically inferior.

The ontological and epistemic criteria have primacy over economic criteria during a period of four and a half centu-ries, from 1500 to 1950. In 1950 the US was taking over the leadership of the world and displacing England, and France

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intellectually, who had been dominating for two and a half centuries. Before that Spain, Portugal and Holland prepared the terrain for for England to take over the control of the seas while France and Germany took over the management of Europe (like in today EU): as Carl Schmitt pointed out, the balance between European countries after the Peace of Westfalia was possible because England controlled the seas and did not allow for international balance. President Har-ry Truman changed the criteria for ranking and classifica-tion: people and regions were inferior because they were underdeveloped. The same logic that applied before for the Christian and civilizing missions, to upgrade epistemically people who are ontological lesser or the other way around to up lift ontological lesser people by upgrading them epis-temically: the civilizing mission. Truman instead put the accent on the economy. And from there on, we are still on the primacy of the economic criteria. But something has changed in the three spheres: epistemically and subjective-ly (which includes religions, aesthetics, gender/sexuality and racism), ontologically and politically-economic.

When the awareness that racism was from the very foundation of Western civilization an epistemic strategy to make people feel inferior, to humiliate and control them, the reaction to reclaim their dignity began to unfold. Al-though it would be possible to find specific moments be-fore 1950 where such responses were advanced, it was around 1950 that the responses began to take collective form, institutional shape and intellectual force. The inde-pendence of India in 1947, for example, was a significant

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event that contributed to the confidence of other struggles for decolonization in Asia and in Africa.

A single moment of the awakening was in my view the Bandung Conference, called by Indonesian Prime Minis-ter Sukarno. Like any event, interpretations vary and the variations depend on where you put the accent and where is the historical narrative that allows you to decide where to put the accent and sustain your interpretation. My inter-pretation is based on some of Sukarno’s statements in the opening address and, previous to the conference, on the ef-fect that the announcement that such a conference will take place had in Richard Wright, an Afro-American intellectu-al, writer and activist from Detroit who was not of course invited to the conference because the invitees where offi-cers of 29 state-governments from Asia and Africa.2

The Bandung Conference took place from April 18 to 24 of 1955 and the inaugural speech was delivered the first President of independent Indonesia: Sukarno. The meet-ing was organized by Indonesia, Myanmar (now Burma), Ceylan, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan. A total of 29 Asian and African countries attended. The common concern was that neither Western capitalism nor Russian or Chinese

2 The conference was attended by 29 Asian and African countries be-sides the five countries mentioned above, namely, Afghanistan, Cambo-dia, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, the Philippines, Saudi Ara-bia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, the Vietnam Democratic Republic, South Vietnam (later reunified with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and Yemen (Republic of Yemen).

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communism offered hopes for their own future.3 Both capi-talism and communism were (rightly) considered as differ-ent forms of colonialism. And indeed both are legacies of the European enlightenment. They are different manifesta-tions of the logic of coloniality hidden under the rhetoric of modernity (peace, salvation, development, dictatorship of the proletarians, etc.). The future of these countries need-ed, in the voices of their own leaders, a new vision, and that vision soon received a name: neither capitalism nor com-munism, but decolonization.

As it could be expected, when the process of decolo-nization progressed in Africa and Asia, and the contend-ers in the Cold War fought for their zone of influence, the goals set up by the conference and the solidarity among states, deteriorated. However, it was never abandoned. It survived until today through the Non-Aligned Countries Movement, inaugurated in Belgrade in 1961. The spirit of Bandung, however, survived not in the communities of the States, but in the emerging global decolonial political soci-ety. In retrospect, the legacies of Bandung spread in three different trajectories:

� The struggle and the vocabulary of decolonization continued in Asia and Africa.

� In 1961, Mariscal Tito organized in Belgrade the first conference of the Non-Aligned Countries. There was

3 See speech of Primer Minister Nehru at the Bandung Conference, http://www.openspaceforum.net/twiki/tiki-print_article.php?articleId=293.

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a mixture here between Non-Aligned Countries of Eastern Europe (caught in the First and the Second Worlds) and the countries outside Europe who were already classified as the Third World.

� The third legacy is dewesternization, to which Part III is devoted.

We are familiar with the histories of the second wave of decolonization [the first took place in the Americas be-tween 1776 and 1830, with the Haitian Revolution in be-tween (1804)]. The problems consisted of native elites tak-ing advantage of decolonization to establish their own lit-tle kingdoms and betraying the spirit of decolonization. The first wave of decolonization in the Americas was not very dissimilar, with the exception of the US that went fur-ther and took over the leadership of the world. The recent events in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt and Libya showed some of the different consequences of the failure of decolonial-ization. However, the failure of decolonization as well as the failure of communism may or may not go away eas-ily. By the 1990s decolonization was redefined as deco-loniality, and decoloniality conceived as an epistemic and ethical issue: without decolonizing knowledge and there-fore being, decolonization cannot take place. Decoloniality means first and foremost to delink from the categories of knowledge, principles and belief systems built upon West-ern epistemology, from Christian theology to secular phi-losophy, science and technology (I will come back to this issue in Part III). The spirit of decolonization was swept

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away in many of the initial 29 countries (India and Chi-na were among them), and the spirit of capitalism began to set in. Thus, the two main legacies of Bandung outside of the ex-Third World were dewesternization and decolonial-ity. Let’s remember some of the relevant moments of these double legacies.

There are several versions of Sukarno’s inaugural speech available on the web.4 I will work, however, with the report provided by Richard Wright, apparently his own transcription of Sukarno’s speech. There are several rea-sons to use this indirection, and not the published version, in books and on the web. I am interested, first, not only in what Sukarno said but also in his way of saying it. This is precisely what Wright picked up in his report. Sukarno was known for the uses of words and intonations, accentuation and rhythm in getting the message across. That dimension is lost in any of the available archival documentation. Not only do they differ from Wright’s report, but they are also mute about the way of saying, only transcribing the said.

The fact that an Afro-American writer and intellectu-al from Detroit, residing in Paris at the time and doing re-search in Spain, was so impressed by the news of a confer-ence in Bandung that at the moment of reading the news he decided to attend, uninvited, deserves serious consideration.

4 Sukarno, http://www.international.ucla.edu/eas/documents/indo-550418.htm; http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1955sukarno-bandong.html. See also, for reflections on the present significance of Bandung, particularly on racial issues, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/04/29/the-1955- bandung-conference-and-its-present-significance.html.

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Isn’t this a global intellectual story of sensing, knowing and believing celebrating that 29 states put race and reli-gious forward in the struggle for liberation? But let’s lis-ten to Wright:

In order to spend Christmas with my family, I’d returned to Paris from a long, tiring trip in Spain where I’d been gathering material for a book (…) Idly, I picked up the evening’s newspaper that lay folded near me upon a table and began thumbing through it. Then I was staring at a news item that baffled me. I bent forward and read the item a second time: Twenty-nine free and independent nations of Asia and Africa are meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss “racialism and colo-nialism” (…). What is this? I scanned the list of nations involved: Chi-na, India, Indonesia, Japan, Burma, Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, etc. My God! I began a rapid calculation of the populations of the nations listed and, when my total topped the billion mark, I stopped.5

So Wright went, attended, listened and finally reported on Sukarno’s speech itself, including a paragraph that can-not be found in the written version circulating on the web. After describing the tension of waiting for the inaugural speech, Wrights says:

At last Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia, mounted the rostrum to deliver the opening address (…). From the very outset, he sounded the notes of race and religion, strong, defiant: before he had uttered more than a hundred syllables, he declared This is the first in-ternational conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind.6

This opening is difficult to find in the existing docu-mentation. Then Wright continues:

5 Richard Wright. The color curtain, Jackson, Mississippi, Banner Books, 1956.6 Wright, p. 136.

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He then placed his finger upon the geographical gateway through which the white men of the West had come into Asia: “Sisters and Brothers, how terrifically dynamic is our time. I recall that, several years ago, I had occasion to make a public analysis of colonialism, and I drew attention to what I called “the life line of imperialism.” This line runs from the Strait of Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Read Sea, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan

It is not only what Sukarno said that counts but the way he said it. Here again we are into the enunciation, in the realm of sensing, believing and knowing that overwhelms knowledge and what it is said. Wright reports that in the third paragraph of his address, Sukarno paid tribute to the genealogy of thought that made it possible to be gathered at that point, in Bandung. Following up on the first paragraph of the inaugural speech, Sukarno continues

I recognize—he said in Wright’s transcription—that we are gathered here today as a result of sacrifices. Sacrifices made by our forefa-thers and by the people of our own and younger generations (…). Their struggle and sacrifice paved the way for this meeting of the highest representatives of independent and sovereign nations from two of the biggest continents of the globe.7

The “sacrifices” are not just deeds but thoughts. There are intellectual histories behind those “sacrifices;” for in-tellectual histories cannot be limited to the documents one finds in archives, written in alphabetic languages, and based in the classical tradition of Greek and Latin.8

7 Wright, p. 137.8 I have addressed this issue a couple of decades ago, “On the coloni-zation of Amerindian languages and memories: Renaissance theories of writing and the discontinuity of the Classical tradition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, n. 34, p. 301-30, 1992.

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Sukarno put forward not just the right to speak, but to dis-pute the control of knowledge for if speaking when there is only one game in town means that the subaltern can-not speak. Sukarno was pointing toward the question of knowledge and genealogies of thoughts that have invent-ed people of color in order to prevent them from producing knowledge and, therefore, to be decided rather than to par-ticipate in decision-making processes:

For many generations our peoples have been the voiceless ones in the world. We have been the un-regarded, the peoples for whom deci-sions were made by others whose interests were paramount, the peo-ples who lived in poverty and humiliation. What can we do? The peo-ples of Asia and Africa wield little physical power. Even our econom-ic strength is dispersed and slight. We cannot indulge in power politics (…). Our statesmen, by and large, are not backed up with serried ranks of jet bombers (…). We, the people of Asia and Africa, 1,400.000.000 strong, far more than half of the population of the world, we can mo-bilize what I have called the Moral Violence of Nations in favor of peace.9

And where is that “moral violence” in favor of peace coming from, Wright asks? And I repeat the question af-ter him. Sukarno had an answer to that question that is not rehearsing the French Revolution ideas of democracy, for the goals shall be peace and equality rather than imposing an idea of democracy that served well France, Western Eu-rope and the US but that became an intruder beyond those realms. “Democracy” was a natural outcome of the modern history of Europe, not of world history. For that reason Su-karno points out that:

9 Wright, p. 139.

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Religion is of dominating importance particularly in this part of the world. There are perhaps more religions here than in other regions of the globe… Our countries were the birthplace of religions.10

Now, the reader can object that religions could be dan-gerous because they may lead to religious fundamentalism. Certainly. But so can secular nationalisms and liberalism, secular states founded in defense of the nation and sup-porting national fundamentalism; and so could be capital-ism, for the defense of an economy that favors the entre-preneurial elite could lead to capital fundamentalism and the dispensability of human life. Wherever you mention the danger of fundamentalism, fundamentalism is knock-ing at your own door while you are recommending aware-ness of fundamentalisms. Briefly: there is no safe place; that is why decolonizing knowledge and being are a neces-sary condition toward a pluriversal world. That is why, let’s say it in passing, decoloniality is an option and not a mis-sion.11 Secularism is no longer an excuse to avoid funda-mentalism, for secularism has ended up in national, state and economic fundamentalisms (called “capitalism”). Plu-riversality is only possible in a world of options, not in a world of missions. For this reason there is something else that shall be considered and Sukarno was not blind to it. That “something else” is what the majority of people on the globe, in Asia (including Central and West Asia), Af-rica, South America and the Caribbean and within the US

10 Wright, p. 139.11 I elaborate this argument in more detail in The darker side of Western modernity: global futures, decolonial options, Durham, Duke Universi-ty Press, 2011.

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(Native Americans, Afro-Americans, Chicano-Latinos), have in common: “Almost all of us have ties to common experience, the experience of colonialism.”12

Today we will say “coloniality,” but it is a question of clarifying concepts. The idea was already there. The point is that the Bandung Conference was the signpost of the two main trajectories that are unfolding today, and one that still remains anchored in the memories of the Cold War and the Third World. The two trajectories—dewesternization and decoloniality—have one element in common: they are both lead by “people of color,” people who still carry—and people who will continue to carry for while—the marks of the colonial and imperial wounds (humiliation facing arro-gance) and therefore of the colonial and imperial differenc-es. The legacies of the Bandung conference spread all over the non-European world, and is now unfolding in West-ern Europe (all that Europe that divided among themselves the entire African continent after the Berlin Conference in 1894) and the US: in Europe mainly by migrants from Asia and Africa and in the US mainly by migrants from South America and the Caribbean.

Let’s now concentrate on dewesternization and leave decoloniality for another occasion.

Part III — The BRICS: dewesternization and the racial distribution of capital and knowledge

There are some semantic difficulties in the fact that the word for “orientation” [to “set yourself in a good direction”

12 Wright, p. 139.

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(to orient yourself)] or to “update your direction demand-ed by the point where you has arrived,” has as its mille-narian points of reference the sunrise. To orient yourself meant to put yourself with your back to the sunrise, your face toward sunset, and then determine your left and right sides. But when Pope Alexander the VI in 1594 (Tordesil-la’s Treaty) and Zaragoza’s Treaty (1529), divided the plan-et between “Indias Occidentales” and “Indias Orientales,” the rules of the game had been set—the conditions for Orientalism were set by the men, categories of thoughts and institutions who inhabit Occident. Once again, Occi-dent and Orient, West and East are basically Western epis-temic-geographic inventions from the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-centuries. The rules had been established: the Orient, where Spirit emerged (according to Hegel’s sto-ry) a long time ago, was the land of yellow people that re-mained stuck in the past.

Something has drastically changed in the first decade of the twenty-first-century. When you notice changes, it doesn’t mean that they are just happening in the moment you notice them. They have been unfolding, someone was noticing them, others not; and sometimes the actors in-volved in the process are not aware of the process involving them/us. But there is a moment in which the confluence of several factors makes the antecedents visible: the anteced-ents are always re-constructed from the way we sense and understand the present. Perhaps dewesternization was not perceived during the Cold War because the interpretive op-tions were two: either capitalism or communism. So when

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Deng Xiaoping turned Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution into a market oriented economy, the interpretation in the West was that China turned capitalist. And by the nineties, the interpretation was that China was not only capitalist but also neoliberal. Which of course, it is an interpretation that not only is Eurocentered but that is basically absurd: if one of neoliberal goals was/is to minimize the state and to let the market rule, how can be neoliberal the political-organi-zation in China that is strongly regulated by the state? Now we can say that Deng Xiaoping was indeed following up on the steps of the Bandung Conference, although in a direc-tion that was not clearly expressed, and perhaps not yet con-ceived, during the conference itself: dewesternization.

If the Bandung Conference set the stage to think that neither capitalism nor communism were the roads to the future, now (sixty seven years later), we see that the con-ditions for dewesternization were there but not seen or at least not clearly articulated.13 Based on the cases of China and Singapore, what was rejected was not the economy of growth, but the liberal and neoliberal agenda that was part of the package of Western economic and political control. Perhaps the possibilities of detaching capitalism from lib-eralism/neoliberalism were not yet clearly perceived. Dew-esternization, as self-conscious of leading a process, was

13 At the time of the Conference the division in three worlds did not yet existed. The “Third World” was a concept that originated in France short-ly after the Bandung Conference. One can be sure that being “Third” was not a classification that originated in the countries classifying themselves as “Third.”

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born when the development and growth was detached from how to do it according to the IMF and the World Bank. Latin America in the sixties was subjected to the project of modernization and development. Theory of dependency was clear in denouncing the un-viability of the US project of modernization and development. They were not heard, the project failed. In the seventies and eighties through the nineties Latin American countries were increasing their debt while China and Singapore were increasing their own pockets. China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore disobeyed and delinked from the Western institutions sur-veying development. In Latin America the process of dis-obeying and delinking began in the twent-first-century. Brazil is leading the way. It was misinterpreted as a “turn to the left” and in some cases, like Bolivia, as a “decolonial turn.” Now it is clear that the turn is toward dewesterniza-tion, which is neither left nor right. That is precisely, anoth-er feature of dewesternization: making Western categories traditional and obsolete.

Back to Deng Xiaoping in China and Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore, started a process that embraced the econo-my of accumulation and growth they embraced the idea of “development” but not the politics of the IMF and the World Bank. That means that Xiaoping and Kwan Lew accepted the content and the form of development but not the enunciation that controls how development shall be conducted. Would Xiaoping and Kwan Lew had followed the enunciation of the World Bank and the IMF we would not have had an “Asia Miracle” and the concept of “the

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Asian Century,” to profile the twenty-first-century, would not exist. The “miracle” of the Asiatic Tigers cannot be explained by saying they adapted themselves to “develop-ment and neoliberalism” in a prudent way (which was of course), as Joseph Stiglitz distinguished the success of Chi-na and the crash of the Soviet Union.14 It was not Stiglitz however who advanced arguments toward dewesterniza-tion. That would have been much to ask. For reasons ex-plained above, colonial and imperial differences, it is ex-pected that someone who is not based in the US, Germany, France or England would take that step. And indeed it was Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the School of Public Policy Lew Kwan-yew at the National University of Singapore.15

Now, if we go back to the years of Deng Xiaoping, and think of the Soviet Union lead by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Perestroika looks, in retrospect, like a move toward dew-esternization that was stopped half way through and did not delink and did not try to dewesternized. On the con-trary, they unreflectively adopted the neoliberal rules of the games and destroyed the Perestroika: in retrospect, what Gorbachev may have had in mind was precisely a process of dewesternization similar to the roads Xiaoping and Kwan Lew initiated. We will never know. What we do know is that Vladimir Putin is, but by different means

14 Stiglitz, Globalization and its discontent, NY, Norton, 2002.15 Kishore Mahbubani, The new Asian hemisphere: “For centuries, the Asians (Chinese, Indians, Muslims, and others) have been bystanders in world history. Now they are ready to become co-drivers.” For more, see http://www.mahbubani.net/book3.html.

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(but perhaps necessary), moving to re-orient Russia toward dewesternization. That is why, precisely, Russia is on of the five BRICS countries. Corruptions and immaturity of leadership stop a process that today I would call dewest-ernization, sunk the Russian population in a decade of de-spair for the majority while for the first time in its history Russians were able to show to the world that the country also had a good number of billionaires, successful and ef-ficient business who showed the life style ethics that cap-italism promotes. Paradoxically enough, it seems that it is Vladimir Putin who is reworking what Gorbachev initiat-ed and that Boris Yeltsin destroyed. If Russia is one of the BRICS, there are reasons to believe that Putin’s interna-tional politics matches that of the other four BRICS coun-tries.

All that to say that the unavoidable next step—for bet-ter or worse—is dewesternization: the opening up of polit-ical, epistemic, ethic, artistic, scientific, subjectivity in the dispute for the control of economy (e.g., trades, labor, fi-nances): a common economy and the end of unilateralism. The painful case of Syria seems to be a sign of the time, after the unilateral decisions in Iraq and Libya and the im-passe of Israel/Palestine, explicitly mentioned in the Dec-laration of the Fourth Summit, in Delhi, in April of 2012.16 In the sphere of the economy, will be the conflictive co-existence of rewesternization with dewesternization that

16 http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Brics+summit+delhi&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz35.

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extends beyond the core countries of either trajectory: for the first, US and the core countries of the European Union (in which for example, Hungary, Poland or Lithuania have not much say) and the core countries of dewesternization (the BRICS countries). At the time of writing these lines, the government of Spain is behaving like a colonizer that it once was, requesting support of the European Union and lifting their fingers and rising their voice to recall “their once vassals from South America,” that Argentina has no right to nationalize oil because it belongs to a Spanish pri-vate company, Repsol.17 This is indeed a text-book case of the conflicts we will see growing when more and more countries start to delink from the US and EU’s effort to re-westernize the world and to keep it under their control.

Dewesternization (as the location of BRICS countries show) is not a geographic but a political concept and refers to all those States (corporate states, for sure) that are con-solidating their economies without following the dictates of the US, the EU, the IMF or the World Bank; and that are also confronting the unbalance of the UN. Delinking here doesn’t mean delinking from “the type of economy” (e.g., from capitalism, as Samir Amin argued), but from the instructions of the World Bank and the IMF and sim-ilar institutions. The delinking is basically in the sphere of authority. Let’s remember that it was President Harry

17 I have addressed this issue in an op-ed: “La desoccidentalizacion es irreversible: la renacionalizacion de REPSOL-YPF,” http://waltermigno-lo.com/2012/04/17/la-desoccidentalizacion-es-irreversible-la-renacional-izacion-de-repsol-ypf/.

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Truman that introduced the word “development”: US fore-saw that the wave of decolonization by Indonesia in 1945 and followed up by India in 1947 would not stop there. In 1949 Truman foresaw the Asia, Africa and South America were formed by underdeveloped countries. Thus, the poli-tics of development became tantamount with the politics of modernization and with the recasting of the already exist-ing idea of progress, very much in use during the hegemo-ny of the British Empire. The US appointed itself to lead the world toward development and modernization. The first step was already taken by the US in 1945 with the cre-ation of the Bretton Woods agreement signed by delegates of 44 nation-states (at the time). As it is known, Bretton Woods was established to regulate the international mone-tary system. From the agreement emerged the IMF (Inter-national Monetary Fund), the IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which mutated into today’s World Bank. Other regional banks were created lat-er, like the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank). The ascending control of finances, economy and international politics by the US from the end of WWII to 2000, allowed it to unilaterally end the convertibility of the dollar to gold. The dollar became the ungrounded currency for all inter-national transactions.

Well, this short story was necessary to underline that dewesternization is in the process of ending the internation-al dependency to the legacies of Bretton Woods and of the dollar as the ungrounded currency for international trans-actions. On March 28-29, 2012, the BRICS countries met

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in New Delhi. Two points are important for this conversa-tion: BRICS have, as critics say, very different local histo-ries and are located in different parts of the world. What they do not say is that BRICS countries have in common Western coloniality impinging in their territories and that their lives, at different moments, in different ways, and in different local Western empires. For example, Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese, South Africa and India by the British, China and Russia were never colonized but they couldn’t avoid Western entanglements: China since the Opium War and Russia by self-inflicted westernization in the hands of Peter and Catherine the Great first and then by the mutation of the Russian Czarate into the Soviet Union. Different local histories, for sure, but all entangled by the same global design: Western global era since 1500.

The second point of interest is the radical critics of the IMF and the proposal for a new international monetary or-ganization to counterbalance the unilateralism of the IMF. Point 13 of the resolution is the following:

13. We have considered the possibility of setting up a new Develop-ment Bank for mobilizing resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in BRICS and other emerging economies and developing countries, to supplement the existing efforts of multilateral and regional financial institutions for global growth and development. We direct our Finance Ministers to examine the feasibility and viabil-ity of such an initiative, set up a joint working group for further study, and report back to us by the next Summit.18

18 The full text of the declaration can be found in http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/321440/20120329/brics-delhi-declaration-russia-china-in-dia-brazil.htm.

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Well, here we have a clear case of delinking from uni-lateralism in economic and financial decisions. That is, we have here a dewesternizing argument. It is not delinking from the economy of growth (which in decolonial vocabu-lary will be “economic coloniality” and in liberal and Marx-ist vocabulary will be “capitalism”). When you read the Declaration of the Fourth Summit it is clear that the “idea of development” is not questioned; what is called into question is who makes the decisions regarding the politics of devel-opment. Delinking, consequently, is at the level of the con-trol of authority, which implies also control of economic de-cisions. This I will call economic-political delinking.

BRICS countries have two options at this point. One would be to demand participation within a world order whose rules have been set for a long time. This option would be to concede and join the project of rewestern-ization lead by the US, with the support of the European Union and some countries around the world (e.g. Colom-bia is one of them, and for that reason organized the con-ference of business people of Latin America in Cartagena and invited President Obama to inaugurate it. Cuba was not invited, and Rafael Correa from Ecuador sent a let-ter to the President of Colombia, Santos, declining the in-vitation because Cuba was not invited). The other option is dewesternization and this seems to be the orientation that BRICS countries are taking and Brazil is leading the way in Latin America. There is more than meets the eye in what seems to be a firm platform that BRICS countries are setting for the future.

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To start with, beyond clause #13 quoted above, the BRICS are pushing for the democratization of internation-al institutions (UN, World Bank, IMF). This is a call that we hear more and more from scholars and public intellec-tuals “of color.”19 What do I mean by that and why would this matter for BRICS? You must be thinking that I have been derailing and this is the point of catastrophe. It may be, but remember that I am building my arguments on the colonial and imperial differences, both epistemic and on-tological.

Let’s parse BRICS countries, looking at how imperi-al and colonial differences “made them” “people of col-or” through five centuries. Categories such as barbarians, primitives, uncivilized and underdeveloped are not catego-ries applied in general to white people but to people of col-or, even if they are white. You see what I mean? Russian governments from the Czars, to the Soviets of the Russian Federation and the population considered national, where and are in its vast majority, ethnically Slavs. And Slavs have white skin. Even more significant: who may be whit-er than the people from Caucasus, the Caucasians? Howev-er, in Russia, Caucasians are Black and in the West they are not—like Latin Americans of European descent—proper-ly white or white enough. They/we seem to be a sort of off white. But that is not enough for the imperial classification of

19 See Jayati Ghosh, “We need a New World Order at the World Bank,” World Public Forum, Feb 10, 2012, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/04/29/the-1955-bandung-conference-and-its-present-signifi-cance.html.

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Western modernity. Slavs are also Christian Orthodox; the Orthodox Church originated in Greece and went through Istanbul (which as we all know was Constantinople and that was where Emperor Constantine integrated Christiani-ty to the Roman Empire). Furthermore, they have a Cyrillic alphabet that next to Orthodox Christianity set them apart and below people who are “properly” Christian (Catholic or Protestant) and have a Latin alphabetic writing. Russia was never colonized like India, but did not escape coloni-ality through the imperial difference. The work of Peter and Catherine the Great through an entire century consist-ed in an effort of auto-westernization. Saint Petersburg is perhaps the most visible sign of Russia wanting to be part of the West and the second was to change their designation from Czars to Emperor and Empress. They did not convert to Western Christianity nor adopted the Latin alphabet. Vladimir Lenin reconverted secular Western civilizational ideals into Western socialist ideals. The Soviet Union was the socialist side of Western secular narratives after the en-lightenment. It was not dewesternization but westerniza-tion from the Left, following the distinction between sec-ular Left and secular Right that emerged from the French Revolution. Vladimir Putin has been steadily moving to-ward dewesternization (as I suggested above): embracing capitalism but delinking from the political and ideological hegemony and dominance of the West. That is, again, why Russia is now one of the BRICS countries.

China, like Russia and unlike India, was never colo-nized. However, the Chinese did not escape the imperial

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difference and consequently the colonial wound—that is, the humiliation that through racism and colonization was projected to people of color all over the world and that Su-karno (Kusno Sosrodihardjo) made everyone remember. As I pointed out in a previous section, the British were, for Chinese, the lesser people inhabiting the far away ter-ritories where the sunsets. As people of the Celestial Em-pire, Chinese saw themselves superior to all people in their surroundings. That was common to every existing civili-zation. The humiliation came into being the day when the lesser people from where the sunset invaded the Celestial Empire and enforced agreements that were disadvanta-geous for the Chinese. It took perhaps three centuries for the Chinese to realize that Matteo Ricci’s (the Italian jesu-it) flipping the world map around and putting the Pacific instead of the Atlantic, at the center of the map, so China was more toward the center and not in the upper right cor-ner, was not disconnected to the Opium War.

As a matter of fact, it was the first step. Ricci was asked why if China was the Middle Kingdom he placed it in the upper right corner? Ricci who already knew the difference between geometric and ethnic centers, had no problem in turning the map around and placing the Pacific at the cen-ter, Europe to the left and Americas to the right. He knew that the center, any way, was already in Rome, no longer even in Jerusalem: Rome became the center when Pope Alexander VI divided the world between Indias Occiden-tales and Indias Orientales: the West and the East were determined in relation to Rome, the Center. Let’s say in

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passing that when the British moved to dispense with all vestige of theology, even in its abstract-geometric formula-tion, they appropriated the center of the World and planted the Greenwich Meridian. Matteo Ricci’s move and the Opi-um War were two distant moments connected by the log-ic of coloniality and the making of the imperial difference. The first was not humiliating for the Chinese they hardly paid attention to it. They should, for if they had, the Opium War may not have taking place. China now is not only an economic “success” without Western assistance (as Rob-ert Zoellick had no choice but to recognize in his presen-tation of the joint report “China 2030”). On the contrary, it was a “success” in spite of the West. Why? There is an ethical and ethic dimension to it that has to do with racism. Dewesternization is, in a way, a process contributing to a certain degree of political deracialization although racism will continue as far as the economy of growth and develop-ment continues: racism is connected to the exploitation of labor, expropriation of land, disregard for the environment and the immediate consequences for the population living in the zone affected by the extraction of natural resources (oil, mineral, metals). I suspect that the “return” of Confu-cius and Mencius may have to do with the “return” and not the “rise” of Asia, and that the bottom line is not just econ-omy and politics but pride after racism and the global hu-miliation (not just national) infringed upon “people of col-or.” The connector with the other four BRICS countries re-sides precisely in the commonality of diverse local histo-ries, and their entanglement with the West through colonial and imperial differences.

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Brazil and South Africa, like India, were colonized coun-tries. Brazil is a consequence of the first moment of West-ern consolidation and expansion, the Renaissance moment; the second the consequence of the Enlightenment moment. Brazil, like Hispanic South America and Caribbean, as well as the French, Dutch and British Caribbean, is part of the formation of the “New World.” New World not because the continent did not exist until all confused Christopher Co-lumbus landed on it, but because it became a New World by the coexistence, from 1500 to 1800, of people from three ethnically diverse but identifiable groups—identifiable not by blood, but by history. The diversity of people who were living in Tawantinsuyu, Anahuac, Ayiti, Abya-Yala and other territoriality and that extended from Southern Chile (Mapuche region) to the First Nations of Canada. In lan-guages, beliefs, social organization, historical rhythms (e.g., in the Andes and Meso-America complex and sophisticat-ed socio-spiritual-economic-architectonic. Second, the in-creasing diversity of Europeans who invited themselves to the New World and, without passport or visa, began to build their own institutions.

If during the sixteenth-century Europeans in the New World were mainly Iberian, from the early seventeenth-century on Dutch, British and French began to flock in. All of them contributed to the transportation and exploi-tation of enslaved Africans to the New World. That is the demographic platform of the Americas, the demograph-ic foundation during three centuries. Brazil is the larg-est country in South America and obviously of any of the

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Caribbean islands. The indigenous population is low, of the order of 1% of 2% of the total population of about 180 mil-lion. The population of African descent is larger, although difficult to determine demographically. What is undeniable the force of African cultures in music and dance (Capoeira) and spirituality (Candomblé). Brazil, like any other South American country have been ruled, with some exceptions like Menem in Argentina, Abad in Ecuador and Morales in Bolivia—by people of Iberian stock, and of Spanish, Por-tuguese, British, French and German education. Howev-er, and this is the point connected to my argument, peo-ple of Iberian descent in South America are not—obvious-ly—European. And not only that, but in the case of Ibero-America, the consequences of colonial and imperial differ-ence have had a long lasting effect. How come?

While being of Iberian stock means to descend from the conquerors and the colonizers, it means also being Creole, that is, people born and raise in the New World. The Creole became the target of the mutation of colonial difference (as we see in Buffon and in Hegel) that, until then, was project-ed on Indians and people of African descent. However, the Creole appropriated the colonial differences and projected it on their own, instead of the European colonizers, on In-dians and Blacks. Things got worst when South American and Caribbean countries became part of the “Third World.” In Latin America the visible Third World people were not so much Indians and Blacks (which were invisible at the time), but the Creole and Mestizos of European descent. Now we are already in familiar terrain: a renovated Left detached

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from the communist party emerged in several countries in the early years of the Cold War. At the same time, the trans-lation of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in 1962 brought the discourse of decolonization in Africa, Asia and refugees and migrants in Paris, back home to Latin America. If the renovated Marxist Left and the growing decolonizing con-sciousness occupied the second half of the twentieth-centu-ry and continue in the early twenty-first-century, the “nov-elty” of the twenty-first-century is the decisive turn toward dewesternization. The leading figure of that turn was Iná-cio Lula da Silva, particularly during his second term.

Now we have arrived at the point of connection between Brazil and the other four BRICS countries. At stake there is more than being a big country with a strong economy—there are the traces of the colonial wound common to coun-tries that endured the experience of direct colonization and its legacies (Brazil, India, South Africa), and traces of the colonial wound inflicted through imperial differences (like in the case of Russia and China).

India was indeed colonized by the British. As a matter of fact, it was the largest British colony in modern/colonial history (that is, from 1500 to today). Indian people and ter-ritory were the “marked” ones in Western view of the non-Western world. In seventeenth-century cartography, the four corners of the map on flat surfaces were filled with icons referring to the four continents. The upper left cor-ner is the most important in a culture that read and writes from left to right and from bottom down. A well dress lady appears generally seating on an elephant. Why not the Chi-

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nese and a dragon instead of an elephant, is something I will not address now. What matters is that Indian was by Linnaeus’s classification and the Indians that the British favored where those who distinguish themselves as “Hin-di” in contradistinction with “Islamic,” predominant in the Mughal Sultanate. The Mughal Sultanate was formed at the beginning of the sixteenth-century, and the British took over formally in 1858. Gandhi led the second significant decolonial movement in India. The first two took place in the Andes, from Taky Onkoy in the sixteenth-century to Tupac Amaru in the late eighteenth-century. Since Gan-dhi, the decolonial option has entered the history of India. However, in the late twentieth-century the government in-creasingly opted for dewesternization. There is then a his-tory of the colonial difference that made Indians, to the eyes of Europeans, brown and inferior. It would be hard to understand whether the history of the colonial wound, of the imperial humiliation that Indians endured through British colonization, is forgotten even if India now mutated from Gandhi’s decolonial struggle, to Nerhu nationalism to the actual corporate Hindi State as Arundati Roy describes it. However, the Hindi Corporate State may make the dif-ference with, for example, the Laic and Neoliberal French State or the Corporate Liberal (in conversation with Neo-liberal projects) US State. The first is a State of people of color; the last two of white people. The fact that the Pres-ident is Black doesn’t alter the fact that the State in the US of America is a Corporate Liberal State, and secular liberal states are not a peculiarity of people of color. The

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“Hindi” in the corporate state explains why India belongs to the BRICS and not to the G7.

Like Brazil, South Africa is a state within a larger conti-nent—the Americas in the first case, Africa in the second. Like Brazil, South Africa belongs to the “southern” part of the continent, Sub-Saharan Africa. There are two crucial historical moments or historical markers in this modern/colonial history of Africa: the triangular enslaved trades that devastated Africa for three centuries and, secondly, the consequences of the Berlin Conference, in 1884, which opened up the doors to all Western European countries to the partition of Africa to their own benefit. By 1900 Afri-ca was a continent of different colors on the map indicating to which Western European countries the region belonged. British and French had the largest portion, and South Afri-ca was one of the regions under the wing of the British Em-pire. The recent history of South Africa is too well known to repeat it here. What shall be underlined is that Africa be-came the “dark continent” and, once again, that was not a self-description by Africans, but a degrading and humiliat-ing description inscribed in the knowledge that Europeans built around themselves, defining themselves through in-venting differences structured by the logic: the logic of co-loniality and its two corollaries: imperial and colonial dif-ferences. The African continent, from Algeria and Tunisia to Congo and from Egypt to South Africa and Tanzania, were involved in the struggle for decolonization during the first half of the twentieth-century. Decolonization failed, mainly because the ruling elites took two wrong steps: one

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was to play the game established by the colonizers with the difference of doing it by themselves but not questioning the rules of the game. The second was to let many of them be carried away by the opportunities of political and econom-ic corruptions that capitalism encourages. Now South Af-rica is leading the way toward dewesternization and that means taking steps to correct the two wrong steps taking by the leading elite of decolonization: not changing the rules of the game and engaging in politico-economic cor-ruptions. The corrections being advanced by dewestern-ization are, then, to change the terms of the conversation and the rules of the game settled by the colonizers. This is precisely what BRICS countries are apparently projecting. The second is to engage in serious efforts of regulations to avoid corruptions. The much talked about “Confucianiza-tion” of the State in China and Singapore, seems to focus on the struggle against corruption. Coming back to South Africa, it has in common with Brazil and India the traces of the colonial wound inflicted through direct colonization.

In her presentation at the Ninth Rhodes Forum, Lot-tin Welly Marguerite, President of the NGO “Associazi-one Interculturale Griot” (Italy) made three points of in-terest for my argument. The first is that African countries shall follow the lead of South Asia as a member of BRICS countries. Second, that African countries shall follow the BRICS model and find association of cooperation and mu-tual strengthening. And third, that in the future,

I believe that the most important partner for Africa will be Brazil with whom we have to develop a more intense synergy and cooperation. Brazil does not look for raw materials or land to buy for an intensive

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exploitation to produce agriculture products. Brazil is already very rich of natural resources, water and land. Brazil is looking for an ex-pansion of its industrial capabilities in some sectors, like the technol-ogies related to the raw material exploitation, to enlarge its market. This can become an important example for the industrial moderniza-tion of Africa. The Latin American country also employs African la-bour force.But the most relevant thing is the sharing of many aspects of the same culture. Over 90 millions Brazil citizens have some African origin.20

In sum, Africa and Brazil have been connected indeed since the sixteenth-century through the Portuguese trade of enslaved Africans. Certainly the Portuguese were not the only ones, although perhaps the pioneers in enslaved trades. But it was through the Portuguese that Brazil and Africa were connected in the very foundation of the colonial dif-ference. Other European monarchies participated as well. In similar fashion of will happen four centuries later as a con-sequence of the Berlin Conference, the trade of enslaved Af-ricans was enacted by Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and English. If the subcontinent has specific ties with Brazil because of demographic factors, the Republic of South Af-rica has the colonial wound with Brazil and India (inflicted through the colonial difference) and with China and Russia (inflicted through the imperial difference). Decoloniality is not an experience common to Chinese and Russians, as it is for South African, Indians and to Brazil. The strength that decoloniality and dewesternization have at this moment is related to local histories of entanglements between the West

20 www.wsp.Africa%20, file:///Users/wmignolo/Desktop/Africa%20Bric s%20886-solidarity-economy-for-africa.htmlBrics%20886-solidarty-economy-for-africa.html.

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and the Rest. Common to the five BRICS is the colonial wound, either through the colonial or imperial differences.

IV — Conclusions and opening up

I shall repeat here—for the readers who went through the narrative—what I said in the abstract. In this paper I made two interrelated arguments and present them in three parts.

In Part III I develop the main argument that connects “humanity,” “difference” and the politics of “BRICS coun-tries.” The argument is this: BRICS countries have an im-portant role to play—and they know it—in balancing the polycentric world in which we are already living and will further unfold in the near future. BRICS appear to be at the point of non-return. These countries have embraced the economy of growth, development and accumulation (that is, economic coloniality). That aspect is certainly a prob-lem. The politicization of the civil society what is already manifested in several spheres, from the World Public Fo-rum to the “Indignados” of Spain and the Occupy Wall Street, is mounting. At the same time, the decolonial lega-cies of Bandung are reviving in the uprising of Tunisia and Egypt, in the student movements in Chile and Colombia, among decolonial organizations among migrants in Eu-rope from the ex-Third World; among Latinos/as and Afro-Caribbean in the US; in the organization denouncing and stopping the open pit mining in South America and Africa; the continuing work of La Via Campesina and Sovereignty of Food, etc. etc. Dewesternization may or may not be able to change the course of history. This is an open question.

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For it is not clear how BRICS states will deal with the limited resources of the planet and the increasing com-petition for natural resources of Western states (and their supporters) and BRICS states (and their supporters). Fur-thermore, exploitation of labor and the drive toward con-sumerism is an essential component of the economy of growth and development. To maintain a society upon the promises of constant growth and that happiness consists in living to consume rather than in consuming to live, people not only need money and commodities to buy; they have to be convinced that this is the only way to live. There is faith involved in maintain a market based on eco-nomic coloniality (“capitalism” in the liberal and Marx-ist vocabulary).

The economic success of the BRICS countries comes from the fact that the leadership is engaged in epistemic economic disobedience vis-à-vis the IMF and the World Bank, two institutions of global scope and, until now, of lo-cal management. Secondly, the economic affirmation leads to the second step taken recently at the Delhi Summit in-dicates that the group is taking a leadership in global gov-ernance and global political coherence. In this respect, the fourth BRICS summit in Delhi was a turning point and a point of no return, in the evolution of a group that had fo-cused on global economic governance issues, but the Del-hi Declaration stated that the goal is also to achieve great-er political coherence. The Declaration of the Summit, that touches and recommended dialogue to solve the problems

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in Syria and Iran, at the same time that recommend Iran should continue its peaceful nuclear investigations, states:

We agree that the period of transformation taking place in the Middle East and North Africa should not be used as a pretext to delay resolu-tion of lasting conflicts but rather it should serve as an incentive to set-tle them, in particular the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Part II is devoted to the second argument. I argue that the commonality of BRICS countries goes beyond econom-ic and political interests. Although, to my knowledge, this issue has not been made explicit, there is an ethical factor supporting economic and political orientations and deci-sions: the five BRICS countries are of and ruled by “people of color.” This is one of the legacies of the Bandung Con-ference and Sukarno’s clear statement: “This is the first international conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind.” The statement is true with the clarification that before 1500 there were people with different skin col-or and different communities of beliefs, ethical and/or spir-itual, but there were no “people of color” in the sense that the expression has had since sixteent-century, and main-ly, since Linnaeus. In that regard, it was the first interna-tional meeting on planet earth since “people of color” were invented by Western main of knowledge and their inven-tion became hegemonic. Colonial and imperial differenc-es were precisely invented around “purity of blood” first, skin color later to which more recently language, religions and nationalities have been added to define the profile of “people of color.” Thus the bottom line, the non-said but I suspect deeply felt, is the colonial/imperial wound that connects the five countries in the history of the modern/

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colonial world. Nevertheless, and whatever you count all BRICS countries carry the “stigma” of “people of color,” of non-Western people, even if their skin is white like Slavs in Russia or European migrants to Latin America from the second half of the nineteenth-century. I am myself a result of that migration.

In Part I set the stage and offer the frame for the two ar-guments I just outlined. I address the topic of this meeting of the Académie de la latinité by assuming that there are “different kinds of difference.” And there is one kind that is crucial to understanding the Western concept of “hu-manity.” I describe it as colonial and imperial difference. These differences do not exist in the world but have been invented in the process of Europeans building knowledge and classifying the world. Colonial and imperial differenc-es are epistemic and ontological. They consist in describ-ing certain people as ontologically and rationally less hu-man. The epistemic difference establishes that certain peo-ple are less rational than the norm, and the norm is the con-cept of rationality of who is making the classification and the ranking. And because some people are rationally defi-cient, they are ontologically inferior. Colonial and imperi-al differences are the foundation of modern/colonial racism and the concept of “humanity”: the standard that serve the reference to classification and ranking.

2Technology and

World Civilization

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The question concerning technology today

Gianni Vattimo

Is there a “question concerning technology today”? Heidegger has often repeated that the essence of technolo-gy is nothing technical. Leaving aside the multiple mean-ings this sentence has acquired in his thought, one may say that it was surely a prophetical sentence. That’s why it is important, in the title of this paper, to emphasize the clause “today.” As a matter of fact, we can say that our experience of technology has developed more and more in the direc-tion of the progressive discovery of the truth of Heidegger’s sentence: there is no technical question on technology: i.e. we cannot say that the question concerning technology—supposed that we may define it—could be solved by a tech-nological move, for instance a new discovery, a new ap-plication of what we know, etc. Very simply, the question

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concerning technology is a metaphysical, or an ontolog-ical question. It has to do with the meaning of technolo-gy in our existence and in relation to what we call Being, truth, value. And the ontological, or existential, meaning of the question concerning technology is exactly the ques-tion as it appears to us today. Even the very notion of some-thing called technology was unthinkable in previous ep-ochs: in Aristotle’s, as you may remember, techne was one of the dianoetic virtues, like phronesis (prudence), intellect (nous) etc.: techne was the ability of producing an object, an ergon, in the material world—also a work of art was a “technical” product. Probably, not even the word technol-ogy is to be found in the vocabulary of Aristotle. At the very end, what we call today the question concerning tech-nology is more or less the story of the transformation of this very word: how did it happen that today we speak still of technique, of technics and technicity, but basically the “question” is for us “technology”?

I am not engaging in a pure word game, believe me. Let’s say: technique became technology when techne lost its qualification as a virtue, a capacity of man as such, de-veloping instead into a global system of productive connec-tions, what Heidegger calls the Gestell, the complex of the production, exploitation of resources, etc. In which sense does this global machinery involve a “question”? Again and again, the question does not allow itself to be re-duced to a simple “question,” as if we were looking for a simple answer. We don’t ask what is technology, look-ing for a definition, an essence. What I’m suggesting is

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not simply that technique has become technology when the system of techno-scientific machinery has appeared ex-plicitly in the form of an integrated “system.” But, more than that, I want to call the attention to the fact that the very question concerning technology has become urgent, and even simply possible, when technology has become an integrated system. There was no question concerning tech-nology when the different techniques progressively devel-oped by man were just different devices in order to facil-itate this or that aspect of existence, by producing objects or modifications in the material world. Medicine, for in-stance, has always been a technique, but only recently it has become part of technology. The meaning of this way of interpreting Heidegger’s sentence on “Die Technik” is rath-er simple: what constitutes the question concerning tech-nology is not a problem related to the fact that man invents and develops instruments and manners of realizing useful objects or different conditions of his/her life; what makes technology become a question for us today is its charac-ter as an integrated system. In relation to this question, the usual answers we find in the current culture—technique is not good or bad in itself, this depends only from the use one makes of it, etc.—sound generally frivolous and obvi-ously unsatisfying. They don’t offer any real answer: why should we ask the question of technology if this was so simple? The reason is that technology as an integrated sys-tem seems to escape exactly to all evaluations, having be-come a sort of autonomous world—it is even difficult to find a name for it: body, connection, machinery… As you

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may remember, Heidegger used the word Gestell, based on the root stellen, put, pose, dispose, and on the prefix Ge, indicating the complex of (Ge-Birg: a chain of mountains etc.). What constitutes the “question” is the Ge-, as it were: as far as it develops into a complex of instruments total-ly integrated with one another, technology appears to us as a “world” which escapes more and more our possibili-ty of controlling and understanding it. Rather paradoxical-ly, the more technique—the totality of instruments creat-ed for the transformation of the material world—becomes strong and efficacious because of its global integration into a system, the more it ends up, for a sort of inertia, by be-ing incapable of creating authentic novelty. This is visible in certain expressions we use commonly: when we say e.g. that something is JUST a technical problem, implying that it is in principle solved, and needs simply the application of a known rule, the use of a given instrument. One might say that the problem of technology is that it hides and dis-solves the problems.

I insist upon this paradox because it seems to me that one of the problematic characteristics of technology in our culture, the very sense of the question concerning technol-ogy of our title, is that technology seems a machinery cre-ated to exclude the action and choice of the human sub-ject engaged in a certain activity. Think of Chaplin’s mov-ie Modern times, where the worker is pictured as totally depending on the rhythm of the machine, which he has the sole task of serving in order to allows the production to go on. Of course this is a very trivial example; but in many

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senses it summarizes the elements of the question we are trying to analyze. From the beginning of 20th century—I am thinking also of the artistic avant-garde (futurism, e.g.) and of the global atmosphere of European culture around the first world war, technology created a “humanistic” re-sistance and deep fears not because of its capacity of mak-ing life easier, merchandises cheaper, etc.; but because it appeared as a form of impersonal domination of the instru-ments upon concrete humans which were supposed to be its masters. What is scaring in technology and explains the hostility towards it in the common everyday attitudes is the fact that it appears as a form of domination, dangerous also because apparently impersonal: against technology there is no possible clear struggle (it’s technology, baby!).

I must confess that this quasi identification of technology with an impersonal power that escapes any control is also more or less inspired to me by a specific experience which I live as a European citizen of our time. The increasing loss of interest in politics which is a general phenomenon not only in Italy but in a large part of European countries to-day is strongly related to the state of mind described by the expression I just quoted: why do you complain, it is econo-my—it’s capitalism; or technology etc.—baby! This expres-sion means more or less the same as the old French one—c’est la vie!—which was used to accept with resignation the inescapable laws of reality which one cannot change, and which don’t even appear to depend on someone’s decision... In these times we have in Italy what we call a “technical government”—a sort of coalition which is not made up of

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elected politicians but of economists and scholars appoint-ed by the chief of the state and accepted with resignation by the political parties. The parties, with all their programmat-ic differences, have accepted the situation in order to restore an economic condition which appeared to be desperate and unsolvable without leaving aside all the conflicting polit-ical programs. There has been a sort of “realistic” accep-tance of the laws of the market—it’s economy, baby. More or less like in ancient Rome, where in case of a war the sen-ate left all the power to a dictator. I recall this Italian, and ancient roman example, to point out that technology, in the everyday use of the word, involves a sort o neutralization of conflicts in the name of a “supreme” interest, i.e., the func-tioning of the system which has its inner logic on which all our lives depend (“ses lois que le coeur ne connait pas”, one would say with Pascal.)

So what? Should one regret the political conflicts be-tween the parties, the expensive electoral campaigns, the corruption so often connected to the mechanisms of repre-sentative democracy? I only want to remark that the neu-tralizing effect of the technical government exemplifies schematically the reason why people, from the very begin-ning of the industrial revolution and especially in 20th cen-tury, tend to feel such a strong suspicion against technol-ogy. They experience it as a power which is out of their control, and (remember certain pages of Max Weber) tends also to acquire the characters of a hidden and threatening divinity. From such observations I propose to draw the fol-lowing thesis: technology appears as a threat not only, or

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not mainly, because it is seen as a sort of hybris, an arro-gant claim manipulating nature and competing with God himself—which is the current prevailing explanation of the fear towards it. As I remarked above, this fear has devel-oped from the moment in which technique has defined it-self as a global system which cannot be modified without breaking the global functioning of it. Too big to fail—were the American banks which had to be rescued by public funds in order to avoid a general disaster which would have involved all of us (at least this was the justification for the governments action in the last international financial cri-sis). What scares people in the technological globalization is not its aggressiveness towards (what we use to call) na-ture and its laws, but the domination and denial of freedom which is required for the regular functioning of the system. Adorno and the school of Frankfurt used to call it the “to-tale Verwaltung”—the total administration/organization. A remote anticipation of this inner tendency of technolo-gy that was going to become oppressive and authoritari-an (totalitarian, as a matter of fact) can be seen in the way Max Weber describes the decisive importance of monothe-ism for the development of modern science. Only if all the aspects of the material world are submitted to a unique au-thority, and not, as it happened in polytheism, to different special divinities, it becomes possible to construe a general science of nature, with general laws valid everywhere (like the law of gravity, for instance etc.). Newton and Galilee would have never made their discoveries outside a mono-theistic view of nature. Even more evident than in the case

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of natural sciences is the importance of a unified “com-mand” in the case of technology as a global system.

Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher no longer as popular as decades ago, used to interpret Marx by saying that the domination of nature has always involved the domination of some men over other men. Marcuse was also persuaded that the exit from the pre-historical era and the transition to civilization (again recalling Marx) had become possible as a consequence of technology itself, which did not require any longer the domination of man over man. This domina-tion, although no longer strictly required by technology it-self, exists still in the form of additional repression: strong and oppressive social discipline is no longer necessary as in previous periods of history, but it lasts as a sort of iner-tial continuation of the privileges which the dominant class doesn’t want to lose. One of the reasons why Marcuse is no longer popular today is, among others reasons, the fact that his hope seems to have lost any credibility. In a sense, Mar-cuse lived in a society (a half century ago, more or less) in which technology appeared still able to redeem itself from its complicity with domination which is no longer the case exactly because of the intensive development of technolo-gy in our lives.

In view of all this, our question concerning technology to-day should be reformulated as follows: how far and in which terms can technology be separated from domination? One has often said that technology is a sort of “second nature” for civilized man. Yes, probably this is true in the worst possible sense: like a second nature it is a dominating power which

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has to be accepted: c’est la vie, etc. But as far as domination is still required for the functioning of the global technologi-cal system, technology is all but a neutral and natural force. It involves the persisting power of man over man, the ap-pearance of neutrality and its power of appeasing conflicts is the worst form of domination insofar it is nor recogniz-able as such. Are we suggesting that all of us are victims of a kind of lobotomy operated by the “system” poisoned by a social drug keeping us quiet and more or less happy? I am not inventing anything: there have been proposals of tranquillizing the masses of unemployed people by allow-ing them to take drugs, a method generally applied in jails in order to avoid riots and disorder. Of course, we assume (hope?) that this is not (yet) the case. But philosophers like Heidegger have spoken, outside of any science-fiction sce-nario, of the forgetfulness of being i.e. of the loss of any ca-pacity of distinguishing Being (capital B) from beings as they are de facto given to us. If the ontological difference is forgotten, then the totality of Being is reduced to what there is, to the factual order of things, which excludes inno-vation, transformation, leaving aside revolution. The dom-ination of technology, where all what happens is in prin-ciple planned and foreseen—this is in fact the good func-tioning of the Ge-stell—is what ideally excludes future and novelty. The fear of technology is the fear one feels in rela-tion to a mechanic universe which promises safety insofar it excludes authentic historicity; all this is of course in large part a nightmare of pessimistic conservatives; but catches one of the risks he technological global order really runs:

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the impossibility of the event, which, to come back again to Heidegger, is the synonymous of Being. In Heidegger’s philosophy, as Being cannot be identified with what de fac-to is—because this, very simply, would make impossible to explain and live our experience of freedom (hope, fear, memory, etc. in one word: human existence), it has to be understood in terms of event: authentic Being is not, it hap-pens when something changes the frame of everyday expe-rience: a great work of art which announces a new civiliza-tion, the foundation of a new political order, the appearance of a new religion… This seems to be a too romantic idea of human history; but in fact it is the only way we have to take seriously our basic notions of historical epochs, change of paradigms, revolutions or restorations, etc.

The idea of the end of history which has been popular-ized in recent years by thinkers like Fukuyama has a mean-ing which probably Fukuyama did not consciously intend to give it. Technology, the system of the Ge-Stell, the pre-dictable and planned global machinery, is the end of his-tory insofar its functioning imposes (requires, orders) that nothing intervenes to disturb the regular working of the machine. Remember that at the beginning of the industri-al revolution rioting workers, for fear of losing their jobs, destroyed the machines, in a movement which, from the name of its creator, was called luddism (movement was named after General Ned Lud or King Ludd). In many sense the current situation now of labor in the Western in-dustrial world is very similar to that; not (only) because of the machines, but because of the pretended “objective”

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laws of economy where thousands of workers are losing their jobs. And that is not an objective essential conse-quence of technology.

Once again, the essence of technology is nothing tech-nical; neither in the sense that technology would develop automatically because of the natural development of its in-ventions and creations—the development requires invest-ments, capitals, choices etc.—nor in the sense that it would create a situation in which human conflicts, political con-trasts, etc. are overcome by a pure rational—scientific, technical, organization of our common life. More clear-ly said: exactly because technology has no automatic de-velopment by itself, no inner tendency to increase, but re-quires choices, investments, decisions, it is still strongly related to power and, let me add, class struggle. The pre-tended neutrality of technology, like it’s so often glorified as the capacity of overcoming conflicts and of creating so-cial peace, welfare, and order, is the mask of those who own the power to direct it towards their ends. What is true and original in our situation is the (technological) power of the media, which have the capacity of making us forget Being—difference, transformations; of making us believe that there is no possible alternative to the current state of affairs. If this process goes on—not automatically, but con-sciously directed by the ruling classes—we have reasons to expect the end of history, because history, as a great Italian thinker, Benedetto Croce, once said, is nothing but the his-tory of freedom.

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The Freudian robot: rethinking the human and the machine

Lydia H. Liu

Critics of instrumental reason since the Frankfurt School have a tendency to focus on the subject-object rela-tionship of the post-Enlightenment era, while taking mod-ern technology as more or less coterminous with the rise of the capitalist mode of production and its domination of the world. Martin Heidegger, in contrast, offers a more sup-ple and interesting approach to the problem of technology by insisting that the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. He writes:

What is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and manipu-lating nor in the using of means, but rather in the revealing mentioned before. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth.1

1 Martin Heidegger, The question concerning technology, and other es-says, translated by William Lovitt, New York, Harper & Row, 1977, p. 58.

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Scientific knowledge, for example, cannot be a cause or origin of technology but rather is dependent upon the de-velopment of technological devices for testing, measuring, verifying, and so on. By presenting his argument this way, is Heidegger not echoing the concerns of quantum physi-cists of his own time?

The answer is yes, for in quantum physics, modern sci-entists had begun to recognize that—in the words of Wer-ner Heisenberg—

there are situations which no longer permit an objective understanding of natural processes, and yet use this realization to order our relation-ships with nature. When we speak of the picture of nature in the ex-act science of our age, we do not mean a picture of nature so much as a picture of our relationships with nature.2

He further suggests that the Cartesian division of the world into objective processes in space and time and the subjective mind in which these processes are mirrored—the division of res extensa and res cogitans—is no longer a valid starting point for understanding modern science.

The scientific method of analyzing, explaining, and classifying has become conscious of its own limitations, which arise out of the fact that by its intervention science alters and refashions the object of in-vestigation (Heisenberg, 1958, p. 29.)

If method and object can no longer be separated out af-ter the discovery of quantum physics, does it follow that our humanistic critique of scientific reasoning and tech-nology must likewise rethink the ground of our critical

2 Heisenberg, The physicist’s conception of nature, London, Hutchinson Scientific and Technical, 1958, p. 28-9.

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consciousness? This question will be highly relevant to the study of the psychic life of digital media which I am going to outline below.

We now know that Heidegger’s elaboration of techne in “The question concerning technology” was an actual re-sponse to the philosophical quandaries of quantum phys-ics, more substantial than his occasional mention of it cared to acknowledge. Cathryn Carson’s research indicates that when Heidegger was invited to give a public lecture on “The question concerning technology” (“Die Frage nach der Technik”) in 1953, he was specifically asked to prepare his lecture in response to Heisenberg’s own lecture “The picture of nature in contemporary physics.” Both lectures took place in a symposium hosted by the Bavarian Acad-emy of Fine Arts in Munich in November 1953.3 I suspect that Heidegger’s elaboration of the “standing reserve” (Bes-tand) with reference to the hydroelectric plant in the river Rhine in that conversation might have been a reaction to Heisenberg’s own allusion to water management in ancient China. It will be interesting to speculate on such a connec-tion, but here I am going to confine myself to Heisenberg’s engagement with ancient Chinese philosophy.

Heisenberg’s “Zhuangzi”

In “The picture of nature in contemporary physics,” Heisenberg alludes to an ancient parable told by Chinese

3 See Cathryn Carson, “Science as instrumental reason: Heidegger, Habermas, Heisenberg,” Continental Philosophy Review, December 5, 2009, http://www.springerlink.com/content/e5772880g7750031/.

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philosopher Zhuangzi (369-286 BCE). In it, Zhuangzi stag-es a confrontation between one of Confucius’s disciples who argues for the good of technology to save labor and achieve efficiency and his opponent—an old Daoist gar-dener—who takes an uncompromising ethical and philo-sophical stance to reject that argument. Through that con-frontation, Heisenberg discovers that philosophical reflec-tions upon the existential and moral entanglement between human beings and their machines did not begin with the modern age but went back several millennia to at least the beginning of recorded history.4 Here is an English transla-tion of the third-century BCE Chinese text:

Zigong [Tzu-Gung] traveled south, and on his way back through Jin, as he passed along the south bank of the river Han, he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. The man had hollowed out an open-ing by which he entered the well and from which he emerged, lugging a pitcher, which he carried out to water the fields. Grunting and puff-ing, he used up a great deal of energy and produced very little result. “There is a machine for this sort of thing,” said Zigong. “In one day it can water a hundred fields, demanding very little effort and produc-ing excellent results. Wouldn’t you like one?” The gardener raised his head and looked at Zigong. “How would it work?” “It’s a contraption called gao and is made of a piece of wood. The wood is shaped so that the back end is heavy and the front end light and it raises the water as though it were pouring it out, so fast that it seems to boil right over! It’s called a well sweep.” A scornful smile appeared in the old man’s face, and he said, “I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses ma-chines [ jixie] does all his work in the manner of a machine [ jishi]. He who does his work in the manner of a machine lets his mind run like a machine [ jixin], and he who carries his machine-like mind around los-es his pure innocence. Without the pure innocence, the life of the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way will

4 Werner Heisenberg, The physicist’s conception of nature, p. 7-31.

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cease to buoy you up. It’s not that I don’t know about your machine. I would be ashamed to use it!”Zigong blushed with chagrin, looked down, and made no reply. After a while, the gardener said, “Who are you, anyway?”“A disciple of Kung Qiu [alias Confucius].”5

Wearing the mask of the old gardener, Zhuangzi attacks Zigong and his rationalizing of machine to demonstrate where and how Confucius’s teaching has erred. Machine, efficiency, and technical skill are each scorned by him in a fierce celebration of the unfettered spirit and the Way or Dao. And it is not for nothing that water management hap-pens to be the center of Zhuangzi’s parable in Heisenberg’s lecture and connects meaningfully with Heidegger’s dis-cussion of water power—“What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the pow-er station”—in “The question concerning technology.”6 Within just a few years of their exchange at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, the same Zhuangzi text reemerged verbatim in McLuhan’s influential book Understanding media. Here, McLuhan quotes the ancient text in order to pay his tribute to Heisenberg for teaching us that techno-logical change alters not only our habits of life, but our pat-terns of thought and valuation.7

5 I adopt here Burton Watson’s English translation and have modified his text slightly according to my reading of the original. See Zhuangzi. The complete works of Chuang Tzu, translated by Burton Watson, p. 134-5. For Heisenberg’s own quote of the Zhuangzi in English translation, see The physicist’s conception of nature, p. 20-1.6 Heidegger, The question concerning technology, p. 167 McLuhan, Understanding media: the extensions of man, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1994 (1964), p. 63.

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Heisenberg or McLuhan have not turned to the ancient parable to appreciate the old gardener’s opposition to ma-chine but used it to articulate their own conflicted views about modern science and technology. There is something in the Zhuangzi that resonates deeply with their under-standing of how humans relate to their machines at some fundamental psychic levels. Heisenberg writes: “The far-reaching changes in our environment and in our way of life wrought by this technical age have also changed dan-gerously our ways of thinking.”8 More than two thousand years ago, Zhuangzi taught us that our machines were not just tools or prosthetic devices that could perform wonder-ful tasks for humans; they were also agents of psychic (and social) transformation. On the basis of that understanding, the old gardener takes up a philosophical position against Zigong’s prosthetic view of machines, which is being dis-missed as flawed and ethically unacceptable.

Techne: prosthetic extension or psychic transformation?

The point of the Zhuangzi parable, however, can easily be misconstrued. The tension Zhuangzi asks us to consid-er is not facile opposition between some irrational human love and hate of machines but rather a carefully stated an-tithesis of two different conceptions of human-machine re-lationship, one being the prosthetic/instrumental view and the other interactive/ transformational view. And this is what

8 Heisenberg, The physicist’s conception of nature, p. 20.

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brought the ancient parable closer to the time of Heisenberg and McLuhan, making it speak to an often reiterated ques-tioning in the discussion of technology: do human beings be-come masters of their machines, or their slaves?

Relevant to our discussion is the etymology of the word “robot,” which originally denotes “slave” through its asso-ciation with the Czech word robota, meaning “compulsory labor.” Some robot engineers such as Rodney Brooks try to distance themselves from the idea that humans use robots as their new slaves; Brooks asks,

Is there, or will there ever be, enough similarity to us in our human-oid robots that we will decide to treat them in the same moral ways we treat other people and, in varying degrees, animals?9

This curious moral stance is complicated by an obser-vation Brooks makes elsewhere in Flesh and Machines. Recalling his childhood experience of watching the Stan-ley Kubrick film 2001: A space odyssey (1968) and in par-ticular the robot character HAL, Brooks writes: “HAL turns out to be a murdering psychopath, but for me there was little to regret in that.”10 Not only is HAL a murder-ing psychopath, but he murders astronauts and engineers whom he is supposed to serve. It appears that something or someone is missing in this parade of robot-slaves and

9 Flesh and machines: how robots will change us, New York, Vintage Books, 2003, p. 154. For further treatment of this and other issues relat-ing to machine and morality, see Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen, Mor-al machines: teaching robots right from wrong.10 Flesh and machines, p. 64.

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robot-psychopaths… Recognizing a similarly missing fig-ure in a different context, Jacques Lacan observes:

When people had become acquainted with thermodynamics, and asked themselves how their machine was going to pay for itself, they left themselves out. They regarded the machine as the master regards the slave—the machine is there, somewhere else, and it works. They were forgetting one thing, that it was they who had signed the order form.11

And what are they?“It’s unfortunate that we’ve become slaves to these

damned things [computers].”12 Admiral Thomas H. Moor-er’s reply to the investigation by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969–70 is well worth recalling here. When President Richard Nixon decided to bomb Cambodia and hide that decision from Congress, the computers in the Pentagon were “fixed” to create a double system of accounting—“one to keep the truth from the people, the other to tell the truth to the computer” (ibid.). The computers transformed the genuine strike reports about the 3630 recorded B-52 sorties in Cambodia and their bombing of a neutral nation into false reports about strikes in South Vietnam. The US government officials who had access to the secret reports had to believe them because they came directly from the Pentagon’s computers.

11 Jacques Lacan, The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 2, the Ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, edit-ed by Jacques-Alain Miller and John Forrester, New York, London, W.W. Norton, 1988, p. 83.12 “(…) Admiral and computer,” New York Times, August 14, 1973.

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Commenting on that war crime, MIT computer scien-tist Joseph Weizenbaum wrote: “George Orwell’s Ministry of Information had become mechanized. History was not merely destroyed, it was recreated.” Those officials “did not realize that they had become their computer’s ‘slaves,’ to use Admiral Moorer’s own word, until the lies they in-structed their computers to tell others ensnared them, the instructors, themselves.”13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat-tari would insist on a distinction here: “One is not enslaved by the technical machine but rather subjected to it.” 14

In Understanding media, McLuhan suggests by continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor reli-gions. An Indian is the servomechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.15

McLuhan’s inversion of the master-slave relationship is provocative and contains some truths in it, but it neverthe-less asserts a cybernetic (machine) view of human-machine relationship that puts his momentary nod to Zhuangzi and Heisenberg in a double bind. For it is well known that cy-berneticians have conceived of the central nervous system it-self as a cybernetic machine like all other servomechanisms

13 Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer power and human reason: from judg-ment to calculation, San Francisco, W. H. Freeman, 1976, p. 239.14 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 457.15 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media: the extensions of man, p. 46.

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capable of maintaining equilibrium or homeostasis. Nor-bert Wiener, for example, would have agreed with McLu-han, while Zhuangzi and Heisenberg would have found his mere inversion of a prosthetic view of human-machine re-lationship just as problematic as the straightforward instru-mental view of machine.

Clearly, McLuhan’s critique of the technocratic civiliza-tion is contradicted by his enthusiastic endorsement of the cybernetics that has been the hallmark of that same civi-lization. In that sense, McLuhan and many of his follow-ers are still toeing the line of Confucius’s disciple Zigong when they repeat ad nauseam that the physiological defi-ciencies of the human species are in need of prosthetic ex-tension through technology. It is one thing to argue that the memory capacity of the human brain can be greatly extended by the increased power of a microchip comput-er and quite another to argue that the logic of the comput-er—and communication networks in general—is the same as the logic of the human psyche itself. In fact, the argu-ment of technological prosthesis never works well in the latter case, especially in regard to cybernetic research. The prosthetic argument is actually an alibi for something more fundamental, and this is the cybernetic conception of the human psyche as a computing machine.

By the 1940s, we began to witness the first generation of cyberneticians arriving upon the scene when Warren Mc-Culloch and Walter Pitts, sought to demonstrate that psychic events follow the “all-or-none” law of communication cir-cuits and constructed their formal neural nets isomorphic to the relations of propositional logic. In the early 1960s, AI

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scientists such as Kenneth Mark Colby and Robert P. Abel-son began to develop their cognitive computer programs to simulate neurosis and paranoia. Marvin Minsky, founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, attempted to derive cognitive models from computation; he calls him-self a neo-Freudian. And there is the interesting story of Lacan, who closely followed the work of Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and the cyberneticians of the Macy Con-ferences as he tried to rethink Freud and advance his own theory of the symbolic order. Where do all these develop-ments add up? Can they tell us something new about the development of digital media that we do not already know? I have proposed to study “the Freudian robot” in my recent work and would like to push this idea further here to allow for a critical analysis of the psychic life of digital media and artificial intelligence. 16

For there is a great deal more going on—politically, so-cially, and psychologically—than the perceived need to overcome human physiological deficiencies with techno-logical prosthesis. From the standpoint of Heisenberg, peo-ple and their machines are always mutually entangled in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. With the coming of the Freudian robot upon the scene—where “the distinction be-tween us and robots is going to disappear” or has already begun to disappear17—the redoubled simulacra of human

16 Lydia H. Liu, The freudian robot: digital media and the future of the unconscious, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010.17 Rodney A. Brooks, Flesh and machines, p. 236. My interpretation of the disappearance of the human-machine distinction is very different from

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machine entanglement are bound to complicate Heisen-berg’s observation by bringing the extremely fraught neu-rophysiological and psychoanalytical dimension of that re-lationship into play.

These days, the public is bombarded with the prophecies of engineers and science fiction pundits who try to persuade us that we are on our way to becoming immortals through the implants and prosthetic extensions they will invent. Min-sky, Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, and others have repeat-edly announced that human beings will transcend biology in the near future. Kurzweil puts it symptomatically:

As we move toward a nonbiological existence, we will gain the means of ‘backing ourselves’ up (storing the key patterns underlying our knowledge, skills, and personality), thereby eliminating most causes of death as we know it.18

The familiar psychic defense mechanisms against the death drive that Freud identified long ago bring us face to face with the looming figure of the Freudian robot in Kurz-weil and his colleagues. The return of the repressed may well lurk in the shadows of their updated myth of human transcendence in the manner of a pseudo religion.

Minsky and the cognitive unconscious

Marvin Minsky is the most influential pioneer in AI re-search and the computer simulation of the mind who has sought to embody Freud’s discoveries in the conceptual-

Brooks’s affirmative conception because he does not recognize the Freud-ian robot in this relationship.18 Kurzweil, The singularity is near: when humans transcend biology, p. 323.

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ization and designing of robots. The robot figure HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: a space odyssey was in-spired by the AI developments and the actual robots that screenplay writer Arthur C. Clarke saw at the MIT Artifi-cial Intelligence Laboratory. This laboratory was founded and directed by Marvin Minsky.

One question that is seldom raised by those who study the AI field is where Freud stands in Minsky’s work on ro-botics and in the AI research programs initiated by him. From the time he is said to have played a role in Shan-non’s designing of the Ultimate Machine to the publica-tion of The society of mind (1986) and The emotion ma-chine (2006), Minsky has long engaged Freud in unique and fascinating ways. His work suggests that Freudian psy-choanalysis has shadowed the cybernetic experiments of AI engineers and theorists throughout the second half of the twentieth century down to the present. This effort is bound to raise some questions about the techne of the un-conscious in digital media.

Minsky’s early work on randomly wired neural network machine had been inspired by McCulloch and Pitt’s spec-ulations about neural nets.19 Later, he professed conflicting allegiance to McCulloch and Freud and practically charac-terized his own project as “neo-Freudian.”20 With the AI

19 See Minsky’s discussion of McCulloch and Pitts in Computation: fi-nite and infinite machines, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967, p. 3266.20 Minsky, The society of mind, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1986, p. 184.

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robotics program in mind, Minsky draws on Freud’s ideas about the unconscious and tries to reformulate them with the help of Jean Piaget’s work on cognition and learning processes. This is an interesting and difficult enterprise. The construction of such robots entails formidable techni-cal obstacles and, more importantly, it raises fundamental philosophical issues about cognition, memory, reflexivity, consciousness, and so on. For example, what makes human beings unique, or not so unique? Or what is it that makes robots endearing or uncanny to humans? In developing his robotic model of the mind, Minsky frames these problems in explicitly Freudian terms, as is demonstrated by the fol-lowing diagram from The emotion machine (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Marvin Minsky’s simulation model nicknamed the Freudian Sandwich.

Minsky calls his diagram “The Freudian Sandwich,” in which the Id, Ego, and Superego are duly replicated in that

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order.21 The main difference is that his particular model—rather than some alternatives—also serves as a model for humanoid robots. The future robot must be equipped with “mental” correctors, suppressors, censors, and so on to al-low it to function at a highly intelligent level. This neo-Freudian view leads to Minsky’s dismissal of rationality as “a kind of fantasy” (p. 92). Minsky argues that “our think-ing is never entirely based on purely logical reasoning” and predicts that “most of our future attempts to build large, growing Artificial Intelligences will be subject to all sorts of mental disorders” (p. 341). More interestingly, HAL-2023 pops up in the midst of his discussion to confirm that “my designers equipped me with special ‘backup’ memo-ry banks in which I can store snapshots of my entire state. So whenever anything goes wrong, I can see exactly what my programs have done—so that I can then debug myself” (p. 128). If this sounds like science fiction, Minsky propos-es that “we must try to design—as opposed to define—machines that can do what human minds do” (p. 107), be-cause until one can simulate the cognitive machinery of the mind in all its respects, one cannot fully understand how the mind works.

Until that moment comes to pass, however, one must be content with human reasoning and theoretical speculation. And this is what Minsky has been doing. His “Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious” merits special attention

21 Minsky, The emotion machine: commonsense thinking, artificial intel-ligence, and the future of the human mind, New York, Simon and Schus-ter, 2006, p. 88.

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here, not merely because the author engages with Freud’s notion of the unconscious in a more sustained manner than he does elsewhere. More important is his rediscovery of the relationship between nonsense and the unconscious, which has not drawn a great deal of attention from Freud-ian scholars. In 1905, Freud raised an interesting question about sense and nonsense in Jokes and their relation to the unconscious, asking in what instances a joke might appear before the critical faculty as nonsense. He shows how jokes can make use of the modes of thought in the unconscious that are strictly proscribed in conscious thought. The effect of jokes thus has something to do with the repression of un-constrained verbal play and with the mechanisms of psy-chological inhibition in general. When a child learns how to handle the vocabulary of his mother tongue, it gives him pleasure to experiment with it in play. Freud writes that the child “puts words together without regard to the condi-tion that they should make sense, in order to obtain from them the pleasurable effect of rhythm or rhyme”22 As the child grows up, this play is brought to a close through the strengthening of the critical faculty or reasonableness, for “all that remains permitted to him are significant combi-nations of words” (ibid.). The preoccupation with meaning and signification in the world of grownups leads to the re-jection of pure play as being meaningless and, as a result

22 Sigmund Freud, “Jokes and their relation to the unconscious,” in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VIII, translated by James Strachey and edited by James Strachey, 24 vols., London, Hogarth Press, 1953-1974, p. 125.

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of censorship and self-censorship, the play becomes im-possible except on those rare occasions when the inhibition is lifted momentarily by verbal transgression such as jokes (p. 128-9). Condensed with double meanings and ambigui-ty, jokes can fool the critical faculty so the latter sees only surface meanings and fails to catch the eruption of forbid-den thoughts.

Minsky accepts the above explanation and further points out that “Freud’s theories do not work as well for humor-ous nonsense as for humorous aggression and sexuality.”23 It is true that Freud has discussed the distinctions between nonsense jokes and other types of jokes but does not spec-ify which mechanism is responsible for initiating non-sense. Minsky offers a cybernetic explanation by showing that humorous nonsense has something to do with what he terms “frame-shift” control in the cognitive unconscious. He gives the example of “meaningless sense-shifts” from a schizophrenic’s transcript in which the patient sees a pen-ny in the street and says “copper, that’s a conductor.” He then runs to a streetcar to speak to the conductor. Minsky argues that this meaningless frame-shift from one sense of “conductor” to another on the basis of coincidental word-sound resemblance—which we may recognize as the psy-chic basis of the literary bond uniting the schizophren-ic and the poet—can occur only when the “bad-analogy”

23 Marvin Minsky, “Jokes and the logic of the cognitive unconscious,” in Cognitive constraints on communication, edited by Lucia Vaina and Jaak-ko Hintikka, Boston, Reidel, 1981, p. 175.

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suppressor is disabled to enhance the general analogy find-er (ibid., p. 185).

Minsky’s formulation of the cognitive unconscious con-sists of Frames, Terminals, and Network Systems as well as Bugs, Suppressors, and other mechanisms of a network of interacting subsystems. His term “the cognitive uncon-scious” derives from Jean Piaget, whom Minsky often cites along with Freud. Whereas Piaget introduces a distinction between affect and intellect as in his use of separate terms for “the affective unconscious” and “the cognitive uncon-scious,” Minsky has reformulated Piaget’s ideas to absorb affect into the intellectual sphere, hence the Emotion Ma-chine. Compare Piaget’s earlier observation:

(…) affectivity is characterized by its energic composition, with charg-es distributed over one object or another (cathexis), positively or neg-atively. The cognitive aspect of conduct, on the contrary, is character-ized by its structure, whether it be elementary action schemata, con-crete classification, operations seriation, etc., or the logic of proposi-tions with their different “functors” (implications, etc.).24

The functions of the cognitive unconscious formulated by Minsky seem not very different from the general work-ings of the unconscious as originally formulated by Freud except that Minsky rejects any association of nonsense with some basic “grammar of humor” or “deep structure.” He ar-gues that there is no single underlying structure from which all humorous nonsense springs and, even if we look deeper for that underlying structure, we will still encounter a lack of unity in the mental event, whether it be Freud’s joke or

24 Jean Piaget, “The affective unconscious and the cognitive unconscious,” Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, n. 21, 1973, p. 250.

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Wittgenstein’s problem of defining “game.” This lack of unity derives from the interplay of sense and nonsense in a complex web of relations among laughter, faulty reason-ing, taboos and prohibitions, and unconscious suppressor mechanisms in the unconscious. For that reason, the pur-suit of semantics can never get us very far when the “clar-ity of words is itself a related illusion” as far as the cog-nitive unconscious is concerned (p. 189). The first-gener-ation computer simulation of verbalized beliefs was built just upon such an elaborate illusion.

From the standpoint of psychoanalysis, Minsky’s psy-chic machine—or at least his conceptualization—comes closer than the earlier computer modeling of verbalized be-liefs to embodying the dynamic of sense and nonsense in the layered networks of the cognitive unconscious. Min-sky does not shun complexity nor does he approach the cognitive unconscious via semantics and established con-cepts. The latter—verbal sense and nonsense—can be ex-plained by the complex pathways of the interconnected network systems in the unconscious, but not the other way around, which has been the mistaken approach represented by computer simulations built by Kenneth Mark Colby and other AI psychiatrists who fetishize semantics. How large and how complex are the interconnected network systems in the human cognitive unconscious? No one has an an-swer yet. Minsky speculates that “it would take more than a million linked-up bits of knowledge, but less than a bil-lion of them, to match the mind of any sage.”25 Would this

25 Minsky, Introduction to Marvin Minsky, ed., Robotics, New York, Anchor Press, 1985, p. 16.

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not put the computer simulation of the human mind out of the question? Minsky believes that such a task is indeed difficult and complicated but not out of reach.

To design machines that can do what human minds do in Minsky’s words is to build the Freudian robot of the future. We must ask, however, where the science fiction will end and virtual reality begin. And why humanoid ro-bots? Minsky replies that this has something to do with our dream of immortality. If the question is “Is it possible, with artificial intelligence, to conquer death?” his answer is an unequivocal yes.26 Minsky predicts that human beings will achieve near-immortality by using robotics and prosthet-ic devices. We will be able to replace all damaged body parts, including our brain cells, and live a healthy and com-fortable life for close to ten thousand years (ibid., p. 303). And we can even transfer our personality into the comput-er and become computers—i.e. Freudian robots—and “we will be able to install in a human form an intelligence un-cannily close to our own” (p. 302). The word “uncannily” slips out from somewhere to recast the extraordinary ambi-tion of AI research in less sanguine terms if we remember what Freud has said about the uncanny. A self-styled neo-Freudian, Minsky has somehow neglected to consider the mechanisms of repression with respect to death. And what would be the place of the “uncanny” once death is con-quered? Can death be conquered? Is the will to the mastery

26 Minsky, “Our robotized future,” ibid., p. 298.

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of the unconscious but another manifestation of the death drive that Freud has discerned in human civilization?

Conclusion

These questions lead me to believe that the study of the Freudian robot promises a firmer and more critical grasp of the precarious nature of our networked society than can reasonably be accommodated by the human-machine com-petition theory (Hubert Dreyfus, John Searle, et al.) of what computers can or cannot do, or Donna Haraway’s celebra-tion of the cyborg, or the transhuman variety predicted by others. It seems to me that the idea of the cyborg or trans-human obfuscates the political and psychic foundations of human-machine entanglement in the digital age more than it clarifies it. For Haraway, the cyborg is “a cybernetic or-ganism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”27 And she is right to point out further that writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs. But she goes on to assert that

cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all mean-ing perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. This is why cy-borg politics insists on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine (Haraway, op. cit., p. 176.)

This may sound empowering as far as the rhetoric goes, but until we figure out what kinds of psychic and political

27 Donna Haraway, “A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and so-cialist-feminism in the late 20th century,” in Simians, cyborgs and wom-en: the reinvention of nature, New York, Routledge, 1991, p. 151.

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transformation remain open and available to cybernetics and digital media, it is unlikely that Haraway’s cyborg can do better than become a Freudian robot and submit to the compulsion to repeat in the feedback loop of human-ma-chine simulacra.

Ultimately, we ought to be concerned with the politi-cal consequences of an emerging society of Freudian ro-bots, which is where American society is headed and at-tempts to lead the world. It is not for nothing that the sci-ences of robotics, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiol-ogy have served the defense and naval research programs so well and been generously rewarded with grants and tax-payer’s money. In fact, many of their pundits do not feel any qualms about their participation in the imperial dom-ination of the world and the universe.28 Would democracy still have a substantial meaning for a society of Freudian robots who are consumed by the desire to control, militari-ly or otherwise, and are ultimately driven by the cybernet-ic unconscious?

28 The majority of the AI researchers and cyberneticians have participat-ed in such programs and benefited from such grants. Kurzweil has men-tioned his own role in the five-member Army Science Advisory Group (ASAG) while discussing smart weapons in The singularity is near, p. 3305. One courageous dissenter I have come across is the late exiled German-Jewish scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, the famed inventor of the first mind simulation program, ELIZA. For Weizenbaum’s scathing criticism of his MIT colleagues and technological messiahs whose work merely justifies military spending and masks real political conflicts, see Weizenbaum, Computer power and human reason, p. 241-57.

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A contemporary significance on Chinese traditional mode of thinking

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1. Raising of question

Thinking, a major kind of method for people’s conscious activity, that including ways of observing and mindfulness, is a effective mean for developing people and society. Spe-cific thinking mode is formed historically. Therefore, be-cause of different living environments, ways of practicing and cultural conditions, the east and west modes of think-ing have appeared differently. In consequence their ways of knowing and practicing that directed by thinking are different. However, a judgment about which mode is better cannot be made, they are just different.

But, from China’s defeat in 1840, the western technol-ogies, institutions and thoughts had been the examples

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learnt by Chinese. Many Chinese intellectual elite, like Gong Zizhen, Liang Qichao, Yan Fu, Hu Shi, Lin Yutang, Lu Xun, Liang Shuming, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao etc., have made comparative study between the west and China, and they had concluded that almost in every aspect China had felt behind the west. As a result, those derogatory terms, ignorance, naivety, senility, back, etc., had been equiva-lent to the name of China. Therefore criticism of Chinese people’s characters and advocacy of revolution of thinking have been the fashion of that time.

May Fourth Movement is the first time of all Chinese intellectual elite’s thorough rethinking to Chinese tradi-tional culture. They make systemic criticism on Chinese traditional politics, economics and culture. The New Cul-ture Movement, holding the doctrine of “overthrow Con-fucian and learn from the West,” swept across the country. The new subjects, vernacular Chinese, simplified Chinese character, science and democracy, were known by mass-es quickly through the intellectual elite’s advocacy. There is no doubt that Chinese people were enlightened and Chi-nese society was made progress in the above-mentioned movements, but some extreme thoughts, like “there’s no need for young man to read Chinese books” (Lu Xun), “China is backward in everything” (Hu Shi), “abolish Chinese character” (Qian Xuantong) and “throw Chinese traditional books to toilet” (Wu Zhihui), also emerged. The situation was just as Hu Shi’s saying in The Chinese Renaissance,1 “there’s revolt everywhere and tradition is

1 Hu Shi, The Chinese Renaissance: selected writings on Hu Shi, Taiwan, Yuanliu Publishing House, 1986, v. 24, p. 179.

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thrown away. The authorities and traditional faith are op-pugned…amount of cheap beliefs of anti-idol and new-worship are emerging.” To change Chinese mode of think-ing and learn westerns, Yan Fu translated J. Mill’s treatise of logic in Chinese and introduced it to Chinese people. Because philosophy is the ground of the mode of think-ing, so the later scholars also tried their best to learn west-ern philosophies. Even until now, the criticism to Chinese tradition still concentrates in the criticism to Chinese mode of thinking, the representative issues are provided by Bo Yang and Chu Yu who think that the essential reason of China’s backwardness is the Chinese mode of thinking and Chinese must learn the western scientific mode of think-ing to make progress. Bo Yang wrote a book On Ugly Chi-nese which claimed Chinese culture is a sauce urn culture. And Mr. Qian Hong had a lecture on “It must have an in-novation for Chinese Thinking Mode,” he claimed that we should be trained by metaphysics. Chu Yu published a book in 2010, which is The animadvert on Chinese think-ing mode, he indicated that the reason for China’s getting behind is traditional mode of thinking, and claimed that we should learn from the western mode of thinking especially scientific thinking mode.

However, the mode of thinking of one nation grounds it-self deeply in its history, and it cannot be uprooted totally from simple advocacy of rejection and revolution. There-fore on the way to modernization, we find that Chinese traditional mode of thinking is losing but western mode of thinking is not established simultaneously. That means

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Chinese people fall into embarrassment, “neither Chinese nor western” or “being Chinese and western at the same time.”

There have been many expositions on the differences between western mode of thinking and Chinese. For ex-ample, Chinese mode of thinking emphasizes in synthe-sis, entirety, induction, hint, implication, ethics, intention, intuition, imagery and circle, whereas western mode of thinking emphasizes in analysis, individuality, deduction, exactness, clarity, recognition, object, logic, demonstra-tion and linearity. Chinese traditional thinking seeks com-mon ground while keeping differences, but Western tradi-tional thinking distinguishes from common ground. Just as Ludwig Feuerbach’s assertion, “the easterner sees unity without differences, whereas the westerner sees differenc-es without unity.”2

In fact, specific mode of thinking has molded in spe-cific living environment of each nation and functions to solving existential problems, so one mode of thinking has its own rationality and is the motivation of formulation of a kind of national character. Nevertheless, it is objectivity that western mode of thinking or Chinese also has its own merits and shortcomings. For instance, from the positive view, Chinese traditional thinking is good at shaping an integral, systematic and active grasping for the world and things, and at the same time Chinese medicine, Qigong and

2 Ludwig Feuerbach, Hegel critique of philosophy: selected writings on Feuerbach, The Commercial Press, 1984, v. 1, p. 45.

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Chinese health preserving all have important relations with the characters of Chinese thinking that emphasizing intu-ition, blur and dialectics. Whereas from the passive view, Chinese traditional thinking lacks the spirit of science and cannot formulate the scientific form of knowledge, so the western modern science cannot originate in China. The dual character of western thinking also represents itself clearly that reason on one hand has been the great impetus of modernization but on the other hand more and more re-stricts the integrated development of human being.

Because it origins from living activities, accompany with the changing of existence the mode of thinking should also change properly. It is not rational that use one thinking to object the other and abandon ones own mode of thinking to cater for an unfamiliar one. An either-or method should be avoided, because it results in the thinking of binary op-position that has been strongly criticized and abandoned by contemporary philosophies. Therefore what we have to do is clarifying the different aspects of one mode of think-ing in order to grasp the ways of it occurs and progresses. The ground of this method lies in that, “man is the produc-er of his own notions, thoughts and so on (…), conscious-ness in any time is the aware being, and the being of man is his actual living process.”3 This is the basic view of histor-ical materialism by Marxism.

3 Karl Max and Friedrich Engels. The German ideology, People’s Publish ing House, 1961, p. 19.

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2. Zhongdao as the Chinese traditional mode of thinking

Thinking of Zhongdao (中道, the middle road) is the common ground of thinking modes of integrity, blur and dialectics that are specific characters compared with west-ern thinking mode. Western philosophy is the necessary “the other” to determine the traits of Chinese thinking mode. Binary thinking, making antithesis between subject and object, phenomenon and substance, reason and percep-tion and so on, is the characteristic of mainstream of west-ern philosophy, whereas there is no such pattern in Chinese traditional thinking. As mentioned above, Chinese think-ing take Tian (天, heaven), Di (地, the earth) and human be-ing as a whole and makes human being an important func-tion. Human beings’ functioning importantly lies in the awareness of existence as an interactive process with envi-ronments that include nature and society. People should be “the heart of TianDi.” That means, world is taken as a life entity, and human being, the smaller life entity, should live properly in it. The proper existentiality is changeable and relative balanced. Because of changing of environments and emerging of new demands of people, balance is reg-ularly broken. Therefore the importance of human being lies in the awareness of life, just as Lao-tzu’s saying, “He who knows others is wise, he who knows himself is en-lightened, he who conquers others has physical strength, he who conquers himself is strong.”4 A real wise and strong man should know himself better and win himself more

4 The Lao Tzu, Chapter 33, cf. Wing-Tsit Chan, A source book in Chinese philosophy.

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than others. The attitude of self awareness should not only be taken by a person but also by a nation.

The purpose of self-awareness living is enhancing peo-ple’s living equality and cultivating perfect personality. People could change their ways of living to attain the Dao (道, the way) and see their worlds much clearly. Such mode of thinking implies great vital energies. The long history of Chinese surmounting survival challenge, the flourishing of “Asian four little dragons” (Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) in the 1960’s that holding Confucian doc-trines and the big advance of China in recent thirty years could all be take as the examples of merits of such think-ing, they are developing in adjusted ceaselessly.

The so-called thinking of Zhong or ZhongDao is con-structed with three dimensions as follows.

The first is right, proper and impartial. The word “Zhong” (middle) emerged early in China and represented the central position of a mast in carapace-bone-script and bronze-script. The ancient meaning of this word is the vital part of a mast that ensures the mast’s upright to make dis-tant people seeing flags. So then “Zhong” have the mean-ing that grasping a proper point to stand up in an unbeaten state. The philosophical meaning of “Zhong,” listening to both sides and choosing the middle course, has originated from this primitive meaning.

The mainstream of Chinese cultural tradition had formed itself in the process of conflict and fusion of Con-fucian, Taoism and Buddhist, and the thinking of ZhongD-ao is the common way. In the Book of changes Confucian

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indicates that locating in “Zhong” is proper, that means avoiding extremes and at the same time not doing one thing and neglecting another. For instance, when emperor Yao abdicated the throne to emperor Shun, he told him “Yun Zhi Jue Zhong” (允执厥中, keep to the centre), and emper-or Shun also told emperor Yu “Yun Zhi Jue Zhong” (允执

厥中, keep to the centre) when he demised. In the orthodox passing, from emperor Yu to Tang, to Wenwang, to Wu-wang, to Zhougong, to Confucius and to Mencius, the in-struction “keep to the centre” was passed too, so this say-ing had been taking as an essence of Chinese cultural tra-dition. Confucius held the point that all things had their own extents and making the excessive and insufficient sit-uations harmony was the middle course. He said, “Since I cannot get men pursuing the due medium, to whom I might communicate my instructions. So I must find the ardent and the cautiously-decided. The ardent will advance and lay hold of truth; the cautiously-decided will keep them-selves from what is wrong.”5 Excessiveness and insuffi-ciency, the extreme tendencies of things or wrong tenden-cies, are objected by Confucius. For instance, one’s con-ducting himself is neither reaching for what is beyond one’s grasp nor having no ambition at all. Much strict or loos-en administration should be rejected. In the book Confu-cius’s precepts to his family, he said that “tampering force with mercy is the harmony way of administration.” Lat-er Mencius inherited Confucian saying, he said, “A great

5 Analects, 13.21, cf. James Legge, The Chinese-English four books.

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artificer does not, for the sake of a stupid workman, alter of do away with the marking line. Yi did not, for the sake of a stupid archer, change his rule for drawing the bow. The superior man draws the bow, but does not discharge the arrow. The whole thing seems to leap before the learn-er. Such is his standing exactly in the middle of the right path. Those who are able, follow him.”6 ZhongDao, right in there, needs people’s searching and practicing, that means people should adapt the middle course but not the middle course adapts people.

In Taoism, Lao-tzu also said, “Much talk will of course come to a dead end. It is better to keep the center (Zhong).”7 Tao is the central notion in Lao-tzu’s thinking, but Zhong is the way of grasping Tao. The meaning of Zhong is grasping unchanging thing in changing things in order to deal with different matters. An important methodological principle of thinking of ZhongDao is avoiding extremes and one-sid-edness, so in Lao-tzu’s thinking there are many discourses on “things turn into their opposites when they reach the ex-treme.” Chuang Tzu also applied thinking of ZhongDao to solve life issues. He said that the humanness and handling affairs should “grasp one to deal with many” and “take the middle course to attain harmony.” Then he took the story of dismembering an ox as skillfully as a butcher as an example to explain “Pursue a middle course as your principle.” That

6 The Works of Mencius, 13.41, cf. James Legge, The Chinese-English four books.7 The Lao Tzu, Chapter 5, cf. Wing-Tsit Chan, A source book in Chinese philosophy.

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means ZhongDao is the way of preserving one’s life. In the view of Buddhism, ZhongDao is the highest truth avoiding extremes. At the same time it is the standard of behaviors, the only way of emancipation through cultivating.

Chinese Buddhism also regarded ZhongDao, be divorced from two sides, as a ultimate goal and a conductive rule. The Middle School (The Madhyamika, created by Nagarjuna) opposes the extremeness, which influenced China a lot.

The three schools, Confucian, Buddhism and Taoism, as the main streams of Chinese traditional culture, all think in the way of ZhongDao. This fact has laid philosophic foundations of Chinese mode of thinking.

As a consequence of the above, the difference between thinking of ZhongDao (the Middle Road) and thinking of dualistic opposition could have been clarified. The former emphasizes harmony of multi-elements and avoiding ex-tremes. ZhongDao and the similar thinking of ZhongYong (中庸, the mean) and ZhongHe (中和, neutralization) to-gether constitute the core of Chinese traditional thinking. They also have become the rich sources of Chinese wis-dom and deeply influence the attitudes of lives of Chinese people. This kind of thinking provides a much broad ho-rizon of possible findings. That means proper adjustment and right ways become possible.

The second character of ZhongDao is Yi (义, righteous-ness). That means proper and reasonable: in proper time one takes a proper method to attain the best result. When Con-fucius talked about how to become a gentleman, he said, “When the person in authority is beneficent without great

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expenditure; when he lays tasks on the people without their repining; when he pursues what he desires without being covetous; when he maintains a dignified ease without be-ing proud; when he is majestic without being fierce,”8 “be-ing expressive of enjoyment without being licentious, and of grief without being hurtfully excessive”9 and “The supe-rior man is dignified, but does not wrangle. He is sociable, but not a partisan.”10 These are not only standards of people conducting, but also standards of administrating country.

To grasping proper method should also pay attention to ShiZhong (时中, taking a proper time) and Quanbian (权变, acting according to circumstances). “ShiZhong” means taking way of Zhong in right time. The notion of time was brought into by Confucius here. In his opinion, there is no abstract Zhong, and presence and historicity are charac-ters of Zhong. That means taking way of Zhong should ap-ply in a flexible way and take actions that suit concrete cir-cumstances. “Quanbian” (权变) is changing, but not with-out principle. That means grasping right way in concrete changing circumstances. “ShinZhong” and “Quanbian” in-clude judgments of value and arts of administration in fol-low ways: following a comprehensive assessment, advanc-es with the times, seizing the opportunities and finding something new in what is old. In Mencius’ view, ZhongD-ao’s concrete application is solving the problem of what the

8 Analects, 20.2, cf. James Legge, The Chinese-English four books.9 Analects, 3.20, cf. James Legge, The Chinese-English four books.10 Analects, 15.22, cf. James Legge, The Chinese-English four books.

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relation between principle (Jing) and changing (Quan) is. Changing should come from principle. If persisting in prin-ciple and neglecting concrete circumstances, changing be-comes impossible and the real Zhong cannot be accessible. In his book, Mencius took story of “saving sister-in-law falling into water” and “Shun (an emperor) saves his guilty father” as examples to interpret the problem solving of re-lation between principle and changing. Also we can take Confucius’ Ren (Humane) as an exemple. There are many statements in Analects about Ren, but there is not a state-ment could be taken as the definition of Ren. Many people consult Confucius in Ren. Their questions have been born in different status. So Confucius’s responding is special and indicative. To generalize the definition of Ren cannot be in the right way. Such intentions could also be found in Daoism and Buddhism. Therefore, the essence of Zhong-Guan is not only practical but also concrete.

The third character of ZhongDao (the Middle Road) is unity of oppositeness and interdependency. The book of changes said, “The Yin (阴) and the Yang (阳) make up the Dao.” That means all things in world are pairing, trans-formation between Yin and Yang and coexisting in harmo-ny. According to the records in “Book of changes, Copula-tive part 2,” early in Chinese high antiquity people “Look-ing up, he observe the pattern of the Tian (天, heaven); looking down, he examine the order of Di. (地, the earth),” “changing according TianDi to go under the way of Tian-Di.” The meaning of ZhongDao, acting according to Tian-Di, has initiated here. Confucius also said, “Am I indeed

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possessed of knowledge? I am not knowing. But if a mean person, who appears quite emptylike, ask anything of me, I set it forth from one end to the other, and exhaust it.”11 This is the description of Confucius’ searching ZhongDao. The saying in The doctrine of the mean, “so raise it to its great-est height and brilliancy, so as to pursue the course of the Mean,”12 has the same meaning.

All things are motivations including contradictions. These contradictions are unities of oppositeness and in a process of balance. Once the balance is disturbed, things would go on extremely. Therefore to keep things proper-ly, man has to go in a right way (ZhongDao). Confucius said that, “Where the solid qualities are in excess of accom-plishments, we have rusticity; where the accomplishments are in excess of the solid qualities, we have the manners of a clerk. When the accomplishments and solid qualities are equally blended, we then have the man of complete.”13 He also said, “While respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.”14 Saying in a modern language is keeping two sides and abounding one side.

Therefore, the core of ZhongDao, the Chinese traditional mode of thinking, is a notion of Du (度, degree，consideration, measure). People who think in this way change existential-

11 Analects, 9.8, cf. James Legge, The Chinese-English four books.12 The doctrine of the mean, Chapter 27, cf. James Legge, The Chinese-English four books.13 Analects, 6.18, cf. James Legge, The Chinese-English four books.14 Analects, 6.22, cf. James Legge, The Chinese-English four books.

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ities properly according to the concrete circumstances to get into situations of peace and harmony.

3. The contemporary significance of thinking mode of ZhongDao

It has been many controversies on how the traditions should be treated, but it is clear that off the ground of tradi-tion innovation cannot be made. It seems to me that the ad-vocacies of revolution of thinking and reforms of mode of thinking represent the deep reflections on the limitations of traditional thinking and worries of blocking of people’s integrated development. Actually, “the integrated develop-ment of people” should be advocated direct. Because the mode of thinking is still a kind of abstracting, and the in-tegrated development of people should include all kinds of activities of innovation of human being.

According to the thinking of ZhongDao, the deviation mentioned above should be adjusted through transforma-tion of thinking modes of people, both easterner and west-erner. The reason of this transformation lies in the fact that the deviation of people’s thinking has occurred and the circumstances have changed. The two facts are actual-ities now. On one hand, the deviation of thinking of Chi-nese people from early modern time has created a situa-tion of “neither Chinese nor western.” On the other hand, it is much essential that the existentiality of science is de-cisive today and the meaning of human lives has been en-riched unprecedentedly, and facing this reality the relevant existentialities cannot be abolished. In Chinese traditional

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thinking, the lack of scientific thinking has cause the advo-cacy of science in May Forth period. The tremendous de-velopment of science and technology in China, the geniture of many excellent scientists and taking science and tech-nology as the primary productive force, have occurred in this context. But because of the inertia of traditional think-ing, the scientific thinking should be consciously insisted. Therefore, the thinking of ZhongDao could play an impor-tant role here. But we should also be awake that the scien-tific thinking is not the only effective thinking. So the intu-itive and organism characters of Chinese traditional think-ing should also be made full uses by us. This is the demand of concrete variable lives. The harm of scientism, the con-sequence of extreme development of scientific thinking, should be rejected by us.

At the same time, the competitive spirit, fair spirit, con-tract spirit and equality spirit, which are accompanied by market economy, are insufficient in Chinese traditional thinking. People must establish these through learning and changing. In fact, the process of China’s opening and re-forming is the process of changing thinking. For examples, the great discussion on the truth in 1980s and the disputa-tion about universality and generality recent years are the representation of such process. Chinese people’s abilities of accommodating also embody in this.

Globalization and spreading of western notions pro-vide us a reference system. Therefore awareness of draw-back of our thinking becomes possible. Micheal Foucault deems the modernity as “an attitude,” which relates to a

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kind of thinking mode and a kind of acting mode. Such kind of mode could also be understood as a time spirit that relates with actuality. It is very clear that the moderniza-tion of thinking mode could be the most important con-structional factor of modernity. Therefore we have to sup-ply our thinking to meeting the requirement of modern so-ciety. This is on the ground of tradition, but not to abound it. Not only for Chinese, but also for westerners, this is an urgent task.

Every nation is facing the challenge of transforming thinking mode in the globalization today. Radical changes of people’s ways of living have taken place in the develop-ment of science and technology, especially the development of information technology. At the same time, the transfor-mation in mode of thinking has also occurred, in which the Multi-dimensional interaction and the open innovation are the main tendencies. That means people should search bal-ances between integrating and analyzing, logic and intu-ition. Therefore in the background of comparison of Chi-nese and western modes of thinking, revaluing the mer-its and deficiencies of the both and creating an active wis-dom to solve problems are the missions and responsibili-ties of us today.

Today our discussing on the value of Asian culture could be very significant. The domination of western culture in recent centuries should be overthrown. In fact, even in the West, many people of insight have began reflecting their own culture and finding new sources in the East. In order to remain one nation’s own identity without assimilation of

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western culture, people should sort out their own cultural heritage immediately. If so, the effective communications between different nations and contributions to world har-mony could become possible.

3Reinventions

and Interactions

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Humanism at the sight of contemporaneity

Candido Mendes

The universal rejected by contemporaneity

The claim for Humanism today is light-years away from the expectations of a decade ago. In this modernity, shaped by technology and progress, that gave us the Secularism in its intent to stand as an alternative to Belief, we saw our-selves as penetrated by the feeling of transcendence.1 Hu-manism turned into the expression of the discourse of the universal, under the promise of the final unfolding of ratio-nality, in face of the scientific revolution, the epistemolog-ical advancement of understanding, and the new deontolo-gy demanded by the Dasein.

1 Rémi Brague, Les ancres dans le ciel, L’infrastructure métaphysique, Paris, Seuil, 2011, p. 36-41.

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And this, as if an inexhaustible phenomenology linked the so-called objective reality to a world finally defined within the limits of our subjectivity. The axiological deter-mination would encompass, immediately, such claim of the “more-being” unveiled unto the consciousness of our “be-ing-there.” It is inseparable from a reference to the whole, and this is no other than the arcane of the individuality un-der construction. In its immediate attributes, it responds to the configuration of the Dasein, which is only conceivable as referable, and postulating the absolute as the limit of this “being-more.” No other could be the universe of culture, as exactly what is “peculiar” to Men, in contrast to nature and the inertial condition of the surrounding reality.

On the frame of the historical process, one cannot dis-lodge the primordial perception of the “being-there” from the condition of subject of human existence, contempora-neity2 would affirm itself by being literally grounded on freedom. But it is also in an irreversible objectivity of the “coming-to-be” that stages are defined in this assumption of consciousness identified with the crescent bestowal of the historical being. In the remnants of our experience, we find in the Enlightenment the rupture of the transcendent mediation and the potestative limit-affirmation of reason. In its first phemenological perception, Humanism assert-ed this de-sacralization along with a radically de-mediat-ing vision of a knowledge yet inadvertent of the reduction

2 Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?, Paris, Rivages-Poche, 2008; Idem, Le Temps qui reste, Paris, Payot & Rivages, 2000.

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to the simulacra, to the intentionality, that should wait the twentieth century of Husserl and Heidegger.3

Enlightenment and the diachrony of historical time

Humanism would be the teleological assurance of such conduct, supposing a final convergence of truths, on the fundamental invariance of its nature.4 It would take time for the experience of Immanentism and of the ethos, in its integrity, in the full or adequate exercise of freedom—as assurance of this “being-more” in a limit-search of its pla-etus—to be registered as a necessarily performative prac-tice in the very core of existence itself. This very time of plenitude is that of the limit-accordance of the individual-ity of each existence: its presumption, more than its medi-ation, is the universal.5 And this fully heads towards the endless operating rationality, in such frame in which this “thinking being” anchors his cogito in his memory and, in it, the permanent support of his condition of “being-in-the-world,” of his Dasein.

A depleting of such ethos emerges on the weight of the historical process, spun from an unchanging arcane into

3 Martin Heidegger, Phénoménologie de la vie religieuse, Paris, Galli-mard, 2012; Edmund Husserl, Recherches logiques, Paris, PUF, CII, 1961, p. 132; Richard Rorty, Essais sur Heidegger et autres écrits, Paris, PUF, 1995, p. 77.4 Jürgen Habermas, Le discours philosophique de la modernité, Paris, Gallimard, 2011, p. 1-27; Jürgen Habermas e Joseph Ratzinger, Raison et religion. Dialectique de la sécularisation, Paris, Salvator, 2010.5 Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris: Seuil, 2000, p. 44-107.

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a permanent and distinguishable “come-to-be.”6 Under the same historical time frame, the transparence of such rep-resentation becomes muddled to the measure that cultures are subject to domination, through which the straightfor-ward game of power structures is taken over by the sub-dued collective subjectivity transposed into the hegemon-ic culture.7 The post-Renaissance West imposed itself unto the adjoining cultures as a phenomenon of the rise of Civ-ilization, through the expropriation of their collective un-conscious and its replacement by a reductive representation displaying the dominated subjectivities in the simulacra of their individuality and their “come to be.”

Humanism was at the forefront of a new foundational stage in the midst of the Enlightenment transparency, but setting aside the raid of belief over reason and guarantee-ing the synchrony of conquests over the inertia of nature and its homogeneous fruition by humankind.8 The arriv-al of the universe of citizenship and the isonomic coexis-tence of all were implicit on such perspective. That is, dif-ference sprouted, as an unquestionable given of the indi-vidual and always permanently recognizable, through the absolute surrender to its evidence.9

6 Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie des formes symboliques, I, Paris, Le Lan-gage, 1972, p. 72-4.7 Alfred Weber, The theory of culture, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura, 1954.8 François Julien, Les transformations silencieuses, Paris, Grasset, 2009, p. 91; idem, De l’universel, de l’uniforme, du commun et du dialogue entre les cultures, Paris, Fayard, 2008, p. 212-13.9 Axel Honneth, La théorie de la reconnaissance, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 2000, p. 16-8.

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Difference and the solipsism of citizenship

On the emerging horizon of globalization, an ever-greater acute breach took place, contrary to the overcom-ing of the diachronic access promised by civilization and progressism as conceived by the Enlightenment as charac-terizing the West and its missionary expansion.10 No oth-er is the bulging consciousness of such paradox, the one of the emerging multidomination and its release from the Imperialism’s cocoon, the first historical timeframe, urbi et orbi, of the systemic or organic relations of production made possible by western capitalism.

This knowledge is an attempt that exceeds the parame-ters of the Enlightenment; a heuristic that responds to the Sloterdijk’s imperatives of the cynic reason.11

The preconditions for the enforcement of the universals are defined today on a new diachronic temporal architec-ture. September 11th has shown to what point the assertion of difference could reach a new “holy war” and affect the process of the West as the civilization. There has been a rupture in the assumptions through which the beginning of the 21st century saw the isonomic advent of that human-ity arrived to citizenship—and to the assurance of human rights as a repertory of the canonic exercise of its freedom and the daily conquest of its “being more.” On the contrary, in this decade what one comes upon is the emergency of

10 Alain Badiou, Le réveil de l’histoire, Paris, Lignes, 2011, p. 85-93.11 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique de la raison cynique, Paris, Christian Bour-geois, 1987, p. 67-9.

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previous cautions as praeter-rights of the difference and the assurance of authenticity, in face of what the world of the universals of reason would be seen as pleonastic in the classic scenario of the advent of the individuality of each and all the humankind.12

Correlate to the struggle for difference is the impera-tive of its mandatory witnessing facing the former purport-ed universal peace and its isonomic demands. On this very stride, for the full performance of citizenship, the conquest of Secularism13 and the discarding of Belief would neces-sarily be hurt.

From martyrdom of witnessing to the collapse of representation

Martyrdoms and jihads come on the grooves of this new emergence, in the priorities assumed by the witness-ings, risking even the harm to the other in order to accom-plish the sacrifice.14 And terrorism, absolutely intransitive in its message, acquires all its new evidence in this begin-ning of century, contrarily to the violence at all costs, but with objective goals of a change in the status quo, as in Ire-land or the Basque Country.

So, the whole isonomous vision of humanity vanishes, and with it the personableness of all vis-à-vis. Not even an

12 Jean-Luc Petit, Solipsisme et intersubjectivité. Quinze leçons sur Hus-serl et Wittgenstein, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1996, p. 25-41.13 Françoise Dastur, “Phénoménologie et différence”, in Philosophie et différence, Les Éditions de la Transparence, 2004, p. 85-115.14 Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident (XIVe-XVIIIe siècles), Paris, Fayard, 1978.

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explicit message is needed, and the anonymous line of hu-man bombs, waiting to explode, sanctions the rupture of the universality of contemporaneous coexistence. Above all, and contrary to the humanism of a decade ago, one fac-es the collapse of representation, hampered by a mediation increasingly ambiguous of public opinion in its collective feeling, as expression, always susceptible of generalization, of individual sum total accounts, with no remnants, in the electoral procedures.

Public space turns again to the square, exhausted the presumption of the achievement of a consensus in the scales and hierarchies of representative majorities and minorities, as a national body. The “democracy of the indignant,” ap-peared in recent times, has its a priori in the non-reducibil-ity of their aspirations to the concerted interplay of Con-gress plenaries and public opinion. Moreover, it shows the perception of the expropriatory character attained by the universe of the media in inducing and manipulating pub-lic opinion in the sense of completely eliminating the rem-nants of the difference for the constitution of the subjectiv-ity, at the level of the contradictions, synthesis and discrep-ancies of the global society.

Overdetermination of difference

What we also face today is the threshold of that epistemo-logical condition described by Carl Schmitt15—a world that re-encounters the polarization friends-enemies, reaching the

15 Jean-François Kervégan, Que faire de Carl Schmitt?, Paris, Gallimard, 2011, p. 208-42.

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extreme rejection of the other in such intransitive manifes-tation of the difference. Within what limits, then, would stand the claims for humanism, bearer of the heritage of the remanding interaction between the universal and the ratio-nal, and the old Kantian belief in the advent of a humani-ty, independently or not from the affirmation of the State in its configuration?16

Even more disquieting, in the framework of the “war of religions,” is the extent to which, in the West, the republi-canism of the Tea Party unfolds in successive variants of the same fundamentalism, from the Mormons up to the radi-cal Catholic extremism. One would have to talk of a lim-it-heuristic for the maintenance of that dialogue, threatened by the brought down of the collective recognitions of this world, that would be a haven to civic terrorism and the so-cial subjectivities descended into the trenches. One would have to ask if the first task of this heuristic should be that of still thinking of the devolution of the polarities to the classic dialectics and to possible remittance of the distinctions, yet driven out to the very last ground of rationality, to the syn-thesis, at the scarps of analogies and approximations. Per-haps, we have not yet realized to what extent the world of the “wars of religion” eliminates the very perspective of the vis-à-vis amongst the collective subjectivities. Nor have we considered what, in a residual phenomenology of recogni-tion, could be the premises for this coexistence to the point

16 Michel Foucault, “Le sujet et le pouvoir”, in Dits et écrits, IV, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque des Sciences Humaines, 1994, p. 577.

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of compromising the complete denial of the other.17 It is as if the ultimate imperative of such survival did not superim-pose itself to a minimal presumable platform of affirma-tion of human rights, where the prius of humanity would rise at least as a natural imperative, and of the irrevocable environment for the whole subjective collectivity. In con-sequence of the stirring up of the “war of religions,” one might even say that the human rights are a “western ide-ology.” However, the humanism now emerging would set-tle on the un-conditionality of consciousness, on the exer-cise of its freedom, a priori linked to that of the other, re-gardless of the advancement of its quiddity or the subse-quent manifestation of their differences.18 In other words, we could only come upon the recognition, in minimis, of this new Humanism in a progress of the Enlightenment, perceived as natural, and from the drawing out of the pro-cess of rendering immanent the post-Renaissance rational-ity.

Civilization of fear and in minimis dialogue

Within the extremes of the diachronies of the same his-torical time, this new horizon will also face the regressive impacts of the de-sacralization of the human, through the return of the Muslin cultures to the Sharia and the postula-tion of transcendence and the religious State.19

17 Theodor Adorno, Dialectique négative, Paris, Payot et Rivages, 2003, p. 174-1.18 Slajov Zizek, Vivre la fin des temps, Paris, Flammarion, 2010, p. 75-9.19 Jean Baubérot, La laïcité falsifiée, Paris, La Découverte, 2012, p. 7-11.

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On the same measure that the advancement of terrorism defines a universal perception of a “civilization of fear,” it would be unthinkable to have the sacrificial terrorism regu-lated. At the same time, the millenary vision of a “just war” supporting the West in the conflicts of the crusades is once and for all overcome, what is also confronted in parallel with the jihads. But in the past decade of the 21st century, as much as the secularism, the purported presumptions of una-nimities in the acknowledgement of the crimes against hu-manity urbi et orbi subjected to the jurisdiction of an Inter-national Court are especially in clear retrogression.

Secularism would have been just an intermezzo in this new sacralization of the public order by the establishment of the Sharia in the Islamic States.20 The pendulum reaches its extreme in Iran, who astoundingly deems to have equa-nimous judicial prowess to the Court of Hague to judge crimes against humanity. The diffidence of the regimes emerging with the Arab Spring, especially Tunisia and Egypt, expresses the difficulties in conserving such Secu-larism in face of a State religion. Even if an extremist fun-damentalism might not be attained, the emerging strength of a rather more rigorous Salafism alongside with the Mus-lin Fraternity grows in the Egyptian ballots.21

On the extremes of such fundamentalism, the Boko Ha-ran in Nigeria are professing territorial separation and, most

20 Hélé Béji, Islam pride. Derrière le voile, Paris, Gallimard, 2011, p. 71-81.21 Tarik Ramadan, Mon intime conviction, Paris, Archipoche, 2009, p. 149-57.

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importantly, the adherence to the Sharia—in a direct con-frontation to other religions by the murdering of believers and destruction of Jewish and Christian temples.

The ad intra regression of the Western Enlightenment

It could be so that the frontiers of the collective recogni-tion unto which the emerging Humanism22 is being suggest-ed, as a replica of tradition, in a venue of a neo-heathenism, when Maometism coexisted with Christians and Jews, in a subaltern system, in the Kingdoms of the Umayyad and the Abbasids. On such a perspective, the platform of a full cit-izenship vis-à-vis, aspired by modernity, loses its purport-ed plenitude of rights in force in face of the new ethnic re-strictions to migration adopted by European governments with respect to the Islamic labor into their territory.23 On such exact measures, the recourse to foreign forces, such as NATO, depend on regional leagues while appealing to the right of safety—contrary to the post-war of 45’ and the Cold War that led to the American command, with its transcontinental breadth. What has been seen in Libya puts at stake the interferences of such devices with these coun-tries’ domestic normalcy, already in a patent conflict with their sovereignty. The claims for human rights are a new mediation between the regional associations in their full

22 Mohammed Arkoun, La construction humaine de l’Islam, Paris, Albin Michel, 2012, p. 105-27.23 Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, La question migratoire au XXIe siècle, Paris, Sciences Po. Les Presses, 2010, p. 85-127.

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primacy. Moreover, what one should expect from this new Humanism is the safeguard of the West itself against the de-secularization in its core, and in it the new limits within which the American fundamentalism could grow over the conquests based on the 18th century revolutions.24 And this was only made possible on the wake of the effective pro-tection of an enjoyable life, not of its teleological under-standing, even at the expenses of banning the access to the universal scientific knowledge, with the elimination of any reference to evolutionism in the American schoolbooks.

The persistence of progressive Providentialism

The compliance with such minimal and non-negotiable demands by the very claim of the human being in the con-text of a regressive postmodernity is currently found on the urges for the recovery of our environment, threatened by the radical technological progress. And that, from the stew-ardship of nature to the intrinsic social improvements—but detached from progressive Providentialism—, should be pursued in order to support development policies in the ur-gency and plenitude of their accomplishment.25 Such an im-perative molded by a state of collective conscience implies an urge towards the tangible and effective common good. The successive and cumulative hurdles to its accomplish-ment range from the change of the economic structure to

24 Liliane Crété, Les puritains — Quel héritage aujourd’hui?, Lyon, Oli-vétan, 2012, p. 92-100.25 François Julien, L’invention de l’idéal et le destin de l’Europe, Paris, Seuil, 2009, p. 290-4.

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the increase in social mobility and political self-determina-tion, and the collective consciousness of the access to wel-fare. Without their overcoming, such imperatives would remain somewhat aside of the notion of “common good,” which would remain within the limits of the Gendarme state concerned with the strict safeguard of public order.

On the broader scope of a more demanding and perfor-mance-driven behavior, one should mention a literal eth-ics of change and the concrete commitment to act, at the right timing, in all areas of social practice, respecting their mutual conditionings and the cumulative effect of the out-comes. Today, such commitment towards development re-gards intrinsically the primary imperative of collective jus-tice and, urbi et orbi, the “more-being” promised to the im-manence of mankind.

Also noteworthy is the potential conflict of this ethos with the imperative of its insertion into a nature marked by the destruction of the planet’s reserves or by the climate change of portions of inhabitable land entirely open to the consequences of technological transformations. Moreover, a pseudo conflict of duties would emerge with respect to the priorities and demands of the collective coexistence, transferring to environmental care the citizen’s priorities of social justice and improvement of well-being.26 The con-sciousness of change is still premature, especially in what comes to the components of a collective ethics, notably in

26 Edgar Morin, Introduction à la pensée complexe, Paris, ESF, 1990, Points Essais, 2005; idem, La méthode (coffret in two volumes), Paris, Opus Seuil, 2005.

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the nations that experienced their status of colony as a “to-tal social fact” under the otherness of a system of produc-tion that obliterated all their expectations related to the benefits of an effective functionality of the economic dy-namics.

Such nations are then exposed to the impending fail-ure of effective change, losing the instance or the moment in which the multiple conditionings of a new social struc-ture might indeed prevail. Such a scenario demands a prop-er timing and a strategy of no return. Otherwise a social inertia could sometimes take place, without possibility of recovery, leading to new cycles of unfavorable productive performance and exploitation.

The presumed natural convergences of prosperity

Still in the dimension of the search for a minimum of interlocution in the world of the “civilization of fear,” the humanism of our time would place its wager on the west-ern survival of universalism, on the acuteness of the criti-cal reason, putting nowadays at stake the credibility of the capitalist system itself.27 We experience in these decades the depletion of the belief in social democracy or in the idea of a State as provider, the État Providence, and, on the other hand, in the classic economic regimes, through the exasper-ation of social inequality, in contrast with the “golden age” of the western prosperity of the post-war years in the West.

27 Tony Judt, Retour sur le XXe siècle. Une histoire de la pensée contem-poraine, Paris, Éd. Héloïse d’Ormesson, 2010, p. 13-43.

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Today the financial capitalism nurtures the dynamics of an increasing ambiguous and contradictory system, as seen by the critical reason, considered the limits attained in the Eu-ropean economy of the transference of private revenue to the public treasury through fiscal obligation, and the lim-its reached by the assets of the State. This is what creates all the perplexity about the nature of profits in a capitalist en-trepreneurship and its effective productivity.28

The unprecedented proposals of increase in taxes by the highly concentrate American capitalist groups may al-ready suggest something like a “Pyrrhus attempt” in order to gain time in the search for a new possible social pact. In such a pact, and as an heritage of the social State of a half century ago, this same critical reason would see the need for the involvement of other dimensions, as those related to the problem of employment or the control over techno-logical innovation. One should not only acknowledge the deadlock of the vision of totality characteristic of the Left, but also the loss of the historical, empirical, decantation of consensus brought to the concept of revolution, as shaped by the Enlightenment. When exploitation yet could be seen as a sharp and unambiguous divide, we still had assumed polarizations to establish a vis-à-vis towards change.

The improbable new social pact

This new asynchronous time is, above all, the time of this concurrent coexistence of new radical marginalities,

28 Gianni Vattimo, El socialismo, o sea, Europa, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra, 2011.

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potentially reaching subcontinent levels destitute from a previous mobilizing consciousness. In such context, the scale of distances and comparative prosperity is lost. The Humanism becomes devoided from such a minimal condi-tion of recognition or identity in which fruition and labor were supposed to respond to the post-Enlightenment pact of ad intra competition in the market. Leisure and effort are bereft of any complementarity, in which the vis-à-vis of vi-ability could constitute the first mirror for such humanity in its process of “coming-to-be.”

Now, one must acknowledge such retraction of bridges in which, in limit, Humanism still shelters a remaining uni-versality that rests on the claims for human rights and the residual exercise of citizenship in face of the State. The re-trieval of fundamentalism reinstates nowadays the Sharia and the re-sacralization of the public order in the context of religious premises beyond any form of transgression. And, in these circumstances, all citizen coexistence will depend on the political autonomy accorded (or not) to the various faiths and to the miscreants. The most unsettling, howev-er, is to know to what extent the “New International Order” in progress is able (or not) to replace the action of the State and sovereignty in the legal discipline of a territory. Espe-cially when the so-called “Global Order” substitutes the or-ganizations regionally responsible for guaranteeing that se-curity, allowing for the intervention of clearly extra-region-al mediating organizations, as is the case with the NATO in countries of the Mediterranean, starting with Libya. Such overlapping in the institutional support of citizenship is un-acceptable, as already stated by the Arab League in the

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Middle-East or by continental entities in Latin America, as are also unacceptable the new response mechanisms as those in the European Union facing potential forced migra-tions of various ethnicities.

The true imperatives of multiculturalism still linger in the European collective consciousness in what comes to the exponential presence of the West in the world, vis-à-vis their counterparts of the new coexistence. The confusion between culture and civilization persists, enmeshing the intrinsic advance of humankind’s “being more” through-out the historical process, on one hand, with what can be perceived as the founding breakthroughs of the building of a collective inner self characterizing culture, on the oth-er. Such a picture is that of Luc Ferry in recent critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss,29 where he condemns the premise of an absolute relativism in the confrontation among contem-poraneous cultures. Could we still accept the existence of an intrinsic congeniality between the West and the reveal-ing rationality of reality as the privileged ground for de ad-vent of the absolute in our “coming-to-be”?30

Survival of dialogue and residual ethics

Humanitarianism, as a vocative of the emerging Human-ism progresses on a new frame of outbreaks, as maifested

29 Luc Ferry, “Si toutes les civilisations se valent”, Le Figaro, 23 février 2012.30 Marcel Gauchet, Les possibles de la pensée, in Dérangements — Aper-çus. Autour du travail de François Julien, Paris, Hermann, 2011, p. 177-8.

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in the case of hosts of Haitian destitutes31 whose situation impelled neighboring nations to harbor them, as recent-ly occurred in Brazil. The fate of those struck nationally by exceeding misery is associated to a citizenly clamor for support that goes beyond the classic and worn out interna-tional aid, the assistencialismo of half century ago. One is faced nowadays with a right to citizenship, as is that related to the generalized pursuit of employment, which could not remain subject to national market protection mechanisms. In this new scenario, and as universals of this acknowledg-ment of citizenship, to the right of free access one should add the right of job seeking, as a challenge to the domestic definition of the common good, for the benefit of a social welfare claimed by an international right of general and prompt coexistence.32

As long as the effective feasibility of the full restoration of the dialogue remains out of reach, the experience of co-existence characteristic of the period previous to the “war of religions” remains animated, in a somnambulistic way, by its presumptions and expectations. Among them, those of the emergent social groups in the developing countries, based on the presumption of an implicit agreement towards the advancement of quasi beneficent advantages articulat-ed through the loose consciousness of the neopopulism and a scenario of complacency with their social improvement. They benefit from the complicity of sectors of overflowing

31 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and universal history, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.32 Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, op. cit., 2010, p. 123-7.

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wealth that feel no need to create hurdles to the other ris-ing sectors.

Concurrently to this, the classic elites who survive on a liberal ideology place their wagers on conservatism. Since the advent of distributive regimes and their power, the op-tion for change, alongside with a consciousness involving neopopulism, will reach extremes on the agenda of radi-calism, by the laxity of effective mobilization. They fail to grasp the true scope of reality and the nature of the prevail-ing origin of social bitterness. Also, by the gravitational force of the historical process subjected to the fast-tracked diachrony, the backdrop of converging suppositions van-ishes. The imperatives of “identity” and “liberty” are con-fronted, and a universal democratic advent is no guarantee for a fiat of such conversion.33 Now, orphans of such homo-geneous process, they face a last call confrontation in the yielding of the mechanics of democracy.

33 Martin Rueff, “Une nouvelle logique du sens”, in Dérangements — Aperçus. Autour du travail de François Julien, Paris, Hermann, 2011, p. 156-7.

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Politics after indignation*

Daniel Innerarity

“There is failure when there is action.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an ethics, p. 435.)

Politics has been held in great esteem and subjected to utter scorn. We have judged it a task to be carried out by a small minority, then by everyone, and finally by no one. It has been considered the solution, and now it seems to be the problem. Esteemed at certain moments in history as the most noble pursuit, even overvalued as if it were a means to salvation, feared as a consolidation of power, and accepted

* Translated by Sandra Kingery.

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at times as a profession that at least strives for respectabili-ty, it is currently tolerated as irrelevant or even openly dis-paraged as the cause of our worst ills.

Politics probably never deserved to be held in such high regard, and it may be that the disdain to which it is current-ly subjected reveals society’s lack of sincerity with itself. In any case, there is no question that there is room for im-provement in politics as it is currently practiced. The aver-sion towards politics today is compatible with the fact that more is now demanded of it than we ever previously ex-pected of it. This is revealed both in the way citizens scruti-nize power structures and by contemporary protest move-ments. Groups such as the Spanish Indignados (“Indignant Ones”) contradict those who used to believe that an aver-sion toward politics was a sign of indifference.

This situation raises any number of questions about the role politics can play in the world today and about the qual-ity of our democracies. In the first place, it is important not to misinterpret the meaning of our dissatisfaction. Should we view the current protests as revolutionary, or are they actually less significant insurrections? How are conflict and protest expressed in contemporary society? Does a lack of trust strengthen or undermine democracy? Is medi-ation unnecessary and representation impossible now that public spaces have been transformed by globalization and the new technologies of communication? In short, is this a time of crisis or exhaustion or could it be an opportunity to transform our democracies?

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Politics after indignation

1. From revolution to indignation

When a system makes revolution unattainable or un-necessary, that system is necessarily stabilized. This does not mean protest is made impossible; just the opposite, in fact. Only senseless regimes fail to understand that pro-tests afford them stability. What happens is that protests stop being revolutionary and become expressive. That is why it makes no sense to criticize the current Indignados in Spain or similar movements elsewhere for not having a concrete plan of action or for not offering specific alterna-tives. Their role is to express dissatisfaction, to call atten-tion to something, not to compete with the political parties’ electoral platforms. In the imperfect democracies that cur-rently exist, the proliferation of protest movements is not a sign of democratic weakness. Instead, it signals an increase in the level of demands that the people are making of those who govern them.

We can see this in the competition the Indignados have unleashed for the most ingenious slogan. This supplants a debate that would have previously focused on determining the most appropriate action for sabotaging or subverting. It is essential to understand this fact in order to respond ap-propriately. An expressive protest does not necessitate the intervention of the authorities to restore public order, but it does require thought in order to properly interpret what the movement signifies or reveals. Conflict has become a mode of expression; its purpose is to communicate and compre-hend. We have not entered a new phase of the great revo-lutions that characterized the transformation of democratic

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societies; rather, we are facing a phenomenon linked to the spectacularization of our public life.

The term “post-democratic” was recently coined to de-note a state of stability in contemporary democracies. For the most optimistic among us, this implied a celebration of the definitive establishment of democracy; for the pes-simists, it suggested a period characterized by mediocrity and decline. The two perspectives, rather than being con-tradictory, may simply be different ways of looking at the same reality that, while strengthened, is also trivialized. Analyses by Crouch, Rancière, Zolo, and Guéhenno have traced every detail of this debate. At the most fundamental level, are we faced with a situation where change is no lon-ger possible? Or could it be that change can only be made from within the system we mean to transform?

In order to resolve this enigma, we must understand how dissatisfaction is handled in contemporary society. We must take note of some events that could be called “post-revolutionary” insofar as they are expressive insurrections rather than destabilizing revolutions. A Spanish Indigna-do is not a revolutionary, just as stirring something up does not necessarily imply an ability to transform. There are no revolutions for the same reasons there is no true political antagonism: there are differences and changes, of course, but political time has stopped being regulated by uprisings. Political confrontation is not a collision between compet-ing models. There is no revolutionary contrast to be found in the rivalry between parties, where time is flat and the competing roles are played by a government that resists

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change and an opposition that awaits it (the best reason for a change of government is to clean house, not to reap the benefits of the opposition’s alternative plan). Everyone who is not a part of the government represents “change,” which is not a value of the left or the right but of opposition.

The language of change, along with everything it pre-supposes about historic time and political intervention, is faulty. In progressive discourse, revolution has been sub-stituted by modernization, adaptation, and innovation; the idea of reform generally belongs to the right; and on the ex-treme left, there are critical gestures, but no critical theory of society (much less a plan of action). A good deal of what is said and done is nothing but a simple display of melan-choly or of “heroism against the market” (Grunberg and Laïdi, 2007, p. 9).

There is no revolutionary distinction outside of the po-litical system either, in the external forces that the protest or Indignado movements may represent. The current ide-ological disillusionment is revealed in the fact that neither the extreme left nor the extreme right is particularly in-terested in intervening through the normal means of rep-resentation. Both conservative individualism and radical leftism conceive of themselves as “parapolitical” or as “an-ti-establishment movements.” In the ideology of both, pi-rates take on the status of role models in the fight against the rigidity of the state or against the neoliberal order. For different and even conflicting reasons, piracy is considered the most appropriate response to the economic and cultur-al development of capitalism.

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Some call for a civil society and others, on the post-communist left, for the multitude (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Both concepts are very liquid and not very political. This is no longer the age of the right and left as institutions, but the age of the Tea Party and social movements. The right prefers the market to the state, and the left—rather than the traditional struggles (labor union, social, institutional, or armed)—substitutes other fighting responses such as exile, defection, or nomadization. As Deleuze and Guattari have suggested, the nomad, more than the proletarian, signifies resistance par excellence (1987). On the left, the most in-novative strategies reflect the decline of revolutionary ide-als. The most we can hope for is “détournement,” the satir-ic parody that is posed by contemporary art, making use of a term coined by the Situationists; it is quite simply an attempt at sabotage, derailment, distortion, or subversion. According to Deleuze, it implies interruptions or mini-in-surrections; nothing, of course, that recalls the ancient goal of seizing power. The most ambitious proposal is to bene-fit from gaps or from areas not controlled by the state. Nao-mi Klein (2000), one of the principal advocates of the anti-globalization movement, calls for “culture jamming” as a form of resistance. This is an interference that attempts to transform brand advertising without altering its communi-cation codes in order to spark a reevaluation of the values those brands transmit. It is easy to note the contradiction of this alterglobalization since employing piracy clearly re-veals a failure to believe that “another world is possible.”

Whenever we see these attempted aggravations, there are those who interpret them as a revelation of some type

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of truly political action, in contrast with a political system or class, both considered depersonalized realities. Follow-ing the lead of Guy Debord and Giorgio Agamben, Zizek recently documented this expectation in his book Living in the end of times (2010). It is an evocation of an entirely dif-ferent world order that fails to give us the slightest indica-tion of what it might involve, what social agent could pro-voke a change of such magnitude, and the most appropri-ate course of action. This pop-Leninism corresponds to the hope that the change toward a new world order will arise from the self-destructive processes of the existing order. This millenarianism does not include a single factual, crit-ical description of contemporary society. When we wield almost nothing of diagnostic value, it is clear that we can-not do anything, beyond awaiting the apocalypse.

All of this is symptomatic of a time when we have stripped politics of its active nature that could have pro-duced a change toward something better. And it takes place within a context where cultural, social, and technological changes are unstoppable constants, but we have lost hope in change of a political nature. Of all the social sciences, politics gives the greatest impression of paralysis; it has stopped being an agent of shaping change and become a place where deadlock is administered. This situation is judged differently by liberals who lament the slow pace of reform and leftists who complain about the lack of alterna-tives.

Indignation, generic commitment, utopian alterglobal-ization, or expressive insurrectionism should not be under-stood, in my opinion, as the harbinger of radical change but

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as the symptom that none of this is feasible outside of the realm of unexceptional democratic normality and modest reformism. The problem with large critical gestures is not that something different is proposed, but that things tend to remain unchanged when the desired modifications are out-side of the dominion of politics.

2. A democratic tension

Charles Taylor has stated that democracy is a tension between institutions and the public. In addition to the type of politics we could call “official,” there is a whole sublay-er of processes that condition institutional realities. Among other benefits, the tensions that result from this coexis-tence help ensure that the political system is enriched, cor-rected, or more forward-looking. We cannot depend solely on the skill sets of professional politicians to achieve polit-ical progress. A good deal of the progress that has already been accomplished by politics was triggered by external forces: it is probably true that most social advances were not dreamed up by politicians; these results were achieved because of very concrete social pressures. The political system requires a certain degree of social energy as well as resources it does not independently possess to perform its tasks. These requirements sometimes inconvenience or even subvert the established order but inevitably influence its exercise of power.

That being said, the assumption that “the public” is nec-essarily better than institutions is a large one; the public also includes regressive movements, pressures and lobbies,

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irrational emotions, illegitimate or insufficient representa-tion. “The public” can be worse than institutions, and may even be reactionary. We should not forget that the world of social movements is as plural as society itself and that so-cial initiatives can be expected to provide one thing and its opposite, advances and retreats, right-leaning and left-leaning movements. Many who invoke society’s participa-tion are thinking only of that wich suit their needs, but so-ciety, naturally enough, affords participants with a wide range of perspectives. There are those on both sides of the political spectrum who hope to step outside of the frame-work of representative democracy: the meaning that the so-cial movements of the 1960s hold in left-wing imagery is matched by the neoliberals’ demands for civil society in the 1990s. This concurrence should at least give us pause.

Democracy is a regime that accepts not only that ten-sion, but other tensions as well, because we assume that no person or group is always right. What saves us from the damages produced by bad decisions is that they are bal-anced out by other agents, limitations, and procedures: there is government, but fortunately there is also opposi-tion; opinion polls help us know what people want at pres-ent, but the political leadership can also focus on less pop-ular criteria. There are things about which one should con-sult and others about which consultation is forbidden; the administration protects us from politicians who are too original, while the daring decisions made by those very politicians compensate the bureaucracy’s lack of imagina-tion. Experts limit the frivolity of certain politicians, and

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those same politicians help us escape the tyranny of the ex-perts. Without the rules of the game, we would be in no po-sition to discuss different goals, but it is not uncommon for the discussion to lead to a demand for a revision of some of those same rules. The dualism between institutions and the public is one of those balances that should be taken into ac-count, like the balance between representation and partici-pation or between obedience and protest.

But what if the greatest threat to our democracies was not so much the strength of institutions as their weakness in the face of the capriciousness of public opinion? What does political regulation of the marketplace mean except obstructing the inevitable chain of events stemming from investors’ free decisions? The problem we face is the pop-ulism that, with all its demands for balance and responsi-bility, impedes the creation of the public good. Our democ-racies’ fragility stems not from the distance between the elites and the people but from what we could call their ex-cessive closeness, the instability of a politics that is vulner-able to existing pressures at any given point in time, pay-ing attention only to temporary changes of opinion (Bard-han, 1999, p. 95-6; Calhoun, 1988).

In a democratic society, politics is at the service of the will of the people, of course, but that will is just as complex, as in need of interpretation as is the reality of “the people” to which we are constantly making reference. Like every-thing that is considered self-evident, bringing up “the peo-ple” almost always serves to block discussion. But as soon as we go a little deeper, the disagreements begin. Are “the

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people” the ones reflected in polls and surveys, the ones the representatives represent, a reality pervaded by global-ization, or an autarkic unit safe from all interference? They are probably all those things; democratic procedures are nothing but ways of verifying whom or what we are talk-ing about in every case. “The people,” from the outset, is a fuzzy reality, something that needs to be elaborated; that is the purpose of representation, public discussion, and the institutional procedures that define boundaries or modify and transform them into democratic decisions.

Institutions protect us against the demagogic appeal to “the people.” They represent them and pull together their constituent plurality and the complexity of their demands. Because of political representation, the people’s will is op-erative and integrative of the times that constitute it. This is important to remember, especially when commonplac-es suggest the opposite and when there is such fascination with popular “spontaneity” that we are made to assume that those who protest are always in the right and those who promote participation necessarily strengthen democracy.

3. The utopia of disintermediation

The current fascination with social networks, participa-tion, and proximity reveals that the only utopia that con-tinues to be in force is that of disintermediation. A lack of confidence in mediation leads us to automatically presume that things are true when they are transparent, that repre-sentation always falsifies, and that every secret is illegiti-mate. There is nothing worse than an intermediary. That is

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why we immediately feel closer to someone who leaks in-formation than to a journalist, to an amateur than a profes-sional, to NGOs than to governments. For this reason, our greatest scorn is aimed at those who imply the greatest de-gree of mediation: as the opinion polls remind us, our prob-lem is… the political class.

What has led to this way of thinking? First off, technol-ogy is having a profound impact on relationships between people, the configuration of public spaces, and our rela-tionship with the institutions of authority. The new infor-mation and communication technologies led to the begin-ning of the current democratizing wave by allowing for a disintermediation that previous technologies did not sup-port. The new modes of disintermediation that new tech-nologies have only recently made possible cannot help but modify our way of understanding and practicing politics.

These new information and communication technolo-gies allow us to live in a type of “consecration of the am-ateur,” a society of non-professionals, that has produced a true democratization of skills (Flichy, 2010). The new im-age of a citizen is that of an amateur who informs him- or herself, expresses opinions freely, and develops new forms of commitment without needing authorization or instruc-tion. These new skills make citizens as suspicious of ex-perts as of their representatives. Experts no longer state ir-refutable facts or use their knowledge to put an end to all controversy. In a knowledge-based society, people possess greater cognitive abilities. New organizations and interest groups arise that help weaken the authority of the experts.

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The knowledge that was once possessed esoteric is now publically debated, controlled, and regulated.

Collective intelligence challenges the experts since it has, right from the start, enabled anyone to make use of any available knowledge. In a knowledge-based society, there is an upsurge in the average amount of knowledge, the free circulation of facts, the ability to communicate one’s opin-ions. For this reason, the new transmission of knowledge and expertise has great democratizing potential. Democ-racy arose in specific opposition to the monopoly of power and in favor of a universalization of the ability to govern. This new democratization now rests on the fact that tech-nological capabilities allow anyone to acquire skills in vig-ilance, control, and judgment at any time.

That being said, the elimination of mediation is an am-biguous reality: the desire to ban it is fueled by democratic dreams of free spontaneity, more transparent markets, and the unlimited accessibility of information. It is the dream that opinion polls can make political wishes perfectly ap-parent, making it possible to govern based solely on polling numbers. But a ban on mediation could also produce the nightmare of a public space lacking the balance provided by limits, procedures, or representation. All three factors protect democracy from its possible irrationality because limits also guarantee our rights, procedures challenge ar-bitrary responses, and representation offsets populism. Of course, transparency and proximity are political values, but one might also value democratic discretion or democrat-ic impartiality. This reveals a fact of which classic writers

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were already well aware: in politics, any value without a counterweight becomes a potential threat.

It is not coincidental that this dynamic of disintermedi-ation is made manifest in diverse social environments and with different effects: if it has been used to justify deregu-lation in the economy, in politics it has promoted forms of direct and participatory democracy. Disintermediation was originally connected to economic neoliberalism; it has now spread to other domains. The affinity found between neo-liberalism and the radical left is always a surprise.

In essence, the same logic and reasoning used in fa-vor of representation also supports the regulation of the marketplace: there is no self-regulating, transparent mar-ket nor is there a group of people that is clearly capable of self-determination. In order to be effective and to be ac-cepted as legitimate, both the market and the people re-quire procedures, rules, and representation. So what if our great challenge were precisely to construct mediations that, while less rigid, were still mediations? These new medi-ations, applied to the economy, politics, or the culture, would make the greatest possible amount of freedom com-patible with a structure that protects rights and eliminates undesirable side-effects.

In this respect, it is not very useful to envision a real-time politics that suppresses institutional mediation, rhe-torical circumlocutions, and the protocols of agreement. An ideology of immediacy proposes returning to the peo-ple the power that is unjustly retained by their representa-tives. It is presumed that democratic representation must

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be a falsification, or at least a deformation, of the pure will of the people, the fragmentation of their original unity into the atomism of various interests.

Being skeptical of the blessings enjoyed by direct de-mocracy does not mean that we are joining forces with those who fight against the “masses” and their unfortunate reactions. In reality, there is no such thing as “the people” as a metaphysical unit or as the authentic and incorrupt-ible essence of the nation. Neither are they, as twenty-first century cultural criticism has disdainfully portrayed them, amorphous “plebs” or a totality of the “consumer hordes.” Representative institutions are not an abstraction of the people’s concrete wishes, but rather the opposite: institu-tionalized democracy is what transforms the abstraction of the “people” into a visible form that is concrete and opera-tive. Its wishes can be verified.

Striving for a more truthful political system and more institutional specificity only leads to a strengthening of the illusion that we live in a world that is retransmitted live, en-tirely subservient to the present moment. The invocation of a politics that reproduces true social reality brings to bear all the functions of a mythical reality that can always be called upon to justify anything. The demand that people act in the immediacy of the moment ends up delegitimiz-ing as inauthentic the delicate artifices that societies devise in order to be able to work together.

That is why the creation of the will of the people some-times fails (we are currently seeing this in the stuttering evolution of the Arab revolts or in the Occupy movements

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of the Western world). Creating the will of the people is as decisive for democratization as indignation and protest are. Popular mobilization is needed to call attention to an in-tolerable state of affairs, but in order to delve more deeply into democracy, we need both representation and compro-mise in order to situate ourselves within a political frame-work.

4. Ballot boxes and dreams

One of the slogans most frequently shouted by the Span-ish Indignados is: “Our dreams don’t fit into your ballot boxes.” As with all utopian demands, this takes its cue from the comfortable prestige of the impossible, which saves us from asking whether our dreams are, at times, pri-vate delusions or nightmares for other people. I am not go-ing to focus my attention here on the fact that the elector-al slate from which we have to choose clearly admits im-provement. Instead, I will attempt to emphasize a reality that defines our political condition: no one, especially in politics, gets what he or she wants. This is, incidentally, one of democracy’s great achievements.

A society is democratically mature when it assimilates the fact that politics is inevitably disappointing and contin-ues to make political demands. Politics is inseparable from a willingness to compromise, which is the ability to accept that something is good even when it does not complete-ly satisfy one’s particular goals. A person who does not have the ability to live with these types of frustrations and respect his or her limits is unsuited for politics. We have been taught that this is what makes politics irresponsible

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and fraudulent, but we should get used to seeing that this is what defines it.

In a democratic society, politics cannot be a means for achieving goals designed at a distance from real circum-stances, beyond institutional realities, or without keeping other people in mind, including those who do not share the same goals. Any political dream is only achievable in col-laboration with other people who also want to participate in its definition. Pacts and alliances reveal that we need oth-er people and that power is always a shared reality. Dem-ocratic coexistence affords many possibilities but also im-poses a good number of limitations. In the first place, there are limits that stem from recognizing that other groups or interested parties have as much of a right as you have to try to win.

That is why political action always implies making con-cessions. Those who confront any individual problem as a question of principle, those who speak constantly of doc-trines or of things that cannot be conceded or of conflict, these are people who doom themselves to frustration or au-thoritarianism. Politics fails when rival groups advocate positions that they consider completely incompatible and contradictory or when they refuse to admit any conces-sions. All zealots believe that their opponents are beyond political persuasion. Those who are unable to understand the plausibility of the other side’s arguments will never be able to think, much less act, politically.

One of the symptoms of the poor quality of our public space is the growing influence of groups and people who have not understood this reality and who practice an in-

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sistent depolitization. The fragility of our democracies in the face of populist pressure is revealed through phenom-ena such as the Tea Party, a true stronghold of inflexibili-ty. I am not merely referring to the movement in the United States, but to a much more widespread tendency in our de-mocracies. We could say without exaggeration that we all have our own Tea Party now. Political parties, churches, la-bor unions, and the media are overwhelmed by a series of movements that are generated around them and that try to influence their habitual practices or directly question their representativeness.

Each of these groups endures its own particular siege against the moderates, a friendly fire that creates a solid impasse so no compromise will be brokered and no ground ceded to the enemy. In this sense, Tea Parties are strong-ly ideological yet disorganized power structures that live like parasites off a different ideological power structure, this one official but weakened. They demand that the offi-cial groups guarantee absolute loyalty to a number of po-litical objectives that must be achieved without compen-sation to or compromise with the enemy. In this way, the idea of consensus or the value of making deals is discred-ited. Those who belong to the Tea Party are guardians of principle who, rather than fight their enemies, lie in wait for those who resemble them the most. They fulfill the ad-age that the worst enemy is always within our own ranks. We can reflect, then, on the political significance of labels such as “without hang-ups” or the proliferation of displays of “pride” that are currently used to describe many ideo-logical renovations.

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Among the most depoliticizing characteristics of these movements is their lack of a sense of responsibility, their unwillingness to come to an agreement, and their inability to engage in intelligent self-limitation. They defend an ide-ological nucleus (the family, the nation, the welfare state, the market, values) that they view as continually under as-sault, and their strongest suspicions are directed at the mod-erates within their own ranks. They are especially vulner-able to populism, and they carry a good deal of emotional weight. “Single issue movements” (on either extreme of the ideological spectrum and focused on various matters: the environment, women, the nation, abortion, etc.) are partic-ularly given to bringing these extreme ideological influ-ences to bear. These movements, since they are very con-cerned about a single issue and care almost nothing about anything else, tend to focus on whichever particular issue they consider essential without considering its viability, the urgency of its timeline, or a framework of compossibility.

The combination of institutional weakness and a num-ber of social and technological factors has stabilized the space for demand and protest, which is as deregulated as the markets. The social networks, which have unleashed great waves of mobilization, communication, and instan-taneousness, have played a decisive role in all of this, but they tend to offer a destructured world in which everyone links to whomever else they choose. Because of this, these networks are less and less social since confrontation with someone who is different tends to be substituted by indig-nation alongside those who are similar, an emotion that is

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nurtured by communicating with other people who share the same irritations.

This probably indicates that we need to reconsider pol-itics in societies that are largely deinstitutionalized, whose conflicts do not have the structural function of previous so-cial conflicts and where citizen demands do not find a clear outlet through labor unions or political representation. Be-cause the world is now defined by antipolitics, not by dem-ocratic equilibrium. What we have are alternative authori-ties that intend not to balance the official power structures, but to neutralize them.

Politics has always disciplined our dreams; it used to de-fine them within a political reality and translate them into programs of action. For that reason, when politics is weak, our expectations regarding the collective future explode, and we become more vulnerable to irrationality. What do we then do with everything we hope to achieve through pol-itics? Should we concede that, considering the disappoint-ing nature of social coexistence, there is no sense in for-mulating ideals or fighting for them? Instead, it is a ques-tion of making a distinction without which there can be no democratic coexistence. What does fit into ballot boxes are our aspirations; what comes after that—if we do not want to turn our own dreams into someone else’s nightmares—is the democratic interplay that often limits and frustrates our desires, but that also enriches them with other people’s contributions. If a person were able to realize all of his or her aspirations, he or she would not share our human or, es-pecially, our political condition.

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5. A democratic suspicion

It is a paradox that at the time when democracy has reached its greatest geographic extension, when it is most valued by the citizenry and there is no alternative model, we observe persistent symptoms of weakness and dysfunc-tion. Polls reveal a growing disillusionment that some peo-ple interpret—mistakenly, in my option—as absolute dis-interest, but this should be analyzed more precisely. We are not facing the death of politics, but we are in the midst of a transformation that forces us to conceive of it and practice it in a different way.

We should not allocate suspicion to outdated catego-ries or relate current disappointments to the antiparliamen-tarism that dramatically weakened democratic govern-ments at the beginning of the twentieth century. We are not on the verge of a democratic crisis, but entering a new era of democratic stability. The disappointment people feel is in no way subversive; it is perfectly compatible with a re-spect for the democratic order. It is a mistake to think this feeling is anything other than fully democratic. We should also not forget that a lack of trust (toward absolute pow-er) is central to the very foundation of our political insti-tutions. Democracy has always been construed as a sys-tem of limited and revocable trust; it is a regime that insti-tutionalizes suspicion. Is it not true that what we generally bemoan as depoliticization simply does not correspond to the type of political leadership to which we were previous-ly accustomed, that is, an emphatic, hierarchical style of leadership that tends not to be ultrademocratic?

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The current state of suspicion stems from the logical transformation of a society that is no longer heroic and whose political system has been stripped of its previous theatrical quality. A lack of trust is not the same as indif-ference; it is a “weak” disappointment that produces more distance than destruction (Lipovetsky, 2006, p. 62). It is one thing for democracy not to foster too much enthusiasm and another for this disappointment to mean indifference to our form of political life. Even if we dislike our newspa-pers or political parties, for example, that does not mean we would let them be suppressed. The demystification of pol-itics does not mean that we do not care about anything; it simply means that our fondness for our political system is not awash in passion or enthusiasm. It is not true that peo-ple have lost all interest in politics; we live in a society in which we feel a greater sense of political competence. We are now better educated and feel capable of passing judg-ment on public affairs, thus we are less tolerant of having that ability appropriated. Numerous studies show that the more education we have, the less confidence we feel in in-stitutions or leaders (Dogan, 2005, p. 14).

One of the ways in which society expresses an opinion about politics is precisely through the intensity of its par-ticipation or interest. If we respect political pluralism in all its manifestations, why not accept that there is also plural-ity regarding degrees of participation and public commit-ment? Why should everyone have to be equally involved in political issues? And who determines the desired level

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of commitment? When citizens express a greater or lesser interest in politics, this is a sign that requires political in-terpretation. A lack of interest is a respectable way of stat-ing an opinion or making a decision and not necessarily a dearth of political commitment.

It is important not to err on this point if we want to un-derstand the society in which we live. We are not facing a time of depoliticization, but a time of the demystification of politics. A society that is interdependent and heterarchi-cal tends to detotalize politics. What some people hastily interpret as a lack of interest stems from the fact that we live in a society where the public space cannot absorb all the dimensions of subjectivity. Although it may be true that politics now only mobilizes passions in a superficial fash-ion, that does not mean that our demands on politics have disappeared. Just the opposite. The same people who are absolutely uninterested in politics do not stop expecting to reap the benefits of the political system, and they are no less vigilant in seeking the fulfillment of their demands. But their expectations are no longer inscribed in the heroic framework of a totalizing politics.

For that reason, we can see that suspicion is not the op-posite of legitimacy, but a subtle means of managing legit-imacy. A lack of interest can be a completely practical re-sponse (Luhmann, 1993, p. 191). Some even believe that a certain amount of political apathy is a good sign. Democra-cies can withstand a high degree of disinterest; in fact, the sudden interest of people who are generally apathetic about

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politics tends to indicate that something is not working as it should. A certain amount of boredom is part and parcel of democratic normality, and excitement about politics does not always bode well.

Much has been said about the way contemporary soci-eties transfer sacredness from established religions to po-litical projects. This picture could be completed by noting that, after the transfer of sacredness from religion to poli-tics, we have reached an era where it is the nonconvention-al forms of politics, what we could call “alterpolitics,” that are consecrated. It is surprising to see this evolution of so-cial expectations; we trust that alternative forms of politics will help us achieve that which we have stopped expecting from conventional politics, reactivating pure energies that, it seems, remained intact in the domain of depoliticized so-ciety. We could call this civil society, active citizenship, social movements, or “counterdemocracy,” to use the term coined by Pierre Rosanvallon (2008).

In my opinion, those who expect the same things from nonpolitics as they previously expected from politics reveal that they have not grasped the transformations that have taken place in society. We live in a society that could be called post-heroic, where heroic appeals and the mindsets of resistance have lesser repercussions. If politics is no lon-ger what it once was, neither is nonpolitics. Alternative po-litical activities (participation, protests, social movements, etc.) no longer offer us the heroism that has faded from in-stitutional politics. “Alter heroism” is a nostalgic refuge for those disappointed by politics in its current form, but like all forms of nostalgia, it is a remnant of the past.

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6. Paradoxes of democratic self-determination

Democracy is a political system that intensifies our ex-pectations; it makes us believe in things that are as inalien-able and impossible as a free society that governs itself or in a society in which those who govern and are governed are identical. This ideal of self-determination is part of de-mocracy’s useful fictional narrative, which does not mean that it is an ideal we should do without or that it reflects ac-tual reality or that it is a literally demandable right. It is, like so many properties by which we define democracy, a goal, a critical or normative principle, in other words, like always, something more complex than what its mere for-mulation might suggest.

Many of the debates that have been raised by the In-dignados movement have revealed the paradoxes of popu-lar sovereignty. It is a tension that has plagued theories of democracy from the very beginning. On the one hand, the ideal of a full democracy (often based on a model of direct democracy), the desire for participation, the insistence on the popular ratification of decisions and firmer mandates from voters, the demand that representatives reflect those who are represented as accurately as possible, a require-ment that representatives fulfill their promises… Com-pared with all these goals, voting seems quite insignificant.

These aspirations are not new, and there are, in contrast, more realistic positions, like those put forth by Schumpeter (2003 [1942]) or Dahl (1971). While the details of their po-sitions differ, both maintain that the greatest democracy to which we can aspire is a competitive oligarchy. At the same

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time, it is not easy to see how it can be a democracy when the bodies that participate in political decisions were ei-ther not elected or elected in very indirect ways (like judg-es, independent authorities, or certain international bod-ies). It would not be very realistic to demand that institu-tions and procedures of global governance uphold the same democratic standards that are required of nation states. On the other hand, experience teaches us that democracy is not always a product of democrats, but of Jacobins or rig-id state machines that are defended by states of emergency and sustained by a public that hates political parties, espe-cially those parties that are not particularly unified, in oth-er words, parties that allow criticism and freedom of ex-pression.

We owe the most famous formulation of democratic sovereignty, of its particular squaring of the circle, to Rous-seau. This is how he synthesizes it in his Social contract:

The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. (Rousseau, 2008 1762, p. 23.)

This objective is contradictory, incompatible with our political condition, and particularly unattainable in com-plex societies. In that sense, it could recall Morgan’s obser-vation (1988, p. 14) that government requires make-believe. (These fabrications support both the assumption that the king is divine as well as the idea that the people have one single voice and are represented by their representatives.)

To understand the innocence of its first formulations, we must keep in mind that representative democracy arose

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at a time when the concurrence of society’s interests and values was imaginable. Modern democracy was first con-ceived prior to today’s political pluralism or the great so-cial conflicts of the contemporary era. Its original simplic-ity is also combined with a certain anthropological naïve-té. Schumpeter called attention to this fact when he ob-served that eighteenth century philosophers saw the com-mon good as an obvious beacon light, so clear that anyone could recognize it. Failure to do so could only be explained by ignorance, stupidity, or evil (2003, p. 250).

That led to the anti-partyism of the founders of Eng-lish and American democracy (Rosenblum, 2008) that then progressed into the organic democracies of the twen-tieth century and into contemporary populisms (in a con-text in which there are, coincidentally, more and more par-ties that reject that designation). It was assumed that ev-eryone would conveniently choose to live under the same laws, so the parties were understood as factions, artifices that broke with the natural unity of societies, spurious di-visions, or the direct result of the ambitions of politicians. Even the very idea of opposition made no sense. If the peo-ple’s self-government is literal, if those who govern are the same as those who are governed, there is no right to oppo-sition. It took some time in the history of democracy to es-tablish the idea that the people can oppose a government that had achieved a majority of the votes.

Today, in more complex societies, we affirm that the gen-eral will can only be the result of compromise among di-verse groups. That is why Kelsen could affirm that the con-cept of public interest or organic solidarity that transcends

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the interests of group, class, or nationality is, in the last analysis, an antipolitical illusion (1988, p. 33). How do we define the ideal of self-determination in large, complex so-cieties with heterogeneous preferences when it seems inev-itable that at least some of the people at certain periods of time will be subject to laws they do not like?

The solution to this dilemma has been the idea of rep-resentation, the institutional concentration of an experi-ence that our rhetoric tends to conceal: the fact that de-mocracy is a representative system means that the citizens do not govern; we are inevitably governed by others. Elec-tions are not held every day; mandates are vague; some of the things for which we vote are less important to us than others; as voters, we give elected officials some room to maneuver; the demand for unanimity (in which everyone’s desires would be realized) is impossible and blocks… One of the greatest challenges of political theory is determin-ing what conditions and what democratic justification al-low this hetero-determination.

In the first place, if the citizens do not govern in com-plex societies—they do not govern everything or continu-ously or every detail—it is because to a certain extent deci-sions are delegated: governments should be capable of gov-erning. If governments only did that which elections ex-pressly authorized them to do, there would be many limita-tions when it came time to govern. Some of the limitations would be positive (because there would be less arbitrari-ness and fewer broken promises) and some negative (be-cause new situations arise, because a majority government

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would have to be configured, or because it would require the creation of pacts). In any case, “mandates are not in-structions” (Przeworski, Manin, and Stokes, 1999, p. 12), but indications that should be concretized through compro-mises or guidelines for confronting the unpredictable fu-ture.

Any leadership will have inevitable costs in terms of democratic authorization and the remoteness demanded by the adoption of decisions (especially the ones we often call “unpopular”). If a government does not maintain a certain distance from voters, they are sometimes unable to tell the truth. In addition, politics cannot separate itself from the current moment, which is one of the biggest burdens it suf-fers nowadays. We must either justify this “distance” dem-ocratically or we will be unable to muster the arguments to oppose the plebiscitary populism that enjoys strong de-fenders on both the right and the left.

It is not a question of choosing between inefficiency and betrayal but of ensuring governments will not distance themselves too much from the mandates of the electors or let their rigidity make them inefficient. Citizens must tol-erate a degree of permissiveness in government decisions because mandates in a democracy are not absolute imper-atives. The inevitable need political parties have to nego-tiate reduces the power of the voters. When they need to form coalition governments, when new and unexpected factors arise that demand unprecedented decisions, polit-ical parties and the government find themselves obligat-ed to distance themselves from express mandates or to

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make modifications that were not expressly authorized. In these situations, would we prefer to condemn them to in-efficiency or to demand express authorization (by referen-dum or a new election), even though that is not always pos-sible or desirable?

The notion of self-government is not incoherent or im-practical unless it is formulated in a weak manner: a de-mocracy is not a regime in which every action is what we all want. It is a regime in which individual decisions have some influence on the final collective decision. Democra-cy is the system that best reflects individual preferences, nothing more and nothing less. The democratic objective is to allow as much self-government as possible, while know-ing that it is inevitable that some people will live under laws that they do not like and that have been determined by other people. What should be done to make their “sub-mission” legitimate and acceptable? The great invention of democracy is that governments are provisional; there is the possibility that the government will be replaced and other people will take over.

So then, we allow other people to govern us because change is possible. This is the procedure that allows the re-alization of the ideal of self-government in complex soci-eties. We are governed by other people, but we can be gov-erned by different other people if that is what we want. “Democratic freedom consisted not in obeying only one-self but in obeying today someone in whose place one would be tomorrow” (Manin, 1997, p. 28).

The solution of alternation, the precedent of which is Aristotle’s formulation of governments ruling in turn, is

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realized, in modern democracies, through free elections. Elections are the fundamental instrument of self-govern-ment. With them, we attempt to elect those who will follow the people’s mandate. Of all the instruments of political participation, elections are the most egalitarian (Przewor-ski, 2010). Even though electoral participation is not per-fect, it is a more important political device than any of the other participatory procedures, which often privilege the people who have the most resources to participate.

By virtue of elections, the people who are in power con-front the possibility of losing it through established pro-cedures, which means that elected officials are forced to anticipate this very threat. The possibility of electing and substituting those who govern us offers credibility to the fiction that we govern ourselves. Elections are precisely the moment of greatest uncertainty, when possibility hov-ers over everyone like a promise or a threat. Elections are an interruption of inertia, an established break from conti-nuity. It is a time when the fact that politics introduces us into a world in which one has to respond and account for one’s actions is made manifest. Power is not absolute be-cause it must be defended, and the opportunities afforded by politics are only temporary. That is why no other mo-ment concentrates as much fear and hope as elections be-cause there is never as much at stake nor is reality so uncer-tain and so distinguishable from the merely possible. The democratic game, to which all participants implicitly sub-mit, means that the person who won could have lost and may well lose in the future.

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Of course elections, while very important, should not be idealized as if democracy required nothing else. But the process of holding elections is the means by which the promise of democratic self-determination is maintained and reiterated. In the end, it turns out that something this commonplace and ordinary, something that strikes us as rather insipid and that barely interests half the population is what best reflects the ideal of self-government and pro-tects us from the appropriation of the us by any triumphant majority.

Our political condition allows human beings to do a great number of things that would be impossible if we lived like Gods or beasts, as Aristotle suggested, but it also pos-es a good number of limitations. That being said, know-ing and recognizing our limits has some unexpected bene-fits, such as preparing us to challenge illegitimate restric-tions. Being conscious of our limits is essential in order to push those limits as far as possible. In this way, we will not criticize democracy for failing to provide things we should not expect of it, and we will be protected from demagog-ic appeals that promise that which cannot be guaranteed. We will know what we have the right to expect and what is, conversely, futile.

Some will feel that this analysis is not hopeful enough or that it throws cold water on our best expectations about the quality of democracy. But one need not be a disheart-ened cynic to remember that a lack of hope is not always bad; we should be pleased if those who project only false illusions are dissatisfied and reassured if true zealots are

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discouraged. In general, democratic maturity involves a certain degree of disappointment, especially the disap-pointment that arises from the unmasking of exaggerated hope.

Political experience includes some demystification of democracy, which does not prevent us from appreciating it or defending it or abandoning the attempt to improve it. In fact, it is just the opposite: if we are blind to possible re-forms, it is most likely as a result of disproportionate ex-pectations. We must distinguish the dissatisfactions that correspond to shortcomings that should be corrected and those that result from the limitations of the human condi-tion and our way of organizing ourselves. Knowing when, where, and why there are no alternatives allows us to un-mask the people who self-interestedly insist there are no al-ternatives when there can and should be.

7. The representability of society

There are protests that question certain decisions and others that criticize the partiality of representation, but contemporary protest movements such as the Indignados go one step further when they condemn the idea of repre-sentation in and of itself. Their underlying ideal is direct democracy without mediation. One of their slogans, “You don’t represent us,” is profoundly antipolitical because there can be no politics without representation. These pro-tests include many factors, many of them very admirable, but they tend to lack a political criticism of politics. Pol-iticians are poor at doing certain things that no one does

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better than they do. We can replace them, and perhaps we should, but we should not let ourselves be deceived by the smokescreen that those who replace them are not, in turn, politicians.

What is at stake in this debate is whether a democrat-ic society can avoid the limitations of representation and do without its benefits. Representation is a site of compro-mise and mediation where, for example, parity and territo-rial balance are assured; these factors are not self-regulat-ed, but require explicit decisions. It is unrealistic to believe these complex balances can be left to the vagaries of spon-taneity. The self-regulation of the marketplace that is sup-ported by the right and the political self-regulation that is lauded by the left suggest very similar preconceptions that coincide in holding the artificial dimension of the public space in low regard.

The will of the people is at least as fragile as the will of the individual; the whole process that leads to config-uring the public space—balancing deliberation and de-cision, participation and delegation—is an arduous and complex process, threatened on the one hand by indeci-sion and on the other by the thoughtlessness of its con-stituents. The problem of political representation is that it has to come up with a democratic synthesis from all in-terested parties. This synthesis must be singular, helpful in making decisions, and respectful of the plural nature of societies. Deciding without deliberation would be illegiti-mate; deliberating without deciding would be inefficient. A democracy is not a regime of referendums, but a system

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that articulates diverse criteria such as the participation of citizens, the quality of deliberations, the transparency of decisions, and the exercise of responsibilities.

Politics always ends up having to confront the respon-sibility of creating a democratic synthesis, which may be very provisional and amendable, but it is still a synthesis. Without it, we would not even perceive the differences we want to protect. If the public space is important in a dem-ocratic sense, it is not only because everyone has the right to assert their desires or convictions, but because they must lay them on the line at the heart of a debate in which inte-grative public policies are determined.

Representation once found its enemies in pre-democrat-ic, absolutist states, but it is now placed in question by a lib-ertarianism that speaks in the name of social networks, civ-il society, the self-regulation of the markets, or direct de-mocracy. These are different labels that all coincide in their suspicion toward mediation. From this perspective, rather than being a tool for configuring the public space, repre-sentation becomes the means of expressing desires, inter-ests, and identities. This leads to viewing the “proximity” of representatives as an ideal. It is said that the more the representatives are like those represented, the better. But the current political crisis does not, as they tend to say, stem from the great distance that separates voters from elected officials, but from the complete opposite: crises arise when both groups are forced to define themselves. This creates a situation where “working on” definitions and demands is impossible because they are presented as

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non-negotiable. We must confront the difficulty of dem-ocratically legitimizing the distance between representa-tives and their constituents so that the coherence and orga-nization of society is made possible.

Politics, conceived of in this way, is impossible, because politics means representation and synthesis. Individual pri-vate rights are foregrounded and understood as something entirely separate from the political arena, complete in their original form, free from any need for negotiation or com-promise, radically depoliticized. Politics would then be an immediate transposition of whatever society happens to be, without being “worked on,” without the added value of co-operation, as if any intervention by other people were a be-trayal of principles that are immediately obvious. Any po-litical mediation would be synonymous with falsifying and concealment. The problem with all of this is that without representation, society would be shattered by a surfeit of demands that all insist on their mutual incompatibility.

Representation is not a cacophonous transposition of social variability but a task of synthesizing, a process in which compromises are configured in such a way that so-cieties can act like societies without abandoning their con-stituent plurality. The deliberative principle is opposed to this belief in a private, pre-political, and exogenous sphere, which ignores the degree to which preferences are a prod-uct of laws, preconceptions, and power dynamics. The con-ception of a social order that succumbs to the immedia-cy of interest groups seems not to recognize the transfor-mative power of politics, which does not merely manage

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what exists but frequently modifies the point of departure. Among other things, politics allows society to acquire a certain distance from itself, a thoughtfulness that allows it to critically examine its own practices (Sunstein, 2004). In the public sphere befitting a republic, the emphasis is not on the people’s pre-established interests or irremedia-bly incompatible visions of the world. Instead, communi-cative processes that contribute to forming and transform-ing the opinions, interests, and identities of the citizens are foregrounded. The goal of these processes is not to satisfy individual interests or to assure the coexistence of differ-ent conceptions of the world, but to collectively elaborate common interpretations of coexistence (Habermas, 1996).

We still need to make a lot of improvements to represen-tative democracy, but there is as of yet no candidate to re-place it. What I see, at the heart of the enthusiasm for alter-native forms of social action, is an attempt to escape politi-cal logic, in other words, an attempt to escape plural action and compromise. This is the dream of a society in which the limitations of our political condition are permanently overcome. This dream of getting beyond politics is shared by many people whose company should strike us as sus-pect.

Representation is an authorized relationship that some-times disappoints and that, under certain conditions, can be revoked. But we can never dispense with representation without stripping the political community of coherence and the capacity for action. We can improve representa-tion, we can demand better reporting, greater control, new

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representatives, as much transparency as we need, but we should not look for solutions elsewhere or, especially, in a non-political framework. That would mean giving ground to those who think that politics cannot work, who are un-intentionally allied with those who do not want politics to work.

8. Provisional conclusion: protests and indignation are not enough

In a society with low intensity citizenship, soaring es-trangement from politics, flat debates, and non-existent discussions, any appeal to jump on the criticism bandwag-on receives immediate approval. If the person writing the statement is, additionally, a former French resistance fight-er and one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is impossible to contradict him or at-tempt to modify the specifics of his position without com-ing across as a stooge of the system.

Nevertheless… Indignation is a necessary, but insuffi-cient, civic virtue. With apologies to Stéphane Hessel and his Indignez-vous!, I see things differently, and I believe the fundamental problem lies elsewhere. In the first place, rather than a lack of indignation, we suffer the complete opposite. There is indignation everywhere; simply flipping through the channels affords a vision of people who are al-most all indignant (particularly on the extremely conser-vative stations). We find indignation among those who be-lieve the welfare state is being whittled away, for example, but also among those who believe it is going too far. The

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indignant label applies to those who believe there are too many foreigners, to zealots of all types, and to those who have allowed their fear to be agitated by the people who hope to channel it.

Our societies are full of people who are “against” while there is a dearth of those who are “for” something con-crete and identifiable. The problem is how to confront the fact that the negative energies of indignation, exaggeration, and victimization are what energize people. This is what Pierre Rosanvallon has called “the age of negative democ-racy,” where those who object do not choose to do so in the manner of previous rebels or dissidents, since their attitude does not specify any desirable horizon or plan of action. In this situation, the problem is how to distinguish regressive anger from justifiable indignation and how to make use of the latter in favor of movements with transformative capa-bilities.

But what if the people who listen to these curses with pleasure are not the solution but part of the problem? Ask-ing people to get indignant implies telling them they are right and that they should continue to respond as they have been doing until now, living a mixture of conformity and unproductive indignation. The revolutionary stance would be to effectively break with populism, with the immedi-acy and adulation that is the cause of our worst relapses. In addition, these populist appeals keep offering us simple explanations for complex problems. Indignation will stop being a harmless broadside that is incapable of improving the objectionable situations that provoke it when it provides

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some reasonable analysis about why that which is happen-ing is happening, when it successfully identifies problems instead of being satisfied with identifying guilty parties, when it proposes some form of action.

And what if indignation is benefitting those who are satisfied with or even responsible for the state of affairs that makes us indignant? It may be that these bursts of vio-lent protest are less transformative of reality than an on-go-ing, sustained effort to formulate good analyses and make patient efforts at introducing improvements. One could dis-cuss a conservative function of indignation in that it stabi-lizes systems just as letting one’s hair down or employing escape valves do. It may end up being the most practical approach to keeping things just the way they are. We need something more in order to move toward a better world, but that something is not greater dramatic exaggeration of our dissatisfaction; it is, in the first place, a good theory that helps us understand what is happening in the world with-out falling into the comfortable temptation of concealing its complexity. Only at that point can programs, projects, or leaderships be formulated that will afford a type of ef-ficient, coherent, and capable social intervention capable of attracting a majority of the people, and not merely those who are angry.

Now that there is a trend of authors exhorting others to do something political—to become indignant or to get en-gaged—I would propose, in spite of almost never knowing what other people should do, an alternative slogan: Com-prehend! I am using “comprehension” in both its senses.

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On the one hand, recognize the complexity of the world and the restrictions our political realities impose on us and, on the other hand, be understanding about those difficul-ties. Any criticism that does not find a starting point in both these attitudes—respect for the challenges of politics and benevolence toward those who undertake it—will not be as profound as it could be in challenging the political system’s evident deficiencies with solid analysis.

BiBliography

Bardhan, Pranab (1999). “Democracy and development: a complex relationship.” In: Democracy’s value. Edited by Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón, 95-96. Cam-bridge, Cambridge University Press.

Calhoun, Craig (1988). “Populist politics, communications media and large scale societal integration.” Sociological Theory, v. 6, n. 2, p. 219-41.

dahl, Robert (1971). Polyarchy: participation and opposi-tion. New Haven, Yale University Press.

deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix (1987). “Treatise on no-madology.” In: Capitalism and schizophrenia 2. A thou-sand plateaus. Translated by Brain Massumi. Minneapo-lis, University of Minnesota Press, p. 351-423.

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doGan, Mattéi, ed. (2005). Political mistrust and the discre-diting of politicians. Boston, Brill.

FliChy, Patrice (2010). Sacre de l’amateur. Paris, Seuil.GrunBerG, Gérard, and laïdi, Zaki (2007). Sortir du pessi-

mism social: Essai sur l’identité de la gauche. Paris, Ha-chette.

haBermas, Jürgen (1996). Die Einbeziehung des Anderen. Studien zur politischen Theorie. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp.

hardt, Michael, and neGri, Antonio (2000). Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press.

Kelsen, Hans (1988). La démocratie. Paris, Economica.Klein, Naomi (2000). No Logo. London, Flamingo.lipovetsKy, Gilles (2006). La société de déception. Paris,

Textuel.luhmann, Niklas (1993). Legitimation durch Verfahren.

Frankfurt, Luchterhand.manin, Bernard (1997). The principles of representative go-

vernment. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.morGan, Edmund S. (1988). Inventing the people: the rise of

popular sovereignty in England and America. New York, Norton.

przeworsKi, Adam (2010). Democracy and the limits of self-government. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

przeworsKi, Adam; manin, Bernard; and stoKes, Susan, eds. (1999). Democracy, accountability and representation. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

rosanvallon, Pierre (2008). Counter-democracy: politics in an age of distrust. Cambridge, Cambridge Universi-ty Press.

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rosenBlum, Nancy L. (2008). On the side of angels: an appre-ciation of parties and partisanship. Princeton, NJ, Prin-ceton University Press.

rousseau, Jean Jacques [2008 (1762)]. The social contract. Translated by G. D. H. Cole. New York, Cosimo.

sartre, Jean Paul (1992). Notebooks for an ethics. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

sChumpeter, Joseph A. [2003 (1942)]. Capitalism, socialism and democracy. Taylor and Francis e-library.

sunstein, Cass R. (2004). “Más allá del resurgimiento repu-blicano.” In: Nuevas ideas republicanas. Autogobierno y libertad. Edited by F. Ovejero, J. L. Martí, and Roberto Gargarella. Barcelona, Paidós.

zizeK, Slavoj (2010). Living in the end of times. London, Ver-so.

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The only emergency is the lack of events

Santiago Zabala

The lack of emergency [Not] is the greatest where self-cer-tainty has become unsurpassable, where everything is held to be calculable and, above all, where it is decided, without a preceding question, who we are and what we are to do—where knowing awareness has been lost without its ever actually having been established that the actual self-being happens by way of a grounding-beyond-oneself, which re-quires the grounding of the grounding-space and its time. (Martin Heidegger, Contributions to philosophy, 1989.1)

The few passages where Martin Heidegger stressed the “futural”2 possibility of hermeneutics should be read not

1 M. Heidegger, Contributions to philosophy (from enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999 (1989), p. 87. While P. Emad and K. Maly translated “Not” as “distress,” R. Polt’s suggested “emergency” (R. Polt, The emergency of being, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 2006), better renders the more political conno-tation of the dogmatism of metaphysics.2 Although Heidegger only once mentions the futural possibility of hermeneutics (“The possibility of access to history is grounded in the

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only as another indication that his understanding of herme-neutics is more radical, anarchic, and progressive than Hans-Georg Gadamer’s but also as directly concerned with Being’s event. Since the publication in 1989 of Con-tributions to philosophy (a text whose thesis had already been circulating), philosophers from different traditions have begun to acknowledge the ontological nature of the event either deconstructively (Jacques Derrida), analytical-ly (Donald Davidson), or mathematically (Alain Badiou) but few have related it to hermeneutics.3 Although Gadam-er’s conservative hermeneutics emphasized the event of interpretation,4 it did not engage in the ontological features of the event, features that are bound, as we will see, with the anarchic nature of hermeneutics.

possibility according to which any specific present understands how to be futural. This is the first principle of all hermeneutics. It says something about the Being of Dasein, which is historicity itself” (M. Heidegger, The concept of time, trans. W. McNeill, London, Wiley-Blackwell, 1992, p. 20), there are passages in Being and time where he emphasizes “possibility” over “actuality” and also the futural essence of “historical inquiry.”3 J. Derrida, “A certain impossible possibility of saying the event,” Crit-ical Inquiry, v. 33, n. 2, 2007, p. 441-61. D. Davidson, Essays on actions and events, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980, 2001. Although some of the essays that constitute this text were written before Heidegger’s publica-tion, they still indicate how the event was reduced to a theory of adverbs, therefore within philosophy of language. W. Quine commented upon Da-vidson’s theory in “Events and reification” (1985) now available in Quine in dialogue, ed. Dagfinn Føllesdal and Douglas B. Quine, Harvard, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2008. A. Badiou, Being and event, trans. O. Feltham, New York, Continuum, 2005.4 See the second chapter of Pol Vandevelde, The task of the interpret-er: text, meaning, and negotiation, Pittsburgh, Penn., University of Pitts-burgh Press, 2005, p. 15-62.

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The main problem with recent philosophical accounts of the event is not their restriction by unexpected incidents (such as 9/11 attacks), hopes (the election of Barack Obama), or disclosures (the Wikileaks revelations), but rather by the fear of being shaken. Those actually shaken by these sort of events are often the ones most framed within metaphysical knowledge, a knowledge accustomed to submit to the es-tablished structures of reality, politics, or, as Heidegger in-dicates in my epigraph, “self-certainty.” If events have be-come an issue it is not because of their ontological status but rather their potentiality to shake our current condition, that is, to transform it. Having said this, what probably drove such prominent philosophers as Davidson and Badiou to at-tempt to frame the event within their philosophies of lan-guage or mathematics is the fear of being shaken or disrupt-ed by the unpredictability of events. Contrary to these phil-osophical positions, hermeneutic ontology not only is com-patible with events, given that it necessarily does not sub-mit to metaphysical function, but also is itself a generator of events. The history of philosophical hermeneutics com-prises events, achieved in the name of interpretation, that have shaken theological, scientific, and psychological para-digms; this is because hermeneutics is not only always-al-ready shaken but also determined to shake. This is probably why, as Gianni Vattimo recently reminded us, hermeneu-tic philosophers are often described as “crypto-terrorist and fomenters of social disorder” even though their objective is to preserve freedom through interpretation.5

5 G. Vattimo, “The political outcome of hermeneutics,” in Consequences of hermeneutics: fifty years after Gadamer’s truth and method, ed. J. Mal-

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The goal of this brief essay is to point out why the event of Being is an opportunity, rather than a threat, and how hermeneutic ontology is a transformative thought interest-ed in both welcoming and generating events. Before ven-turing into these two problems it is important to stress how hermeneutic ontology’s interest in events is not driven sim-ply by its anarchic origins or generative goal but above all by the emergency created by the lack of events. This emergency is both philosophical and political given the strong support realist metaphysical positions continue to receive from our conservative democratic institutions. If such so-called realist analytical philosophers as John Sear-le and Barry Smith are awarded and funded excessively,6 it is not because their positions are “truer” than, for ex-ample, the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, but because they provide a stronger refuge from the shocks and disruptions of events. For this reason Sear-le holds that the “task of the philosopher is to get the prob-lem into a precise enough form, to state the problem care-

pas and S. Zabala, Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press, 2010, p. 286. Also see G. Vattimo and S. Zabala, Hermeneutic communism: from Heidegger to Marx, New York, Columbia University Press, in press.6 President George W. Bush awarded the National Humanities Medal to John Searle in 2007 for his “efforts to deepen understanding of the human mind, for using his writings to shape modern thought, defend reason and objectivity, and define debate about the nature of artificial intelligence” (http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/20041117.html), and Barry Smith, who is not only a disciple of Searle but also one of best representatives of the dissolution of philosophy into science, has received over a million dollars in funding from diverse political and corporate institutions, such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Volkswagen Foundation.

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fully enough, so that it admits a scientific resolution.”7 This metaphysical obsession assumes that philosophy’s only ob-ligation is to defend the Enlightenment scientific-objec-tivist agenda, which was questioned repeatedly as early as the beginning of the last century by Oswald Spengler, Karl Popper, and Hannah Arendt. These classical authors, and many others, were concerned with the “total subordina-tion of reason to metaphysical reality,” which, as Herbert Marcuse explained, “prepares the way for racist ideology.”8 But if such subordination drives toward racist ideology it is not because metaphysics has been allied to certain fas-cist, communist, or neoliberal political agendas but rather because of the generally totalitarian nature of Enlighten-ment thought. Against the alarm of these thinkers over the ongoing rationalization of the world for the sake of “free-dom” (an alarm endorsed by John Dewey, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others), contemporary analytic philosophers continue to submit philosophy to scientific methods even though in “the end,” as Searle explained, “perhaps we will have to give up on certain features of our self conception, such as free will.”9 This metaphysical world, centered in the anal-ysis and conservation of facts, has created the “emergen-cy” that Heidegger refers to, where “everything is held to be calculable and, above all, where it is decided, without a

7 J. Searle, Freedom and neurobiology, New York, Columbia Universi-ty Press, 2007, p. 32.8 H. Marcuse, Heideggerian marxism, ed. R. Wolin and J. Abromeit, Lin-coln, University of Nebraska Press, 2005, p. 158.9 J. Searle, Freedom and neurobiology, p. 5.

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preceding question, who we are and what we are to do.”10 This is probably why Heidegger went on to explain how it would not take long for

“science” to realize that its “liberal” essence and its “ideal of objectiv-ity” are not only compatible with the political-national “orientation” but also indispensable to it. (…) The national “organization” of sci-ence moves along the same lines as the “American” [organization of science].11

Perhaps this is why Searle was pleased with George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore in 2000 even though many American citizens felt he obtained the presidency illegiti-mately. The “important thing” for Searle was not the pop-ular vote but rather that the “deontic power” (or, which is the same, “science’s liberal ideal of objectivity”) continued to function.12 If the desire to avoid shake-ups within insti-tutional realities13 is crucial for the correct functioning of philosophy and politics, then the only real emergency is the very lack of these same events—given that they repre-sent freedom, the space for improvements. Searle’s desire to achieve total control through the objectivistic imposi-tions of sciences betrays not only his fear of being shaken, similar to Davidson’s and Badiou’s, but also Being’s own eventual or loose nature. This fear drives all three to create metaphysical refuges.

10 M. Heidegger, Contributions to philosophy, p. 140.11 M. Heidegger, Contributions to philosophy, p. 103.12 Searle, Freedom and neurobiology, p. 103.13 “The form of motivation that goes with a system of accepted status functions is essential to our concept of the political” (Searle, Freedom and neurobiology, p. 99).

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If Being, as Heidegger’s and Derrida’s destructions and deconstructions indicated, is always at large, that is, free from philosophical agendas, such freedom does not entail that knowledge is incapable of attaining Being but rather an opportunity to transform knowledge itself. This transfor-mation may take place only if philosophy becomes a trans-formative thought, that is, capable of welcoming unpredict-abilities as events. Hermeneutics, contrary to the majori-ty of Gadamer’s followers, who insist upon its traditional philological objectives, has always been a transformative political thought that constantly questioned knowledge and power rather than seeking them. A justification of this po-litical agenda can be found in the anarchic vein that runs throughout the history of hermeneutics where interpreta-tion was used to overcome institutionalized norms, which made the system “dangerous for all those who want pre-serve the existing ‘order’ at any cost.”14 Thus both Hermes and Martin Luther were accused of treachery for trans-mitting and translating what is supposedly beyond human knowledge, and Freud and Kuhn, of relativism for shak-ing the grounds of psychology and the empirical status of science.15 But these operations were not meant to suggest that in the “name of interpretation” everything is allowed

14 G. Vattimo, “The political outcome of hermeneutics,” p. 287.15 For a reconstruction of Hermes, Luther, and other classic herme-neutic philosophies see, the histories, introductions, and dictionaries of hermeneutics by G. Burns, M. Ferraris, J. Grondin, P. Lanceros, A. Ortiz-Osés, L. Ormiston, R. Palmer, J. Risser, A. D. Schrift, J. Wein-sheimer, and others.

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but rather how human existence (Dasein) instead of being above the world is (in Heidegger’s vocabulary) a “thrown project”; in other words, it has expectations, interest, and desires inherited from language, culture, and history. Per-haps the most paradigmatic example of the anarchic vein of hermeneutics can be found in Friedrich Schleiermacher, for whom the task of hermeneutics is

to understand the utterance at first just as well and then better than its author. For because we have no immediate knowledge of what is in him, we must seek to bring much to consciousness that can remain un-conscious to him, except to the extent to which he himself reflectively becomes its own reader. On the objective side he has even here no oth-er data than we do (…). The task is, put like this, an infinite task be-cause it is an infinity of past and future that we wish to see in the mo-ment of the utterance. For this reason this art is as capable of enthusi-asm as every other art.16

Schleiermacher’s interest in understanding “better” than the author is not very different from the transgressions of Hermes, Luther, Freud, and Kuhn against existing orders because it stresses the possibility of our performing regard-less of text, author, or authority. For him hermeneutics is not a question of “understanding differently” in order to “understand at all” as Gadamer would suggest, but rath-er to interpreting instead of understanding. It is specifi-cally in this difference that the anarchic vein of hermeneu-tics emerges because while understanding requires a guid-ing rule that, interpretation proceeds through many rules: anarchy, as Reiner Schürmann explained, does not imply the absence of all rules but rather of the single rule. As

16 M. Heidegger, Contributions to philosophy, p. 103.

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the transgression of principles, conventions, and catego-ries, anarchy is not at the end of hermeneutics but rather at its beginning. In this condition truth’s normative power is disabled in order to allow, as Richard Rorty suggested, the continuation of the conversation.

The transformative knowledge of hermeneutics dis-solves the ideal of total explanation, which seeks to substi-tute the conservation of facts for the interpretative perfor-mance of our own existence. If Dasein strives to interpret, it is not for rational purposes but rather for existential need; whoever “does not succeed in becoming an autonomous ‘interpreter,’ in this sense, perishes, no longer lives like a person but like a number, a statistical item in the system of production and consumption.”17 This is why Heidegger in-sisted that hermeneutics was not meant to achieve a cogni-zance of something in order to have “knowledge about it, but rather an existential knowing, i.e., a Being.”18 Existen-tial knowing is the very looseness of Being that I have al-ready discussed, that is, our ability to transgress the orders that have framed our existence. But such looseness, or, as Heidegger would say, “ontological difference,” is not just another metaphysical frame we are bound to submit to, but rather the postmetaphysical realm of freedom where Being is generated. Heidegger, in Being and time, declared that the ontological difference ought to be the point of depar-

17 G. Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. W. McCuaig, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 130.18 M. Heidegger, Ontology: the hermeneutics of facticity, trans. J. van Buren, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 14

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ture of philosophy rather than the point of arrival because philosophy “must at all times work out Being for itself anew,”19 that is, generate Being. This generation requires transformative thought that does not overcome (überwin-den) metaphysics, but rather surpasses (verwinden) it. If metaphysics could be overcome entirely, there would not be a change of paradigms, as Kuhn pointed out, or a bet-ter understanding, as Schleiermacher demands, but rath-er a single paradigm with its unique knowledge. Although hermeneutic ontology facilitates the generation of Being by transgressing existing orders, such Being will always be at large, loose, and unpredictable as event.

These features of Being, far from been a setback for phi-losophy, constitute its progress because they maintain our existence in its striving for interpretation, that is, as shak-en. If hermeneutics is determined to shake, it is because it is always already shaken by the same conflict of interpre-tations that constitutes it, a conflict whose practical mis-sion is to resist, endure, and survive. But what is herme-neutics protecting? As Vattimo recently affirmed, herme-neutics, like certain oppressed political, ecological, or so-cial movements, is

committed to defend the survival of the human species on earth. The continuation of life requires that the event of Being is held open (…).The history of Being and the history of interpretations, of world-views, of “openings” or of “paradigms,” are the same thing. If one were to impose—as every type of “authority” does—the one Truth, with a capital “T,” human life itself on earth would be threatened, in

19 M. Heidegger, Introduction to metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 2000, p. 97.

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the same way that the loss of breathable air and drinkable water threat-en it.20

Thus the only emergency is the lack of events, that is, the constraint of Being, where it is not at large but rather framed and submitted to total organization. Against this to-tal organization Heidegger suggested that truth is not a sta-ble authority but rather a “historical” “happening”; in other words, it “happens only by establishing itself in the strife and space it itself opens up” whereas “science, by contrast, is not an original happening of truth but always the cultiva-tion of a domain of truth that has already been opened.”21 If Searle’s, Davidson’s, and Badiou’s philosophies are de-termined by fear it is because they are the cultivation of a previously open domain that struggles to conserve its real-ization against events, which it necessarily sees as foreign threats. While events represent a threat for these philoso-phies, for hermeneutic ontology they represent an oppor-tunity for change, that is, for further interpretations. The problem is not being shaken by events but rather the fear of being shaken, a fear which leads metaphysicians to create refuges from difference, alterity, and also the proper prac-tice of democracy.22 This is why Benjamin emphasized the

20 G. Vattimo, “The political outcome of hermeneutics,” in Consequen-ces of hermeneutics, p. 28421 M. Heidegger, “The origin of the work of art” (1936), in Off the beat-en track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 37.22 By “proper” I do not refer to “objective” democratic procedures but rather those “free” from private investments that are often linked to cor-porate systems of production and consumption.

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significance of bringing “about a real state of emergency” in order to “improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.”23 But how is this possible?

The “real” state of emergency called for by Benjamin should not be interpreted today as a violent revolt but rath-er as the recognition of the “happening” or interpretative nature of truth. This is probably why Heidegger criticized Marx’s charge that philosophers should change the world instead of interpreting it because “changing the world in the manner intended requires beforehand that thinking be changed.”24 As we’ve seen, this is the transformation of thought that hermeneutics enacts in order to become an

23 W. Benjamin, “On the concept of history” (1939), in Selected writ-ings: 1938-1940, v. 4, ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, Cambridge Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 392.24 Heidegger is commenting on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: “For, meanwhile, it has also been demanded of philosophy that it no longer be satisfied with interpreting the world and roving about in abstract specula-tions, but rather that what really matters is changing the world practically. But changing the world in the manner intended requires beforehand that thinking be changed, just as a change of thinking already underlies the demand we have mentioned [Cf. Karl Marx, The German ideology, “A. Theses on Feuerbach ad Feuerbach, II”: “The philosophers have only in-terpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (p. 275).]. But in what way is thinking supposed to change if it does not take the path into that which is worthy of thought? Now, the fact that Being pres-ents itself as that which is worthy of thought is neither an optional pre-supposition nor an arbitrary invention. It is the verdict of a tradition that still governs us today, and this far more decisively than one might care to admit” (M. Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill, Cambridge, Cam-bridge University Press, 1988, p. 338). For further analysis of the relation between Heidegger and Marx see G. Vattimo and S. Zabala, Hermeneu-tic communism: from Heidegger to Marx, New York, Columbia Universi-ty Press, forthcoming.

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“existential knowing” that welcomes and generates events. Hermeneutic ontology must preserve the event of Being loose, that is, at large, free from those metaphysical ref-uges that are incapable of “grounding-beyond-oneself”25 or “understand[ing] how to be futural.”26 These two fea-tures of the anarchic vein of hermeneutic ontology are es-sential preconditions for “a real state of emergency,” for be-ing shaken by events without fear.

25 M. Heidegger, Contributions to philosophy, p. 140.26 M. Heidegger, The concept of time, p. 17.

4Spaces of Difference

(Part 1)

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La “clôture” européenne

François L’Yvonnet

“Agis en ton lieu, pense avec le monde”. Cette phrase d’Édouard Glissant, mise en exergue d’une tribune de Ré-gis Debray parue dans le quotidien français Le Monde (sous le titre “L’inquiétant oubli du monde”), résume assez bien notre propos. L’auteur de ladite tribune souligne le peu de place occupée par la politique étrangère dans la cam-pagne présidentielle française. “Ne pas oublier l’arène pla-nétaire”, “Que le ring électoral fasse si peu de cas du grand large laisse pantois”, autant d’expressions qui témoignent d’une profonde inquiétude.

La vie de la planète fut en effet quasi absente des dé-bats, tandis que les esprits, gagnés par l’électoralisme, ne semblaient occupés que par divers vrais ou faux problèmes “locaux”: socio-économiques, sociétaux, politiques (natio-naux ou accessoirement “européens”, de l’immigration à la renégociation de certains traités) ou culturels.

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“Atlantisme, européisme, ethnicisme et urgentisme ca-ractérisent la diplomatie de nos défuntes années, d’une dé-sastreuse banalité”, dit encore le même Régis Debray.

Une situation, à bien des égards alarmante, qui marque un repli de la France sur le pré carré d’idéologies vieillies, à la mesure d’un certain nombrilisme auquel elle cède par-fois, mais aussi, à une échelle plus large, parce que l’Eu-rope elle-même n’échappe pas à la “clôture”. L’incapacité dans laquelle elle se trouve d’avoir une politique étrangère cohérente, ambitieuse et prospective est, de ce point de vue, significative.

L’alignement de notre politique militaire sur l’OTAN, autant dire sur les États-Unis, le rôle de supplétif joué par la France et l’Angleterre (et quelques autres pays de l’Union européenne) en Afghanistan et le factuel leadership alle-mand, aujourd’hui célébré par la droite comme l’incontour-nable modèle anti-crise — témoigne de l’engluement “dans une géographie mentale en peau de chagrin où une mappe-monde avec 195 capitales se réduit à deux clignotants, Ber-lin et Washington” (ibid.).

“[L’Europe] est grasse et grande mais sans vision ni des-sein, inexistante à l’international (et notamment aux yeux des présidents américains) et sans ancrage dans les cœurs” (ibid.).

Le rétrécissement de la carte mentale va de pair avec un diktat de l’instant. Paul Virilio a bien analysé ce phénomène remarquable des sociétés contemporaines: le “temps réel”, c’est-à-dire le temps mondial, intégral, uniforme, unique réalise les trois attributs traditionnels du divin: l’ubiquité,

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l’instantanéité et l’immédiateté.1 Appliqué à la politique étrangère de la France, cela donne une absence de distance, de mise en perspective qui nourrit toutes sortes de propos (ou de postures) francocentrés ou européocentrés.

“Écervelée, cette façon de coller au fait divers et à la compassion du moment met immanquablement en retard sur les tendances et flux de la mouvante histoire” (ibid.).

I — Il faudrait aussi, paradoxalement, mettre au compte de cette clôture, l’inflation en France des lois dites “mé-morielles”, censées punir les divers négationnismes. Loi “Gayssot” (qui qualifie de délit la contestation de l’exis-tence des crimes contre l’humanité, tels que définis dans le statut du Tribunal militaire international de Nuremberg);

1 Ce temps réel, potentiellement tyrannique, est une menace pour la dé-mocratie, dit Paul Virilio (il y a un pouvoir absolu de la vitesse absolue). Penseur de la vitesse, il montre qu’elle est le pouvoir même, “tout pou-voir, dit-il, est dromocratique” (du grec dromos, la course), et toute so-ciété est “une société de course” (avec la volonté de contrôler un territoire avec “des messagers, des moyens de transport et de transmission”). Il y a donc toute une économie de la vitesse — la vitesse qui change notre vision du monde, notre “Weltanschauung”. À chaque société, à chaque époque sa vitesse, tant qu’elles étaient relatives, elles pouvaient être démocratisées, c’est-à-dire partagées (de la trière grecque à l’avion, en passant par le train et la voiture, il y a chaque fois un temps relatif partageable), aujourd’hui avec le triomphe des nouvelles technologies, avec, je le cite encore: “La vitesse absolue des ondes électromagnétiques, la question de la démocra-tisation de la vitesse absolue se pose”. Le cyberespace, avec la vitesse des ondes, constitue une menace réelle pour la démocratie. Il y a donc danger en la demeure civile… Les autoroutes de l’information, avec l’interactivi-té instantanée, nous font accéder à une société globale en temps réel qui comporte des formes d’accélération incontrôlable, non maîtrisable, qui risque de dissoudre le pouvoir dans le réseau, le rendant invisible et in-saisissable. La démocratie est donc menacée dans sa temporalité même, la vitesse absolue interdisant, par exemple, toute espèce de délibération.

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loi “Taubira” (concernant la reconnaissance des traites et des esclaves comme crime contre l’humanité); et la der-nière en date,2 reconnaissant et condamnant toute contes-tation du génocide arménien. À chaque fois, une manière ethnocentrée et politicienne de résoudre des problèmes qui devraient relever du seul travail historique et qui exige, le cas de l’Arménie est remarquable, la prise en considéra-tion de données diplomatiques et géopolitiques complexes. La Turquie d’aujourd’hui, qui n’est pas plus celle d’hier, se trouve mise au ban des nations respectables, d’une manière particulièrement arrogante, au moment même où la France participait à une opération militaire en Libye, ou la crise syrienne bat son plein; c’est-à-dire, au moment où la Tur-quie apparaît comme l’un des acteurs politiques majeurs et incontournables de la région. Pas de meilleure illustration de l’enfermement autistique de la France sur les bons senti-ments et les enjeux électoralistes (rappelons que la commu-nauté arménienne, très à cheval sur la question, représente un électorat non négligeable, estimé à quelques centaines de milliers de voix). Tout cela fait partie du culte du “réactif”

2 Nombreux pays ont “reconnu” le génocide arménien perpétré par l’État Turc entre avril 1915 et juillet 1916. La France a innové en voulant faire de toute contestation dudit génocide un délit. Votée le 21 décembre 2011, le Conseil Constitutionnel la jugera contraire à la Constitution en février 2012. L’historien Pierre Nora, inquiet de voir l’histoire dictée par la loi, a pris la plume pour souligner les ambiguïtés de ce qu’il nomme un “sport législatif purement français”: “Et le plus tragique est de voir l’invocation à la défense des droits de l’homme et au message universel de la France, servir (…) de cache-misère à la soviétisation de l’histoire” (Le Monde, 28/11/2011).

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dont parle encore pertinemment Régis Debray: “Agir sans anticiper ce qui résultera de l’action”.

Postures enrobées de mots sacralisés, de ces mots que la France, facilement donneuse de leçon, aime brandir à la face de l’humanité:

Quitte à ripoliner sa godille avec des grands mots qui chantent plus qu’ils ne parlent: “les droits de l’homme” (couverture impeccable, comme l’Évangile sous l’Ancien Régime), “la communauté interna-tionale” (un Directoire représentant 20% de la population mondia-le); “la gouvernance mondiale” (la Cité calquée sur l’entreprise); “la Démocratie” avec majuscule (laquelle, de Périclès à la reine Victoria, admet le massacre des âmes et des corps barbares). (Ibid.)

Jamais la France et l’Europe n’ont été aussi seules dans un monde en profonde transformation, travaillé par des contradictions inédites, soumis à des tensions extrêmes. Jamais la France et l’Europe n’ont été aussi désenchantées, aussi peu concernées par les affaires du monde, aussi inca-pables de témoigner d’un “esprit” (au sens où Hegel parle de l’esprit d’un peuple, Volksgeist). Serait-ce, comme le suggère encore Régis Debray, par défaut d’ennemi fédéra-teur, “Le moi se pose en s’opposant. C’est encore plus vrai pour le nous. Vous voulez un nous? Cherchez un eux!”3 Hier, sur “nos” marches orientales se tenait la Russie sta-linienne, mais aujourd’hui? Le terrorisme est un phéno-mène trop indéterminé, trop insaisissable, trop ambivalent (peut-on mettre sur le même plan le terrorisme de résis-tance et le terrorisme aveugle?), pour être un tiers par rap-port auquel s’affirmerait une quelconque “identité”. Les

3 Le Figaro, 14 février 2004.

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théocraties islamiques et leurs émules peuvent-elles jouer le rôle d’ennemi (au sens où l’entend Carl Schmitt)? Mais l’Iran et les monarchies du Golfe n’ont pas été fondus dans le même moule et ne relèvent pas du même modèle politico-religieux. Et l’Iran, comme le montre bien Em-manuel Todd,4 est déjà entré dans la modernité, ce dont témoignent toutes sortes de paramètres ou d’indicateurs sociologiques et démographiques. La révolution démocra-tique iranienne viendra, comme elle est venue en Tunisie, par l’action de lentes transformations sociales et idéolo-giques et le sens politique in fine de quelques leaders in-dividuels ou collectifs.

Il reste le sacro-saint marché et sa terre d’inspiration et de prospérité, les États-Unis. Il ne s’agit bien évidemment pas d’adopter une posture guerrière. Mais d’imaginer une Europe (et donc une France) qui redonnerait à la politique tous ses droits et qui tiendrait en lisière la seule logique éco-nomique, celle qui aujourd’hui menace le monde d’implo-sion. Or, la crise récente a montré que la France et quelques autres pays européens n’avaient pu imaginer d’autres sor-ties de crise que par et dans le modèle néo libéral (sinon ul-tralibéral), incarné par l’Allemagne de la chancelière An-gela Merkel.

L’Europe ne peut pas à la fois se plier aux exigences du marché (et, par là même, passer sous les fourches cau-dines de l’Allemagne et des États-Unis) et faire valoir une

4 Emmanuel Todd, L’Origine des systèmes familiaux, tome I, L’Eurasie, Gallimard, 2011.

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politique étrangère indépendante et ambitieuse. Le re-fus de l’Europe (et de la France) de se poser “contre”, la condamne au “défaut” d’identité, ou à la rechercher (sur le mode névrotique) dans un passé fantasmé. “On ne peut, à la fois, se fondre dans la jouissance de l’autre, s’identifier à lui, et se maintenir différent” (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire).

L’Union européenne a pour fondement la paix.5 Mais cette paix — en elle-même le plus grand des biens (si la guerre civile est le “pire des maux”, selon l’expression de Pascal) —, a fini par devenir le motif exclusif de toute po-litique. Elle sert d’aune. Elle nourrit une rhétorique du re-pli, de la peur et de la soumission.

Nous sommes dans une situation paradoxale: l’heure est à la mondialisation, de fait et de droit. Les problèmes ne peuvent être envisagés qu’à l’échelle de la planète, que dans le cadre spatio-temporel d’un monde à la fois élargi et ré-duit à l’in-épaisseur de l’instant; or, l’Europe et la France ne conçoivent cette mondialisation qu’à partir d’un pseudo principe de réalité: la loi du marché et à partir d’une norme devenue vœux pieux, la paix. Aucune invention, aucune originalité, aucune initiative radicale. La somnolence eu-ropéenne n’est troublée que par des déclarations de prin-cipes s’adressant à l’universel humain. En même temps, l’Union européenne campe sur des “limes” d’autant plus

5 Le projet de traité établissant une Constitution pour l’Europe établissait formellement que “[l]’Union a pour but de promouvoir la paix, ses valeurs et le bien-être de ses peuples” (art. I-3 § 1).

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rigides qu’improbables et voit dans l’immigration la grande menace “civilisationnelle”.

Les rodomontades universalisantes, qui souvent re-layent le bellicisme nord-américain, témoignent de l’inca-pacité à envisager une politique européenne planétaire.

II — Quasi simultanément, à l’acmé de la campagne pour l’élection présidentielle française, le ministre de l’intérieur, Claude Guéant, a fait la déclaration suivante: “Contraire-ment à ce que dit l’idéologie relativiste de gauche, pour nous, toutes les civilisations ne se valent pas.” Voilà qui est très remarquable. Moins on se soucie du “monde”, plus l’universel est brandi. Plus il est brandi, moins il est parta-gé. On aurait pu croire que les travaux anthropologiques, ceux de Lévi-Strauss, en particulier, avaient jeté, depuis le temps, leurs lumières sur les ministères: l’impossibilité de produire des normes d’évaluation en dehors d’une “ci-vilisation” particulière nous condamne à un relativisme “sans appel”. Il faudrait n’appartenir à aucune culture pour prétendre juger dans l’absolu de la valeur des unes et des autres. Le ministre aurait gagné à adopter un “méta” point de vue, à la manière d’Edgar Morin, qui reconnaîtrait les limites intrinsèques de toute évaluation, tout en maintenant l’attachement à des valeurs différentes. On ne peut penser l’universel qu’en s’appuyant sur les particularismes, sinon on verse dans l’uniformisation.

Et puis, qu’est-ce qu’une civilisation? Le ministre s’est bien gardé d’en produire une définition. Ce que l’on peut dire, sans entrer dans des querelles nominalistes, c’est qu’elles ne constituent pas des ensembles homogènes, mais

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composites. Qu’en elles l’ouverture voisine avec la clôture (c’est le cas de l’Islam, dont a si bien parlé Mohammed Arkoun); la tolérance avec le rejet de l’autre (la civilisa-tion dite “judéo-chrétienne” réalisera admirablement cette “coincidentia oppositorum”); la révolution industrielle, avec ses avancées technologiques incontestables et les dé-gâts qu’elle impose à l’environnement…6

Ce qui ne veut pas dire que tout se vaut. Relativisme et nihilisme font deux. Lorsque Montaigne dénonce ce que l’on appellerait aujourd’hui l’“illusion ethnocentriste” (“On appelle barbarie, ce qui n’est pas de notre usage”, Essais, I, 31), lorsque Lévi-Strauss dit que le “barbare, c’est d’abord l’homme qui croit à la barbarie” (Race et histoire, ch. 3), il s’agit chaque fois de prôner un relativisme culturel inspiré par l’étude et la réflexion et non par la seule morale. Le ni-hilisme nie qu’il y ait des valeurs ou pose que tout se vaut, ce qui revient au même. On ne peut mettre sur le même plan la démocratie et la dictature; la reconnaissance des li-bertés et leur négation; le respect inspiré par l’homme et le mépris qu’on lui voue.

Toutes les civilisations se valent, puisqu’elles ne va-lent rien dans l’absolu, puisqu’il n’y a pas d’absolu à par-tir duquel on les évaluerait. Ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’en elles tout se vaut. Mais aucune ne peut prétendre incar-ner la norme. Une “civilisation” désigne “l’ensemble des

6 Cf. André Comte-Sponville, “Noter l’autre est absurde, pourquoi je suis relativiste”, Le Monde, 24 février 2012.

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caractères que présente la vie collective d’un groupement humain” (Marcel Détienne),

Ce sont de grands ensembles à longue portée historique où se recon-naissent au long cours des schèmes de pensée et des manières d’être, d’agir, de se représenter le monde identifiables selon de nombreux critères: grands groupes linguistiques, vêtements, habitats, dans leurs grandes lignes, mais aussi religions et cultes, systèmes politiques, sys-tèmes artistiques. (Françoise Héritier.)

En somme, elle désigne le mode d’être d’une commu-nauté. Alors que la “Civilisation” (“marquée au fer rouge du jugement de valeur”), dont se réclame le ministre Guéant, renverrait à quelques grandes “cultures” domi-nantes, comme la “nôtre”. On est libre d’aimer ou ne pas aimer telle ou telle mœurs, telle ou telle coutume (ainsi Lé-vi-Strauss qui n’aimait pas l’islam7), mais poser une civi-lisation comme étant supérieure à une autre est privé de sens. Nicolas Sarkozy, avec son aplomb coutumier, avait déjà déclaré urbi et orbi (Dakar, 2007) que les Africains n’étaient pas encore entrés dans l’histoire. Voilà désormais une partie de la planète non encore entrée en “civilisation”.

Françoise Héritier, titulaire de la chaire d’anthropolo-gie au Collège de France, fait remarquer que c’est Claude Guéant (et ceux qui ont repris l’antienne) qui est relativiste, dans la mesure où il pose la pétition de principe que

toutes les cultures sont des blocs autonomes, irréductibles les uns aux autres, si radicalement différents qu’ils ne peuvent pas être comparés

7 “Il n’est nullement coupable de placer une manière de vivre et de pen-ser au-dessus de toutes les autres, et d’éprouver peu d’attirance envers tel ou tel genre de vie, respectable en lui-même, mais qui s’éloigne par trop de celui auquel on est traditionnellement attaché” (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Regard éloigné).

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entre eux, d’autant qu’une hiérarchie implicite affirme que le bloc au-quel on appartient est supérieur en tous points aux autres. (Le Monde, 12 février 2012.)

L’essentialisation des cultures, qui conduit à les poser comme des entités pérennes et distinctes, constitue le vé-ritable relativisme. Alors qu’il s’agirait plutôt, par un ef-fort de pensée “anthropologique”, de jeter des ponts et des passerelles, de repérer des vecteurs et des invariants entre cultures ou civilisations différentes. C’est à ce prix que peuvent se com-prendre (au sens de “prendre avec”) la diversité irréductible des cultures et l’appartenance à une même humanité.

L’arrogance universalisante va de pair avec un aban-don du monde. C’est ici, nous semble-t-il, que l’idée de la-tinité peut apparaître comme un précieux “paradigme”. Comme une manière originale, peu ou prou partagée par les peuples latins, de se frayer des voies d’accès vers un universel “concret”, non exclusif.

III — La latinité peut être l’atelier d’une nouvelle vi-sion du monde, d’un relativisme prudent, d’un agacement des frontières, celles des cultures, des peuples, comme celles des États. L’esprit de latinité nous invite à prendre conscience que nous sommes tous des minoritaires en sur-sis. Les minorités aujourd’hui ne cherchent pas à se libérer, ne cherchent pas à dissiper le brouillard, ni à rompre le se-cret (“l’enfer est né d’une indiscrétion”, disait Céline), car on n’avance jamais qu’à tâtons.

Les minorités opposent l’infinie complexité du monde aux promesses de perfection. Il est des libérations extermi-natrices, notre vieux monde en sait quelque chose.

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Il ne s’agit pas de redonner du sens au sens, de réin-troduire de la finalité dans l’histoire. Comme si le pro-grès n’était que moribond et qu’à son chevet veille la bonne vieille latinité. Il y a dans la latinité une manière de se te-nir dans l’expectative plus que dans l’attente. Passagère du meilleur et du pire, encore titubante, elle nous invite à ne pas perpétuellement gager sur l’avenir, mais à méditer notre propre destin.

Qu’est-ce qu’être latin, sinon reconnaître l’autre qui est en nous? Sinon, éprouver que l’on ne se suffit jamais à soi-même? C’est aussi, par là même, engendrer — à la manière socratique — une expérience de pluralité, chez ceux avec lesquels nous prenons langue. Il y a de l’ironie dans la La-tinité, cet art du dédoublement de l’autre par le dédouble-ment de soi.

Le monde hégémonique condamne les hommes à l’exil — au propre et au figuré — la latinité offre le salut de l’exode, une sortie hors de soi pour être soi. On n’est pas la-tin tout seul, entre soi, se félicitant de l’aubaine, savourant sa supériorité. Il y a une responsabilité particulière à po-ser la latinité comme valeur. C’est affirmer que le “fleuve de vie” (Carlos Fuentes), comme tout fleuve, a deux rives, desquelles nous nous regardons, dans un face-à-face, un vis-à-vis salutaire.

•

Le monde dans lequel nous vivons, relayé jusque dans les esprits par l’emprise médiatique, est un monde où le face-à-face et le vis-à-vis n’est plus possible. C’est un

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monde sans rive… C’est un monde où l’autre n’est jamais regardé dans les yeux.

On s’étonne et on regrette que l’esprit latin n’ait pas davantage inspiré notre politique étrangère et la diplo-matie européenne. Qu’en un certain sens, l’Europe ne s’affirme pas latine ce qui, plus sûrement que ses pro-blématiques racines “chrétiennes”, l’ancrerait dans une identité forte et polycentrée.

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Contemporary creativity and the redesign of relations between author and work:

the exhaustion of the creative burst*

Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida

Significant changes in the standards of perception, ori-entation and functioning of professionalization practices of young people have been at work in our contemporary society in a most disturbing and overwhelming manner. Discontinuities erupting in linear and consecutive career trajectories: hesitations and uncertainties of all sorts in the once more assertive and precise notion of vocation. The inexistence of perspectives of planning one’s profession-al life in the long run; the dismantlement of legitimation standards of cumulative and unidirectional experiences,

* Translated by Daniel Gomma de Azevedo.

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embodied in a vertical build-up résumé; disorientations in the search for financial stability in the face of ever more deteriorating conditions etc. In the last decades, this multi-faceted scenery has been coexisting alongside the rise of a sort of synthetic-image, and at the same time a tautologi-cal and diffuse one; of the new types of entrepreneurship. Although they surpass by far the central axis of this dis-cussion, the new and young entrepreneurship is comprised here only as a starting point to anchor the development of our argument.

Since 2008 I have been developing a research on the transformations of creativity among young professionals from the most diverse artistic and entrepreneurial areas in Rio de Janeiro, with ages varying from 19 to 41,1 but most of all characterized by a markedly young lifestyle. Their axes of fixation in the city are mobile and episodical, run-ning through both its South and West Zones; they include temporary migrations to foreign countries and character-ize fairly varied social belongings and incomes, whose

1 We point out here that in the Brazilian media, both printed and digital, innumerous newspaper stories depicting behaviors related to the breach in the articulation between the statistical notion of youth and the “feeling of youth,” which passes by and ravages a good portion of our population. In accord with the analyses conducted by Bozon (2004), we have followed the contradictory way by which sexual behaviors are currently put in relation with the biographical temporality. It is as well a timely occasion to refer to the work of Le Breton (1999), in which the reference to personal production of identities in the contemporaneity is connected to modalities of cultural bricolage where social influences mostly praise the importance of the air du temps rather than the more profound and durable regularities.

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Contemporary creativity and the redesign of relations…

scope may comprise medium and low-medium sectors of our society. It is important, however, in the matter at hand, not to look at the refined demographic, socioeconomic and gender survey of this group of young people,2 but rather at the specific functioning that distinguishes their way of taking action in the world. This functioning will be ex-amined later, but not without first mentioning that the two main professional areas picked out by these young people are apparently understood as contrasting ones: the artistic-expressive universe (such as cinema, music, literature, vi-sual arts, fashion, theatre etc.) and the one characterized by executive vocations, whose emphasis falls upon the corpo-rate, management and business domains.

Since they are still in the early stages of their forma-tion, that is, in the middle of the initial processes of de-sign and building of their professional layouts, the experi-ence obtained from these young people must be examined through the lens of a sort of “disarming” of the contrast-ing views generally attributed to the notions of creativity,

2 As to the questions on possible statistical and demographic representativeness of the universe of these young people, or even of the relations between quantitative and qualitative aspects of researches on human societies, we make ours the argument by Gabriel Tarde as they have been updated by Latour (2002, p. 3-4) when the former, distancing himself of the acceptance of the Durkheimian argument that structures may qualitatively differ from its components, emphasizes: “the more we penetrate an individual’s intimacy, the more we find discrete quantities; and if we move outward from the individual in the direction of the aggregate, we begin losing more and more quantities on the way, because we lack the instruments in order to collect enough of these quantitative assessments” (free translation).

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on the one hand, and productivity or professionalization, on the other. A singular reconfiguration of the opposition regimes that until then had characterized these two profes-sional repertoires seems to act, if we calibrate our look and sensibility towards the recent movements of maximization of values such as competence, professionalism, expertise and performance, that today stand equal and united to the values of creativity, playfulness, expressivity and pleasure. We let ourselves be conducted, therefore, by the initial pre-diction of increasing and significant movements of recip-rocal contamination between the notions of creativity and productivity. And, moreover, we sought to follow the tracks of subjectivity regimes and mechanisms that would be at play in the simultaneous processes of creativization of the profession—a movement that would be pushing the value of creativity, more usually connected to the arts world, into the territory of the “corporation”—, and the professional-ization of creativity—a movement that would be ever more conferring to the artistic creation a professional span, af-fected by a competent, assertive and “responsible” func-tioning typical of corporate models.

Pondering on such relations of mutual contamination between these two universes has demanded us to perform an astute (De Certeau, 2004) exercise of initial displace-ment towards the romantic sense of creativity, to then cap-ture principles of traceability (Latour, 2002) that would bring us closer to the counterpoint to contemporary forms of creativity. Therefore, functioning as a facilitating lever

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for the set of initial deadlocks we have to face when deal-ing with an innovative approach on transformations of the subjectivity,3 this counterpoint has granted us easier access to a form of “appeasing” of our first worries about the rela-tions between creativity and contemporaneity.

This resource has also been willingly contaminated by the valuable suggestion of Viveiros de Castro (2002, p. 123-9) Amerindian perspectivism of entering into a relation with the other—a “relationism”—by which it is affirmed that the truth of the relative lies in the relation, and where “it is not about ‘imagining an experience, but experimenting an imagination’.”

In the last two years we have met, spent time with and talked to these young people; we have inhabited their work-ing spaces—art studios, mobile ateliers, offices, lofts, in-cubators, collectives, companies, artistic residences, home-offices—and have been configuring ethnographic encoun-ters that made us realize the contemporary emergence of a

3 By choosing to work with processes of subjectivity such as production and sharing of the common and extraction of the singular from the common—in short, the idea of subjectivity as a passing through—we privileged, in the wake of Guattari (2005, p. 34 and 36) “mutations of subjectivity that function not only in the register of ideologies but in the very heart of individuals, in their way of perceiving the world, of articulating with the urban fabric, with the machinic work processes and with the social order that supports these production forces. (…) It is question here to affect the points of singularity, processes of singularization that are the very roots which produce subjectivity in its plurality.”It is also worth adding that, here, in the ethnographic displacement that we tried to undertake—the dimension of the encounter and an emphasis on the relational perspective—a relationism, in the words of Viveiros de Castro (2002).

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sort of new creative social agent. Therefore, it resides in a way of functioning, or rather in the embodiment of an equal arrangement of forces, the key-element capable of building a condition of passing through common to these subjec-tive configurations. Such creative social agents manifest themselves in networks of collaborative gatherings (Laz-zarato, 2006) or in the distributed personhood of a creator that is extended as a position in the relation (Viveiros de Castro, 2002) as an agent of his own singular abilities, ac-quired in his relation with the world, in a ceaseless con-nection with the multiplicity of all things surrounding him. In this sense, we stray from the romantic notion of totali-ty and unity (Duarte, 2004) based on the solitary and au-tonomous creator/artist, regarded as substance and identi-ty block, from the importance accorded to ontological dif-ferences, as well as from the notions of organicity, totali-ty and whole unity. In other words, the romantic creator is moored on the instance of the individual conceived in terms of authenticity and originality, moved by the burst, by spontaneity, by the free flow in his intimate regional-ization (Urry, 2000), by the impulse, the improvisation, conducted by the “baton” of the inspiration spark and of dense and extensive experience. His time is the time of in-ternal duration, both thick and contemplative; its mission is the perpetual conditioning of himself, the continuous pursuit of his own ballast.

Contemporarily, the artistic making is understood as immersed in multicentered networks, in collaborative ex-pansionism and enlargement, in the valorization of the in-finitesimal fractionation (Tarde, 2003), in the prevalence

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of focus, clarity and explicitation of functionings. Giving rise to a sort of clamor for the revalorization of the crafts-man (Sennett, 2009), who combines autonomy and com-munity; these functionings articulate themselves around the desubstantialization of the creative nucleus. The rela-tions of co-presence between thinking and making come near as well to the favoring of the notion of sketch—where the preparation of a site for creation already constitutes a “making,” instead of plans—where the absence of dialogue between form and materials gives place to the obsession with a prior planning of the final destination. Therefore, the sketch comes near to the importance granted to the things you can count on to perform your work, associat-ed to a script of restraints/directions and to the continuous and ceaseless equation between solution/problem detection (ibidem). Such scenery is associated with circumstances of mutual irrigation between Homo faber and Animal la-borens, “thinking with your hands” (ibidem), and to rela-tions of coexistence of spirit-action, fact and feat (Latour, 2002), and passed through by the presentified, relational and situated experience. One works responsibly with what is available, recruiting the other and the surroundings, tak-ing advantage of events and turning them into opportuni-ties. Finally, an astute functioning (De Certeau, 2004), that acts by liberation, by catch and release, is also at stake in the way of acting in the world by this new creative social agent. That is because it is immersed—continually negotiat-ing in contexts of flexible subjectification—in a contempo-rary scenery of “societies of control” (Deleuze, 1992), ruled by the capture of the values of creativity, imagination and

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playfulness, by an ever more connectionist and rhyzom-atic logic of capital (Pélbart, 2003; Boltanski and Chiapel-lo, 1999; Hardt and Negri, 2005; Lazzarato, 2006), in a process through which all the ingredients in the mix of cultural contestations during the 1960s and 1970s would have been converted, between the decades of 1980 and 2000, in praised and creative values, and most of all, be-longing to the mainstream. From this paradoxical turn it is then drawn, as a new normativitiy, the reciprocal con-tamination between creativity and productivity. In other words, redesigning a world “with no outside” (Sloterdi-jk, 2006) from the aseptic multiculturalism (Zizek, 2006).

The “secret,” now deprived of refuge

In the direction and continuity of our debate bearings, we bring as a sort of implicit luggage the intuition by Can-clini, when he tells us “a world ends not only when we have to file the answers, but when the questions that originated them have lost their meaning” (Canclini, 2010, p. 42). If modernity, just like romanticism as its counterdiscour-sive correspondent—(for which, in the case of art, “dis-covering” (having the inspiration) gives rise to the artist’s creation)—did not cease to be guided by both explana-tion (discovery, science, Fact) and interpretation (inven-tion, art, Feat)—both took shelter or sought refuge in a “ secret.” When criticizing the melancholic disenchantment with the system-world of arts, in which the critic interpre-tation becomes an element of the system itself, Canclini refers to the need of “defatalizing the secret” (Rancière apud Canclini, 2010, p. 231). This image converts itself

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in an opportune reinforcement of our incursions into the functioning of explicitation in contemporary creative pro-cesses. In them, the dimension of the feat is visible, the pro-cesses that lead to the facts (Latour, 2002) tend to become explicit and come to the surface, appearing in a line of con-tinuity with the fact, separated from it only by a matter of variable degree or density, supporting the preponderance of the discourse of explicitation/description and of presen-tation.

“To defatalize the secret,” as well as to redescribe the sensible (Rancière apud Canclini, 2010, p. 235) in the realm of discoveries, of the pairs captures and thefts (De-leuze and Parnet, 1998) carried out throughout the route following these young creators is also to work towards the maximization of affordances.4 The latter synthesize both objective and subjectively a vast array of reciprocity rela-tions capable of being activated between the organism and the environment, and are derived from the way by which people actively move in their worlds (Urry, 2000, p. 205).

4 The rereading made by John Urry (2000, p. 205) of this notion of affordance created by James Gibson (1977) constitutes a valuable tool to the amplification of new approaches to creativity. Among the adaptations of this concept, we also underline the one carried out by Donald Norman (1988) for the context of the interaction man-machine in order to only allude to those possibilities of action that are promptly perceived by an actor. In the wake of three rereadings, we sought to expand even more its network of senses by enveloping as affordances, for example, the properties that both objects and systems of possibilities of action have that call us to “relate with.” (It would be question, let’s say, of a sort of “convocation,” as suggested by Fernanda Eugênio.) In the field of interaction between technology and design, we can talk, for example, of a website as having a good affordance, just as, upon the launch of a new water jug, we may say it needs more affordance in order to become pleasant to be hold.

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From the intense, extensive and prolific time spent throughout the years with these creators, it was drawn a di-agram of contemporary creativity that runs through 9 cen-tral axes: the investment in the autonomy of stages versus the prominence of the notion of career/specialist; the as-sembly of collaborative gatherings; the favoring of the idea of occupation and situation; the oscillation between time-pressure and time-process, as well as between insular au-thorship and collaborative authorship; the understanding of the creation as an operation in opposition to creation as in-spiration; the forms of accomplishment of work into prod-uct; the prerogative awarded to explicitation and clarity; and finally, the exercise of the liberation process as a tactic.

Keeping this vast diagram about contemporary creativ-ity in mind, we chose to restrain, in the scope of this paper, to the thematization of oscillations between insular author-ship and collaborative authorship, and the apprehension of the creation process as operation, functioning and connec-tion. These limits will also undertake the examination and reflection on the setting up of collaborative gatherings and the favoring of explicitation as a central tool used in pro-cesses of subjectification of the creative agents in question.

Coexistence of worlds, its vicissitudes and its remains

Volney Faustini, a researcher of the processes of dig-ital inclusion and a consultant at Inovação e Tecnologia5 addresses as “bathed in bits” the generation of youngsters

5 News story by columnist Elis Monteiro, “Nativos digitais,” for the mag-azine O Globo Digital, May 18, 2009.

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from 10 to 15 years of age, who are digitally “including” their mothers, fathers and grandparents. For the consultant, this generation, that he also dubs the “digital natives,”6 “is promoting a dramatic change in the way that human beings interact with the world.” Still according to Faustini, it is possible for a digital immigrant (the way he calls the gener-ations of the parents and grandparents) to live in harmony with the new generation, and still not lose its “accent.” As digital immigrants, we speak with an “accent,” he repeats.

The digital natives and the immigrants that include themselves in the digital world, but keep their accents, con-stitute good clues to consider working “with what remains” (or what is left), to display “what is not visible” (Medina apud Canclini, 2010, p. 227). That is to say, the accent, of which one hardly gets completely rid of, is located right there, often imperceptible in its layouts of “exclusion,” act-ing on and affecting the dynamic of family relations tra-versed by the technological apparatus.

Digital natives, immigrants “with an accent” and chang-es in the forms of relation between humans and the world may help us visualize the confluence and the zones of ten-sion, conflict, coexistence, as well as dialogue remnants between the insular author and the multiple collaboration that is distributed in the contemporaneity.

Upon reflection on the new conceptions of authorship and the meanings of creation as an operation, as a think-

6 The seminal reference for the term “digital natives,” “digital immi-grants,” as well as for the idea of “accent” within this context can be found in Marc Prensky, in his article “Digital natives, digital immigrants,” On the Horizon, MCB University Press, v. 9, n. 5, October 2001.

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ing/making, we will be working the interfaces between the worlds of modernity/postmodernity and of the contempo-raneity. These worlds, their more or less visible remains, as well as their remnant excesses and accents, go towards a complex subjective architecture, both unpredictable and multiple, whose entity and ontological dimension has been losing its outlines and landmarks. In a word, more than sig-naling the loss or vacuum left behind by an old and yellow-ish script of a subjectivity either in way of “dismantling” or liquefied, it is question here of a movement of redesign, of rematerialization, of remaking of relations between worlds, things and humans.

Authors, collaborators, competitors, craftsmen and artists: rearrangements and rematerializations around visions of creation

The oscillations between insular authorships and collaborative authorships

The making of an advertisement, the design of a logo-type, the music portfolio of a DJ, a report on investments in the financial market, the setting of an online art gallery, an installation artwork, the organization of collectives spe-cialized in creating music brandings, a hotel venture, a the-atrical performance, the “invention” of a strolling catering service for offices, a festival of cell phones’ movies—these are but some among several examples of experimentation we have followed to learn about their creative process and countless current challenges.

João, an industrial designer, with an MBA in project man-agement and a master’s degree in Management of Cultural

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Assets and Social Projects from Fundação Getulio Vargas, as well as manager of multiple ventures in the hotel busi-ness, understands the “artistic making,” and even the no-tion of creation, as continually collaborative processes. In the office he shares with his father, who is a visual artist—and where he often sees the birth of his artworks, João tells us about the person who helps his father in the preparation of a canvas on which he will paint. In his opinion, by doing that, this person is already imprinting a “personal creative process” on top of the first doodles made by his father. For better or for worse, he emphasizes:

there’s a making there that is hers, and that takes action on top of the doodles he made before, but there will always be, there always is a col-lective action. Even if the makings of the visual artist overlay them (…), even so, there is an inevitable collaboration.

When setting up his hotel business—passing one mul-tiplicity into another and inventing agencies from agen-cies that invented himself—João, instead of subsuming his condition as the author, as the subject of the enunciation (Deleuze and Parnet, 1998), blends in with the figure of a writer—“here at Cama e Café everybody has an influence, from the waiter to the host, from the person making the sale at the door to the coordinating staff”—embodying the challenge of having all the elements in a non-homogeneous group conspire, making then function together. Instead of approaching the invention as the creation of something that does not exist yet, the agencies put in motion and dy-namized by João are those of co-functionings, of “friendli-ness” and of symbiosis (ibidem). Unmaking, therefore, his credentials as the author, one that does not shut himself in

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the recognition but is open to encounters and is always de-fined in relation to an outside (ibidem), João, as a creator, considers that in the contemporaneity

we all have to be more like sponges, absorbing, liberating and ex-changing. Even the notion of individual creation and the very artis-tic knowledge already carries within it the individual memory created by the artist, from the experience he has had with several people (…).

Creation as a sponge, fixation on the learning move-ment and not in the resulting knowledge, absorption, ex-change and redesign of the set of tools that are already in the world. Therefore, it has been created from something real that already existed—“the fact that in Rio de Janei-ro there is a concentration of many interesting and socia-ble people—and we just tried to potentialize that.” There-fore, what is new in João’s creative scheme has been gener-ated from his work on top of what was already given, what already existed—the Bed and Breakfast, a hotel business that has its origin in 19th century Ireland—, but produc-ing from that a kind of reorganization and refitting of its “parts.” No longer subsumed by the idea of creating some-thing unprecedented, or the necessary condition of tabula rasa, the invention consists in a different way of disposing, or of laying out, what is already “out there.”

So, assuming his role not as nuclear and substantialized creator, but as position in the relation (Viveiros de Castro, 2002), or repository of the singular opportunity of a com-bination, João is amused by the memories from the time he launched his business—which was already successful worldwide—and to which he associated, “boosting” and

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redesigning the hospitality of Rio de Janeiro, tapiocas for breakfast, transforming them in a product:

I began classifying interesting houses and people that enjoyed having guests over, we had the houses inspected, the owners did the neces-sary renovations and then we came up with all the marketing. But that was the idea, to create a product from an intangible cultural asset: the hospitality of cariocas. We began in Santa Tereza, but today we have expanded to the rest of the city.

Discoveries, encounters, thefts, the wedding, rather than the recognized and regular conjugalities (Deleuze e Parnet, 1998) traverse the creative modalities of not only this entrepreneur, but of many of those we met and whose discoveries resided in their power to creatively combine, associate and redesign resources, subsidies and informa-tion that until then already existed, just like solitudes that end up finding each other and working together. Encoun-ters of singularity between people, or between them and a project, individuations without a subject, as a unique pos-sibility of producing that combination: “there is no agency that works as a single flow. The question is not imitation, but conjugation” (ibidem).

And as suggested by Bruno Latour, from the fruitful image of a cautious contemporary Prometheus,

God, as a designer, is actually a redesigner of something that was al-ready there (…) if humanity has been made (or should we say rede-signed?) in the image of God, then they too should learn that things are never created but rather carefully and modestly redesigned. (La-tour, 2008, p. 5; free translation.)

Working together does not mean doing the same thing, and Gabriela experience, who is not only a doctor but also a DJ, poet and musician, invites us to follow the creative

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function emerging in encounters and collaborations, which take place “in-between.” Medicine and the arts world here act in relations of feedback, reiterative mixes in which agency and structure,7 instead of opposing each other, co-work and co-manage themselves in the daily life of this creator. The concreteness, the organized and practical way of functioning and the assertivity of her facet as a med-ic contributed very much to giving her artistic life a more pragmatic approach, in organizing her ideas in a better way, so “things don’t get too vague.” Finally, from this pro-cess of mutual irrigation between these different sectors of her life, Gabriela, as a poet and artist, began to “work hard,” to provide all requests with firmer and more confi-dent feedbacks.

When writing her poetry book, something she consid-ers “really visual,” Gab actually made some of the visu-al work herself. However, she realized that she would need someone to execute the graphic work; she called a design-er friend of hers, with whom at the time she was taking part in a study group, and told her: “I really want to make some objects out of these poems!” At the same time Ga-briela manifests this wish within her creative process, en-ters the scene the turning to the other, whose response (out-put) is converted into new and successive inputs which re-allocate the initial one. Both the friends and the profession-als are traversed by what Urry (2000) defines as a autopoi-etic circular system, in which are mixed contributions of

7 See Urry (2000, p. 206) on the opposition structure-agency and the autopoietic circular system.

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all agents involved—the designer does not think Gabriela’s plans will work and suggests that they start thinking in an-other way. And, at last, the solution was found as a team.

Forms of anthropophagic recruitment of the team for a cooperation between minds (Lazzarato, 2006), as the one seen between Gabriela and her designer friend, as well as between so many creators both from the arts and the cor-porate world that we have followed; such forms—although they do not exclude affective choices—pick out, on each occasion, in their social networks, the singularities most suited to each project.

In turn, sharing minds is something nowhere close to the image of a mere juxtaposition of executors in some task. That is how Yuri thinks and ironically speaks. He is a visual artist and performer. His irony and skepticism re-garding the senses of sharing are evident. The fertile image of training and coordinating of hands when they work to-gether from the very beginning (Sennett, 2009) insinuates its contrast to what Yuri calls the collaborative trickery, which is nothing but a sort of slightly updated line of as-sembly. This is the impression he manifested upon remem-bering an experience he took part in: it consisted of taking a picture and making it available on the web for indiscrimi-nate interventions by the public. When exhibited alongside those of many other participants, this picture embodied the author’s utmost expression, and, in the opinion of this visu-al artist, it was even worse, “because it’s the author and his discourse that the final image was produced with the help of a thousand hands.”

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Juxtaposition, successive additions, collages, mere rela-tions of contiguities overlap in the artwork whose collabor-ative failure is insistently pointed out by this artist.

Playing an arpeggio, where the stronger left thumb is mobilized in order to help out the skimpy right Twinkie is perhaps the most difficult physi-cal procedure in collaborative coordination. (Sennett, 2009, p. 185.)

With this image, we obtained, in the wake of the beau-tiful study on the hand by Richard Sennett, the revealing expression of what constitutes shared work. And, in this sense, it occurs to us one episode in the professional tra-jectory of Eduardo, a musician and composer, in which are inverted the flows between sharing and the need to “un-load” the author’s regime. Having abandoned his studies in chemical engineering to devote himself to a band, shared with friends, with which he obtained not only great success but also his financial stability and autonomy, Eduardo then decided to turn the table. He renounces a successful career, his financial stability, once more leaning on his father for some material support, but he admits to be experiencing the most fertile moment of his life as an authorial compos-er, “making himself understood,” and living a (financially) streamlined, “but incomparably happier life.”

Music is yet another of Gabriela’s skills, who has always played solo instruments such as the saxophone, the flute. This initial solitude experienced with her instruments points to a functioning based on the proposition of her iteractive acting,8 in which are mixed the singular contributions of all

8 The functioning by iteraction (Urry, 2000) is not characterized by a closed plan, but only as a proposition of acting, the design of a purpose that functions as a trigger to action. Through iteractive cycles, the increment

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agents to the dynamic of “spatialization” processes of the singular autonomy of the creator (craftsman) in the com-munity surroundings. Connecting and already rematerial-izing at the same time the need to be accompanied by oth-er instruments that would contribute for the harmony of her music, as well as the magical impact that practicing as a group had on the rise and production of ideas, Gabriela realized that “it could be done in other areas as well, you know?! It didn’t have to be limited to the music!”

Even when it comes to works that choose to be solos, such as those verified in creative processes such as Vol-mir’s, a dancer, and the duo of musicians Felipe and Edu-ardo, there are “others” acting and producing effects: the machine, or even the “other” as non-human agents, are among those. As in the image of the hybrid car-driver by John Urry,

the car is never a mere means of transportation (…). It became almost a ‘second home’, a place to work, date, gather family or friends, com-mit crimes etc. (Urry, 2000, p. 191; own translation.)

At the time we contacted Volmir, he was graduating in performing arts from a public university in Rio de Janeiro and was a member, as a dancer, of a well-known dance cor-pus of the city. Among his plans for the near future, there was a master’s degree in Angers, France, and whose first rehears-al of his admission project we had the opportunity to watch on the day we had our encounter. Volmir curiously baptized

takes place as it produces itself, in the extent that it allows to make and use at the same time, to learn, test and increment the creation of a processual mode, speeding up the execution of the project “in ever smaller intervals.”

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his work as the solo “Anti-só” (“Anti-alone,” in Portuguese) and it consists in “supposing” or making us imagine, in his solitary dancing, the company of innumerous other hu-man and non-human agents. Thus, we could follow, within a single physical space, Volmir interacting in his “dancing” with the air, the atmosphere, with other bodies and objects of different shapes, sizes and consistencies.

The innumerous technological amenities that today al-low musicians as Eduardo and Felipe to have their own ed-iting room or recording studio at home expand the possi-bilities of collaboration and of an increased immediatism of the creation. That is because these creators would no longer be at the mercy of labels’ approval or their official acknowledgement. This relation with the machine in the condition of “other,” however, is capable of, at the same time, activating the proliferation of authors. That is to say, people who do all themselves, self-sufficient in their home studios, and unable to “exchange” and share experienc-es. One of these musicians considers this phenomenon as a path for recrudescence of competitive relations…

By activating multiple, circular and iterative (Urry, 2000) uses of returns between relations of relations (Vi-veiros de Castro, 2002a) and between subjects and their surroundings, we move away from solid and self-centered regimes of inspiration. And, moreover, in order to think in yet another way this new authorship, we feel compelled to activate the counterpoint conceived by Zygmunt Bauman between the metaphors of gardening and the gamekeeper

(Bauman apud Urry, 2000, p. 188), so as to, applying the former, describe modern societies based on the cautious

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and meticulous role played by the State. The gamekeep-er-state, on the contrary, lacking an encompassing tale, would solely play the role of regulator of mobilities (ibi-dem, p. 195), since its “ability of striating” would be now “reduced” (ibidem, p. 198). Withdrawing from the rigorous classifying scrutiny of the gardener’s modus operandi, for creative agents of the new gamekeeper authorship it is not proper to intervene. In it, all those involved watch over the fluidity of events, diluting the figure of the one who con-trols and leads.

“Ideas are little birds”: conversation as work

Frederico, a historian, professor and researcher, DJ, mu-seum curator and cultural producer, embodies in a paradig-matic way the mark of the gamekeeper in his unarmed lack of concern for the centralization of authorships.

Being constantly contacted by people to engage in con-versations, he asks himself: “is this work, from the mar-ket’s point of view?” In the same movement with which he answers negatively to the question, he also eloquently in-cludes his personal statement: “from the point of training, of articulation, of future possibilities, that’s a hell of a job!” Both for Fred and for us, in the way we approached the young people, the conversation is assumed as a real “math-ematical equation of proliferation multiplying all sides in-stead of adding them up, breaking all the circles in benefit of polygons” (Deleuze and Parnet, 1998, p. 27).

Singular and valuable currency in the professional uni-verse of this creator, the conversation is a capture, an occa-sion to multiply connections and networks of access. To his

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large community of friends, Fred admits he brings more than the possibility of a good text, or a good research, he brings “the conjunction.”

To the contrary of plagiarism and copy, double process-es of theft and capture of imitation emerge in Fred’s con-versation-work. And that is how he goes on creating, not something mutual, but an “asymmetric block, an a-paral-lel evolution, a nuptial between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’” (ibi-dem, p. 15).

The fertile perimeter of the conversation as work is also subsidizes by the magnetism of several encounters be-tween domains and that complete both of Fred’s daily and professional lives. Mentioning one of those—which took place with a very successful visual artist, in a informal so-cial gathering for which they were both invited, despite not knowing each other—this creative agent made us plunge in the moving world of the event. Since they were not will-ing to watch the film around which, on that occasion, all the guests were gathering, the two stood outside the room, and “one word leads to another,” and before Fred knew it,

wow, this idea is awesome, is that what you do? Yeah. Wanna do this? Let’s do it! That first night we left with the complete idea for the “Ase-mbleia Geral”9 event up in our heads. We had never met before, not even exchanged a “hi.” So, I believe in this, you can meet people and you can encounter people. I believe in encounters.

9 “Assembléia geral” (general assembly, in Portuguese) is plural idea fo-rum organized by Raul Mourão and Frederico Coelho at the Lapa atelier (on 71, Rua Joaquim Silva). The project aims to be a place of encounter and conversation in which new minds and new projects can meet each oth-er in a creative way, swiveling around broad themes and issues of the con-temporaneity.

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If the “collaboration is the engine of things,” if he, as he told us, has no issues with matters of intellectual proper-ty, with googling and finding one of his texts in someone else’s blog with no mention of his name; and if neither does he ask or hope people to consider him as an original au-thor, Fred, going against the grain of authorial persistenc-es, which in the contemporary seesaw still have their place, synthesizes:

I think that’s what life is: ideas are like little birds,10 they are meant for the world. I won’t make a living with them. This is also some-thing that doesn’t belong to our generation; I’ll make money not from my intellectual property, but rather from my mind. (…) Don’t I do the same with others? Don’t I do the same with ideas I found in books and don’t belong to me? Thank God I have no issues with all this. Liter-ature will give you this shot of boldness, it frees you from having to prove a canon.

If, on the one hand, today it is possible to realize our limits and vicissitudes characteristic of the romantic ge-nius, or of what Hannah Arendt (apud Sennettt, 2009)

In his blog (http://raulmourao.blogspot.com/2009/07/assembleia-geral.html), on July 1st 2009, Raul Mourão describes how this first encoun-ter developed. 10 It is interesting to take this statement by Fred and oppose it to the one by composer Caetano Veloso, who uses the same term “little bird” to celebrate the current extremely severe policies on copyright. Says the composer: “Copyright is a modern achievement, which dates back to the beginning of the 19th century. Until then, as our great Donga used to say (to limit myself to the realm of music), samba songs were just like little birds, they belonged to the first one to catch them. Today, the Brazilian Constitution states that ‘the work of the spirit’ is a non-transferable right of the author. The author having the autonomy to decide the worth of his work, that’s modern. The rest is the vanguard of backwardness” (O Globo, January 30, 2011, Segundo Caderno; italics added).

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called “the principle of natality,” on the other hand there is no shortage of testimonies and experiences from other cre-ators, for whom the authorial nodes are still very much ev-ident in their creative makings.

Guilherme, a freelance consultant hired by companies to develop brands and concepts of products, considers that nowadays corporations are defined by the crucial movement of several people working out solutions. Despite speaking from an eloquent and ratifying rostrum—“no man is an is-land”—as to the importance of collaborative creation, Guil-herme surrenders to the dichotomic evidence of “empirical verification” and admits there are difficulties in joint cre-ations. Going beyond his own professional universe, and in-cluding the artistic field in his remarks, he sees art as a par-ticular expression of one person about reality, and mani-fests his skepticism about the eventual success of joint cre-ations. This consultant even considers impossible to com-pose something innovative when there are several people bringing in their particular worldviews. From praising the collaboration on an ideal level to the inevitable irruption of the belief in creation as an individual process—only after which it becomes possible to access the good collective work—Guilherme is among those who function in “ca-thedral model”11 (Sennett, 2009). His persistence in the

11 The “cathedral” model is, according to Sennett, a free software model that can be related to the Microsoft regime, in which a closed group of programmers develops the code to then make it available for anyone interested in it. This model, also according to Sennett, is opposed to another one, related to the Linux regime, in which anyone can take part through the Internet, producing codes. To this latter model is attributed the title of “bazar” model (Sennett, 2009, p. 35).

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creative node—such as in the first movement of the ex-ample of free software—no longer presents the same hard substance of Romanticism, indicating softer and more di-lated margins of maneuver towards the availability of all creation materials for the collective.

Leonardo, 29, is one of the associates of Multifoco pub-lishing house, specialized in launching new literary talents that are far from the bureaucratic scrutinies of official pub-lishers. When finishing his journalism studies at Universi-dade Federal Fluminense, Leonardo had to face a problem: he needed 300 copies of a magazine he was putting togeth-er, but printing and publishing houses wouldn’t run less than a thousand copies. In the end, this problem became the subject of his final paper. Researching here and there, Leonardo noticed an unexplored market: Editora Multifo-co was born. At the time, this small editor had a market geared towards magazines in mind; that is when Raphael, a colleague from university, opened his eyes for books. He and another friend, Thiago França, then became collabo-rators. Today, the small press specializes in launching new authors, without passing on to them any editing or printing costs, thanks to a new way of organizing the editorial pro-duction. “This attracts many people who are getting start-ed,” he tells us, and emphasizes:

in this two years, we made 20 thousand copies, of nearly 200 published titles. The genres vary from poetry to short stories, passing by novels, child and academic books, and even book originated by blogs.

At the same time in which he is known for being a great preconizer of contemporary networks of collaborative gath-erings—(and his pioneer spirit at Multifoco thus qualifies

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him,as we visited the publishing house and during the con-versation we had with him) we realized that the authori-al eagerness was the north of those who sought the com-pany’s sponsorship. This equation had seemed to us, in the beginning, contradictory (since Leonardo had become a reference in collaborative ways of functioning for his gen-eration). We later understood that the vision of the artist as an insular individual had not lost its breath and thickness in formatting the demand that Leonardo dealt with. How-ever, collaborative tracks still kept penetrating the horizons of Leonardo’s professional practice, but they were located in “another place,” demanding from us a certain twist/bend on the “observed material.” The layout of this entrepre-neur’s collaboration was inscribed in the ability of each of his businesses—publishing, party organizing, the produc-tion of concerts, dance performances, plays, readings—to mutually manage and irrigate each other. That is to say that for each one of these events, several others would be ac-tivated in a broad network of mutual propagation. Thus, for instance, the launching of poetry work could generate the coparticipation of an artist who would set the poems to music, at the same time activating the services of a bar to serve guests and, possibly, this occasion could also result in the taking over of the dance floor. All of this, of course, constituting the perfect chain of profitable effects for the owners of the publishing house. Not only this “cascade ef-fect” would end up contemplating a large number of profes-sionals and their fields of action and expertise, but would also expand the effects of promoting the company and its

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broad range of competencies. Therefore, the collaborative network was understood much more in the scope of these arrangements rather than strictly inside a perspective of dismantlement of the authorial comprehension of the art-ist as a solitary creator.

Ward the competition off: aporias on the “collaborative chemistry”

The principle of competition, among the young from both the artistic and corporate worlds, can be understood as a shadow zone, a sort of “return of the repressed” for those who won’t admit “breaches” in their contemporary aspirations of collaboration and legitimation of the distrib-utive whole (Deleuze apud Lazzarato, 2006) or of singu-larities’ gatherings. It is in these functionings’ dynamic that takes place the production and sharing of the common and the extraction of what is singular, from the common. In one word, subjectivity as crossing.

The waves of oscillation authorship/collaboration will find in the competition—sometimes a veiled one, some-times seen as healthy emulation, sometimes even as a search for improvement, as a way of creating, or contributing to “surprise in the act” the persistence of authorial nodes—its main watershed.

There are some tactics to “ward off the competition.” One of them is to single yourself out in what you do. An-other, for example, consists precisely in allying with your very target of competition, originating a collaborative gath-ering. Both express, in different degrees and nuances, ways

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of functioning whose individualistic frontiers give way to an equation closer to the distributive spirit.

When competition is established, according to João, an advertiser and musician, “the only way out is to join your opponent and turn him into your ally.” Fred has also been through very similar situations, when he had to join his competitor in order to neutralize his competition. To this first movement, another part of the antidote to competi-tiveness is added: the astute art of becoming singular and unique in their fields of action. In Fred’s case—who con-siders himself as a hedonist Buddhist, and for whom “if a problem cannot be solved, it ceases to be a problem”—his ability of being an “articulator of parties” is evident. When he was introduced to two older and more experienced re-searchers that would work with him in mounting the ex-hibit of which he was the curator, Fred at first felt “vulner-able” before them, and activated his greatest expertise: he opposed his ability to produce reflections to their ability of collecting and processing data, and came to the conclusion that it would be far better for him to let those ladies do their work and provide him “on a silver platter” contents that he only had to “read, articulate and write.”

Endowing his potential as articulator and agglutinant between parties of the appropriate gauging, Fred remetab-olizes the competitiveness that, in this same movement al-ready points towards a way of functioning in the key of distributism, whose mechanism is shared and expanded by the experience of João Brasil as a DJ in electronic music

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parties. In his field, “competition is a jungle and you have to win allies.” From this first movement, he starts build-ing on “a group,” leaving the individualist functioning be-hind, answering to decentralizing appeals and the maximi-zation of affordances (Urry, 2000) of the web of reciproc-ities among his DJ friends. The latter, in their turn, “de-mand” from João assiduous appearances to their parties, shaping the inter-game of the reigning symmetry ethos in the group. João, for whom “party is work,” overstates the law of retaliation: “If you don’t go to other people’s parties, nobody will show in yours. In the next event there will be a lot of people available to play, and nobody will call you.”

The measure of quality and success in João’s parties—corroborating the argument of practical, real and concrete verification—is assessed by simply observing whether people are dancing or not. If people won’t dance in your parties, it is because they are no good.

Finally, allying with his friends makes him feel stron-ger, delineating with his team a sort of immune outfit able to function as a liberating action regarding capture and competition (Sloterdijk apud Latour, 2002). Besides, con-tacts and connections are key ingredients to his business. At the time we encountered him, João was getting ready to go live in Europe for a while, where, besides studying, he would carry on with his DJ activities. In order to do that, he had already sent his music to the main DJs in Germa-ny—where he won a remix competition—and had already received in return the work of his competitors.

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Another way of processing the collaborative game as an antidote to competitiveness enters the stage when one in-habits the atmosphere prevailing among colleagues in an investment bank, where Thiago, 26, an economist, deals in the stock exchange. Much closer to the type of functioning that confers to impersonality a privileged position, rather than focusing on identity personality, the principle of “con-tributing to the debate” is reinforced here. The particular-ity that penetrates into the collaborative game of the bazar model “turns people towards the outside” (Sennett, 2009). What seems to prevail in the bank where Thiago works is the debate, rather than competition or entrance in relation by the path of the autonomous individual who is not trans-parent in his proceedings. There is a set limit on the quan-tity of operations one may perform, even if it may be “the same operation of the guy sitting next to you.”

If I am dealing with one particular stock, the guy next to me can say: “hey, that’s a very good one, I’ll tag along.” I’m also buying: the ex-ternalities of the debate are very positive. You start the debate with something and end up with something totally different, and that gen-erates an idea that has nothing to do with the beginning of the debate.

Thiago tells us of a kind of experience that, just as the problem solving game embodied by the Linux operational system, is an open one: each solution is not an ending, but a new beginning, since it opens up new possibilities and new actions of detection. It is a personal, physical engagement with the situation. In permanent expansion, the “solution” does not take the shape of closure, but rather of an opening of new and continuous fronts of inventions of possibilities (Sennett, 2009, p. 36, 49-50).

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A slit is opened in the to and fro motion of relations be-tween tacit and explicit knowledge, and it is capable of, in such cases, launching the subject in the hunt for external legitimacies. The question here is the figure embodied by the withholder/hoarder of information, a product of what Sennett baptized as the Stradivari Syndrome (Sennett, 2009, p. 277) that inhabits the conviction of the ineffable special-ization. Patrícia Bárbara, 39, a producer, performer, actress and filmmaker complains about the existence of this char-acter in her working universe, and considers him as the ex-pression of all that is undesirable and “unhealthy” in this new functioning. When competitiveness is born from un-equal premises, in what regards access to information, for example, “then it results in a competitiveness of exclusion.” This would be the archaic and unhealthy side of competi-tion: “it’s been 200 years since it was explained that with-holding information is stupid, but to this day there are peo-ple who withhold information.”

Patrícia claims to have a broad “vision of the game,” such as a defensive football player, and thus, for this only reason, she “commands” her performing group. However, one cannot help but notice that, despite preaching horizon-tality as the working practice of her whole team, its nucle-us is called Patrícia Bárbara. That is to say that the synthe-sis capable of being nominated as “I” is a disjunctive syn-thesis (Deleuze, 1974), the one who joins and separates in the same movement, for Patrícia (“I”) would be at the same time the leader/place that congregates, distributed in the network of contacts, liberation and capture.

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Creation as operation: defragmentions and reconnection to that which is sensitive

Emanuel, a denizen of a “comunidade”12 is 28 years old and the creator of Kabum Project, organizer of the Central Aesthetics Festival, movie director, cameraman and de-signer. By the end of our meeting with Emanuel and his as-sociates in a studio apartment/office in Estácio neighbor-hood, Manu had forgotten to mention the computer game project they were devising. As we walked towards the exit he mentioned that his plan involved the creation of some-thing appealing to the youth and that could concurrently be a means of welfare, quality of life and self-esteem for the whole family. Manu had mentioned that the idea for the game came about with the continuous observing the youth’s uninterrupted practice of spending the day in front of a computer screen playing games. It is quite common to see youngsters inside Lan Houses (online game play-ing stores common in Brazil) completely hooked in online game playing. After having realized this, they devised a means of transforming what they’d seen into something productive, yielding positive benefits. What if the young-ster could earn, let’s say, a house renovation or the add-ing of a new room and improvements to their house, for in-stance. Maybe then his family would support him in such endeavor and stop complaining of his choice of spending so much time in ludic activities. Thus, the games might in-volve and draw the youth’s interest in regards to family and to the community’s interest. That is, the project would act

12 The way shantytowns are usually referred to.

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as an improvement of quality of life by raising their self-esteem, and concurrently would be of assistance removing the fault of juvenile idleness.

By then, Manu and her partners were trying to get a sponsorship from major tech companies such as Intel and IBM.

Such elaborate description is able to lead us deeper into the configuration of the operation creationwise. Manu and her partners devised the configuration of the game idea in that they worked on a re-materializing of the surroundings of the community they lived in by broadening the poten-tial affordances until then, still unexplored and found en-try spots generated by the most unthinkable connections which allowed them the creation of “nice nature.”13 The op-eration explores the collection to that which is inherent to the ecology of the situation, to the gamut of sensitivities and opportunities. (Urry, 2000, p. 205).

Rodrigo is an economist, works in a major investment bank and is a founding partner of Frugale. That which gave rise for his company was as maximum accrual of reciproc-ity networks and association among three situations Ro-drigo “enveloped” (Sloterdijk apud Latour, 2008) his own manner through his creating process. Well overweight due

13 Such expression refers to a finished product of an object but also could make reference to the creation process itself, characterizing it as “clean,” simple, awaiting for further evolution, but pleasing, relating to a variety of senses and maximizes affordances. A nice nature maximizes the display of affordances for humans and it also relates to the “variety of senses.” Nice Nature must offer haptic, hearing, smelling and palatable experiences, besides movement and visual ones (Urry, 2000, p. 205; free translation).

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to accumulations while sitting in front of a computer non-stop monitoring the stock exchange operations, he de-scribes having had a vision of a flight attendant walking past behind his stock operating desk pushing a cart laden with healthy products. Frugale came to pass in the wake of the frequent flying, the unease of having to bear six kilo-grams of excess weight and the hardship to find fast and healthy food around his workplace and, also his sedentary lifestyle. As we spoke to Rodrigo we could enjoy a num-ber of his healthy bites and drinks, juices, salads, healthy sandwiches and yogurts of various flavors. We could also tag along the “land flight attendant” pushing her cart to a number of floors in the company. He offers his services to more than 10 companies in Rio de Janeiro.

It is not about discovery or inventing, but about con-necting, restructuring information and contexts, ideas, ob-jects and situations that might yield the implicit, explic-it, generating isonomous relations between matters of fact and matters of concern.14 The pioneering philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk, while dealing with life supports as matters of concern, makes possible the compiling and collection of interests over interests, fold over fold, envelopes over enve-lopes. According to Bruno Latour’s words on the change of

14 We have chosen for not translating it. Both express unconclusively the contrasts between notions of materiality and morality in facts and value, tangible facts or things and facts of interest. The modernist take in force since the first half of the 20th century having Habermas as a great preconizer who faces the meanings of matters of fact and matters of concern in antagonizing and contradictory manner (Sloterdijk apud Latour, 2008).

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language the philosopher establishes in regards to the rela-tion between facts and values, things and humans:

we absorb humans towards the innermost of ever-greater number of el-ements carefully made explicit, protected, conserved and maintained (immunology is the great philosophy of Biology, according to Sloter-dijk) (Latour, 2008, p. 10; free translation.)

The explicitation is now converted to a key notion through which we seek to take another step towards the contemporaneous reconfigurations of the creative process among our entrepreneurial youth. The concept of explic-itation, following the philosopher of design’s major intu-itions allows for a feasibility of reconciliation in contem-poraneity of two of the main narratives modernity has sep-arated; that of emancipation, a branch of official history and that of cautiousness/attention to detail (or attachment), that which has always kept secret and mysterious (Sloter-dijk apud Latour, 2008, p. 8). The opposition delineated by modernism between the senses of social, symbolic, subjec-tive and experienced, and the material, real, objective and factual world will undergo a radical spin on its workabouts. This is the direction in which the

explicitation might allow us to better understand what is rematerial-izable without importing, alongside the concept of “matter,” the mod-ernist “baggage” of “matter of factness.” (Sloterdijk apud Latour, 2008, p. 9; free translation.)

Most of the connections made with the youth be it in the arts, games and overall expressions and this more tuned into the entrepreneurial world, presented a leitmotif; cre-ativity as something “created.” Despite the pleonastic and rather tautological expression there seemed to permeate a

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guiding aspect for the producers of a new contemporaneous meaning for such a notion—creation as the granting privi-lege of the trajective operational continuum, as of making explicit, recombining/connection of factors.

Delano is 29 and the founding partner of Gomus, a com-pany that defines its activity as “music branding,” songs carefully chosen to be played in stores, events, organiza-tions bringing musical identity and other services of this sort. Besides being a musical entrepreneur, Delano is a jour-nalist, and states, “we keep on hitting the same point, re-thinking and reconceiving the same ideas and surprisingly, it takes form of its own yielding an incredible work of cre-ativity.” When it seems we are in the doldrums, he breathes deep, steps outside “because there’s a limit to everything.” “This idea of waiting for the great inspiration to pay a vis-it,” he states, “it really doesn’t happen.” In his organiza-tion creativity is pursuit, persistence and in his words, “its wringing it all towards the common goal.” A slight allusion to the “creativity of idleness” he experienced when he was younger, he reminisces when he grabbed his guitar and, “if (inspiration) arrived, great, if not, it was ok”—which leads us to the romantic idea of free flow—“a pause for a breath until inspiration decides do come.” Such “creativity” is de-scribed as not existing anymore, and insists on perspiration (“wringing,” “hammering,” “wringing and hammering”). In this entrepreneur’s perspective “breathing” refers to the perimeter of the expansion of idleness and to remote atmospheres permeated by a certain nostalgia of the flow of free associations with no commitments to the socalled

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first youth. It’s not that we are suggesting that such a condi-tion has become rarefied in the midst of our contemporane-ous scenarios of creativity, but rather, it is an emphasising its insertion in another orchestration of rotations working in times of pressures and in times of processes. A conjugat-ed thought and action yielding new semantics for Gomus’ creative processes. Delano and his associates have been re-searching sounds and new musicians on the Internet, but also came about with the new music and redesigned sounds for their clients. When we went to interview them we met at the garden of a two-floor house with garage at the top of Gavea neighborhood in Rio, owned by the parents of one of the associates. Gomus was made of an office, an adjunct building on the garden right in front of the house (a 20 m2

room) and also a recording studio in the same house. In this environment, much of the creative aspect lies on the at-tempt itself. For Delano

the most creative people are those “hammering” the ideas repeated-ly, throwing in new concepts, masticating them, throwing in yet some more ideas and suddenly the yielded pulp takes a form of its own, a fantastic creation.

This morphing is a circumstance that takes place repeat-edly in the universe of creative agents. While being a mi-grant procedure (Sennet, 2009) that involves the displace-ment of “innate talent” in favor of a “morphing” and of an unending qualification/training, it implies a displacement of the artist in favor of the craftsperson. But the “morph-ing” also involves a permanent act of broadening stimulat-ing environments, at least, new enough to be presented as

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substance for invention. “Morphing” is also a meta-morph-ing, on the other hand. It involves procedures to find terri-tories for action among which are those taking on the artic-ulation between doing/learning—a type of learning on the fly, which is a new approach for professionalizing.

Here we see clear homologies as a suggestion of design and redesign, substituting notions of construction and ed-ification, necessarily subject to the creation from scratch. Bricks, timberwork, structures, cement, beams work as hinges over hinges of uncountable envelopes Delano uses to recombine, rematerialize his work in favor of a continu-ous clarity of procedures and that displayed.

The privileging explicitness and the redesigns of originality

“People say that nothing falls from the heavens any-more, not even dove guano, let alone ideas. The more peo-ple believe in falling apples and insights from gravity, the further they are from creativity,” adds Raphael, a re-nowned entrepreneur and part of the Board of Directors of Biruta—Idéias Mirabolantes (Gaudy Ideas).15 His royal and assertive tone shows no diffidence. His grandstand is that of the craftsman.

15 Self defines as a new type of organization, Biruta focuses on innovation on its broader sense and aims at being a creative partner for their clients, aligning planning, know-how, technology and boldness. According to one of the associates, their marketing mantra is “Gaudy ideas yield result. Our task: to tangibilize ideas.”

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A stark opponent to that practice of treasuring secrets, Rafael has a fluid body language while elaborating on the countless challenges he’s faced with every day as an entre-preneur. A job well done, with clear demands for transpar-ence and objectivity are part of a modus operandi involv-ing hard work at their office, and sets aside any celebration of the “lonely creative wolf.” Also against the grain of the halo of originality, of celebrating the individual who sired the original idea, “who is but a channel of venting it off—the real creator is he who knows how to get it done and de-livers as a team player.” This is “the man,” according to him. As he touches on “conjugatable” principles and con-victions that every day attempt to avoid having the prag-matic branches eclipse the creative ones, he also brings at-tention to the need of managing the creative aspect. When he and associates first started activities on the marketing sector, they confided to us they had agreed that “creativity without management is nothing but funny ideas.”

The emphasis on the qualification plan in the realm of implementation and tangibility, on the serious and unend-ing qualification of the craftsperson ends up leaving be-hind the primacies bestowed to the hermetic concept of originality and innate talent taken as being prerogatives of the artist’s genius. Not only such prerogatives are left be-hind but are also new vectors of possibilities and a trend of conjugating an unseparableness of sequential automatism in the field of reflection and action.

Images such as “taking (it) out of the hat” and “margins for casuistry” are recurrent in the entrepreneurial youth’s

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imagery as goals to reiterate a kind of obsolete context, al-ready left behind—a portfolio of vestigial values no longer part of recommendations for prestige and success.

Once again, the explicit as dilution, dilation and avail-ability spread about as multiple know-hows are all denom-inators of Thiago’s experience in investment banks. In such environment the reasons and realization are even more im-portant than the idea per se. Moreover, the connecting ines-capable skill remains as a producing effect of rematerializ-ing of the creative process. And likewise, the “pick-up” (as explained further ahead), and not the postmodern “cut-up” reminiscing to the sheer collage/add-up/juxtaposition, is an operation Thiago undertakes as he faced the issue of the sinking soybean laden cargo ship sailing towards China.

It happens among ideas which when shared end up losing each its own frontiers following guidelines that are not circumscribed nor limit-ed one by another, but convey one another as a block (Deleuze e Par-net, 1998, p. 26.)

One of his bank colleagues is noteworthy for knowing how to “extract.” That is, in a context detached from com-plete, fully finished and solitary deeds his colleague rema-terializes and redesigns the circumstance of the creating fact in the organization.

The American economy will undergo an upturn because people will purchase more goods, due to these and those reasons, thus, more job placements will be made available and we will experience a bullish stock market and economy will rise.

“The pundit,” Thiago explains,had his idea, the apt guy is he who takes the idea and comes up with a connection. That is, it’s the person who has a contemporaneous

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understanding of creation as operation, and places the ‘finding out’ (connecting) and inventing as synchronicity and contagion, thus al-lowing for a perception that the fact is a feat. (Latour, 2002.)

Stock market brokers share the same principle—the creating movement does not rest in “owning an idea,” but rather in knowing how to draw associations and connec-tions among that which is existing and is given unto the world. This is the great creating movement. That is when the “pick-up” and the connecting movement of that which is possible Thiago was able to come up with: the sink-ing of a cargo ship laden with soybeans heading to Chi-na. How can a deal with such information? As he states, “it is about being able to collect all information available and using it to get some somewhere.” Well, the ship has sunk, he then conceives, “I am definitely buying some shares of this company, they will do just fine because the Chinese people will need soybeans and won’t have an other suppli-er to go to.” As he blends all these factors and thinks how they can be intertwined and impact one another, the entre-preneur starts his creative movement. All of this informa-tion shall not be left unfruitful and must be used as input. This means one has to be aware of a vision in a broad as-pect, and keep the widest angle possible on her zoom lens.

The imagery of dregs of a syrup, awaiting to be shaken and then ingested, although not clearly used by Yuri, a vi-sual artist and 26 years old, it can be used as metaphor for his creative process. As one allows to be woven with the concurrent aspects of thinking/doing, and no one knows for sure when one aspect triggers the other, or in what or-

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der that takes place, their ideas take form as they are im-plemented. From then on new ideas arise, this time from friction he originates. In his words, “and when you realize it, you have a cluster of ‘stuff’, layers between theory and practice all blended into an indiscernible whole.” That is when we use the metaphor of the syrup. When Yuri final-ly thinks that his work has decanted he is able to shake it, and then it is presentable, not as a final product but as part of the process towards it.

The act of shaking the dregs is an image that does not necessarily imply a sequential trajectivity neither the possi-bility of foreseeing a possible outcome. The very same way there is no linear dimension to the time between thinking and praxis as an artist, Delano is not sure “if the becoming of the artist he is was an internal or external stimulus.” The movement of creation of the artist was neither external nor internal, it just went on happening. So much for institution-al recognition, it did not take prevalence, as it went on in its development, nourishing its condition, without allowing the anticipation of the sacral declaration of being an artist to congeal the development based on its original blueprint (Sennet, 2009). “I don’t even know what it means to be an artist, to be on the spotlights, on the metiér and exhibiting one’s work. I guess it just happened as a means of having fun, of creating something,” he states.

A bet on liberation as tactics

By the end of this reflection, still a work in progress, we have suggested a counterpoint for the stiffer models of

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interpretations advocating for the entrance of a new and congesting behavioral regulation in the contemporaneous society.16 In opposition to a new normativity, we suggest not an Euclidian or naïve opposition, personified in an ad-jectified reading of a liberation process. However we pro-pose to understand the liberation in its nature as adverb of manner we keep in mind a means of bringing momentum or putting into operation which is not rooted in the being. And that recurrently produces an infinitesimal looting and infiltration of the norm due to its “internal” operation and not as opposition or escape. As we have saught to describe and demonstrate, the subjectivities overlapping the creative processes in the agenda in the realm of the subtelty of the game flexibility/coercion,17 Urry (2000), work by catch and release versus an operation which increasingly speaks the same “rhyzomatic” and more “higienized” language which works by catch and result.

Likewise to Richard Sennet’s research (2009) about the image of clenching hand—a research made with Japanese cooks while handling knives used to slice fish. Here we highlight the “holding,” which necessarily involves “releas-ing,” or knowing how to “let go.” “Clenching” is the “state of alertness,” or the permanent co-presence of thinking and

16 Cf. Bozon (2004) and Le Breton (1999).17 The fact that the State molds into the gamekeeper allows us to ponder on the opening of breaches for the astute games of liberation: “The State furnishes the license and infrastructure for those drifting and aimlessly walking, but not where and when” (Urry, 2000, p. 191; our italics and free translation).

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doing (Sennet, 2009), so often found in professional tra-jectories and experiences our collaborating creative agents have. The calculation of minimum force (as the one used by the hand of the Japanese cook): the pressure/tension needs to be diminished, worked on, remetabolized and not increased as, for instance, the youth currently employ in competition, in order to generated fluid movement.

We thus understand that the liberation as precision ob-tained by the management of tension and attainment of tranquility is like an “ethics of release.” Liberation not as a condition of interiorizing control as purported by the civi-lizing hypothesis of Norbert Elias.18

The coming about of concentration/focus/direction/movement/rhythm (and not impulse) takes place through the co-presence of thinking and doing, eyes and hands.

Hardt and Negri (2005, 2006) direct their final analyses towards a broad reflection of nonmaterial work and the sen-sitive subjective changes they originate. We see that the con-cept of power that in the cognitive capitalism of our times, the cognitariat as major agent, bears the dialectical relation of capital/proletariat/work and its undissociated concept of revolution. Although one had to deal and work with the sce-nario of “rhyzomatic” capitalism capturing the values of imagination and ludicity, the schemish processes of libera-tion tangibilize and present their effects in regards to forms of dealing with vicissitudes of routines, with the impromp-tu, the unexpected and with competition itself.

18 Cf. Norbert Elias, O processo civilizador — uma história dos costumes (1990).

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In the contemporaneous universe of work relations it is impossible to ignore the cutting and disturbing relations of co-presence among the new creative agents, whose ac-tions we have been following, the remaining Fordist soci-ety traits, personified by the telemarketing agents and by the semi-slavery working conditions still present and so far from being eradicated.

As a provisional conclusion we start seeking both in-ternally and externally on a broad network of negotiations, and liberation as a yield of sensorial dissent (Rancière apud Canclini, 2010) as the art of immanence, of the qua-si-, of that which is not decisive, of the inconclusive and the beams of virtues and serendipities that we seek to start ex-ploring with this work.

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