THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE LANGUAGE.
RIGHT-WING CULTURE AND PROGRESSIVIST MORASS
Rodrigo
Karmy Bolton
For some time now we have been witnessing an advance of right-wing culture. Systematically accelerated by the triumph of the “Rechazo” (Rejection) of the proposed new Chilean Constitution in the plebiscite of September 4, 2022, it is expressed in the transformation of all emancipatory concepts into properly reactionary concepts. “Democracy”, “freedom”, “rights” have become oppressive terms rather than emancipatory ones, as if a secret internal logic revealed an ominous possibility in their new use. Nothing new, if we follow the United States’ imperialist trajectory where humanitarian wars that advocate democracy, freedom and the defense of Human Rights have been more than frequent.
I remember an Iraqi journalist in 2003 ironizing the United States bombing Baghdad saying: here comes “democracy.” That the emancipatory terms have become reactionary cannot limit the analysis to the simple question of the dispute—as if it were something “simple”—, but must enter the genealogical field through which the same terms and forces that give rise to them are forged. The terms are not neutral, they never arise from the transparency of a brilliant mind, no matter how brilliant these terms are. It is always the silent work of large or small, intense or moderate struggles that weave the forces of a term and the horizon of its possibilities.
In this light, the advance of right-wing culture has not been a natural phenomenon, but rather a historical and political one. Nor has it been simply because the big media oligopolies dominate, or because they invest huge sums of money in algorithms and bots. First of all, this advance is due to the weakness of the left-wing culture that has ended up experiencing a singular process of expropriation of the language: the lefts—I include progressivism here as their most emblematic symptom—have begun to speak the language of another and, even, to speak their own signifiers, but under the terminology—and temporality—imposed by the other. The lefts have given up political disputes too long ago. The advance of right-wing culture expresses precisely that resignation.
Several decades ago, the Italian intellectual Furio Jesi offered an interview in which he was asked what “right-wing culture” was—it was the title of his book first published in 1979—,[1] and Jesi responded:
It is the culture in which the past is a kind of homogenized mush that can be shaped and kept in shape in the most useful way. The culture in which the culture of death prevails or also a religion of the exemplary dead. The culture in which it is declared that there are indisputable values, indicated in words with capital letters, above all Tradition and Culture, but also Justice, Freedom, Revolution. A culture, in short, made of authority, of mythological sureness regarding the norms of knowing, teaching, commanding and obeying.
Precisely, a culture founded on indisputable values, a culture that “makes itself of authority.” Right-wing culture is the culture which fetishizes the past, turns it into a place of authenticity and sets it up as invariant. Only in this way, this culture can sustain all its practices and discourses based on authority, leadership and obedience.
Parallel to Jesi’s work, since 1978 with the publication of «Orientalism», Edward Said offered a critique of the notion of culture, since it is structurally tied to the different forms of power. Not only the saga inaugurated by «Orientalism» accounts for this («The Question of Palestine», «Covering Islam») but also «Culture and Imperialism» (1993),[2] in which he stated:
What I want is to examine how the processes of imperialism occur beyond economic laws and political decisions. And how they manifest themselves—as a predisposition by the authority emanating from recognizable cultural formations and by their continuous consolidation within education, literature and the visual and musical arts—on another very significant plane, that of national culture, which we have tended to purify by considering it a stronghold of immutable intellectual monuments exempt from mundane conspiracies.
Going beyond the “economicist” notion of imperialism means “mundaneizing” the cultural monumentality that is perceived as invariant and, ultimately, sacred. Because what interests Said here is precisely how a structural link between culture and power persists conditioning the “idea” that defines imperialism and unfolds itself in a “national culture” that, from Jesi’s point of view, is a “right-wing culture”.
It is interesting to see how the triumph of the “Rechazo” (Rejection) accelerated the advance of right-wing culture in Chile, not only identifying itself with the national culture but also monumentalizing the “people”, anthropologizing the “Chilean” man and woman, sacralizing “order” and naturalizing the “tradition”. Everything returns to its place. The place it should never have left. Along with this, the stagnation of the left to dispute this advance is evident. Precisely, progressivism is the very expression of this morass, the moment in which the left speaks the lexicon of the right as if it were obvious and natural.[3]
The discourses begin to proliferate: supposedly, the defeat of September 4, 2022, should be interpreted on the base of how left-wing cosmopolitanism put traditions aside and would not have attended to the country’s anthropological reality. The mythological construction produces the “anthropological” as an “invariant” that politics could never modify and that tells us that Chilean people would be “conservative”, that it would have an identity more oriented towards “order” and that the transformative cosmopolitanism proposed in the New Constitution would have been alien to it. It would be, then, a fight between right-wing nationalism and left-wing internationalism, between the defense of the homeland and its enemies who would come to desecrate it. It would be, then, a culture war. First of all, a “war”.
This was the way in which the right-wing deployed the “Rejection” campaign and it has been the way in which the right-wing has historically faced the political dispute with the left-wing: denouncing the latter as anti-nationalist, an enemy of the homeland. If you like, the right-wing was built as structurally anti-Semitic, whose secularized form is expressed in anti-communism and its reference to the “national culture.”[4] Chilean right-wing culture has always worked like this. It is not a matter of doing it with or without fake news, with or without algorithms, but rather, in what way are we capable of dismantling the mythological machine that it sets in motion.
Because the key point lies with the left-wing: can it dispute that culture? Or, more radically: to what extent would it be possible to dismantle the very notion of “culture” as an effect of the mythological machine and so making visible the framework of the class struggle? Has the left-wing disputed the naturalized premises that make up the field called “cultural”? Feminism has been a decisive discourse in this dispute. But, like all good discourse, this one was also engulfed by neoliberal progressivism, extracting from it its commitment to “forms-of-life” and reducing it to an “identity”. In this sense, neoliberal progressivism continues to be a Christianity and, even worse, a faction in which its converts inhabit. In fact, as early as 1990, regarding the fast conversion of the “left” to neoliberal “progressivism” (Anthony Giddens)—the new recomposition of the “Portalian party” during the transition—, there was a renunciation of the dispute and an acceptance sine qua non of the invariant, a-historical and a-political character of right-wing culture—today, that of neoliberalism.
But this right-wing culture has changed. Neoliberalism is no longer its exclusive language. So is the reactionary imprint—older than the neoliberal lexicon itself, but which operates as its effect, sidekick and most decisive complement. What was neoliberalism if not the classist violence of the great financial oligarchies that came to power towards the end of the 1970s, that is, fascism that became an economic-managerial technique and no longer a state-national dispositive? The triumph of the Rejection made possible an advance of that right-wing culture of a fascist nature, but which expresses nothing more and nothing less than the truth of neoliberal capitalism and its violence.
Nationalism, the return of anthropological values and the continuity of that culture “made of authority” (according to Jesi) is maintained both in the neoliberal and in the fascist right-wing. Both are a complement to the other, the petty bourgeoisie always allied with the global financial oligarchy (although the former detests the latter) and the latter instigating the former to do the necessary “dirty work”.
In this sense, if we accept the thesis that “traditions were violated by the new constitutional project”, that the Chilean identity would be “conservative”, as is commonly said, that Chile would be a country attached to order unlike other countries, we will be naturalizing the mythological machine, deepening the phenomenon of the expropriation of the language, making impossible a transformation project able to dispute for a different country. In our province, let’s say, right-wing culture has a precise name: Portalian phantasm.[5] Order, authority, virtue, tradition and national unity are part of their jargon. Renouncing the dispute and dissent regarding these matters means surrendering to the victors: accepting them as such and completely surrendering at their feet. Perhaps it is a matter, as Nelly Richard has commented, of preserving a “minor democracy”—in turn, this may mean creating a field of resistance based on friendship and camaraderie. The commitment to a critical concept of culture and the possibility of radically disputing the mythologized terms in use constitute the premises of our survival. Dissent, criticism and the ability to deactivate right-wing culture is, today, more relevant and necessary than ever. We cannot join the technologies of reconciliation.
Excursus
Interviewed by La Tercera newspaper on October 16, 2022, the scholar Carlos Peña, referring to the “dramatic” situation of Chilean public education, stated: “The teacher is not an animator for young people, is not there to contain them, is there to educate them. And to educate authority is required. But today people are afraid to exercise authority”.[6] This is not the place to analyze sentence by sentence what Peña said in this interview, but it is to underline this sentence that is tied into the strictly political operation of sacrificing revolt and reimposing order. It is here that Peña seems to take what authority is for granted. As if it could be understood by itself, as if it were very clear what would be what a certain philosophical and political tradition has called “authority” and which today would seem to be experiencing its decline. I am interested precisely in that “taking for granted”: in it we notice how Peña does not invite us to think about the question of authority, but precisely to claim it without further ado. His gesture cannot be philosophical, but openly theological. He does not raise a problem, but the need for an operation. Here is why Peña has become who he has become: the intellectual who says what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false. Almost like a Creole Hegel, he tries to place himself in the position of a “knowledge” that already knew everything even before events could unfold. For him there are no “events”, but “facts”, his thought claims to fit entirely with reality, and his demand to academics and intellectuals—but also to the general public—is that they see “reality” as it is, that they judge by virtue of the facts and not by their own “drives”. Under this logic, right-wing culture sees in Peña the consummation of its progress by erecting the notion of “authority” without further ado, without problems, as if it were a “fact” that, as Durkheim would say, could be approached as one more “thing” of those that are part of the so-called “reality.” The identity between thought and reality appears in Peña without cracks or discontinuities, in the immediacy of a positivism in which there are only “facts” that are there for the eye of the philosopher. There is no principle of negativity, there is no fissure, everything responds to the continuum between observer and observed, philosopher and reality. For this reason, the relationship of Peña’s thought with that of contemporary neo-fascism is intrinsic, despite what he might claim. For both positivism and neo-fascism, “authority” seems to be a fact, a historical invariant that can be appealed to without further ado.
For a materialism of the imaginal.
The criticism on the expropriation of the language experienced by the left-wing that has become progressivism does not imply assuming a supposed “authentic left-wing”. It is not a question of a “false left”, but of a mythological machine, of the same current right-wing culture whose most decisive effect is precisely to produce the idea that there is authenticity, originality, a clear and distinct foundation with all its violence.
It is not a matter of an “authentic left” waiting for its militants to draw the ideological veil to appear in the clear, but of a left that is always to come and, because it is so, must necessarily be invented in each instance by virtue of strategic analyzes in which it predominates an imaginal materialism that does not allow itself to be humiliated by economicism or culturalism. Therefore, there will not be an “authentic” left to which to appeal, but rather a set of fragments to use, parts to imagine with. In this way, the antidote to prevent the expropriation of the language is not to take refuge in a rigid and walled identity like the doctrine, but to invent, each time, that language in light of the strategic situation. Indeed, it would no longer be a question of languages as of dialects that claim their impurity and infinite translatability.
In this light, a materialism of the imaginal supposes embracing what is frequently called “necessities” and the field of desire, underlining their historicity and the machines that have produced them in order to elaborate strategies that de-operate them by offering other uses to our relationship with the world. Precisely, a materialism of the imaginal starts from the premise that Marx’s analyzes of Capital are decisive to the extent that he manages to highlight the historicity of “exchange value” and its forms of accumulation, but that, perhaps, they should be complemented problematically with a set of genealogies of the “use” and its unworking bet. In this sense, a genealogy of use can offer communism as a society where use (life) is indistinguishable from change (law) or, if you like, where change is seen without the accumulation machine and its regime of general equivalence. Communism will not be a regime here, but a strategy; it would not be a party, but a practice; it would not be a doctrine, but a field of analysis. As such, we could even bet that the existence of such a society does not involve erasing the “market”, but rather making forms of exchange proliferate without accumulation, forms of exchange that thus dispute the centrality, univocity and totalization of the properly “capitalist” market that, since the 16th century, it ended up conquering all the markets that existed and dominating the entire planet with its optimization logic.[7]
Promoting the proliferation of markets means inventing unique market forms whose rules of exchange prevent the logic of accumulation. Perhaps this means defending the true markets, not the “false” ones: those in which a use-exchange (pure medium) is at stake and not an abstract regime of value. Precisely, a society in which use and exchange become one and the same immanence constitutes the future opened by this strange materialism that, in an absolutely provisional way, we can call here the materialism of the imaginal.
November,
2022
Translated from Spanish into English by
Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier.
[1] Furio Jesi, «Cultura di destra», Edizioni Garzanti, Milano, 1979;
new and augmented edition, «Cultura di destra. Con tre
inediti e un'intervista», curated by Andrea Cavalletti, Edizioni
Nottetempo, Rome, 2011.
[2] Edward Said, «Culture and Imperialism», Vintage Books, New York, 1993.
[3] See the recent
column by Noam Titelman as a symptom of said stagnation and monumentalization
of the Tradition: “Solo un progresismo que valore las tradiciones populares
podrá ser mayoritario”, en Ex-Ante, September 24, 2022, link: https://www.ex-ante.cl/solo-un-progresismo-que-valore-las-tradiciones-populares-podra-ser-mayoritario-por-noam-titelman/
[4] I understand
“anti-Semitism” as a Christian construction that was forged in the 18th century
when the term “Semite” was invented to designate Jews, Arabs and Muslims.
Although this term was reduced to racial violence against Jews, its genealogy
and articulation in present days show that “anti-Semitism” can assume the Jew,
Arab or Muslim as the object of “evil”. For that reason, Said could say,
towards the end of his introduction to «Culture and Imperialism», that:
“In addition, and by an almost inescapable logic, I have ended up writing a history
linked in a secret and mysterious way to Western anti-Semitism. This anti-Semitism
and orientalism in its Islamic branch are very similar (...)” (p. 53). In this
sense, the “link” that Said identifies allows us to think about how
contemporary “Islamophobia” is nothing more than an anti-Semitism displaced
from the “Jew” to the “Muslim”, an evident issue in the conformation of the
discourse of the European ultra-rights—and,
by the way, by the Zionist mythological machine.
[5] [Translator’s note. Cf. Rodrigo Karmy, «El fantasma portaliano. Arte de gobierno y
república de los cuerpos», Ediciones UFRO, Temuco, 2022; and «Nuestra
confianza en nosotros. La Unidad Popular y la herencia de lo por venir. El fantasma
portaliano 2», Ediciones UFRO, Temuco, 2023. The “Portalian phantasm” (where the word
phantasm refers to the psychoanalytic concept, Phantom in German
for Sigmund Freud, fantasme in French for Jacques Lacan), far from
installing a factual transcendental, refers to the delayed continuity of a
principial and axiomatic logics that has sustained the political imaginary and
the habitus of the oligarchic ruling classes since the time of the
transition from the Spanish colony to the Chilean republic. It is part of its
performance, precisely, to assert itself as a transcendental apparatus of
legitimacy and legality. In his prologue to «El fantasma portaliano. Arte de
gobierno y república de los cuerpos», Diamela Eltit writes: “The notion of phantasm,
as that which remains and guarantees, will become one of the central concepts
that Rodrigo Karmy puts into circulation to analyze the interior of a republic
thought, according to the Portalian imaginary, as devoid of citizens or
desiring bodies and made up of a mass of inert population, because that
population, for the minister, lacked attributes and, in his program, the
concept of citizenship only operated as a horizon to be built in an indeterminate
future”].
[6] Carlos Peña, “Chile está convertido en un desastre. Yo no
sé cómo no lo advierten”, in La Tercera, October 16, 2022.
[7] Ellen Meiksins Wood, «El origen del
capitalismo. Una mirada a largo plazo», translated from English into Spanish by
Olga Abasolo, Ediciones Siglo XXI, Madrid, 2021.
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