Contemporânea

 With this text, I aim to question the validity of critical thought and of the writing we produce, in the increasing awareness of the difficulties (often impossibility) of producing any real social impact, given the rampant, uncritical ways in which society manifests itself in the public sphere. I do not seek to justify such ineffectiveness, but rather to contribute to a reflection on possible forms of resisting the dominance of narratives that so clearly fail to serve either our shared lives, or the environments that sustain them. Public narratives are seductive, powerful weapons; and because the language of power depends upon the maintenance of immediacy, apathy, and oversimplification, we find ourselves living in a world entirely subjected to competing fictions. Words have so thoroughly escaped their functional structures that they have come to wear the same costume as the images that speed voraciously through the dulled synapses of anonymous but easily profiled audiences. As Marc Augé notes, “(the) links between life and art are so close that it is sometimes hard to know”1 how meaning moves between the two. And it is spectacle—flattened into oversimplified events, inflating faits divers beyond what may be reasonable—that has taken over the most mundane, accessible spaces of everyday life, aggregated on our mobile phones. We know that anything may grab attention, as a hook intended to effectively manipulate desire through psychological capture; we know that today’s social dynamics often resemble a mediatic tragicomedy. It would perhaps be comical if the daily struggles for survival were not under such constant and violent threat!

I will explore the concepts of liminality and hybridity as key to the understanding of the current cultural and social dynamics, especially in contexts marked by transition, borders, and globalisation. In recovering a vital tradition of critical thought, I propose these concepts as operative tools for examining situations of ambiguity, transformation and of the negotiation of identity across various domains of human life. Though necessarily in a brief manner, this enquiry will touch upon a few key thinkers, from Franco “Bifo” Berardi to Davi Kopenawa, in what may seem like a backwards trajectory from the standpoint of a "Westernising" logic—one in which the power of civilisation is grounded in the illusion of infinite growth. What interests me, thus, is to invoke certain voices that help frame this movement as essential to resisting the colonisation of time and the capture of our attention by the processes of extreme extractivist capitalism, which undermines the possibility of an integrated humanised future.

In Futurability,2 Franco Berardi writes, “(p)ossibility is content, potency is energy, and power is form,” opening up a triadic field in which power establishes the form through which it dominates content—and by extension, the potency that might otherwise push consciousness forward. He argues that intelligent life is precisely this process of “local, provisional reversal of entropy”—always local and provisional—because power, in its ability to realise possibility, will always favour its own continuity and (ever-expanding) empowerment. And this is how we have come to witness the global consolidation of so many different autocracies. Quoting Gilles Deleuze (commenting on Spinoza), Berardi notes that power is exercised through the maintenance of sadness and guilt. These “sad passions” (such as fear, guilt, sorrow), are the most effective tools of power because they diminish the individual’s potency for action and awareness.

The tyrant needs sadness to exercise their power. Sadness is the energy of servitude.3

And sadness is served under the guise of instant gratification and under the illusion of control that technocracy implements so singularly. The promise of the age of the algorithm, that arrived under the mask of liberation and empowerment, has in fact eroded the coherence of lived daily experience, both cognitively and emotionally. Essentially there is no mental or emotional mechanisms to cope with the fragmentation of the online experience, in which human actions offer the illusion of control that, in fact, is a form of submission. This is hardly new, but perhaps never before has it been so difficult to counteract in our current reality. In the very first line of Scorched Earth, Jonathan Crary writes: “If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline …”4 I wonder whether one possible path to this liveable and shared future might lie in the ability to occupy multiple positions—not only in spatial or material terms, but, in light of the lessons from Cultural Studies, also in identitarian ones. I will try to lay out some of its consequences.

As mentioned above, it is through the psychological manipulation of desire that the algorithm controls both individual and collective potency, whether by flooding an unchecked marketplace with limitless choice, by steering and distorting perception, or by peddling the deceitful immediacy of promised futures. It is common knowledge that these mechanisms celebrate ways of living which are patently out of reach yet persistently marketed as attainable, thereby directing the perception of failure toward the most immediate targets: the neighbour, the (poor) foreigner, the one who is different. What is disturbing is that egalitarian processes that took decades to build and implement within society have now been reframed as obstacles to domination; and so perception itself is manipulated to discredit them. What we need, then, is to rethink the form of the political outside the logic of consumerist desire—the guilt we are made to feel over consumption serves only to mask the self-serving excess of industrial hyper-production—as a hybrid, liminal political form that articulates positions of refusal and resistance. In Scorched Earth, Jonathan Crary defines digital capitalism as a regime of “scorched earth” that extinguishes our ways of inhabiting the world, both ecologically and socially. He proposes a “radical practice of refusal of the 24/7 continuum”, showing how capitalist power controls collective and individual potency by capturing time, attention, and hope, repackaged as desire. The algorithm understands the psychology of desire and learns to generate frustration followed by gratification, capitalising on the smallest lapse in (in)attention to divert the brain’s electric current towards the next field. This constant buzz of information does something to memory—this is not news—but it also does something far more lethal to our very notion of the future, which cannot be imagined without an anchor in what has passed. Marc Augé writes, “(w)hen the past disappears, meaning is erased,” and, with caution, underlines the importance of the past:

Ambiguity is the armature of a dialectical conception of reality and history which lays heavy emphasis on contradiction, and which is thus responsible for the importance we ascribe to the role of the past in every domain. That role is undeniable, and it would be absurd and dangerous to ignore it either in the life of groups or of individuals. But to use it as the explanation for everything, to make it the sole actor, is to risk ignoring in our relation to time all that falls outside history, or more exactly evades historical determination: intuition, creation, commencement, volition, encounters.5

It is, then, in the experiential dimension that we may find keys to an understanding of the fluidity of rites of passage wherein the concept of in-betweenness becomes useful. Originating in anthropology, first introduced by Arnold van Gennep in Les Rites de Passage (1909) and later developed by Victor Turner (1969),6 in-betweenness refers to transitional states in which individuals find themselves between social or ontological statuses, marked by ambiguity, the resignification of social norms, and the potential for symbolic reinvention. In this in-between space-time, identities are reconfigured, creating the conditions for new forms of individual and collective identitarian affirmation to emerge. The idea of liminality is thus grounded in a performative notion of culture that emphasizes the active, often tactical dimension of social life, reinforcing the idea of fluidity in the formation of identity.7 It is impossible not to consider that every moment in which power exerts pressure on individual or collective potency (in war or under oppressive regimes, e.g.) has a transformative effect on identities, thereby deeply reshaping cultures in their struggle to survive. What I want to return to here is a line of thought from Cultural Studies that treats the notion of identity positioning as a framework for hybridity and fluidity, especially through the work of Homi K. Bhabha (1994),8 one of the foremost postcolonial theorists. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha proposes hybridity as a discursive strategy that emerges within the so-called “third space”: a fluid zone where different cultures intersect, clash, and generate new meanings. Hybridity, therefore, is not (it rarely is) a harmonious fusion or evolution; rather, it is a volatile, generative process of negotiation, resistance, and reinscription of meaning. Harmony, in such a process, is inversely proportional to the intensity and duration of the pressure exerted. The mechanisms set in motion by technological progress—which is primarily developed at the service of excessive industrialisation and militarisation, especially in contexts of colonialism, migration, and diaspora—suspend categories like identity and culture, and open the door to dystopian realities. Any moment of transition places bodies in a state of vulnerability; and so we must speak of the body (or bodies) as living site(s) of absorption, change, and archive—as Bruno Latour puts it: "the body as what learns to be affected,” a constant interface where chemistries, technologies, and experiences intersect, and in whose very existence the violence of imposed processes is inscribed. Berardi asks:

What can our body do nowadays? What can the social body do under the present condition of separation from the automated brain? (2017, p. 14)

Might utopias, then, be the space of resistance to dystopias within the asymmetrical power structures produced by processes of domination? And yet utopias have failed us precisely in the face of situations where the exercise of power annihilates freedom, survival, life itself.

It is impossible, then, to speak of utopias of material life without also addressing the ways in which a notion of hybridity actively affects the forms of transition (movement being the very condition of bodily existence) that act upon the body and the immaterial dimensions of life (including the control of movement). The mistrust of hybrid forms by those seeking to dominate arises insofar as fluidity evades control; and yet, paradoxically, hybridity finally becomes co-opted as a tool to fallaciously control collective narratives. What I want to stress is that the sophistication of manipulative mechanisms leaves only the narrowest margin for asserting awareness, operating as they do on the thin edge of plausibility, which requires not only close attention but also literacy. Facts and their manipulation, reality and spectacle, are rendered indistinguishable in the cracks of inattention and the collective thirst to witness catastrophe. Such is the crisis of hybridity, playing on indeterminacy to sabotage the potential of an ambiguity that could generate meaning.

This is why the challenge posed by deepfakes goes far beyond any intrinsic idea of falsity, for it forces us to ask how prepared humankind really is to face, question, and defend the very notion of truth. In a world where the representation of truth is constantly reshaped by proliferating synthetic realities,9 it is the meaning of truth itself, beyond its appearance, that becomes negotiable, vulnerable to preference, power, and manipulation. Rather than trying to see within the blinding glare of the media, we need to learn to "see in the dark." As Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, seeing in the dark "(...) is not the sight of a single person but a collective and collaborative process, seeing in the dark has resilience and love whose older name is solidarity.”^[10

The true catastrophe of the present, as such, is the tragic annihilation of solidarity. And whilst, as we know, movements of solidarity have historically comprised colonising mechanisms, with well-meaning intentions cloaking a form of Western arrogance, what we are now witnessing in global politics is the overt, unprecedented destruction of even the most basic principle of human empathy. And that is the most tragic kind of arrogance: the one that dehumanises and reduces both human lives and entire ecosystems to a dangerously reductive Manichaeism.

Catastrophe and ecology are bound together in a shared reality. As Bruno Latour puts it:

Ecological politics needs to acknowledge that ecological crises are not simply crises in nature, but also a crisis of objectivity: by definition, its objects are uncertain, controversial and shape-shifting hybrids (…)11

And in this sense, in the ruins of cities or forests, time exists without date, because past forms and present tragedies converge in them simultaneously. Paraphrasing Marc Augé, for whom, in the tragedy of catastrophe, time is not completely abolished. According to the author the ruins prevent the landscape from sinking into the indeterminacy of a human-less nature. Marc Augé speaks of a sort of pedagogical potential of ruins. Even if we assume that, in the wake of catastrophe, nature will eventually assert its autonomy and outlast us, even amongst ruins of concrete and stone, we also know that it is the very notion of a nature without humans that does not, in truth, exist. In trying to separate the human from the natural, we fall into two epistemological errors: the first is imagining we can dispense with our natural surroundings in a utopia of artificialism; the second is to confine the existence of things, including nature, to our own cognition. The first fuels the technological chimera that proposes synthetic (so-called artificial) realities not as concomitant, hybrid, or integrative, but as substitutes. The second reveals the human being’s most arrogant presumption.

Hito Steyerl12describes the contemporary world as “medium hot”—a zone where the symbolic temperature of images and discourse oscillates between fact and fiction. This fluctuation reveals that forms are not fixed, and gives rise to the proliferation of hybrid meanings. But the idea I mentioned earlier about how power controls energy is strikingly exemplified by a situation Steyerl recounts, in which, after inputting the prompt “protest” into an AI platform, the image returned shows a militarised figure in a vigilant stance, watching a blurred group of figures and an indistinct projection in the background. The image does not depict protest in terms of collective rights, but rather through the looming threat of their subjugation. The script fed into the algorithm is shaped by a narrative of control, not by the assumption of freedom that we hold as intrinsic to a way of life we believe in, and which we now recognise we must return to (or continue) fighting for. For freedom is not an achieved condition, but rather an ongoing process.13

So, knowing that democracy has been hijacked by the control of media and by the spectacle of populism, how can we prevent hope from being taken hostage by dystopia, bought out as it has been by the voracity of media and markets? As Judith Butler suggests, resistance—a word worn thin by media repetition—lies in the ability to view vulnerability not as a condition of oppression but as a form of resistance, as a process that culminates “(...) in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction coupled with a commitment to world building that honors global interdependency of the kind that embodies ideals of economic, social, and political freedom and equality.”14She wonders whether that which stops us from killing could also be what prompts us to seek moral or political paths that actively, wherever possible, strive to preserve life. The problem for the vulnerable dimension of existence is that this sense of preservation is incompatible with the ruling unrestrained mercantile ambition, which is hasty, ruthless, and exclusivist.

In The Aesthetics of Resistance, Peter Weiss shows how the artistic and political gestures of the oppressed resist through the reinvention of form, activating memory as an active potency. It would be in the love of life and of the Earth that holds it, then, that the possibility of reinvention might continue to safeguard both land as habitat and the egalitarian ideals that preserve social co-habitability. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky (2010) has been widely cited in denouncing the destruction of the forest as a form of cosmological collapse, showing that the Earth’s becoming depends on ways of inhabiting it, grounded on an integrated understanding of environment and body—a cosmology in which we play a minute part. Kopenawa demonstrates that the most lethal feature of human practice lies in the imbalance between the scale of our presence in the cosmos and the impact of our actions, whether locally or indirectly. Furthermore, in claiming that to “inhabit the Earth” we must break with extractivist modernity, Bruno Latour15posits the planet as a relational subject with a kind of autoimmune consciousness that will always work towards its own preservation, learning to integrate the synthetic products of technological revolutions into hybrid strategies of survival. Where and how we stand as humans, should we annihilate the awareness of justice, equality, the protection of vulnerability, and the celebration of biological and cultural diversity, is, therefore, the larger interrogation of the present.

As we have seen, Marc Augé, though wary of historical determinism, stresses the importance of history. We often decry historical ignorance; but in the immediacy of the present, it is our collective responsibility that is being gagged by a kind of invisibility that no amount of media exposure can counter—as though competing for visibility had become the barometer of reality. There is a sort of inverted priority in being aware of a past that the present renders inoperative, because the space for free action vanishes when that fleeting moment of consciousness itself becomes deterministic—that is, when we proceed to exist “within” the instrument that measures the real (that barometer that sucks us in), instead of embracing responsibility for the future that is contained in the present we inhabit. For it is the crimes of the present to which history cannot offer justification that reconfigure memory and redefine the horizon within which we imagine the future. And how can we envision the future if the present, in its extreme violence, is never duly processed?

To reflect on the becoming of history through the lenses of liminality and hybridity is to acknowledge that history is and will always be an unfinished process made up of interruptions and reinventions, driven by an insurgent present. The notion of potency, as the energy of becoming, is key to becoming aware of the processes of transformation that unfold beyond or beneath the instituted forms, which will always seek to manipulate said processes. To inhabit the liminal is to survive oppression, whether overt or covert. To critically understand the hybrid is a radical gesture of affirmation. Along this path, it is worth remembering that aesthetic, ontological, and epistemological resistance is profoundly entwined with how we inhabit time—and how we love the Earth.