Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott / Reactionary Reformism

 

REACTIONARY REFORMISM

 

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott

 
 
1. - A version popularized by analysts and the media maintains that the failure of the Chilean constituent process is due, fundamentally, to the fiery rhetoric of the members of the constitutional convention, which ended up producing a maximalist and incoherent proposal that, far from representing the balanced feeling of Chilean society, echoed the outbursts of the front line, a kind of feverish vanguard that insisted on maintaining the climate of confusion inaugurated by the revolts of 2019. Not having presented a “reasonable” constitution, not having politically calculated the balances by considering the centrist tendency of the national electoral processes (with the exception of the so-called entry plebiscite of October 25, 2020), triggered the citizen rejection of the exit plebiscite of September 4, 2022. To this more or less basic version, analyzes of various types are added, among them, those that characterize the revolts themselves as youthful outbursts and tantrums for access to the benefits of mass consumption, or those that characterize the massive and horizontal days of rebellion –which arose from the insubordination of high school students in the face of the rise in subway fares– as anomic expressions of a society in crisis, incapable of adequately processing its intense modernization processes. Indeed, analysts, political scientists, professional politicians and occasional intellectuals have brought to light the arsenal of normative concepts and technologies typical of a long tradition of thought dedicated to classifying, determining and neutralizing the threats of the masses, plebs or multitudes to the so-called exceptional Chilean democracy. What Étienne Balibar (2009) called “fear of the masses” and which constitutes the secret core of modern reactionary thought, has been present since the beginning of Chilean republican life, whether we are referring to interventions of a positivist and pacifying nature in the second half of the 19th century, or we are referencing the aristocratic and ethnocentric essayism that goes from La raza chilena by Palacios, through El roto by Joaquín Edwards Bello, to the moralizing diatribes of Lucy Oporto or Carlos Peña about the recent revolts, which coincide, and not by chance, with the warnings of transitional sociology against the days of protests that destabilized the dictatorial regime, and which were later instrumentalized by the establishment of the transition. The so-called Hobbesian or securitarian hypothesis that, among others, Roberto Esposito (2004) recently questioned again, acquires an unusual relevance in the national context insofar as it allows us to explain the foundation of the oligarchic pact of the 19th century and its continuity with the contemporary immunitary or juristocratic practices, those that limit and reduce politics to an administrative and police sphere, at the hands of a “political class” that, by the way, has no legitimacy, according to official surveys in the country.
 
2. – However, this standardized narrative is not the patrimony of the Chilean right-wing, but is shared by the political class in a transversal way, since it provides powerful arguments to justify the final relevance of political parties for politics, a politics, one should remember this here, that is subsidized by State and consequently oriented to maintain peace and order, governability and the rule of law, based on a permanent process of spoliation and neutralization of citizen demands. If, as Mario Góngora (1981) postulated, the Chilean nation was founded from the State, so it is not difficult to perceive how this foundation marked and continues to mark the limits of democracy. Whether we are referring to the oligarchic pact in which liberals and conservatives alternated during the 19th century; to the liberal-democratic pact of the 20th century, which coincided with national-developmentalism and whose last chapter was marked by the processes of nationalization of copper and the agrarian reform; or that we refer to the current neoliberal pact, inaugurated with the civic-military dictatorship and deepened in the post-dictatorial context by the administrations of both the Concertación and the right-wing, which together have re-staged the palatial make-up of the 19th century in a duopoly that “democratically” takes turns in the office. In this long-term horizon, the definition of politics and its limits was marked by the predominance of the juristocratic pact, that is, the pact that, based on the preeminence of the law and the constitution, was imposed as necessary while hiding the illegitimate nature of the law itself and of the various national constitutions, all of them elaborated behind the backs of the people (Salazar 2023). In this context, it should come as no surprise that, after the well-advertised failure of the exit plebiscite, a return to an old national custom has taken place: that of delegating the production of a new constitution to a group of experts whose legitimacy is far from unquestionable.
 
3. – Of course, this tendency to judicialize socio-political processes is not exclusive to the Chilean case, but it is here where it is expressed in an exemplary manner, given the legal ties and the electoral law itself, which perpetuates the constitutional order inherited from the dictatorship. Beyond Chile, however, the juristocratic trend responds to a process of immunitary bureaucratization that operates by neutralizing social conflicts through its technical delegation to experts or law functionaries, who, far from being guided by normative imperatives of social justice, are guided by the self-referential assumptions of the legal-administrative sphere of the State and its sovereignty (I take this notion from Hirschl 2007, though I use it in a different way). This dissociation between the requirements of institutional legality and the assumptions of social legitimacy constitutes one of the most relevant aspects of the debate on the crisis of politics, at least since the Weberian diagnosis of instrumental rationality, or since the debates between Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann regarding the crisis of legitimation of the welfare state. What stands out now, however, is that the conventional democratic solution, that is, the expansion of participation and the decentralization of authority, does not seem to be enough to counteract the folding of political-administrative processes to the demands of flexible contemporary accumulation. It is precisely here where the Chilean case is symptomatic because it clearly shows the way in which neoliberal governance functions as a new type of passive revolution, a gattopardism decanted in the Chilean criollismo, which promises substantive changes, while intensifying accumulation and devastation processes that affect the population in general. In turn, the so-called universalization of the securitarian paradigm, that is, of the security agenda as global pacification, which in the post-Cold War context becomes an absolute priority (expressed in the wars against crime, terrorism or drug trafficking), in reality defines a new strategy of neoliberal governmentality, a strategy articulated by various technologies and dispositives of domination, all of them based on the reduction of the people to the condition of population and on the priority of capitalist deregulation over any criterion of redistributive social justice. These new technologies of neoliberal governmentality, which by the way are no longer the prerogatives of the State, are disseminated through social formations in varying degrees and intensities: the binding nature of the debt; the modernization of the police apparatus and its performative crisis; the reduction of cultural and value debates to the so-called lawfare or legal dispute, particularly in relation to the problem of sexual dissidence, women’s rights, migratory processes and the re-emergence of ethnic-racial diversities as a symptom of a radical crisis of the restricted notion of citizenship; the emergence of algorithmic government practices and the speculative and financial virtualization of economic processes; etc. It is in this context, therefore, that the Chilean process must be inscribed in order to understand how its institutional inertia tends towards its own reproduction (an issue that Benjamin characterized as mythical violence of law, 1998). It would be this legal self-referentiality that overdetermines contemporary reformism, revealing its profoundly reactionary character, which expresses itself by neutralizing and deactivating the antagonistic dynamics that define social movements –an issue that also explains the continuity between the various administrations in the post- Chilean dictatorship. On the other hand, however, it should be understood that this juristocratic pact is not exclusive to the Chilean process, but rather expresses a change in the nature of political and administrative practices and institutions at a global level, a mutation of sovereignty as a hermeneutic horizon in which, historically, social struggles were inscribed.
 
4. – For all this, it does not cease to amaze us that before noticing the anti-democratic character of this Creole, exceptionalist and juristocratic tradition; before looking at its functionality to the imperatives of accumulation, be it in the expansive capitalism of the 19th century, in the industrial capitalism of the 20th century, or in contemporary global and neo-extractivist capitalism; before noticing the imperatives of neoliberalism and its processes of flexible accumulation and devastation, which are expressed in a sustained precariousness of the lives of the working masses and an exponential growth of the debt as a correlate of the managerial utopia of the so-called middle class; and even before noticing the sustained processes of economic and political exploitation and spoliation that found the so-called Chilean democracy, the official and providential account of the experts on duty accused the revolts of having altered, almost irreparably, the social order, inscribing within the national coexistence an unprecedented and unforgivable violence, a violence that attempted against a long democratic tradition. The same sermon is heard everywhere, right and left: the reason for the current crisis is due both to the days of social revolts, and to the incompetence of the constituents to adjust themselves to the national civic sentiment. And this is precisely what ends up complementing the limited legal model in which the process of constitutional re-foundation is inscribed, that is, a moralistic conception of violence that is blind to its own violent precedents. Isn’t the perpetuation of the same management model implemented by the civic-military dictatorship in the context of post-dictatorial administrations radically violent? Isn’t the structural corruption of the country’s military and police institutions violent, along with the repeated cases of corruption and corporate collusion in the last 30 years? Isn’t the same distribution of income, property and wealth in the country violent? Or are we willing to assume that these things are products of a natural law and therefore beyond our reach? All this, without even mentioning the sustained embezzlement of natural resources; the equally sustained repressive violence of the police apparatus against the Mapuche population and against the Chilean population in general; the administrative negligence related to immigration and public health crisis; the scandalous fishing law as a synecdoche of a structural corruption that shows the logic of accumulation itself and the endemic concentration of wealth and property in the same families for a long time, as long as the history of the country; the monopoly of the media and its infinite vulgarization of “national events”, thanks to absolutely irrelevant morning shows and sensationalist media journalism; the business of universities and the precarization of free public education; the crisis of the health system and social security, and so on. Bertolt Brecht maintained that robbing a bank was infinitely less criminal than founding it. Isn't this the true horizon in which we should inscribe the revolts? After all, what is a revolt in the context of the permanent exploitation and spoliation of the citizenry by the agents of the neoliberal order? As a famous 19th century German essayist would say, the revolts have shown us that the Holy Alliance is always ready and willing to sanctify the status quo.
 
5. – But there is still a more decisive dimension of this juristocratic horizon. That relative to the continuity between the immunitarian operation of law and the cybernetic reduction of experience to the condition of information. Indeed, the so-called cybernetic hypothesis (Tiqqun 2015) consists of showing the transformations of sovereignty in the contemporary world, noting how technological mediation implies a general standardization of historical-cultural references and the development of a governmentality capable of producing anticipatory models and operate in preventive terms. What the humanities feared so much: the technification of language and the predominance of communicability without communication, has been accomplished in the context of cybernetic governmentality, data-mining and big data. In turn, what Bernard Stiegler (2010) identified as generalized entropy, that is, as an entropic reduction of the complexity or singularity of historical experiences and references, was already present in the criticism of the mythical violence of law (Benjamin), but now it extends to the general forms of order configuration in contemporary societies. In this sense, the critique of law is also a critique of algorithmic governmentality, because although it claims to be an objective (“post-humanist”) overcoming of the linguistic referent, it is still structured by a binary and evaluative language, which organizes the world according to self-referential criteria of relevance. In other words, the conversion of experience into information, of justice into law, of politics into administration, is nothing more than the conversion of historical contingency into an autopoietic process oriented towards its own systemic reproduction. But why is all this important? Because it allows us to understand the scope of neoliberal governmentality beyond its conventional representation, that is, it allows us to understand how the critique of law, historicism and cybernetic mediation point to the same process of obliteration of differences. It would be this process of reduction and obliteration that also shows us a radical change in the very configuration of relations of power and domination. To put it schematically, the self-referentiality of legal and administrative languages currently dispenses with hegemonic mediation and the classical theory of democratic legitimacy. The substantive change in the nature of the State and the modern political institutions precipitated by the globalization processes is now shown as a metamorphosis of sovereignty oriented towards the decentralization of its control and reproduction processes, beyond the classic public sphere, and beyond the problem of legitimation and any other modern regulatory criteria. The very configuration of this techno-tele-mediatic order implies the triumph of a facticity without historical density, in which the random and anarchic condition of contingency is converted into a neoliberal performance. Hence, then, the need to think about the anarchic and random nature of the revolts as a disarticulation of the securitarian governmentality.
 
6. – Of course, we are not advocating either a rejection of technology or an anti-parliamentary radicalism. It is not about betting on a total exodus from the State and the institutions, but on an effective historicization of the meaning of politics, democracy and participation, to better appreciate the limits of the Chilean juristocratic pact. We are advocating for a critical theory of institutions that allows us to understand them not as inseminations of a sacred divine will, but as temporary prostheses destined to promote and enhance life in common. It is not, therefore, a question of abdicating the law and its mythical and violent operations, but of enabling a new relationship with the law, “inoperative” and capable of breaking with the equivalential assumption that mobilizes it. A law not of sanctioned reciprocity or calculated equivalence, but open to the singularity of justice, which implies a material theory of institutions as technical devices at the service of life, and not as sacralized and de-historicized sovereign landmarks. It is precisely in this context that we can no longer continue to confuse the common of a historically situated existence with the public, which is nothing more than the reduction of the common to the representational operation of the modern sovereign theater.
 
7. – The modern sovereign theater is constituted by the series of State operations oriented to the production of a national, transversal and mobilized identity according to the imperatives of national-developmentalism (Williams 2022). From inclusive public policies, the expansion of the vote and basic education, the transculturating and modernizing policies, the development of Latin American populism in the mid-20th century –understood as machines that mobilize and configure the “national People”–, passing through the strategies of popular front and the expansion of the sphere of electoral competition, including the development of national and continental culture, the internationalization of art and literature, and the expansion of symbolic markets, up to the development of nuestramericanistas, anti-imperialist, and nationalist hermeneutics, a series of identification processes and operations allowed the production of a national identity that coincided with the legal-political representation of the People, on which Popular sovereignty rested, and  on which, in turn, the State sovereignty rested. That is to say, the scopic regime of this sovereign theater allowed legitimizing the operations of the Nation-State in the sovereignty of the People, but of a national People already homogenized according to the postulation of a determined fictitious identity. In other words, the legitimacy of the State, its apparatuses and its forms of government was guaranteed, in the last instance, by the sovereignty of the People, but this People (with capital letters) did not respond to the material and effective heterogeneity of the peoples, but to the construction of a fictive ethnicity inseminated from the State. The co-belonging between State sovereignty and Popular sovereignty, ultimately, allowed the organization of the political spectrum without radically calling into question the assumptions of the very theater of operations. Whether in terms of a bipolar geopolitics strongly marked by the Cold War, whether in terms of a national(ist) resistance against imperialism, or in terms of a war of positions in order to achieve hegemony, the truth is that, as in Kafka’s famous story about the Oklahoma theater, in the Latin American sovereign theater everyone was challenged. Certainly, left and right-wings co-belonged in this sovereign theater.
 
8. – It is this same sovereign theater (now in ruins) that continues to determine the progressive affection of the contemporary left, the affection that allows it to reprogram itself according to the emphases of the new international scene, occupying the place of the struggles for identity and recognition, without realizing that such struggles constitute the backbone of the democratic politics of the modern political theater –changing the notion of the Third World or periphery to that of the Global South can undoubtedly seem like a genius invention! The current combination of identity struggles and processes of intensification of extractivism –that has characterized the recent progressive governments of Latin America– allowed them to enter the new world order as suppliers for the so-called commodity consensus (Svampa 2013), but this Pyrrhic progress has revealed the structural condition of the passive revolution of global capitalism, showing at the same time that reactionary reformism constitutes a complex framework of positions in which progressivism continues to think that it “swims with the current.” If, as Simón Ramírez (2022) has pointed out, neoliberalism goes beyond the merely economic sphere, constituting a great attempt to recompose society, an issue that also demands a complex and concerted strategy for its dismantling, it is also true that even before enter into its democratic-parliamentary game, we would need to sharpen our analysis tools to better understand the ways in which its flexible and accommodative managerial operation supposes not only a turn to the right, but a radical mutation of the order and nature of politics and of democracy. Otherwise, living in the ruins of the modern sovereign theater, we can only aspire to its partial, palliative and contingent reconstruction, without the possibility of interrupting the accumulation processes and the abstraction and standardization operations of contemporary cybernetic capitalism. That is to say, without a critique of value in the context of the total subsumption of life to capital, we can only aspire to the compensatory reformism of the contemporary progressive horizon, necessary, but not sufficient.
 
9. – Of course, it is not about renouncing the tactical utility of said progressivism and clumsily betting on an extra-parliamentary position, fueled by a romantic representation of revolutionary ethics, since that ethics ended up being as sacrificial as the capitalist ethos (Echeverría, 1998), demanding partisan dedication and sacrifice, beyond the actual possibility of change. On the contrary, it is a matter of thinking the complexity of all the institutions and concepts that make up the framework of the modern sovereign theater, including notions such as popular sovereignty, people and revolution.
 
9.1. – On the one hand, the question of popular sovereignty and the people appear as natural referents on which the final legitimacy of power rests; however, in the face of this quasi-naturalistic model, a critique of the substantialization and transcendentalization of the People would have to be carried out, as if said People –in which Popular sovereignty would finally reside– were a substantive and transhistorical entelechy, a substance ontologically complete and ready to be discovered and emancipated. Against these substantialist theories it would be necessary to oppose the material heterogeneity of peoples, that is, of peoples as proliferating forms of life, beyond their subordination to the juridical notion of The People. For peoples only exists in the contingency of its demotic irruptions (Rancière 1996), in the self-organization of its historical emplacements, and not in the ballot paper or in the urban planning of contemporary social engineering. As Georges Didi-Huberman (2012) has insisted, the legally exposed People should be stressed from by the irruption of the figurative peoples, those who catachrestically alter the plane of modern legal-political representation.
 
9.2. – On the other hand, the history of the 20th century shows us that the very notion of Revolution ended up being captured by the sovereign theater, which turned it into an original, foundational and monumental event, legitimizing its own processes and deployments. That is to say, the Revolution, which began by being imagined as a radical transformation, ended up constituting the foundational and sovereign moment of the re-articulation of the modern political theater, and its corresponding monumentalization allowed the neutralization of its destituent forces, the deactivation of its critical potential, giving way to a historicist and sacrificial narrative that petrifies the past and naturalizes the present. The insurrectionary moment ended up being devoured by the rhetoric of the Revolution and, as Furio Jesi (2015) has indicated, beyond the possible convergences between revolt and revolution, the revolt does not try to accelerate the realization of a certain historical project, but to interrupt precisely this historical time, which is nothing more than the spatialized time of capital, from a radical alteration of the sovereign theater, an alteration in which the bodies resist following the pre-established script of history and become insubordinate to occupy the streets of a city that can no longer be conceived as the scene of sovereignty and its operations. In this sense, the series of contemporary revolts from the Zapatista insurrection to the Occupy Movement, from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, or from the Chilean student revolts to the recent social demonstrations in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Iran, etc., reveal the end of the modern sovereign theater, the dissolution of modern distance and the classical pit, which was nothing but an effect of the scopic regime of sovereignty, staging a destituent and anarchic potency that denies the foundation –the principle or arché– and, therefore, the pre-established script of history, to manifest itself contingently on the horizon of a time that resists its full capitalistic spatialization. Contemporary revolts no longer represent previously assigned class identities, are no longer explained by geopolitical and identity partisan struggles, nor are they reduced to conventional demands for recognition: revolts have in common the fact of affirming ways of life beyond the spoliation and devastation constitutive of contemporary accumulation processes. In this sense, revolts imply a conatus of existence against the devastation of capital.
 
10. - If the revolts imply the irruption of a material heterogeneity that can no longer be redirected to the notion of identity, be it national, class or of any other type, then the revolts demand a radical questioning of the limits of the modern sovereign theater. When trying to calm this irruption from the reconfiguration of the juristocratic pact, the heterogeneity expressed by the revolts is once again reduced to an identifying and patronage logic. How then to think of an alternative to the permanent reproduction of the modern representational bond? Especially if we understand that one cannot live permanently in the revolt, that is, in the demotic irruption since, as an irruption, it implies a suspension of historical time. How to advance beyond the moment of the revolt, towards an instituting process that does not repeat the vicious circle of the mythification of the foundation? This is the horizon in which the possibility of a wild republicanism is inscribed, without arché, at odds with the logic of foundation, articulated beyond the normative determinants codified by law, open to historical contingencies and configured by a relationship of extimacy with the orderless order of events. Precisely because it is not a question of a maximalist critique of law and institutions, but of a historical and critical interrogation that allows us to enter into a different relationship with law, as a historically articulated form of imagination, and with institutions as prostheses of a common and enhanced existence beyond the misery of neoliberal democracy. These same questions arise from the Chilean case, precisely because in it the revolts disclose the radical mismatch between the institutional order of representation and the material configuration of society.
 
April 2023
 
 
 
Translated from Spanish into English by Gonzalo Díaz Letelier.
 
 
 
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