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Senile Fascism and the Financial Algorithm. Uses of Bifo. // Interview with Franco “Bifo” Berardi by Diego Stzulwark

Translated by Liz Mason-Deese

With almost a dozen books published in Spanish, Bifo, far from being an unknown author in South America, has become an esteemed source of inspiration. For those who do not know him, this activist philosopher from Bologna, who is close to 70 years old, is a prolific author whose work has been published in Argentina with great interest by several publishing houses (Cruce, Tinta Limón, Cactus, Hethk, Caja Negra).  Bifo is one of the paradigmatic figures of the young Italian autonomist movement (also known as operaismo): he was one of the protagonists of the Italian 1968 movement – which in Italy extended until 1977 –, he founded the historical magazine A/traverso and the mythical Radio Alice (the first Italian pirate radio station). Translated by small publishing houses and blogs – nodes of authentic networks of active practices in the sphere of pedagogy and activism, of theater and film –, read by hackers and psychoanalysts, communicators and philosophers of technology, his ideas continue to be used and put in connection with diverse situations. He lived in New York for a few years where he got to know cyberpunk up close, and was the creator of TV Orfeo, the first community television channel in Italy. He is currently a professor of Social History of Communication at the Fine Arts Academy of Brera, Milan.

In this conversation, we wanted to know more about the method of plasticity or the “cartographic” method – inherited from Félix Guattari –, and how this mode of work evolved, taking as reference points Bifo’s works published in Argentina: Generación post Alfa, Félix, De la Sublevación, El trabajo del Alma y Fenomenología del fin (published in English as: Precarious Rhapsody; Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography; The Uprising; The Soul at Work; and And: Phenomenology of the End). In his words, the “rhizomatic” method consists of creating a living, never totalizing, cartography of social composition. How can we read Bifo today, from our circumstances? What does his way of working teach us when it comes to taking up situated practices in the particular historical conjuncture in the region – the neoliberalism without crisis in Chile, the limits of so-called progressive politics in Uruguay, the handbook neoliberalism of Durán Barba, key to understanding the Argentine political situation, the emergent techno-fascism in Brazil –?  How to link the updating of the cartographic method with the everyday incorporation of new generations of activists in different collectives, organizations, and movements that investigate and experiment beyond neoliberalism, racism, patriarchy, and fascism? How to avoid the harmfulness of simplifications related to desire – that “psychic flow that is activated and de-activated, and which is modified by the cultural, technical, social conditions in which the flows of the imaginary move” – which is key to the force of these movements?

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Practices of Sensitivization for a Non-Humanistic Politics (Reading Bifo in Buenos Aires) // Diego Sztulwark

Translated by: Ana Vivaldi & Liz Mason-Deese

Bifo’s recent book AND: Phenomenology of the End deals with processes of subjectivation which, through communication, information technology, and the government of signs, determine our modes of life and affect the political conjuncture. His central argument emerges from describing the transition from a world in which the relation between bodies and signs was processed through sensitivity (a conjunctional concatenation) to a regime in which we only operate with already codified signs, and with combinations that have already been pre-established by a prior compatibility (connective concatenation). This transformation follows the recent virtual revolution in semiocapitalism, in which capital is valorized through the production of signs, that is due both to a technological transformation and an ontological rupture. This transformation and ontological rupture consist of the sign’s aspiration of autonomy in relation to its referent (in language, the link between the signifier/signified, and in finances the link between money/labor).

In other words the human animal suffers the consequences of their actions over the environment – the infosphere which is populated with information flows which circulate at a vertiginous speed – that they have irreversibly modified and to which now they only aspire to adapt.

The infinite emission of information becomes incompatible with the capacity of the individual and social brain to receive/metabolize, it becomes impossible for the human brain. This transformation of the environment is thus inseparable from an anthropological mutation that the author describes both from the perspective of new technological patterns and from that of the new power of finance and the pathologies that subjects suffer.

The digital revolution disrupts the way in which the body is connected to signs, to the detriment of sensitivity, (tactile) sensoriality, and sensuality (pleasure-pain). That is, the loss of all the components that produce empathy. General desensitization neutralizes the critical power of culture and annuls the availability of the necessary time for erotic bonds, without which there is neither individual happiness nor the capacity to articulate counterpowers. This regeneration of sensitivity – in parallel to the loss of the sense of history – is not, however, for Bifo the effect of technological development on its own, but rather the conditions established by large capitalist corporations for this development.

II

For those who don’t know him, this activist philosopher from Bologna, who is around 70 years old, is a prolific author whose work has been published in Argentina for years with great interest by different publishing houses. Bifo is one of the paradigmatic figures of the young Italian autonomist movement (also known as operaismo): he was one of the protagonists of the Italian 1968 movement – which in Italy extended until 1977 –, he founded the historical magazine A/traverso and the mythical Radio Alice (the first Italian pirate radio station). He was a close friend of Félix Guattari, who continues inspiring his work. He lived in New York for a few years where he got to know cyberpunk up close, and was the creator of TV Orfeo, the first community television channel in Italy. He is currently a professor of Social History of Communication at the Fine Arts Academy of Brera, Milan.

III

Bifo has a poetic and political idea of the body, the erotic and the social body, just as the uprising creates it and the artistic imagination anticipates it. Diagnosis (crisis of capitalism) and therapeutics (uprising, recomposition of an autonomous collective body) refer to the two great analytical and political traditions that he continues to rework: those corresponding to Italian workerism and a micropolitical cartography.

IV

Digitalization and semiocapitalism – understood through the workerist method of class struggle as compositionism (a reading of the variation in the technical and subjective aspects of proletarian cooperation) – are inseparable from the power of corporations over the programming and mechanisms of subjugation of the “general intellect” (of which Marx spoke about). Therefore, for Bifo there is no question of a desire to return to the past (nostalgia for the Fordist exploitation of labor power), nor of a phobia of technology. The only phobia registered in the text is directed toward capital, and is expressed, in aesthetic terms, as the rejection of a purism rooted in technology that prepares the smooth space in which the sign is separated from the sensual and productive body and is handed over to code, connectivity without a remainder, to which forms of labor are subordinated, and over which financial power reigns. This purism, curiously, has affected its most serious opponent, Leninism, whose revolutionary purity (which for Bifo is linked to an expression of Russian Orthodox Christianity) has led to a catastrophic voluntarism. So if we can no longer count on classic revolutionary politics to oppose the current semiocapitalist command, how will we respond to avoid collapse?

V

Bifo is criticized for being “pessimistic” (by Ricardo Forster and Jorge Alemán for example), because his description of the world as a cyber cell does not offer any way out. In any case, pessimism and optimism are narrow, useless categories. If optimism has turned into neoliberal futurism, pessimism is its flip side, a sad form of thought that is incapable of creating new possibilities.

The gesture Bifo produces is uncomfortable because it makes two movements: it shows us that we are immersed in a present with no solution, at the same time as it points us to problems and invites us to work. Read in this line it doesn’t create enthusiasm or discouragement, but rather it encourages us to produce. His main thesis about historical time argues that the time when acting implied transforming reality has passed. Rather, in our time, to act is the effort to adapt one’s self, or to update one’s self, when faced with the speed of change generated by the virtual, digital or technological revolution. This has important consequences for the left that inherits the legacy of revolution, condemned to impotence if it does not manage to develop a sense of irony that is capable of resituating itself within and against (against but within) this world. Insofar as, in semiocapitalism, we are all sinking in the same mud, the vanguard attitude that denounces or saves the “others” (who are alienated, ignorant, tricked) loses all relevance. Enlightened minorities become irrelevant in the face of collectives that work within the problems that are common to all of us.

VI

Lenin liked to say that irony and discipline were the Bolcheviques’ best values. Vladimir Jankelevich affirms that irony is a certain capacity of distance to manage new dispositions. For Bifo, irony is an insolvency of language, the ability to avoid overcoding. Irony is a feature of any authentic social movement.

VII

If we are within – if we are not foreign or external to the problems that overwhelm us –, thinking must start from that immanence. There is no way of resolving this “from above.” Rather than external gazes, distanced perspectives, or know-it-all readings, we need to map the complexity of the present based on experience itself. We owe each other situated explanations, to clash with the concrete obstacles overlooked by analysis that occurs from a distance. How do we know? Bifo maintains that our cognitive reality has mutated. Being “inside” problems no longer has anything to do with adopting moral commitments, but rather accounting for what we cannot do and what we can. When Bifo diagnoses a problem of the “desensitization” of society, he is touching on this type of situation. It is not, of course, about the end of sensitivity as such, but of its productivist modulation, which is prefigured, codified, submitted to an algorithmic logic. We are experiencing a reduction of the sensitive, the sensual, and the erotic as we become increasingly incapable of decodifying the not said, of inventing relations for signs with prior compatibility. When Bifo links this process with the death of politics, perhaps we should understand this death as the (tendential, not absolute) extinction of a virile will of intervention/control over a reified and still manageable world. Semiocapitalism will not be transformed – Bifo says – based on Machiavellian or Leninist maneuvers. In other words, what dies is politics as it was conceived by humanists and revolutionaries, or rather, a will of transformation consummated in a state.

VIII

What emancipatory practice would be capable of challenging semiocapital? What is happening to our political experiences? One possible key for interpreting recent Argentine history highlights the reduction – the modulation – of the sensitive. There is a continuum that goes from state terrorism to neoliberalism: from terror to competition. Rita Segato states it quite clearly: patriarchy is a metaphysics that treats the living as a simple thing to be manipulated. The practices of counterpower, from the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to the women’s movement, from the movement of the unemployed to the struggles for land and in defense of the commons, have made a strong historicizing and resensitizing impression on the social fabric, with – in the meaning that Bifo gives the term – a notable sense of irony.

IX

Irony and sensitivity seem to be two of the possible key elements for de-stereotyping the political. Is it possible to think about modes of refusal and collective decision-making beyond the model that ranges from the Prince to the Party? To the extent that practices of sensitization operate as counterpowers in relation to labor exploitation, repression, racism, genocide, sexual oppression, and the destruction of nature by financial mega-operations, it is impossible to dissociate them from the two fundamental political capacities: imposing a limit on power and experimenting collective forms of decision-making. These two issues remain in the heart of the political, even if it is a post-human or post-revolutionary politics.

Then, we would have to reconstruct a theory of post-representative collective decision-making, in which the subjects that are critical of processes of capital accumulation would be displaced toward the center. It is not enough to critique verticalization and support horizontality. To the contrary, this passage toward non-representation implies the construction of a method, forms of composition, and new modes of leadership. So-called horizontality remains in a state of abstraction if it is disconnected from concrete modes of making decisions.

X

Marx had written that it is no longer about interpreting the world, as the philosophers claimed, but about transforming it: a new way of conceiving critique as practice. This aspect of critique is what enters into crisis in the world whose coordinates Bifo plots. Rather than transforming, as we already said, the postmodern subject is dedicated to updating their perceptions and knowledges in regards to an environment that is mutating at a dizzying speed. The change in experience is given in the passage from interpretation-transformation to updating-adaptation.

What type of comprehension can be practiced in relation to the reality that we experience under semiocapitalism? Perhaps the practice of translation – in the hands of all the struggles that desacralize, profane and return to common use the dimensions of praxis and collective wealth that capital axiomatizes, subordinating them to the market logic – provides us with a useful indication. Then, it is about counter-translating the world, understanding it by decodifying it, retaking the capacity for creating common meanings beyond the command of capital. This brings us back to irony: an open spatiality of translation of problems that traverse the individual and the collective.

2018-11-16

Prologue to Hypothesis 891: On Method, by Colectivo Situaciones

Here we present a new translation of the Prologue – “On Method” – to Hypothesis 891: Beyond the Roadblocks (Colectivo Situaciones & MTD de Solano, 2002) translated and retranslated over the years by many hands, (some of whom refused to remain silent and insisted on inserting themselves into the text). A text that circulated extensively in the early 2000s, especially among elements of the alter-globalization movement, and was foundational for a generation of practices of research militancy, we present this translation not to prolong a moment that has long passed, but to experiment with new resonances in the present.

Hypothesis 891: Beyond the Roadblocks

Prologue by Colectivo Situaciones

On Method

I

Is a prologue internal or external to the text that it precedes? As we know, the prologue precedes from the end: although it opens the book, it is the last part to be written. It is not, then, a text that is internal to the book, nor is it something completely external to it. It is, rather, both things at the same time. It is external; yes, it is “post.” It speaks from “after” the closing of the book. It is a “second closure” that opens. But this new beginning – starting afterward – makes the main body of the text exist in another way: as if prefacing itself, it were projected.

This extension is not a mere continuation, but rather an operation that reveals a form of work. This book is always already a prolongation: the prolongation of an encounter in a workshop, of one workshop into many others, of these into a first publication, that of the original dossier (Situaciones 4; Conversations with the MTD of Solano), from the dossier – already re-edited and out of print again – into this book that, in turn, will itself be prolonged in its readers, and becomes available for many other possible prolongations. [We might add that it is again prolonged, temporally, linguistically, spatially, in its translation many years later.]

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Altitude Sickness. Notes on a Trip to Bolivia* (October, 2005) // Colectivo Situaciones

1. In its heterogeneity and permanent movement, Bolivia is at the same time the experience and the fracture of magma. It is there where faces, bodies, and languages tell stories that challenge those seeking to understand, accompany, and enjoy. Our trip, in February 2005, was a struggle between this attempt to understand and the difficulties of adaptation (of which altitude was not the least of obstacles). It is also a wager on the distinctive outlook opened by what took place in recent years in Argentina. And this dialogue between processes of de-institution-construction is vital for both.

2. To arrive in Bolivia is to be surprised at an atmosphere that concentrates an extreme tension between different elements, a polymorphous dynamic that today characterizes, in different ways, the syntaxis of the movements and struggles of a good portion of Latin America. To connect with Bolivia is part of a necessary and renovated literacy. It looks as though any image let itself be seen and read. Today the space referred to as “Latin American” appears to the public through the emergence of so-called “leftist” national governments. The literacy we propose is one that allows us to have new keys to read this process. These governments—each in its own way—function as an extension, interpellation, substitution, subordination, displacement and/or reorganization of the movements and experiments that strive, in entire regions of the continent—precisely the hotter and more creative ones—to unfold a politics from below. This democratic impulse does not thrive without moments of insurrection, which spatialize and open new terrains, but, evidently, nor does it emphasize the constructive and innovative dimension of the processes that have been opened.

3. As with the “piqueteros” in Argentina, in Bolivia the struggles summon new expressions. The media invent new ways of naming each irruption. Thus, the aggressiveness displayed by the struggles is immediately called “war for” (water, coca, gas). These “wars,” however, are not moments of organization within a designed and consistent strategy over the control of the apparatus of the state, as it could have been conceived only two decades ago, althought it is evident that the consequences of these conflicts have a bearing on a constant politicization and a neutralization and erosion of central power’s ability to command. The so-called violence in the struggles in Bolivia is not decided and deployed by traditional revolutionary organizations, but by communitarian impulses more or less configured as such. This is why the coexistence of an electoral strategy of indigenous and popular groups along with harder or hidden resistances is not only highly conflictive but also persistent and even partially articulable at some moments.

4. Another feeling we have about the construction of this social grammar has to do with what we could quickly call questions of mobility. The territories of “war” constitute at the same time the terrain of a settlement and a recomposition of the large internal migrations. This component of re-territorialization of population flows has a double dimension. With the process of neoliberal relocalization of the campesino and mining labour power in the 1980s and ’90s a reorganization of the economic profile of Bolivia took place, decomposing, at the same time, an experience of modes of struggle and identification achieved after decades of popular political work. And at the same time, after two decades, it is possible to perceive the beginning of the weaving of new links from the reviving of elements of the earlier life (as in the mining neighbourhoods of El Alto) that operates as a contribution of the unionist tradition to urban struggle, to the invention that arises from adaptating and creating new modes of linkage and new subjects of struggle. This reorganization appears, in different ways, with the Aymaras, the Queshua campesinos, and the Landless Peasants Movement (MST) of Bolivia.

5. In Bolivia, as in many other places, it is not possibile to give up a mixed regime of understanding. There is not “ONE” explanatory principle of the audible and visible phenomena. There is an unconcealable social fracture, of course; but the rigidity that this image presupposes hides the magmatic fluidity (sometimes hotter and more dynamic toward revolt, other times colder and slower). The same happens with the old and the new. It seems that certain pinnacles of classical philosophical thought admit a doctrine according to which the old is not the oldest, nor is the new the most recent, but rather the old is born old and the new is so for eternity. The old is not anachronistic and the new does not admit the logic of fashion and snobbism. The old would be that which is separated from the ability to create. The new, in contrast, is the ancient possibility of production. All this to say that in Bolivia there is an ancient and wide-ranging self-management capacity that is actualized today configuring networks of everyday life, and, at the same time, it harbours a capacity to develop struggles without excessively specializing specific and professional organizations. However, these networks coexist and are regarded, once and again, as unproductive, patriarchical, and strategistic logics. Both tendencies survive.

6. Another aspect in relation to the aptitudes of the Bolivian resistance movement is linked with the experiments of constructing what we could call (with all the objections we have regarding the use of the term “institution” as a name for this phenomenon) “non-statist institutions of counterpower.” We are witnessing the instauration of methods of organization, selection, and production of a limited representativity, exercised by very controlled delegation and mandate, following the assembly model, with broad and permanent coordinating bodies. From the FEJUVE (a federation of 500 assemblies from the El Alto area) to the coordinating committees for the defense of natural resources (which already consist of levels of self-management of public enterprises) or the Ayllus (productive communities from the Altiplano) and the extended experiences of community [s1]control all anticipate modes of appropriation of resources that are outlined in situations of organization of collective power (potencia)1 very different from the classical demand for the state ownership of public services. Its non-statist character, however, does not elude a fundamental ambiguity: as much in its imaginaries as in its discourses elements of a non-statist sociability mix with the continuance of a statist horizon.

7. Of course the political, social, linguistic and economic elites operate upon the ambivalence that runs through the popular networks. The strategy with which this bloc confronts the present crisis of domination is plural and includes aspects from the direct dispute over rent and the extractive productive profile to the autonomization of strategic regions and the appeal to international tribunals to condition the capacities of Bolivian sovereignty (Aguas de Illimani-Suez Lyonnaise de Aux and Aguas de Tunari-Bechtel); to the nomination of new candidates from the right to the preparation of paramilitary groups to confront the campesinos that seize land; to the “contention” by the neighboring countries (Argentina and Brazil) to the regional preparation of the United States in order to be able to place a material-military limit to an eventual outburst of social unrest. (The concern of the U.S. military apparatus about what is going on in Bolivia seems to retroactively confirm Che Guevara’s intuition with respect to its geostrategic potential in the heart of South America.)

8. The depth of the revolution that is developing in Bolivia can be assessed by the importance of what it brings to bear: a) The affirmation of a new complex popular subject that aspires to its full right to speak politics, which questions the structure of hierarchies that organize society and upon which the state finds support; b) the recomposition of communitary forms of life and their correlates in modes of struggle; c) the antagonism with the transnational structure of the colonial state. In any of the possible variants, however, a principle of organization develops which totally or partially questions the regime of autonomy of a sphere of politics and reconsiders the terms of a popular democracy. Because of the complexity of the process no linear vision can be sustained without problems.

9. In short: in Bolivia there is a social creativity that is alive, althought it is also possible to say that it is—paradoxically—“in crisis.” In Bolivia the problems of counterpower are concentrated and highly developed, but still this is not an “exhaustive sampling.” Moreover, it is possible that, in regard to many of the aspects inside the movements that cause “crisis,” there are in Chiapas, but also in some other movements in Argentina and the rest of the continent, more advanced experiments.

Bolivia implies a certain contraction of general problems, which it displays with a certain accentuation, but it represents neither the heart nor the sole point where the essence of the process unfolds. We could not say that Latin America’s counterpower is at stake in Bolivia, but we could say, perhaps, that “without Bolivia” we miss the general grammar of the struggles of present day Latin America. And in this grammar we perceive that it is essential to link the experience and elaboration of two poles so similar and yet so different: the movements in Bolivia and the Zapatista experience in Mexico. After trying out a series of strategies of construction that encompass from the constitution of a voice and an imaginary of their own to the creation of free municipalities and autonomous regions (Juntas of Good Government), Zapatismo feels they have arrived at a limit of their experience and as such are calling for the constitution of a new broad political strategy (Sixth Declaration of the EZLN). As much in Bolivia as in Mexico, the radical movements have to articulate their civilizatory perspectives and the construction of their autonomies to certain tactics in order to confront the dynamics that disperse them. Both Bolivia and Mexico are torn today over the nature of possible progressive governments that might result from the next elections. In both countries there is a counterpower that attempts to position itself in relation to what is coming, but in addition both had some time to watch, in Argentina and in Brazil (two different cases), the functioning of a complex relation between three terms: democratic governments with progressive aspirations, neoliberal conditions of existence, and the life of movements.

Colectivo Situaciones

October, 2005

Translated by Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza


Situaciones is the name of an ongoing militant research around which our collective is organized. We have been working together for more than five years, and we do it, fundamentally, in workshops in which we think along with experiments of the new radicality. Among others, we have participated in co-research with the group H.I.J.O.S. and Mesa de Escrache Popular, the Campesino Movement of Santiago del Estero (MOCASE), the Movement of Unemployed Workers (MTD) of Solano, with experiments in alternative education, such as the Educational Community Creciendo Juntos (Growing Together) and the Universidad Trashumante (Transhumant University), with counterinformation collectives, such as lavaca, and art collectives, such as the Grupo de Arte Callejero (Street Art Group), and with people from this country and other regions. Since we came together we elaborated an autonomous press, in order to publish and disseminate the expressions of this work. This has grown to become a militant-press which we call Tinta Limon ediciones (www.tintalimonediciones.org).

* This is an excerpt from a longer piece that will be published soon in the book Mal de altura (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limon Ediciones, 2005).

1 In Spanish there are two words corresponding to the English word ‘power’: potencia and poder. Potencia refers to power as capacity – the power to act, power in the sense of ‘empower’. Poder refers to constituted power in institutions, in the sense of ‘the powers that be’ or ‘state power’. –Tr.

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Argentina, December 19th and 20th, 2001: A New Type of Insurrection // Colectivo Situaciones

Translators’ Introduction

Que se vayan todos! Four Spanish words became part of the universal language of rebellion after a multitude of Argentineans occupied the streets the evening of December 19th 2001. The words were thrown at every politician, functionary, economist, journalist and at nobody in particular, cutting a threshold in history, a before and an after for Argentina that would find a wave of resonances around the world.

The revolt surprised analysts, always ready to judge the new with reference to their old interpretive grids. But for many of its protagonists, however, it had long been foretold. Argentina had been one of the testing grounds for neoliberalism since 1975, shortly before a dictatorship, initially commanded by General Jorge Videla, institutionalized the forms of repression of revolutionary activism that were already under way, while launching a package of reforms that began undoing the labour rights and welfare state policies that had been the result of decades of workers’ struggles.

Eight years later electoral democracy finally returned. The consequences of the repression became visible as the military’s large-scale process of social engineering had been successful in demobilizing the population. Neoliberal reforms could now be imposed by consensus. In the 1990s, president Carlos Menem and his finance minister, Domingo Cavallo, in alliance with the labour bureaucracy, undertook sweeping structural adjustment reforms, privatizing nearly every state-run company at every level of government, deregulating labour and finance markets, pegging the peso to the dollar, and leaving nearly fourty percent of the population unemployed or underemployed.

During the Menem era, a new generation of activists and new forms of protest slowly emerged. H.I.J.O.S., the organization of the children of the disappeared, came about in 1995 and introduced creative ways of denouncing the unpunished torturers of their often-revolutionary parents and preserving their memory. In 1997, unemployed workers began to protest blocking roads. Their multiple movements, known as piqueteros, spread throughout the country very quickly. All the attempts of the Peronist government to co-opt the movement proved unsuccessful. To find alterantives to the recession, barter clubs were created in different points of the country, giving rise to a massive underground economy based on solidarity principles.

In 1999 Fenando de la Rúa became president with a promise of change, but kept the neoliberal reforms intact in the name of preserving “governability.” When the national economy came to the verge of collapse, after having tried different plans to keep paying installments on the (now massive) foreign debt on time, de la Rúa recruited Cavallo.

After July 2001 the pace of events became dizzying. The numerous piquetero movements, which so far had acted mostly in isolation, started coordinating entire days of roadblocks throughout the vast Argentine geography. In the mid-term elections of October 2001 voters massively submitted spoiled ballots, with percentages of abstinence never seen before. In November, Cavallo froze withdrawals from bank accounts to prevent a drainage of reserves that would force the government to abandon the peg between the dollar and the peso. People from all walks of life suddenly found themselves without money for the most basic needs. Almost overnight, thousands of retail businesses were left without customers.

The article that follows captures with vivid eloquence the street actions of December 19th and 20th, 2001, exposing, at the same time, the inadequacy of analyses of the events that fail to acknowledge the agency, autonomy and creativity of the mobilized the masses. The two days of street fighting, plus the alternative forms of life that appeared after them (including neighbourhood assemblies, factory occupations, and others), reveal what Colectivo Situaciones calls the thought of the multiple, a form of thinking of the multitude that rejects all central forms of power.

This article is an excerpt from the book Colectivo Situaciones wrote on the events of December 2001. Situaciones, a collective of militant researchers based in Buenos Aires, began working together two years earlier. Its emergence was motivated by the search for a form of intervention and production of knowledge that ‘reads’ struggles from within, a phenomenology and a genealogy that that takes distance from the modalities established by both academia and traditional left politics. Colectivo Situaciones has published several books and booklets on different aspects of Argentina’s new protagonism, including the unemployed workers movement MTD of Solano, the peasants movement Mo.Ca.S.E., and H.I.J.O.S., among others. This research has extended to form compositions with local radical experiements in places like Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, France, Uruguay, Brazil, Italy, Spain, and Germany. Some of these affinities are documented in articles, working papers and declarations, some of which can be found in the collective’s website: http://www.situaciones.org.

Argentina, December 19th and 20th, 2001: A New Type of Insurrection

Insurrection Without a Subject

The insurrection of December 19th and 20th did not have an author. There are no political or sociological theories available to comprehend, in their full scope, the logics activated during those more than thirty uninterrupted hours. The difficulty of this task resides in the number of personal and group stories, the phase shifts, and the breakdown of the represesentations that in other conditions would have been able to organize the meaning of these events. It becomes impossible to intellectually encompass the intensity and plurality linked by the pots and pans,[1] on the 19th, and by open confrontation, on the 20th. The most common avenues of interpretation collapsed one by one: the political conspiracy, the hidden hand of obscure interests, and—because of that all-powerful combination—the crisis of capitalism.

In the streets it was not easy to understand what was happening. What had awakened those long-benumbed energies from their dream? What might all the people gathered there want? Did they want the same that we, who were also there, wanted? How to know? Did knowing it matter?

First in the neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, and then in the Plaza de Mayo, all sorts of things could be heard. “Whoever does not jump is an Englishman.” “Whoever does not jump is from the military.” “Execute those who sold the nation.” “Cavallo motherfucker.” “Argentina, Argentina.” And the most celebrated, from the night of the 19th: “stick the state of siege up your asses.”[2] And, then, the first articulation of “all of them out, none of them should remain.” The mixture of slogans made the struggles of the past reappear in the present: against the dictatorship, the Malvinas/Falklands war, the impunity of the genocides, the privatization of public companies, and others. The chants did not overlap, nor was it possible to identify previously existing groups among the crowd gathered there. All, as a single body, chanted the slogans one by one. At the same time, the contemporary piquetero methods of barricades, burning and blocking urban arteries, appeared in all the streets.

Words were superfluous during the most intense moments of those days. Not because the bodies in movement were silent. They were not. But because words circulated following unusual patterns of signification. Words functioned in another way. They sounded along with pots and pans, but did not substitute for them. They accompanied them. They did not remit to a specific demand. They did not transmit a constituted meaning. Words did not mean, they just sounded. A reading of those words could not be done unless this new and specific function they acquired is understood: they expressed the acoustic resources of those who were there, as a collective confirmation of the possibilities of constructing a consistency from the fragments that were beginning to recognize each other in an unanimous and indeterminate will.

The fiesta—because Wednesday 19th was a fiesta—gradually expanded. It was the end of the terrorizing effects of the dictatorship and the open challenge to the state of siege imposed by the government and, at the same time, there was celebration for the surprise of being protagonists of a historical action. And the surprise of doing it without being able to explain to each other the particular reasons of the rest. The sequence was the same all over the city: from fear and anger, to the balcony, to the rooftop, to the corner and, once there, to the transmutation. It was Wednesday. 10:30pm for some, 10pm for others. And in the patios and the streets a novel situation was operating. Thousands of people were living through a transformation at one and the same time: “being taken” by an unexpected collective process. People also celebrated the possibility of a still possible fiesta, as well as the discovery of potent social desires, capable of altering thousands of singular destinies.

Nobody tried to deny the dramaticity of the background. Joy did not negate each one’s reasons for concern and struggle. It was the tense irruption of all those elements at once. Archaic forms of ritualism were adopted, a simulation of exorcism whose meaning—an anthropologist would say—seemed to be the reencounter with the capacities of the multitudinous, the collective, the neighbourly. Each had to resolve in a matter of minutes decisions that are usually difficult to make: moving away from television; talking to oneself, and to others; asking what was really going on; resisting for a few seconds the intense impulse to go out to the streets with the pots and pans; approaching rather prudently; and, then, letting oneself be driven in unforeseen directions.

Once in the streets, the barricades and the fire united the neighbours. And from there, they moved on swiftly to see what was happening in other corners nearby. Then it was necessary to decide where to go: Plaza de Mayo, Plaza de los Dos Congresos and, in each neighbourhood, to start finding targets more at hand: Videla’s house, or Cavallo’s. The multitude divided itself, in each neighbourhood, and dealt with all the “targets” at once. The most radical spontaneity sustained itself in collectively organized memory. They were thousands and thousands of people acting with clear and precise goals, enacting a collective intelligence.

At dawn another scene began to be played. While some were going to sleep—some at 3 in the morning, some others at 5:30—the discussion was on what had happened and what would come next: many continued organizing themselves with the objective of not allowing Plaza de Mayo to be occupied by repressive forces given that, formally, the state of siege was still in place.

By then, the confrontation, which had not yet been unleashed in all its magnitude, began to be prefigured. On the 20th things presented themselves in a different way. The square became the greatest object of disputes. What took place there, right after midday, was a true battle. It is not easy to say what happened. It was not easy to remember other opportunities in which such an air was breathed in the surroundings of the plaza. The violence of the confrontations contrasted with the absence of apparent meaning among the participants.

Young people openly confronted the police, while the older ones were holding on and helping from behind. Roles and tasks were spontaneously structured. Plaza de Mayo revalidated its condition as privileged stage for community actions with the greatest symbolic power. Only this time the representations that accompanied so many other multitudes that believed in the power of that massive pink building, so jealously and inefficiently defended by the police, did not materialize. There were detainees, injured, and many dead from the brutal police repression. Officially they spoke of thirty in the whole country, but we all know there were more.

The city of Buenos Aires became redrawn. The financial centre was destroyed. Or, maybe, reconstructed by new human flows, new forms of inhabiting and understanding the meaning of store windows and banks. The energies unleashed were extraordinary, and, as could be anticipated, they did not deactivate. The events of the 19th and 20th were followed, in the city of Buenos Aires, by a feverish activity of escraches,[3] assemblies and marches. In the rest of the country, the reaction was uneven. But in every province the repercussion of the events combined with previous circumstances: roadblocks, looting, protests, and uprisings.

Words and Silences: From Interpretation to the Unrepresentable

With silence and quietude, words recovered their habitual usages. The first interpretations began to go around. Those who sought the fastest political readings of the events faced enormous difficulties. It is evident that no power (poder[4]) could be behind them. Not because those powers do not exist, but because the events surpassed any mechanism of control that anyone could have sought to mount. The questions about power remain unanswered: Who was behind this? Who led the masses?

These are ideological questions. They interpellate ghosts. What is the subject who believes itself to be seeing powers  behind life looking for? How to conceive the existence of this questioning, conspiratorial subjectivity that believes that the only possible sense of the events is the play among already constituted powers? If these questions had any value in other situations, they were never as insipid as in the 19th and 20th. The separation between the bodies and their movements and the imaginary plans organized by the established powers became tangible like never before in our history. Moroeover, these powers had to show all their impotence: not only were they unable to provide a logic to the situation, but even afterwards they did not come upon anything but to accommodate themselves in the effects of the events. Thus, all the preexisting interpretative matrices, overturned, caricatured, were activated to dominate the assemblies that wagered on supporting the movement of the 19th and 20th.

The diagnoses were many: “socialist revolution,” “revolutionary crisis,” “antidemocratic fascism,” “reactionary market antipolitics,” “the second national independence,” “a crazy and irrational social outburst,” “a citizens’ hurricane for a new democracy,” “a mani pulite from below,”[5] or the Deluge itself. All these interpretations, heterogeneous in their contents, operate in a very similar way: faced with a major event, they cast their old nets, seeking much less to establish what escapes through them than to verify the possibilities of formatting a diverse movement.

The movement of the 19th and 20th dispensed with all types of centralized organizations. They were present neither in the call to assemble or in the organization of the events. Nor were there any at a later moment, at the time of interpreting them. This condition, which in other times would have been lived as a lack, in this occasion manifested itself as an achievement. Because this absence was not spontaneous. There was a multitudinous and sustained rejection of every organization that intended to represent, symbolize, and hegemonize street activity. In all these senses, the popular intellect overcame the intellectual previsions and political strategies.

Moreover, not even the state was the central organization behind the movement. In fact, the state of siege was not as much confronted as it was routed. If confrontation organizes two opposing symmetric consistencies, routing highlights an asymmetry. The multitude disorganized the efficacy of the repression that the government had announced with the explicit goal of controlling the national territory. The neutralization of the powers (potencias) of the state on the part of a multiple reaction was possible due to the condition of—and not due to shortage—the inexistence of a call to assemble and a central organization.

Some intellectuals—very comfortable with the consistency of their role—feel also unauthorized by an acting multiplicity that destabilizes all solidity upon which to think.

But perhaps we can get even closer to some hard novelties of the movement of the 19th and 20th.

The presence of so many people, who usually do not participate in the public sphere unless it is in the capacity of limited individuals and objects of representation by either the communicational or the political apparatuses, de-instituted[6] any central situation. There were no individual protagonists: every representational situation was de-stituted. A practical and effective de-stitution, animated by the presence of a multitude of bodies of men and women, and extended later in the “all of them out, none of them should remain.”

In this way, without either speeches or flags, without words unifying into a single logic, the insurrection of the 19th and 20th was becoming potent in the same proportion as it resisted every facile and immediate meaning. The movement of the 19th and 20th blew up the negative thinking of a series of knowledges about the capacity of resistance of the men and women who, unexpectedly, gathered there. Unlike past insurrections, the movement did not organize under the illusion of a promise. The current demonstrations have abandoned certainties with respect to a promising future. The presence of the multitude in the streets does not extend the spirit of the 1970s. This was not about the insurgent masses conquering their future under the socialist promise of a better life.

The movement of the 19th and 20th does not draw its logic from the future but from the present: its affirmation cannot be read in terms of programs and proposals about what the Argentina of the future ought to be like. Of course there are shared longings. Yet they did not let themselves be apprehended into single “models” of thought, action, and organization. Multiplicity was one of the keys of the efficacy of the movement: it gained experience about the strength possessed by an intelligent diversity of demonstrations, gathering points, different groups, and a whole plurality of forms of organization, initiatives, and solidarities. This active variety permitted the simultaneous reproduction of the same elaboration in each group, without the need of an explicit coordination. And this was, at the same time, the most effective antidote against any obstruction of the action.

Consequently, there was not a senseless dispersion, but an experience of the multiple, an opening towards new and active becomings. In sum, the insurrection could not be defined by any of the lacks that are attributed to it. Its plenitude consisted in the conviction with which the social body unfolded as a multiple, and the mark it was capable of provoking on its own history.

Translated by Sebastian Touza and Nate Holdren

[1] Loud banging on saucepans or cacerolas by large crowds has been a common practice in the recent uprisings in Argentina. This activity is called a cacerolazo. The suffix ‘-azo’, in this case, means ‘insurrection’; ‘cacerola’ means ‘sauce pan’. Cacerolazo, then, literally means, roughly, ‘insurrection of the sauce pans’. (Tr.)

[2] The state of siege refers to the emergency measures taken by the Argentine government in attempt to put a lid on unreset. (Tr.)

[3] The word “escrache” is Argentinean slang that means “exposing something outrageous.” Escraches started as colorful street demonstrations organized by H.I.J.O.S. in front of the houses where people involved in human rights violations during the dictatorship live. During and after the rebellion, numerous spontaneous escraches were organized by people whenever they spotted a politician in a public place such as a restaurant or a caf During and after the rebellion, numerous spontaneous escraches were organized by people whenever they spotted a politician in a public place such as a restaurant, a café, or the street. (Tr.)

[4] In Spanish there are two words for power, poder and potencia(s), whose origin can be traced, respectively, to the Latin words potestas and potentia. In general, poder refers to transcendent forms of power, such as state power, and potencia refers to power that exists in the sphere of immanent, concrete experience. To maintain this distinction we indicate the original term between brackets when the use is unclear or changes from prior uses.  The words “potent” and “impotence” should be read as derivatives of potencia. (Tr.)

[5] Mani pulite, literally ‘clean hands’ in Italian, was a national investigation on government corruption in Italy during the 1990s. Because the campaign took place at the same time when Argentinean newspapers were unveiling one corruption scandal after the other, the expression was quicly adopted by journalists and politicians. (Tr.)

[6] We have chosen to use the expression de-institute and as a translation of the Spanish word destituir, which makes reference to the power that unseats a regime, in order to preserve the resonances that indicate a power opposite to that which institutes or that which is part of a constitutive process. We use the hyphen to avoid confusion with the English word destitution, which carries connotations of impoverishment. (Tr.)

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