La ofensiva sensible: a somatic reading of the present moment

A body’s persistence in letting a single form-of-life affect it, despite the diversity of situations it passes through, depends on its crack. The more a body cracks up—that is, the wider and deeper its crack becomes—the fewer the polarizations compatible with its survival there are, and the more it will tend to recreate situations in which it finds itself involved in its familiar polarizations. The bigger a body’s crack grows, the more its absence to the world increases and its penchants dwindle.

Tiqqun, Introduction to the civil war

We share a review-reading of Diego Sztulwark’s essay La ofensiva sensible (Caja Negra, 2019) by Amador Fernández-Savater, published with lobo suelto (04/12/2020).

According to his teacher Ignacio Lewkowicz, Diego Sztulwark practices a “dirty way” of reading and writing. What does it consist of? It is a way of saying what one wants to say through the words and thoughts of another, a smuggling of one’s own intuitions under the cloak of suitably distorted scholarly or erudite quotes. It is the “method” by which La ofensiva sensible has been written. The result is very rich, because it gives the reader a large number of powerful references -the “plebe” of Lefort/Machiavelli, the “way of life” of Pierre Hadot, the “knowledge of the body” of León Rozitchner, etc. – and at the same time an original thought is passed on without fanfare that productively wrings these same references in the desired direction.

Even so, for some reason that he does not reveal, Diego considers that this “method” is “surely unsatisfactory” to account for “the exigency that every singular event imposes”. While waiting for a new creative attempt in the order of thought and writing, we are going to review this book in a “dirty” way as well, but in reverse. If Diego passes his intuitions through the ideas of others, we will pass Diego’s ideas through some of our own words and images; an exercise in paraphrasing. But the goal is always the same: to keep ideas moving, translate them, and re-appropriate them without fetishism or veneration, something that we have learned in good measure from the author.

Somatic battle

We grasp a possible thread of dirty reading among others: the question of the body. Neoliberalism according to Diego Sztulwark is not only a political, economic or ideological issue, it does not have to do exclusively with austerity policies, adjustment plans or faith in the free market, but also, at the same time, alongside and through all of this, with the daily production and reproduction of a body type.

At the heart of the struggle to preserve or transform the state of affairs is therefore a fundamental somatic dimension, but to which very little attention is paid. There is a very severe limit in the politics that ignore bodies, in the politics that say to bodies: “don’t move, don’t worry, stay still, I’ll take care of the fighting for you.” What limit is it?

We can have both an anti-neoliberal or post-neoliberal government and a deeply neoliberal society, whose bodies and the relationships they maintain with each other and with the world are organised by devices that reproduce a mode of existence based on calculating and extracting profit from every encounter, every bond, every situation, every gesture.

Neoliberalism – a notion that the author considers “unsatisfactory” and only provisionally useful – not only “descends” from hieght of political command, but also “rises up” from society to power through ways of life. The electoral victory and the Macri government – and other similar governments – can thus be understood as a concentrate, a reflection, a hologram of the triumph of neoliberal ways of life, of the neoliberal body.

The flexible body

From reading the book, I propose three images to contribute to giving visibility and importance to this somatic dimension of social transformation: the flexible body, the cracked body and the vagabond body. They are bodies in dispute between the forces present at the current moment. In the middle would be the fissures, the holes.

The flexible body is the neoliberal body, the body that we are pressured to give to ourselves as entrepreneurs, managers of a human capital that we must constantly valorise, the “I” as a brand. It is an ideal and idealised body of omnipotence (“yes, we can”), independence (“I can alone”) and total availability (“I always can”). According to Diego Sztulwark, this flexibility is actually pure docility before the neoliberal apparatuses of market valorisation. It has nothing to do with an interesting plasticity, a desirable porosity, an openness to the wild and unknown side of life.

Three notes on that neoliberal body. In the first place, it is reproduced through all kinds of apparatuses that work beyond or below the state sphere: traveling on Uber, communicating on Facebook, shopping at the supermarket, flirting on Tinder, etc. Second, it is more consumed than invented. Neoliberalism proposes “ways of life” already made, ready to “take down from the shelf”, if one has the means to pay for them, of course. Every existential problem has its solution, its recipe, its app. There is a fundamental difference between “mode of life” (that is consumed) and “form of life” (that is created). Third, neoliberalism is a power of homologation, of standardisation, of abstraction, never of singularisation. The only permitted singularisation is the “free choice” of this or that profile on Facebook or Tinder, of this or that product in the supermarket. It is a fatal mistake to give over the word “singularity” to neoliberalism, which only knows of the effort to distinguish between identical commodities.

Finally, the flexible neoliberal body – which each one of us is – is as fragile as glass. Unlike many books of critical thinking, Diego does not gloat about describing to us how neoliberalism has us trapped and even more trapped the more we believe we reject it. He does not fall into the fascination of the “perfect crime” that permeates so many sophisticated denunciations today. This is a strategic book, written from the point of view of resistance, because criticism does not pass so much by what is said, as from where one looks.

The holes

Describing neoliberalism from the point of view of the resistance goes through seeing it entirely bored out. The neoliberal biopolitical fabric -which is presented as total, full, finished- is in reality perforated on all sides. We have the body, as the colleagues from Córdoba say, made a sieve.

A crisis of meaning is a hole.

A social or environmental catastrophe is a hole.

A revolt is a hole.

Perhaps the strongest statement in this book is this: its only possible to see, think, and transform something beginning where the holes are. The “symptoms”, in the author’s language.

This is a difficult statement to accept because those holes are our wounds. We can only see, think or transform something from intimate and collective wounds, but that means keeping them open and it hurts.

The neoliberal flexible body, which aspires to omnipotence, independence and availability, is deep down as fragile as glass. Certainly more fragile than other dominant forms of subjectivisation in the past. The neoliberal self presents itself as a conqueror, but it is always on the verge of depression, on the verge of collapse, a couple of crises away from becoming a clown like the Joker.

What are we going to do with our hole filled bodies? This question is a crucial crossroads in the book. Are we going to give ourselves a new body from there or are we going to let ourselves be overcome by fear, to try to regain normalcy, to close the holes as we can?

The age, and each one of us, walks this tightrope.

The cracked body

Let’s start with the second option: the cracked body (1). The cracked body is a perferated body but that has run out of resources – its own forces, networks, alliances – to give itself a new body, to carry out transformations. It can be an individual or collective body, a subject or a society, there is no difference.

This body is no longer the flexible neoliberal body – triumphant, energetic, optimistic – but it does not invent a way of life either. It is paralysed, terrified to death.

It is a body (that perceives itself as) made of glass, about to explode into a thousand pieces at the slightest contact. It flees from any encounter that puts its to the test like the plague, from any encounter with something it does not understand or master. It only wants to repeat the familiar scenes, where it knows how to function, where its cracks cannot be seen from the outside.

It defends itself against cracks and holes in at least three ways:

-Resorting to all types of prostheses. The prosthesis is the way to appear normal when the latter no longer exists, when everything falters or collapses. It is an apparatus of order in disorder, of balance in imbalance, of control in chaos. Diego lists: “Tinelli [celebrity television host in argentina], porn, gambling, series, evangelism, football.” We could add: therapies, pills, mindfulness … In fact anything can be a prosthesis, including political activism, because its objective consistency does not configure it as such, but rather we grasp it as a stabiliser, a repairer of meaning, a mask without play.

-The withdrawal or absence, all the forms of the “disappearance of oneself” as described in the book of the same name by David Le Breton, that is, all the ways of disappearing from the world and deserting one’s affections, all forms of anesthesia and desensitisation. He is the Joker when, after suffering several stumbles on any given day, he finally arrives home, carefully takes all the products out of the freezer and then goes inside himself.

-Victimisation, the search for a culprit for what happens to me, the idea that I can close the hole in the crisis by locating and neutralising an enemy, a scapegoat whose sacrifice will return us to normality: overly empowered women, migrants , youth from the peripheries, etc. It is necessary to think about the unprecedented capacity of the current right to cause damage with its policies of predation and at the same time channel the discomfort – even protest – against that damage.

Today the cracked body turns to the right everywhere, but it is not a question of challenging it from the left, of promising from the left real protection that the right would only pretend to give, as left-wing populism thinks, but to get out of it, to get out of our victimised and spectator condition, always waiting for something or someone who – without touching our body, through delegation and representation – will save us from the dangers that threaten us.

The vagabond body

Brazilian activist Alana Moraes draws attention (2) to the following: Bolsonaro won the 2018 elections with a campaign directed against vagabonds. Vagabonds are first of all the homeless, against whom sectors of the police want to have the right to shoot with impunity, but not only. Vagabonds are also indigenous people, blacks, women who move from their place, teachers who teach “what they shouldn’t” … That is, anyone who does not fit or who questions the standard of total productivity.

Everything that sneaks in, everything that escapes, everything that slips through the holes is a vagabond: all forms of life heterogeneous at some point to the norm of total productivity; all other ways of relating to oneself (not as an entrepreneur of oneself), with others (not as obstacles or competitors) and with the world (not as a territory of predation). The vagabond does not avoid holes, but crosses through them and continues, surely not to another dimension, but to another plane of perception.

The vagabond deserts. The deserter was the subversive figure par excellence of the disciplinary society: the one who escaped from the main mold of all disciplines, the army, the one who escaped from the “total mobilisation” of society for war. The Jews, the homosexuals, the gypsies were deserters… But when capital assumes its neoliberal form, life is mobilised again. Now by the economic war; every aspect and every moment of existence is capable of generating value, that is contemporary predatory capitalism. The vagabond that Bolsonaro wants to eliminate is the one who deserted from total productivity, from war and postmodern fascism.

We can learn a lot from these vagrant bodies by listening: it is a compelling invitation from this book. Learn and become infected with those “subjectivities of the crisis” or “plebeian subjectivities” that know how to do without guarantees, do with little, inhabit uncertainty. Neoliberal fascism – fascism as a prosthesis of the cracked body – does not want to eliminate vagabond bodies just because, because they are weak, as is sometimes said of women, migrants or the poor. Quite the contrary: it wants to eliminate them because they are strong in their assumed vulnerability, because they fight and invent life forms in the middle of quicksand.

Jack Kerouac, who wandered a lot himself, has beautiful pages on American vagrants: without idealising them, he never simply regards them as wretched figures of poverty and lack. There is a “pride” of the vagabond, says Kerouac, there is a desire and a drive for vagrancy. It is the pride of a sovereign way of life, in the sense that it does not receive its value from elsewhere, but creates value from itself and on the go, on the road.

That is the pride that puts them in the spotlight of the fascisms that emerge today. Precisely the one who does not allow themselves to be sacrificed, who does not want to sacrifice their life on the altar of the homeland-company, becomes sacrificial for others. It is the “parasite”, the “enemy”, whose elimination will supposedly bring prosperity and normality again.

The vagabond is a failure in the complete identification between life and capital that neoliberalism seeks; it is any of us when it feeds a crisis of meaning in terms of a transformation of forms of life.

To resensitise the cracked body

A hope for our cracked body: the movements.

It is very limited to understand movements simply from the perspective of political sociology, as “social movements” or even as “counterpowers”. If the heart of the political dispute is our body, what effects do movements have on them? Effects of resensitisation tells us this book, in the wake of Franco Berardi (Bifo) or Rita Segato. What does this mean?

A movement is what allows us to heal our cracked body without resorting to stabilising prostheses, without anesthetizing ourselves or erasing ourselves from the map, without surrendering to the reactive rage that seeks those responsible, blameable, for our misery. Healing here is the exact opposite of repairing, denying, and patching holes. It is to gain in plasticity; it is knowing how to do with not knowing; it is to make the crisis a lever for intimate and social transformation.

Wherever there is fear, resentment or reactive anger, a movement can graft on the individual and collective body a taste, a desire, an openness and a willingness to meet, to move, to think, to create. Wherever the other is presented to us as that which threatens our fragile and cracked body, a movement can bring forth the empathy, solidarity, confidence that the only possible salvation lies precisely in contact, by coming into contact.

I read this book from Europe that right now appears to me as a large cracked body, that rejects, for example, migrants who could be – and in fact are already, at many levels – a factor of rejuvenation, enrichment and revitalisation of the cracked body.

To the left and to the right, all political discourses challenge the body-victim, the suffering body, the cracked body that asks for protection and security. With different meanings, all political speeches offer prosthetics and point to some guilty scapegoat for our holes (migrants, the political elite, both). The right is very effective in this discourse, a certain left drools with envy and even flirts with racism and xenophobia to resemble it.

The movements open other paths, outside of those infernal alternatives. They affirm and deploy potentialities that are not only of vertical protection and tutelage, but of cultural, existential bifurcation. They do not simply contain the civilisational crisis with patches, but leverage it to turn it towards a civilising mutation. They not only return to normal, but create new forms of life. They not only plug the holes but look, think and create from them, to widen the cracks.

In these movements we find alliances between cracked bodies -whose cracks come together along the way, passing from victims to affected- and homeless bodies in search of other forms of life. It is my perception of the French yellow vests for example. But let’s not expect any purity or coherence in these movements, because the matter with which they work is misery and the energy they elaborate comes from their wounds, not from ideology, consciousness, a programme or an alternative model of society. How much impurity can we sustain?

They are themselves vagabond movements because they do not know where they are going, where we are going, surely unlike other times when there was, whether acknowledged or not, a social alternative such as that offered by the USSR; impure politicisations in which it is mainly about being involved, in contact, listening, learning, transforming and to whose slow construction of another vocabulary, of other forms of action and other images of change, this little great book by Diego Sztulwark wants to contribute.

Communication at the presentation of La offensiva sensible at the La casa del arbol librería in Buenos Aires on Thursday, December 5, together with Diego Genoud, Lila Feldman and Diego Sztulwark.

(1) On this figure of the cracked body, one can read something more in Introduction to the civil war by Tiqqun.

(2) For example here: http://www.ihu.unisinos.br/159-noticias/entrevistas/583308-a-polarizacao-politica-as-paixoes-da-sociedade-e-a-disputa-pelos-rumos-do-neoliberalismo-entrevista-especial-com-alana-moraes

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.