By LAZAR VASCONCELOS OLIVEIRA*

If the classic hero has succumbed to the spectacularization of reality, perhaps the solution lies not in the search for new myths, but in the deconstruction of the very idea of ​​heroism. After all, in a world where politics dissolves into algorithms and revolution is reduced to hashtags, the true act of courage may be to refuse to play any role.

In Immanuel Kant's Copernican turn specifically in Critique of Pure Reason (1781) his work is guided by the central question of German idealism: Do external objects enable knowability? In other words, what is the relationship between the subject of experience and the objects external to him?

Long before German idealism, Buddhist epistemology was also concerned with the representational unity of the world, the self (self). The difference is that for Buddhism, this unity of representation creates an illusion between the self, phenomena and time.

In Immanuel Kant, time is transcendental for knowledge, it is the possibility of representing objects, in Buddhism, the self (self) creates an illusion of representation of the world and distorts the perception of time, creating an existential abyss between the finitude and infinity of objects.

Thus, if the representational materiality of the world of objects creates a kind of attachment to the world through passions, subjects begin to divide themselves between friends and enemies, because this attachment to the world reverberates in an accumulation of emotions, which transgress the balance of good living, or rather, the essential notion that everything dissolves in time.

1.

The origin of the Greek word “Eros”, westernized as “hero”, is linked to the idea of ​​the myth of someone who acts driven by a passion, whether for a cause, for others or for some ideal. Anakim Skywalker’s hero’s journey in Star Wars, George Lucas' film franchise, conveys very well the notion of Karma in Buddhism, of the force that governs the universe, without necessarily being bound by a Christian Manichaean notion of good and evil.

This escape from the Christian notion of the world made possible a beautiful reading by George Lucas of the gears that govern bourgeois democracy internally, in the same way I will use the first three great acts; the hero's journey, the hero's fallacy and the dissolution of democracy in Star Wars in light of the theory of simulacra, to understand how the bourgeois institutions built on the accumulation of catechist colonialism ended in a passive nihilism of the masses, which Baudrillard well explained when he said that “the Kingdom of God has always been on earth, in the pagan immanence of images, in the spectacle that the Church offered them […] The masses absorbed religion in the magical and spectacular practice that they adopted” (2005, p. 5).

The first three Star Wars films follow a galactic republic, composed of several species and planets governed by the Senate, after the coup of the Sith Lords, minority factions that represent the dark side of knowledge about the force, a centralization of power occurs, diluting a republican democracy into an imperial tyranny, as warned The Federalists (1788), a collection of Enlightenment articles by Anglo-American intellectuals who defended the constitution, and which today, in my view, much better represents the position of the institutional left.

When Anakim receives the call to the hero's journey, he echoes with him the Oedipal oracular curse of Yoda, which transcribes how his future was still protected by the emotional loss of his mother. In the franchise's script, the hero's journey is wisely diluted in a Machiavellian plot around passions and power. The unknown and the dark force quickly capture Skywalker through their emotional interference, his passions, which leads him to commit genocide based on his illusion of achieving the power of immortality, which reveals his immaturity, as Yoda predicted, in dealing with loss.

Se Star Wars were it not fiction, it would be quite ironic, or timely in how its reinterpretation in light of the 2016 coup up to the events of January 8, 2023 allows us, like George Lucas, to make a Machiavellian analysis of the journey of Brazilian democracy, without necessarily falling into the Manichaeism of the notion of institutionalized right and left, or into the myth that democracy needs to be represented by a hero.

This is because institutionalization itself is no longer the only force on the political board, the virtualization of time has revealed that democratic reason has long since been replaced by the reason of the masses, but as Baudrillard pointed out, the masses do not even have reason, but “the masses are a much stronger means than all the means of communication, which are the ones that entangle and absorb them – or at least there is no priority of one over the other” (2005, p. 22-23).

2.

The current media coverage of the imprisonment of Rio de Janeiro trap and funk musicians crystallizes an old contingency of state punishment that becomes a spectacle against the outskirts, but in postmodernity, punishment is simultaneously fetishized. On the other hand, the simulacrum problem already exposed at the end of the 2005th century by Baudrillard about the end of the social, no longer the contradiction of value, but of its incoherence, total dissolution, because the masses only “want signs, they idolize the game of signs and stereotypes, they idolize all content as long as it transforms into a spectacular sequence” (6, p. XNUMX).

Thus, the mediatization of state punishment creates for marginalized communities a Greek gift sculpted by the media simulacra of punishment.

The presence of anti-blackness in this process is clear, but it is even more interesting how those who mobilized themselves in the residual layers of the classes, the game of social capital takes another form, as in the case of MCs who used their mediatized prisons to release their albums and profit from the general problem. The issue of class mobility, mainly due to the virtualization of fashion in Baudrillard, as well as for Buddhists in relation to the self, displaces the truth of reality.

In hyperreality, the image of the “ostentatious peripheral” feeds the State’s policies of exception and creates a problem of representation of the hero for peripheral communities, artists mediated by the fashion industry, fulfill the ideology of black money and act as true proxys of the alienation of consumption, thus “the illusion of change is joined by the democratic illusion. It is thought that the ephemeral nature of fashion eliminates the heredity of distinctive signs and that it gives everyone, at each moment of the cycle, equal possibilities” (1972, p. 40).

3.

If the transparency of the 2016 coup up until the attempted democratic resumption of January 8 caused by the dismantling of institutional pieces did not return with such clear positions in the gears of the democratic machine, we must, as a matter of principle, answer: How did the far-right masses take over the revolutionary vanguard?

I believe that Baudrillard's argument about the masses and the era of “simulation”, where signs and images have replaced real references and traditional institutions have lost their role of symbolic mediation and production of meaning, represents the right line of thought for the current situation in the country, close to the new presidential elections. Are we in the shadow of silent majorities?

Democracy no longer represents the clear lines of the political projects of real neoliberalism.

The death of the hero, the acceleration of social networks, the power of Big-techs and mass dissemination, created an ideal scenario for the liberal fantasies of the LED-neon futurism of the 80s, which projected a spatial futurism, but ended up in the central cowardice of drones, the imminence of a third world war, in masses fed by the “passion of the code that, regulating and subordinating objects and subjects to itself simultaneously, votes them together to abstract manipulation” (2005, p.6), a YouTube channel, a social network, factions no longer need to occupy institutions to manipulate the masses.

If the traditional hero has been diluted into the symbol and reinforces the illusion of change through the aesthetics and violence of the images, Edgard Navarro's boldness in the film SuperOther (1989) is a great strategy for revitalizing the figure of the political hero in contemporary society, because the figure constructed in the film recovers the reality of representation, it does not base reality on a model of space fiction, the cry of “Wake up humanity!” from a schizophrenic and homeless hero who wanders through the suburbs of Salvador, Bahia, replaces the emptiness of black money and creates a good example of a hero for future generations, based on a Brazil that needs increasingly anthropophagic heroes.

*Lazaro Vasconcelos Oliveira is a graduate in social sciences at the State University of Santa Cruz (UESC).

References

BAUDRILLARD, Jean. In the shadow of the silent majorities: the end of the social and the emergence of the masses. Lisbon, 2005.

BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Pour un critique de l'economie politique du signe. Translated by Aníbal Alves. Lisbon: Edições 70, 1972.

the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE