culture

De Certeau’s untold night. by Gerardo Muñoz

The highest poetic moment in Michel De Certeau’s La culture au pluriel (1974) appears in the concluding pages where the historian resorts to a hunting image: “Culture is an untold night in which the revolutions of earlier times are dormant, invisible, folded into practices – but fireflies, and sometimes great nocturnal birds, cutting through it – as thrusts and creations that trace the promise of another day to come” [1]. This is De Certeau’s trope that stands for culture as opening of possibilities, the shoreline where administrators and technicians (his own terms) do not dare to cross and will probably never adventure. This is the site (the night, la noche oscura, which has a ringtone of the mystical tradition that the author knew perfectly well) where De Certeau wants to posit the possibilities of new struggles of cultural alterities [2]. A book in 1974 means many things, but for De Certeau it is an incursion into the collapse of his historical present, already showing full fledged signs of the crisis of legitimation, erosion of institutional trust, and the decomposition of social forms across Western symbolic realities. It is the nascent confirmation of the ascent of real subsumption, a term that does not appear in De Certeau’s book, although it informs it, even if negatively (the Italian Fiat wildstrikes makes a surprising cameo in the last paragraphs). Where to look, then?  

De Certeau’s answer read today does bring much naivete: cultural alterity. But this notion, which is reworked and contested in concrete fields of human activities (the university and schools, the new technological society and communication, social practices intertwined in popular and elite culture, power relations and post-statist configurations) do not appeal to the identitarian cosmopolitan horizon prima facie anchored in the diversity administration of a well integrated, albeit exploited planetary humanity. One senses that for De Certeau the nineteenth century “Social Question” has become the “cultural question” as the unit of the national sovereign state wanes and reacts. With the crisis of legitimation as backdrop, De Certeau sees the rise of a new subjectivity that he calls the new “militants without a cause”, a battalion of “exiles” that will only tacitly accept credible cultural imprints [3]. He wants to work with “culture” because at bottom De Certeau is both a historian and a realist. This new erosion of civil society-State relations entails a “new exile is in the works” [4]. And for De Certeau the exile, since biblical times, is seeking a new Earth where to “land”. 

In 1974, De Certeau’s invitation was to create the conditions for pluralist cultural landings that will foster, in the night of waiting, a new politics. But, could the same be said today even assuming concrete situations and the infuriating image of migration as a token for the workings of hegemonic politics? Does Gaia not alert us that we must “land” somewhere else on Earth? The anger and dissatisfaction that De Certeau cautiously predicated head on is already here in the form of what some of us have theorized as ongoing social stasis that is integrated in every social mediation. In the global metastasis of the 1970s De Certeau could claim that “behind anger there is the desire to create a polis and a politics; there is a desire to organize the conditions of life….” [5].

We are far removed from this desire, and even the most prominent cycle of revolts of the decade have refused in the solicitation of a new politics or a political horizon; and, even if, almost like weeds in cracks of piled urban ruins, we see again and again the last residues of the desire for hegemonic representation of the totality (the People, the Movement, the Class). In this light – now it is our own epoche – culture can only be compensatory, and still very much a symptom of the closure of exteriority. “Where there is no longer an imaginable outside we lose the possibility of an inside”, Moreiras wrote at the turn of the century against every form of culturalism [6]. Of course, De Certeau was well aware of it, which is why his proposal to cultural alterity retains zones of hermeneutical ambiguity many decades later [7]. For instance, he writes when commenting on neo-nationalist regional movements (Quebec, Catalonia, Occitania) that “cultural claims appear to be a reminder and a compensation” [8]. 

And recent events have proven De Certeau correct: what is Catalan nationalism – whether left or right, although ideological division is not a substantive difference – if not a compensatory rhetorical ruse to mobilize regional political elites to feed off the stagnant resources of a waning state form? The rhetoric of “political foundation” in the Catalan case created an “cultural alterity” that depended on the high illusion of hegemonic politics; a politics solely based on the “bad faith” of escalating and superposing values (“Spanish” v. “Catalan”) as the combustion of a fractured political social contract that ultimately deepens its fragmentation. De Certeau noted – cited with the long Augustunian tradition of political liberalism – that politics cannot bring happiness, but only create its conditions. However, today even this liberal ideal fails to account for its true source: our metapolitical collapse at the twilight of secularization means that the revival of the “social bond” is not to be found in the demand of new political principles, however narrowly or broadly defined. De Certeau in 1974 aspired at giving politics one more chance pulling it to the facticial heterogeneity of culture: “a politics that discovers in the diversity of the sky a generical….linked to the ambition of beginning over again, that is, of living” [9].

And indeed, we must begin all over again, but is really the only possibility? I believe that there are symptoms elsewhere in La culture au pluriel, and these concern language. In the second chapter, referring to the crisis of speech, De Certeau refers to the “denaturing act” of speech, as communication enters the regimen of commercial language and new computational masteries (what Jaime Semprún called neo-language) [10]. The crisis of language in the ascent of a new expressivity renders communication obsolete and obtuse; parasitic, or mushroom-like, as Hugo Von Hofmenthal had already noted in his Letter to Lord Chandos. Speech becomes a new form of blasphemy, something confirmed in recent years in the United States, which takes itself also as the homeland of “Free Speech” is increasingly under heavy surveillance by constitutionalism of codified parameters of “time, place, and manner”.

De Certeau shows himself highly consternated about blasphemous language, which is also conspiratorial language; the language that dwells on the reverse of social normativity and legal codification. But this perhaps the only language today can properly speak of pain without recurring to the transactions of violence; especially of the numbing violence of a neo-language that can communicate “everything” insofar as it ceases to communicate to no one. Could the “untold night”, that is also the night of the “unthought”, be the site of the preservation of another use of language, of nurturing language, descending into the hymnic sources of the sayable – thus, inverting the denaturing of historical severability – a language embedded in silence, in the protofigure of the mystic, assuming “the immediacy of nature and experience, to contact of things, one by one, in their primal disorder”? [11]. Ultimately, whatever the night will tell will only be possible through and in language. 

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Notes 

1. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 138.

2. Ibid., 11.

3. Ibid., 7.

4. Ibid., 8.

5. Ibid., 11.

6.  Alberto Moreiras. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Duke U Press, 2001), 21. 

7. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 78.

8. Ibid., 70. 

9. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 100.

10. Jaime Semprún. Defensa e ilustración de la neolengua (Ediciones El Salmón, 2018). 

11. Nicola Chiaromonte. “An Age of Bad Faith”, in The Paradox of History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 148. On the hymnic dimension of human speech, see the study undertaken by Nicoletta Di Vita, Il nome e la voce. Per una filosofia dell’inno (Neri Pozza, 2022).

Four positions of refusal. by Gerardo Muñoz

A friend recently suggested that the refusal is at center of multiple critical positions against the moralization of politics. And I agree. In fact, I would go as far as saying that the strategy of refusal is something like a common denominator in positions critical of political mediation. Although the refusal could take many forms, I would also add that the refusal is directed against hegemony broadly understood (culturalist, political, logistical, etc.). Primarily, the refusal awakes from the dream of hegemony as contributing towards any real substantive transformation anchored in “political realism”. Realism today is mostly deployed as a freestanding argument aimed at political traction, although it merely contributes to stagnation and paralysis; it is a katechon to any concrete transformative movement of the actual moment.

It is telling that the notion of ‘refusal’ was first developed in the French political context by the likes of Maurice Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo in the journal Le 14 Julliet, a project obscured by the monumental historiographies of May 68. In his short text “Refusal”, Maurice Blanchot defines the notion as the gap in representation between an event and language: “accomplished by neither us nor in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs to those who cannot speak” [1]. The refusal denotes a limit to representation. Similarly, in “Refus Inconditional”, Dionys Mascolo understands refusal as the constitutive possibility of silence so that true communication can indeed take place [2]. For both Mascolo and Blanchot, the notion of refusal was the condition for the possibility of friendship preceding subjectivism. By way of refusal, the realization of a “community of the species” is guarded against the socialization of alienable classes. I think one could name four positions of refusal against the closure of hegemony as the organization of secondly separations (alienation). These might not be the only positions – and many a time there is a clear overlap of the problem at hand.

1. The refusal of culture. First, there is Mario Tronti’s “The Strategy of refusal” (Operaio e capitale), which grasps the refusal in classical Marxist terms by way of criticizing culture as resistance against capitalist form. In fact, for Tronti culture amounted to a mediation of social relation of capitalism uncapped expansion. And for Tronti, “oppositional culture does not escape this fact; rather, it merely states the body of the worker’s movement ideologies in the common clothing of bourgeoisie culture” [3]. Hence, for Tronti, refusal meant disengaging from “becoming of intellectuals” as disengaged from the practice of the class struggle. The critique of culture functioned as an inversion of mediation with no transformative leverage whatsoever. However, for Tronti ‘refusal’ was still understood as a political strategy, which necessarily needed to engage with the “subjected” force of class and organized in the party form. In other words, the refusal in Tronti’s early work was the rejection of cultural mediation by intensifying the antagonism of the autonomy of the political. There is not yet a rejection of politics, but rather the assumption that the refusal can lead the way in the destruction of capital production given the “pagan force” of the proletariat. 

2. Refusal and fugitivity. Second, there is a clear and direct strategy of refusal in Afropessimism aimed at the totalization of the social bond organized around the destruction of black existence. Hence, for Afropessimism refusal takes the form of an archipolitics that seeks fugitivity from logistics of social death [4]. As Moten & Harney argue in All Incomplete (2021): “The Undercommons is the refusal of the interpersonal, and by extension the international, incomplete in the service of a shared incompletion, which acknowledges and upon which politics is built. To be undercommon is to live insists the inoperative condition of the individual and the nation as these upon brutal and unsustainable fantasies and all of the material effects they generate oscillate in the ever-foreshortening interval between liberalism and fascism. These inoperative forms still try to operate through us” [5]. Against all forms of bondage subsidized by hegemonic sature, the afropessimist refusal opens up a fugitive life in errancy that points to a new central antagonism now framed between black life and the world. In Wayward Lives (2020), Saidiya Hartman puts it in this way: “To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the world. It is the practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies; it is the lived experience of enclosure and segregation, assembling and huddling together. It is the directionless search for a free territory; it is a practice of making and relation that enfolds within the policed boundaries of the dark ghetto; it is the mutual aid offered in the open-air prison. It is a queer resource of black survival. It is a beautiful experiment in how-to-live” [6]. The refusal of the total circulation of social relations allocates Black existence at the threshold of politics. This negative community refuses any hegemonic social rearticulation.

3. Refusal of logistics. Thirdly, in the work of the Invisible Committee the refusal entails destituting the social bond, although the emphasis is placed in infrastructure as the concrete and operative terrain of domination. For the collective the refusal becomes twofold: on the one hand, blocking the logistics of circulation and production of subjection; and on the other, separating the form of life from the regime of subjective domestication. At bottom, the refusal in the Committee’s takes aim against the mystification of the social as a site for autonomous gain from political struggle. For both Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee one needs to refuse the artificiality of the subject (Bloom) in the name of the form of life and reject politics of class antagonism favoring the civil war as a generic science of desertion (what remains after the collapse of the authority of modern politics).

4. Posthegemonic refusal. Finally, posthegemony refuses the codependency of politics and domination, and favors their non-correspondence; it refuses politics as hegemony, and hegemony as newcomer after the closure of metaphysics.  In this sense, posthegemony favors the exit from the total structure of socialization ordered through the equivalence of demands. One could say that posthegemony affirms the “realistic option of non-cooperation” with hegemony. But the space of non-cooperation allows the exit from subjective limit of the political. The posthegemonic separation, therefore, is the refusal of cooperation on the basis of refusal of conditions of obligation (what Eric Nelson labels being “stuck on the boat”), whether predicated on a distributive conception of social justice, or as the maximization of indirect interests proper to liberalism [7]. In this sense, the posthegemonic refusal abandons the temptation of establishing a new civilizatory principle with politics as its auxiliary and optimizing tool of order [8]. 

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Notes 

1. Maurice Blanchot. “Refusal”, in Political Writings (1953-1993) (Fordham U Press, 2010). 7.

2. Dionys Mascolo. “Refus inconditionel”, en La révolution par l’amitié (La Fabrique éditions, 2022). 27-30. 

3. Mario Tronti. “The Strategy of Refusal”, in Workers and Capital (Verso, 2021).

4. Alberto Moreiras. “An Invitation to Social Death: Afropessimism and Posthegemony, Archipolitics and Infrapolitics”, Tillfällighetsskrivande: https://www.tillfallighet.org/tillfallighetsskrivande/an-invitation-to-social-death-afropessimism-and-posthegemony-archipolitics-and-infrapolitics

5. Fred Moten & Stefano Harney. All Incomplete (Minor Compositions, 2021). 29.

6. Saidiya Hartman. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton, 2019). 227.

7. Eric Nelson. The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God (Harvard U Press, 2019). 163-164.

8. Gerardo Muñoz. “Posthegemonía, o por una retracción de los principios de la civilización”, Infrapolitical Reflections, 2020: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2020/08/03/posthegemonia-o-por-una-retraccion-de-los-principios-de-la-civilizacion-por-gerardo-munoz/