Catharsis

The film Luna de Avellaneda aroused the expectations of a multitude of Argentines, and praise for it ran by word of mouth; there, in that time the film offers us, we can feel represented; in those touching characters, we can feel identified; in that corrupt politician, we can find the cause of our ills; in those suffering men and women, courageous and conflicted as they are, we can see ourselves reflected, and weep and laugh with them. And yet… I cannot help distrusting our sound common sense which, as everyone knows, is the most widely shared of the senses, as Descartes said. And, speaking of philosophers, the Greeks invented a political device that Aristotle enshrines in his Poetics under the concept of catharsis. The domination the Cretans suffered at the hands of successive waves of Indo-Europeans condemned to exile that magnificent culture, feminine, sensual, open. There is a well-known image in which Pallas Athena crushes a serpent with her shield, symbol of the earth and of the feminine; in this way the daughter of Zeus enshrines Indo-European domination over the Cretan people. Groups of women nevertheless went on celebrating in the woods the sparagmós, an orgiastic feast whose victim was a goat and perhaps, if gossip is to be believed, some man of the race of the dominators. A secret cult, this one, like others, represented the resistance of a people against the enslavement of its culture and the plundering of its riches. Well… we could go on talking about Greek history, but it is better not to dwell on it; what is certain is that these cults of resistance were colonised and neutralised the moment they were placed in the Athenian theatre as “spectacle”, as an object to be seen, making possible the catharsis that old Aristotle held to be necessary to the maintenance of order in the polis.

Greek theatre, and fundamentally tragedy, had a profound political meaning that it is not possible to analyse here, but catharsis played a central role in it — a word that came from medical language and referred to a purging of the body and of its vital functions.

There, when the citizen turned into a spectator of his own pains, he could feel contradictory emotions, identify with characters, express feelings, thereby deactivate them and also learn. In this way he would assimilate situations, he would be able to manage them and accept them as best he could so that in the polis there might reign the kosmos (order, arrangement, harmony). The magnificent invention of the Greeks lives on to this day in multiple and subtle ways. I believe it lives on in Luna de Avellaneda too.

The work, nimble and enjoyable, puts us at ease from the very beginning and makes us weep and laugh at ourselves. It makes the ancient and necessary catharsis possible for us. But, alongside this process of affective purgation, what else happens to us? Or rather, so as not to universalise in vain: what happened to me? Will others read what I felt in the same way? I do not know, but I am interested in analysing narratives and their possible effects on subjects, beyond the intentions of their “authors”. I would also like to rethink the political place of catharsis.

The social question and the wage-earning society

What does Luna de Avellaneda build in us? The film shows us a rupture, a cut. The first scene lights up a happy time, presented with mythical features, in which the families of a neighbourhood gather joyfully at the club for a carnival ball. The scene illuminates a way of life in which subjectivity was constituted within a family, with fathers who worked, families that protected, a neighbourhood that widened the space of the house and which, like the maternal womb, welcomingly prepared children to go out into a world where time implied a certain predictability and where spaces were clearly delimited. The inside of the house, the friendly streets of the neighbourhood and the spaces of the club completed one another and constituted, in their ordered and predictable spatiality, subjectivities whose time could unfold along an expected course, in a more or less reliable life trajectory. This could involve homogeneities and resemblances, but also supports and, from there, often, alternative thoughts and actions.

What was at stake was the old wage-earning society, which built a fabric of relations known as “the social”. The containing weave of “the social” was the effect of multiple strategies designed from the 19^th century onwards, but which were consolidated after the Second World War in the constitution of a social pact between companies, the State and the trade unions. This pact gave rise to “the wage-earning society” in order to contain the “social question”. What are we talking about when we say “social question”? We are referring to the abyss that exists between the proclaimed principles (freedom, equality, property, work) and effective reality. This void between the proclaimed principles and concrete history is the spectre that has haunted the capitalist world since its constitution. Since the time of the industrial revolution, the social question has erupted into constant conflicts: they are the symptoms of a spectre that cannot be exorcised.

The constitution of the wage-earning society was a strategy that lasted some thirty years.

It was the most successful attempt to exorcise the spectre of the social question. In that wage-earning society, the family, which ordered sexuality within the field of alliances, played a central role. The mother and the doctor (it does not seem accidental that Alberto Castillo, the protagonist of the first scene of Luna de Avellaneda, was in real life a doctor as well as one of the popular singers who, from the screen, most upheld the value of the family and of joy) embodied an alliance that presided over the “normal” constitution of the body of the child, the future citizen. The family was consolidated as the matrix of the normal adult to come, who moved with a certain security through the stages of life. Of a life inscribed in a grid that contained and repaired (at least partially) the inequalities that characterise the social question.

The constitution of mythical time and the erasure of historical memory

Suddenly, the festive joy of the carnival breaks off: the film fades the colours of the celebration to black, and the same physical space reappears, but almost empty now, ugly, without colour or animation. The plot then continues many years later, in the now that weighs us down and smells of tragedy. In the scene that follows the fade to black, the spaces are no longer the place where loving bonds are constituted, they do not constitute a predictable time; already a conflict is announced in which the lack of work and violence between friends and between relatives begin to show. A time in which the old family has been shattered. A time in which the split “normal” – “pathological” has become obsolete, for there are no longer predictable times or spaces. But I ask myself: what does that fade to black between the two scenes imply? Something is missing there.

What is missing belongs to the order of history. In the place of the flesh and blood of history dwells the black. The following scenes unfold in the present, under the construction and the invocation of a mythical moment situated in a very different past; the difference is perceived, but what is not seen is that something is missing. The fade to black operates a cut in historical memory and thereby makes possible the play between the mythical moment, placed outside history (the carnival ball – the wage-earning society), and the present, whose ugly vacuity is thereby naturalised. That black which separates the present from the mythical past suspends in a nowhere the time and the space that make up the genealogy of the present tragedy, as if there were nothing to explain, or as if the reason for the tragedy lay in the corrupt politician who wants the club to be sold in exchange for some obscure deal from which he alone profits. But can the weave of the social be reduced to that perception?

Is it a few individuals of doubtful honesty who cause the destruction of the club, of social bonds, of Argentina? What does this substantialisation of processes in a single subject conceal?

What is missing from the film resembles the loss of our historical memory. Yet collective and historical memory is necessary in order to understand the present and to project oneself towards the future. What the film does not speak of is a profound historical mutation we have been going through since the 1970s, the moment when, at the international level, the parameters of capital accumulation changed on the basis of the third industrial revolution, which was expressed politically in the orientations of the Trilateral Commission and, in the 1980s, in the Washington Consensus. These “events” sanction a strategy that tends towards the end of “the social” as a weave containing and repairing differences; these facts sanction the end of the wage-earning society and of the pact between companies, the State and the trade unions. An end announced as a consequence of inter-capitalist struggles, but also of popular revolts. The wage-earning society, or society of disciplines, created homogeneous subjects, but also honest ones, believing in the law of the categorical imperative introjected within the family and, often for that very reason, resistant to injustice.

The collective bodies that once again called order into question in the 1960s, in various places around the world, constituted the conflictual emergence of the spectre of the social question. This showed that this spectre reappears, returns in various forms and under various names, is expressed in countless different social symptoms; this spectre seems constitutive of the capitalist social order. The various exorcisms of this spectre have failed; and so, in the 1980s, a triumphant Margaret Thatcher proclaimed, as a new exorcism, the end of “the social”.

Among us, this meant undoing the weave that had given rise to relations and bonds that are today the object of our nostalgia, and that the Luna de Avellaneda lights up in the first scene of the film, where the popular ball shows families and their affective bonds in a world in which neighbourhood relations were the extension of the intimacy of the house that opened us to the world. Thus, when the third industrial revolution made it possible, from the 1970s onwards, to replace living labour with dead labour as never before in history, the diagram of power began to change. The new technologies allowed capitalism to bypass its three strongest obstacles: the lack of energy, the lack of raw materials and the limits, both physical and psychosocial, of the labour force. To proclaim the end of “the social” implied the structuring of a strategy in which the loss of labour bonds would carry with it the rupture of neighbourhood, friendship, trade-union and family bonds.

In this new strategy, subjects are called “autonomous”, but that autonomy conceals a deep and harrowing subjective dereliction, sustained by the erasure of historical memory and by the disarticulation of societal bonds.

From the mid-1970s onwards, unemployment and the precarisation of work would become structural; the jobless would no longer be an “industrial reserve army”, but a growing layer of the world population, expelled from the system. From a system that demands, as one of its characteristics, the flexibility of products (thereby constantly renewing demand), of processes and of subjects.

The subject, in his very identity, must be made flexible in order to adapt to the constant changes demanded by the market, now represented by international bodies. The death of “the social” has meant a transformation of the totality of modes of thought, of culture, of political, social and economic relations and of the bonds between people.

This has implied a profound historical mutation in which the State and its functions have been resignified. In the country of Avellaneda, it has involved a tragedy that unfolded in several acts, which form, without our knowing it, the layers of our memory.

The three acts of an Argentine tragedy

The first act was constituted, at least in Latin America, by a wave of military dictatorships that imposed themselves in the name of national security, but whose purpose was to reformulate the relations between the State and civil society, in order to reconfigure the totality of relations in accordance with the demands of the mega-corporations that were arising in tune with the possibilities opened up by the change of productive paradigm.

The genocides perpetrated had several aims: from the economic point of view, to force the economies of the poor countries to adapt to the new dictates of the central countries led by the United States; from the political point of view, to bring about the constitution of a new social pact that would no longer rest on the moral integration of citizens; from the social and cultural point of view, the reconstruction of modes of thought and of conduct. This was deemed necessary by men such as Samuel Huntington (a member of the Trilateral Commission), who conceived the need to structure forms of “consensus by apathy” since, he said, an excess of democracy affects governability.

The existence of marginal populations would deactivate ardour and would make it possible to steer the poor countries more suitably, countries which moreover held raw materials and strategic resources. Those countries, in the case of Latin America, could ally themselves with one another or with the USSR: they had to be controlled.

The construction of consensus through the terror provoked by the disappearance of bodies was the first act of the tragedy. Terror undermines memory, produces a floating anxiety that drives towards the disavowal of what is given and, along with it, of the events, bonds or processes attached to the object of terror. Terror destructures social bonds and folds subjects back on themselves, without their even being aware of it.

The second act is formed by the emergence of democracies in the 1980s.

The dictatorships stood in the way of the flexible circulation of goods, subjects and information. The democracies were constituted on that layer of terror which had begun to associate politics with death and which engendered, unconsciously, a certain hostility towards politics, insofar as politics referred, more or less consciously, to the horror of death. That certain discouragement with regard to politics as a form of citizen participation in public affairs sharpens after the disenchantment produced in the population by many governmental measures. The process accelerates in hyperinflation, which reactivates at the unconscious level the horror of politics. Hyperinflation resignified the horror of the genocide, through the vulnerability to which it exposed subjects. With it, the destruction of bonds sharpened and memory once again disavowed the past, and in particular death.

The third act of the tragedy is consummated at the beginning of the 1990s, when saviour figures offer themselves and establish measures that promise entry into the paradise of the first world, a promise that implies tearing oneself away from the threat of death to which the two previous acts had exposed subjects. The figure and his entourage constituted a set of “key men” linked to the international establishment, who came to redefine politics and to depose the social, completing the process begun in 1976. The process that opened up in the 1990s has been characterised as “neo-decisionism” and came to reconfigure politics and to resemanticise history on the basis of the construction of consensus by apathy. “Neo-decisionism” rests on a strengthening of presidential powers, arising from the transition from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones and from state centralism to the free market.

The constitution of discretionary powers on the side of the Executive is sustained by leaders of popular tradition. The legitimacy of governmental acts rests on the response to the demand for efficient decision, and popular support emerges as a kind of “diffuse consensus” or “consensus by apathy”, such as Huntington called for in the 1970s, all of it within the framework of democracy and suffrage. The new strategy of reducing “the social” centred on the symbolic power of the leader bearing a “promise of salvation” and on an “efficient” elite, which replaced, without this being visible, contractualist and parliamentary values, active citizen participation and the differentiation between the public and the private spheres. On the juridical plane, it set the exception against the emergency and the force of the accomplished fact against the impersonal universal law. This surreptitiously reconciled a balance between two contradictory logics: “legitimation” and “repression” (Bosoer and Leiras, 1999).

Neo-decisionism was a political strategy aimed at countries liable to balk at the structural transformations led by the United States. Argentina, Peru and Russia were three of the countries in which it was tried out.

The process of the 1990s, politically sustained by neo-decisionism, converged with a media wave in which the work of the school and family communication were gradually replaced by the mass media. There, famous figures displayed the luxuries and beauties of power, while everything noble was disqualified. The entertaining, the easy, the vain then became the models to follow. The process of “cultural coarsening” of populations was completed by an incitement to the consumption of objects, of time and even of subjects. Everything was turned into merchandise, including loving bonds. The other ceased to be an end and became a means for obtaining ends. To the rhythm of the new carnival, the categorical imperative fell with a crash, while citizens delegated to others “who know” the responsibility for political participation and consented, without knowing it, to neo-decisionism.

Here the family shattered in its old roles, even if it persists in the imagination as a place of refuge. This contradiction between the imagined family and the effective family engenders conflicts that are inexplicable to subjects.

Yet this third act of the tragedy (every classical tragedy has three acts) had another dark side. The privatisations and technological advance left the nation-State without strategic resources, while unemployment and precarisation expelled half of Argentina’s working population from the labour market.

Disavowal of death and the constitution of a tragic subjectivity

Thus this tragedy in three acts has obscured memory, disavowed history and the death that inhabits it, and constituted the horizon of possibility allowing the flexibility of products, of processes and of subjects to be naturalised. The disavowal of death was sustained by the illusion of voracious consumption, which seemed to leave neither lacks nor holes. Consumption, to which old Aristotle alludes (without naming it, of course) in The Politics, is an infinity that is never filled, but which engenders the illusion of completeness. The illusion of consumption allowed many subjectivities to evade a feeling that later, when the carnival came to an end, burst forth with all its force. That feeling, which seems to predominate in the characters Luna de Avellaneda shows us, is anxiety. It reveals that, behind the dizzying pace of change, the perishability of all things is hidden, while at the same time the imminent danger of losing everything confronts subjects with a void that refers to finitude, to nothingness, to death. To a death that, as we have seen, has been disavowed in three historical moments. Disavowed death has sustained the erasure of historical memory and the transformation of the other into a means; through this, it has brought about the shattering of bonds and the emergence of subjective dereliction.

Yet this death, this limit, this disavowed finitude returns inevitably. It places subjects in tragic contradictions. It is possible that the condition of the tragic lies in situations in which a subject finds himself faced with two opposing imperatives and in which, whatever his decision, he perceives in one way or another that it will lead to his being condemned. In our subjects, today in Buenos Aires, several tragic contradictions dwell, which can be summed up in this fact: in order to be, they are required, on the one hand, to consume and renew incessantly and, on the other, they must increasingly take on the presence of lack.

The consequence of these tragic contradictions is expressed in growing anxiety, which manifests itself as a profound relapse into immediacy: this implies, on the one hand, the elimination of historical memory and of the possibility of projecting oneself towards the future and, on the other, the destructuring of social bonds. A folding back of subjects on themselves.

This inevitably involves a collapse of ideals, a narrowing of the gap between the ego ideal and the real ego, an effect of the relapse into immediacy, of a blind attachment to what is given.

The relapse into immediacy often has an influence on a diminution of the capacity for abstraction. On the cognitive plane, this is expressed in a language stuck to the concrete, in answers in which general concepts are replaced by singular examples or by images; the diminution of the capacity for abstraction is expressed not only as a lower cognitive performance, but also as a difficulty in imagining and proposing alternatives to what is given. It is also expressed in the fall of universal law and its replacement by self-interested loyalties. This relapse into immediacy, which erases the bonds with memory and with others, engenders the sense that the world is something inexplicable and ungovernable. That sense is nonetheless different according to the social zone one belongs to. The greater the expulsion from the social order (not only for economic reasons, but also through a lack of participation in collective activities), the greater the feeling of powerlessness and incomprehension seems to be. At the same time, this relapse into immediacy is expressed above all in a feeling of detachment, of dispassion. Sincere passion is dangerous in a world where everything is merchandise and where the subject must renew himself constantly. Thus, alongside detachment, boredom arises. Free time, or the time of study, involves neither inquiry, nor curiosity, nor creation, but emptiness. The occupation of time must have an immediate, visible, useful application.

When violence erupts in bodies

Now this tragic condition, the daughter of a death that is disavowed yet sharpened — for death now ceases to be a representation of strangeness and presents itself as something that can inevitably happen to any one of us —, bypasses the possibility of being put into words and emerges as violence. A dull, silent and unexpected violence which, lying in wait, springs against oneself or against others at the moment one least expects it.

In reality, this is in keeping with the fact that the world appears as nonsense, as something ungovernable and incomprehensible, for there is nothing that contains me or, worse still, there is no one who needs me for myself. Thus the nothingness of existence is often resolved into violence as a mode of self-affirmation, of self-bestowal of meaning in the face of the dizziness of innovation. A violence that is not proper to the poor, but which is expressed in every social sector, in a physical or a symbolic form. This mode of self-affirmation is often expressed, paradoxically, as an attempt at one’s own death. The rise in suicide rates and in drug addictions is part of this. Turns of speech that name death are particularly noticeable among the youngest. In them, the desire for death could perhaps be read, as in various cultures, as a return to the maternal womb, to the peace of mother earth. Early pregnancy, so frequent, can also be read in this key: the child is a way of affirming oneself in a world where death and nonsense deprive subjects of the possibility of collective projects. The child is a way of being in the world, often the only possible project of one’s own.

The tragic condition that tears Argentine subjectivity apart disavows reality as an objective social process, insofar as reality leads to death, no longer as the representation of something strange, but as an inevitable presence. There follows the projection onto others of one’s own anxiety, a projection that turns into the moral blaming of the other, or into the most pitiless racism. This engenders family, group and intrapersonal conflicts. Conflicts aggravated by social fragmentation, which has built diverse codes of communication.

Thus, in the first scene of Luna de Avellaneda, the codes of the gaze and those of speech had a certain affinity that made communication possible. In the scenes of the present-day world, communication is more and more a fiction. The fall of universal law is accompanied by the collapse of shared codes and, with it, dialogues are often a set of monologues, simply because there are no shared ways of seeing the world and speaking about it. The conflict, incapable of being put into words, is projected and reified onto others: the young and the poor. They are the repositories of an anxiety linked to the disavowed danger of death. They come to embody the unacknowledged danger of death.

At the same time, the processes and the political participation of citizens through the institutions of the republic are devalued and turned into a thing in the figure of the “politician”, who appears as the individual person responsible for the tragedy. The process is lost from view and reality is seen as incomprehensible and ungovernable. Reciprocal distrust corners subjects in a context of deposed social bonds. “Politicians” (as though they constituted a “class”) are then called upon for a firm hand, for the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility. All of it tinged with a veil of “apoliticism”. A formidable paradox built within a tragedy: “politicians” are asked, in an “apolitical” manner, to use, within democracy, a firm hand against those in whom our own anxiety is reified.

Those others are generally our neighbour, a young person or a poor person involuntarily expelled from the labour market.

An open ending: how are we to refound ourselves?

In spite of everything, hope is stubbornly reborn in subjects; thus, in the scene that precedes the closing credits of Luna de Avellaneda, the protagonist, an honest, intelligent, courageous and combative man, finds his old membership card for the club again and asks how they might go about founding a new club.

The analogy is simple: how are we to refound ourselves as a country? how are we to refound our old loving bonds? how are we to reconstitute the equitable Law? The soul of the viewer then blazes with emotion. An open ending…

And yet Luna de Avellaneda does not end there. The true ending comes when, in the middle of the credits that close the film, one of the protagonists resorts to a disloyal stratagem in order to “repay” her ex-husband for the ill-treatment he had inflicted on her.

Some viewers laugh, others applaud. Revenge has been carried out. And yet I ask myself… what does this “closing syntagm” mean? What does this scene almost outside the film build in us, spilling over into the real world amid the lights that are beginning to come back on? Does it not once again sanction reciprocal distrust, the fall of law, of the true and profound law? Does it not come to tell us, ambivalently, that the only way out is individual salvation, dressed in the framework of the autonomy of subjects, of women’s liberation, or of so many other human rights mistreated and used to build the fragmentation of “the social”?

This ending outside the ending allows the old catharsis to take place, but, unintentionally, it confirms us in the consensus by apathy, sustained by our pain and by our forgetting of history and of law. These pages, too, have an open ending; the ending takes up the question again:

how are we to reconstruct historical memory, social bonds and a law that includes us and respects us in our otherness? How are we to reconstruct love?

Without it, there is only dereliction.