movement

On reciprocity. by Gerardo Muñoz

Surely friendship does not depend on obligations or frequency, but it does posit expectations on something like a movement of reciprocity. In fact, movement (κίνηση) and reciprocity are so intertwined that without it, there would not be any separation, only a compact bundle in unity without relations. But, what is at bottom reciprocity? If this notion merits anything thought at all, it must be removed from any conception of exchange in the manner of the quid pro quo and the the ius talionis, where at first sight reciprocity seems to reside as a form of levelling differentiated quantities. In social exchange there is levelling but surely there is no reciprocity except by the legal force enacted by the pressure of duties and obligations. Already in the nineteenth century, at outset of bourgeois society, Søren Kierkegaard with extreme lucidity denounced social levelling as a form of glittering vice: “The idolized positive principle of sociality in our time is the consuming, demoralizing principle, which in the thraldom of reflection transforms even virtues into vitia splendida. Levelling is not a single individual’s action but an activity of reflection in the hands of an abstract power” [1]. 

What is reciprocal in social exchange is no longer the incommensurable relation between beings, but the enactment of language saturated by its own completion, which is the aim of social organization. If there is no reciprocity in the age of kallopismata orphnes as the reduction of rhetorical language it is because there is no longer a missing word in the event of communication, given that, potentially, everything has been already communicated (it is obvious that today this process can only intensify with the planetary deployment of Artificial Intelligence). The only determination of reciprocity that should be of interest is the one that accounts for the lacunae in language that halts force of social levelling. To reciprocate does not mean to give each his due that defines the Western legal operation; it is rather the mutual codependency in the unforfeited event of language. 

At this point, an etymological observation might be useful. In On the Latin Language, Varro records reciproca as a condition of elasticity; that is, a present quality that allows a thing to return to the position from which it has started. Reciprocare thus entails to move to and fro, and to demand [2]. But if we adapt this observation into the sphere of language, we immediately notice that in language there is no previous position nor set origin, which means that reciprocity can only be the undisclosed and disclosed movement of language. Breathing, articulating, speaking: the animus that escapes from the mouth as a mirror of the god of words. The erosion of reciprocity in modern society, thus, goes deeper than the first appearance in fact that human beings are witnesses to a crisis of communication; more importantly, humans have ceased to sense reciprocity because they believe that there is only god where language is mute, and there is language when gods are extinct. Such is the long vigil of computing language as an idol that is neither divine nor of the essence of the human voice. To reciprocate today means to re-divinize the world through words; and through our words greet incoming worlds.

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Notes 

1. Søren Kierkegaard. “The results of observing two ages”, in A Literary Review (Penguin, 2001), 76. 

2. Varro. On the Latin Language, Vol.1 (Loeb Classical Library, 1938), 335.

The world has been posthegemonic. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a recent text published at Verso Blog, entitled “The Coming Post-Hegemonic World”, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra make a case for a “turn to a post-hegemonic model” that will challenge the consensus of global in the coming era. In many ways, this era is already here with its diverse and multifaceted (in terms of intensities, forces, and leverages) of protracted and bizarre nationalisms, which as Jamie Merchant has teased out brilliantly, amount to desperate attempts to offer a belated response to the decline of growth as one more stage for containing rampant processes of accumulation via state capacities. For Hardt & Mezzadra, this “posthegemonic world to come” is characterized by a global spatial reconfiguration of capital – accommodating the logistics of regional spaces of influences and exchange across the planet – and on the other, an increasingly “domestic sphere of authoritarian rule” promoted by new accelerated initiatives at generating social homogeneity in the wake of rushing fragmentation hand in hand with a war regime that has utterly scrapped ideals about “strategic autonomy” in order to trumpet an arm race (nuclear weapons included), as it is currently unfolding in Europe. 

One can claim that this posthegemonic world is one that firmly assumes the consequences of two interdependent vectors that imploded within the project of political modernity: the end of  economic growth (thus validating the law of the fall of profit outlined in Capital V.III), and the liquidation of the principle of legitimacy that for two centuries accommodated the legislative sources of the state authority in democratic constituent power. For Hardt & Mezzadra posthegemony means global fragmentation, authoritarianism, and spatial remaking; however, one should also say that it means, the opening towards stagnation, the collapse of political unity of the state, and most recently the total discredit of the foolish leftist hypothesis that promoted a “rainbow social equivalent coalitions” to push for compensatory, and in every instance insufficient and moribound, populist resurgences elevated through the combustion of ethereal but effective rhetoric (in fact, my argument in a new short book, La fisura posthegemónica, is that the push for political hegemony of the last decades only cosigned forms of consensual totalization at the expense of the production of subalternization and social death).  

Even taken as a descriptive and normative condition of the current state of Western politics, the posthegemonic situation lays bare the reciprocal impasse of the claim of its opposition: in other words, one should also put to rest social mobilization that characterized the politics of High Modernity, since ultimately movements (and total mobilization as an apparatus of social energy transfer) presupposes that “every social structure, that it can receive what form required the needs of the political adventure…total mobilization signifies nothing other that the effort to reduce the social substance to a kind of plastic”, as Gérard Granel once defined it. Hence when Hardt & Mezzadra claim that the “effective rebellion must be rooted in social movements envisioning a life beyond the rule of capital”, they are inadvertently refusing to come to terms with the factical posthegemonic reality that they are describing, which is no longer driven by expansive economic growth, but rather by stagnation, and inoperativity at planetary scale that is maintained through the a global veneer of production into regimes of competitive accumulation (of territory, contractual debt, fiscal regulation, executive taxation or tariffs, and increasing arbitrary monetary regulations in the global system) for marginal profitability, as Paul Mattick argues in his recent The Return of Inflation (2023). 

This means that there is no outlook towards ‘social mobilization’ that does not serve the subjective productivity of real subsumption, since its ultimate goal is to anaxate social energy into the force of (un)productive labor. This form of dilatant mobilization can only serve the master of illusionary hegemony, and thus promote functional and unwarranted servitude everywhere. Indeed, only a reprobate can be immune to the moralist or the realist conditions of hegemony. If push comes to shove, the posthegemonic factical world of stagnation and political fragmentation already here proves that the ongoing irruption of non-movements are irreducible to the modern movement’s energy; and that life never fully coincides with political claim to rule and legitimacy, even less so in the becoming-world of Production. 

Ultimately, this posthegemonic fissure outlives the crumbling hegemonic world of principial High Modernism and no ‘international movement’ can piece it back together again. We are all posthegemonic now, but only if one takes up this predicament seriously and candidly.

Photogenesis and the invisible: on John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959). Notes for a seminar presentation. by Gerardo Muñoz

i. What is your name? Every time that I have watched John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) I end up facing the same question: what is taking place in this film? Perhaps it is the incorrect question insofar as Shadows (1959) is, first and foremost, a film about the event; about “what takes place”. Unlike Hollywood’s telic form over conflict, the whole premise of Cassavetes’ method of improvisation is a way to liberate the event in the moving image. This is what I would like to call here a photogenic event. The whole structure of Shadows is, to this effect, the bringing-fourth of appearing without narration or naming. Hence, what takes place is the way in which characters or figures emerge from light, retracting from the plunge unto theatricality. The photogenetic effect in Cassavetes is a way out of the logic of naming: remember “what is your name?”, as Bennie asks very early in the film (the café sequence). Indeed, the naming is always what emerges after the event, once boredom has kicked him and the separation from light and shadow, human and animal, theater and theatrically have taken place. The taking place in Shadows is a return to an abysmal site predating naming, faces, or intentions: it is absolute proximity.

ii. The vocation of the quotidian. The photogenetic image works through the texture of life: this is why in Shadows nothing truly happens in virtue that everything takes place. The difference between happening and taking place is an irreducible distinction; mainly, what happens is not provoked a mediation between subjects and objects, but rather at a moment when both subject and object coincide only to immediately suspend each other. What takes place is life’s destiny, which ultimately entails that we are figures of exposure before we are subjects of narrative and causality. As in a diary or a midnight party, what takes place is the clandestine life once it enters in relation with other bodies, languages, and gestures. In this sense, Shadows remains faithful to one and only one principle: how to transfigure the boredom of factical life into a vocation of a clandestine life. It is not too clear that Cassavetes arrives at a successful answer to this problem; almost as if, indeed, to remain clandestine is to insist on the “invisible” image that is always missing from every life. The promiscuity between shadows and light transpires the possibility of the living all the other invisible and nonexistent lives that are scarified within that which we call “life”. 

iii. Under the glorious sky. If the task of vocation opens to the invisible in life, then this means that there is always a dimension that is exterior the anthropological determination. In the solitude of the nocturnal splendor of the late modern metropolis – as in the instance in which Lelia is outside of a Manhattan theater lost in thought or contemplating the shimmering lights above – the existence of the human shines along with the embers of the sky. This most definitely an inherence of paganism in the sense of the medium in life as a mode of appearance without judgement. As one can still contemplate it from the frescos at Villa Fernesina, the pagan gazing towards the sky is not a flight towards abstraction or transcendence, but rather a releasement of life’s destiny as affirmed in the terrestrial presence [1]. Paradoxically, at the moment of the total subsumption of life into the Spectacle, the medium frees the possibility of the deconstitution of life into the modes and resources of appearing. From the photogenic perspective, this entails full saturation on the horizon; from the pagan perspective, the onwards unfolding of existence becomes a fragment in the exploration of the common sky. 

iv. Inharmonious tonality. Now, fragmentation opens a heterochronic disassociation between images and events. Indeed, all of Shadows unfolding bears witness to the way in which the tonality of life is always at odds with the attunement of the rhythms of the world. It is in this threshold where interiority of the self and exteriority of music point to the peak of prophecy. For one thing, because music is the medium through the residual mystery of the “inexpressive” becomes the process of traversing the ecstatic formlessness of the event [2]. This disharmony dislocates the homogenization vis-à-vis the sky of cinematography. Bresson says something very beautiful about this disharmony: the image of cinematography must be such that it puts in relation the voice and the steps of a person in a way that the protagonist themselves have not foreseen [3]. This nocturnal knowledge between image and sound, rhythm and tonality of life, becomes the triumph of the photogenic medium in which life dissolves in a kinetic outburst without recourse.

v. The invisible and intoxication. At a very superficial dimension, Shadows is about alcohol consumption; hence about what happens to a life under the stage of intoxication. The only knowledge is that of the oblique pedagogy in which the way of the flesh becomes a pathway for language, friendship, and violence among other bodies. There is no transgression as an intoxicated subject, since intoxication is already the violence against the substance of the subject. In other words – and this was suggested to me by the contemporary artist and designer Claudia Patricia – the logistics of errancy is being able to do otherwise from a site in which no other possibility could have emerged. This absolute necessity moves against reality and the future planning of the metropolis. And here I must return to the beginning: what takes place is what allows a relation with the invisible. Already in 1959, Cassavetes understood that intoxication redeems an ethical life against an epochal phase in which total anthropological exposure would become the concrete utopia of the socialization of capital. 

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Notes 

1. Fritz Saxl. La fede astrologica di Agostino Chigi. Interpretazione dei dipinti di Baldassarre Peruzzi nella Sala di Galatea della Farnesina (Bardi Edizioni, 2017).

2. Gianni Carchia. “Dialettica dell’immagine: note sull’estetica biblica e cristiana”, in La legittimazione dell’arte: studi sull’intelligibile estetico (1982). 

3. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983 (NYRB, 2016).