By EDU TERUKI OTSUKA & IVONE DARÉ RABELLO*
Comment on the film directed by Pedro Pinho
The film the factory of nothing narrates the response of workers to the resignation announcement at Fortileva, an elevator factory in the region of Póvoa de Santa Iria (north of Lisbon), when production ceased to be profitable enough for its owners due to the crisis in civil construction and Chinese competition , which offers prices below the national standard.
The progressive construction of this response in actions presented in the feature film, as well as excerpts from “To our friends”, by the Invisible Committee, enunciated by a voice over, and the debate among left-wing intellectuals, are of interest to the discussion of how one can think about the limits of a struggle to maintain jobs, as well as the reinvigoration of theoretical reflection on the possibility of overcoming a social system founded on abstract work and on the commodity fetishism.
Summoned in the middle of the night due to what they consider to be a break-in at the Fortileva factory, the workers discover that machinery and materials are being removed at unknown command. They face the porters who remove their work tools and thus ensure that not everything is taken. The following morning, the company director (Patrícia Soso) explains that she is going to implement a production reorganization. Promises are made to reallocate jobs, always for “the good of all”, according to Marta (Joana Paes de Brito), the HR manager brought in by the director.
Faced with the order for workers to return to their homes and return to the factory during their working hours the next day, and sensing that that Fortileva branch could close, most employees decide to stay there day and night to prevent the rest of the equipment to be relocated and try to secure their jobs, still not knowing what will be offered to them.
The action of the film refers to the real experience that took place at Fateleva (Portuguese Otis), mentioned at the end of the film in a sign honoring the workers who successfully managed the factory between 1975 and 2016. But the film takes place in the current era,[I] when many Portuguese factories have been closed since the economic crisis hit the country, associated with the structural crisis of capitalism, whose effects are global.
In the confrontation between owner – represented in the figure of the company’s director[ii] – and workers, the focus of the factory of nothing it is in the reaction of the workers, in the ways in which they seek to safeguard their jobs, the source of their survival.
The next day, keeping their work schedule, and there being no production or definition of what will be the fate of the workers and employees in the reorganization of the company, they try to fill the empty waiting time with games. They are urged by the supervisor to remain in front of the remaining machines so that they will not be fired if seen on security cameras. That's when Dr. Marta, HR manager, who starts calling each of the workers for individual interviews.
When, in the sequence, the focus is on the return of a worker (Carlos Santos) after the meeting with the manager, it becomes clear to the viewer that the company's decision is devastating: “They want to close the factory”, “with friendly terminations” , indemnity and extra months of salary. Marta's cynical and predictable rhetoric is that the crisis “is also an opportunity”. The business strategy of calling one by one to sign the acceptance of the breach of contract is to divide workers, also due to differences in the value of indemnities.
Only a few workers accept the offer.[iii] Others don't want the money; they want work. Older ones know they won't get another job; realize that many factories have closed in the region and jobs are scarce.[iv] Others, even though sympathetic to the group, hesitate and, faced with the company's decision, are not sure what to do, given the need for immediate survival, which would impel them to accept compensation, even if the money allows survival for months or at most one or two years.[v]
Even without clarity on the path to take, workers continue with internal discussions, in search of a course of action. The film emphasizes the hesitations, fears and conflicts experienced by them, focusing, in this first moment, on the group's lack of unity on the decisions to be taken. This avoids the idealization of a politicized working class, led by a leader. Here, non-politicized workers are confronted with a situation that demands of them a political gesture that needs to be invented.[vi]
Knowing that the company's proposal is dismissal, which implies, for the workers, the impossibility of finding another job, those who do not accept the termination of the contract decide to remain in the factory, despite the uncertainty regarding the consequences of this, one of which is not receive payment of wages. The fight will go on for months and is initially driven by the common desire to defend jobs, in an attitude that is not politically oriented. It will come from Rui (Rui Ruivo), the most combative worker, the organizational proposal of action: strike, occupation of the factory, and impediment of the entrance of the new administrators in the place.
A stranger (who will later reveal himself as an Italian militant who had accompanied the occupation of an Argentine factory) arrives at the place and talks with the worker Zé (José Smith Vargas); he asks him how to get into Fortileva as he heard that it is stopped. He claims to be working on the crisis in Europe. But Zé does not continue the conversation.
Hours later, union representatives appear accompanied by the Italian militant, who just watches. Clarifying the workers' doubts, they inform that the strike, legal in a stopped factory and supported by the union, would put pressure on the administrators to keep the jobs; the occupation, being illegal, will not be assumed by the union, therefore the workers will have to take responsibility for it. The workers vote for the occupation and organize themselves in day and night shifts.
When the managers want to enter the factory and the workers stop them, a new conflict arises. Soon after, the police intervene, claiming to have received a report of trespassing on private property. Rui claims to have been advised to wait for the union's lawyer. When he arrives, along with other union representatives, he informs the police that he has already filed a precautionary measure to prevent the removal of the company's assets; therefore, there is no crime of public order. The police have to withdraw.
The Italian militant (Daniele Incalcaterra[vii]), who has international contacts and previously only observed the workers or accompanied the union members, goes to the factory and, during a night shift in which they report their current and past difficulties, asks them to encourage them. He wants information about the assembly organized by them; he wants them to deal with matters related to the occupation. He wants what, in his conception, would be the politicization of the struggle, as if the exchange of experiences of suffering in the daily lives of these workers had no political meaning. But his voice does not find echo among the workers, who want to talk about their daily lives while occupying the factory.
When meeting Zé after a show, in a bar conversation, the Italian suggests that the workers should organize themselves to make the factory work, just as the Fasinpat workers did. Daniele explains to Zé the possible functioning of a cooperative, as had happened at Fasinpa.
However, in the factory environment, it is still not known what to do, and the workers do not seem to have prospects of a resolution favorable to them: it is not enough to occupy the factory and preserve the physical existence of the facilities for the owners to go back on their decision to close it. Without producing, workers invent games, trying to take advantage of what they rarely have, that is, idle time. However, the uncertainty about their future does not allow them to experience this new temporality.
The situation changes with a sudden phone call from Argentina, who orders XNUMX tilting modules from them, paying half the amount in advance. This raises the possibility of creating a cooperative.
The sequence immediately after the phone call from Argentina breaks the realistic representation of the film, by inserting a musical number directed by the Italian militant. The tone of the musical is triumphant and the only moment of effective joy for the group of workers. The supervisor questions the meaninglessness of the singing, but the others point out that “they are doing nothing”, and, with the order, it is necessary to listen to the noise of “the machines that are calling”. They sing that, from the paper to the plates, “we have the giant in our hands” and are the “head of the giant that we have in our hands”. Self-management is staged as victory.
Faced with the realistic perspective of returning to production, other questions arise, such as the need, or not, for management specialists, bank financing for the purchase of machines, assessment of the company's liabilities. Some want to give up, claiming that in Portugal no self-managed factory, since 1974, has escaped the crash.
But to this Rui replies that they themselves will experience it, here and now; the opportunity has opened up. Others want to go ahead with the Argentine proposal, but assessing its legal viability. It is the Italian militant who convinces that Argentina's proposal allows experimenting with self-management, creating a new factory. This, he says, is a political response, especially to the European left which, in these years, has not given any response to the economic-political crisis.
Discussions continue about the new organization of the factory, now referring to money management, the hiring of a production engineer, the definition of salaries for specialized professionals. The heated discussion did not reach a consensus. Frustrated with the difficulty in reaching decisions in this first self-management meeting, Zé withdrew from the meeting, offending the Italian militant, who followed him. Zé confronts him for not making it clear to the workers that he was the one who contacted the Argentine company where he worked. The conversation between them – towards the Tagus, in a scenario taken by ruins of factories – marks the differences between the common man and the militancy of the intellectuals.
If the center of the film shows the difficulty of reaching consensus among workers, it is emphasized that they are united by a common yearning – against unemployment and the insecurity it produces.[viii] It is this longing that drives the actions from which a political dimension emerges for the struggle, which can go beyond the immediate purpose of maintaining jobs. Despite the uncertainties, the cooperative will be the solution adopted by them.
Amidst the discussions of the workers, who decide how to organize the occupation and even before the idea of the cooperative, the scene of the debate between Anselm Jappe, the Italian militant (Daniele Incalcaterra), Roger Claustre (a French intellectual who was exiled in Portugal in the 1970s) and Portuguese intellectuals (Matilde Gago da Silva, Isabel do Carmo, Toni, Sara Pinto), based on the Fortileva situation. The discussion seems to be external to what the workers think, who probably don't even know about it.
For Jappe, the self-management discourse can be a trap, and it is based on his ideas that the debate expands, without, however, reaching consensus. Anselm Jappe's lines align with Robert Kurz's analyses.[ix] Capitalism exists to create surplus value, possible only as part of the value created by living labor. Any technological evolution tends to replace the living workforce with machines, which do not create value. In recent decades, this has taken on gigantic proportions, and this is the basic contradiction from which we cannot escape. It is necessary, for Jappe, to overcome the idea that capitalism is the domination of one class over another for its own profit.
This is just a first level. Behind it, there is a totally irrational system, based on the transformation of all human work into a simple waste of human energy without any relation to its content. Therefore, Jappe, who supports self-management, does not consider it radical enough, since workers will have to enter into competition, they will have to produce surplus value. While self-management may be useful in their immediate survival, it will force them to apply the laws of the market against themselves. The system, he says, is slowly collapsing catastrophically, and its self-destruction is leading to increased barbarization. If people want money and work – and they are right because that is what the principle of social life is based on – and if there is no more work or money, it is necessary to create alternatives to barbarization.
The intellectuals participating in the debate question Anselm Jappe's conceptions. Toni affirms the class struggle as a way of confronting capitalism, insisting on a view of the traditional left. For him, alternative struggles, such as defense of the environment or gender equality, can be perfectly integrated into the system. Only by abolishing the exploitation of one class over another would capitalism be defeated. Jappe retorts: at the limit, there can be capitalism without capitalists.
Another intellectual defends the cooperative, not as an end in itself, but as an effective possibility of political learning for the worker. Faced with the threat of losing his job, and in the name of survival, he can continue to manufacture goods, and, once the pressing problem is solved, he could begin to ask himself why he is doing it and perhaps challenge the capitalist mode of exploitation and production of surplus value.
The Italian takes up the example of Fasinpa and tells how the workers did not want a cooperative, because that meant becoming their own bosses. They didn't want to share the profits equally. But it is not explicit what these workers wanted and accomplished[X]. In some way, however, his speech can be aligned with the idea of creating alternatives against the barbarization caused by the collapse of the system: a factory managed by the workers themselves would not need to limit itself to producing surplus value, competing in the anonymous market governed by the money imperatives, circumventing restrictions on ecological issues, and not caring at all about the system as a whole.
The meeting, therefore, exposes points of view that, while converging in support for the Fortileva movement, are also not consensual and indicate the effort to seek alternatives to the contemporary situation, without uncritically adhering to traditional solutions. Intellectuals think about the limits of self-management, how this struggle does not immediately mean changes in the system. Fortileva workers, on the other hand, adopt the cooperative as the only way they have to defend their work; anti-systemic disruption is not on their horizon; their yearning is for the continuity of what they understand to be their way of survival through work as they know it, because without it, only misery would remain.
It is this confrontation between anti-systemic theory and practice in defense of survival that recurs in the final scenes of the factory of nothing. The musical that breaks the realistic representation, with triumphant staging and choreography are built by the Italian militant, thus inciting the self-confidence of the workers who seem to be in fact enthusiastic about the prospect opened with the order. As there is no camera on the scene, the Italian's “direction” can be understood as a metaphor for how he was the one who gave new direction to the workers' movement, since he is responsible for contact with the Argentine factory. For him, the cooperative can contribute to the anti-systemic struggle.
However, the prospect of changing course of action is opened by him without consulting the workers. The political direction that he considers to be the right one and that he gives to the movement is the decisive adventure created by him. And that's exactly what Zé doesn't accept.
Having noticed the Italian's intervention, Zé questions why he hadn't explained to the others that he had contacted the Argentine factory. In his understanding, the Italian wants to use their real experience as a reference for other militants in the struggle for social transformation: “Are we going to be the characters in your neorealist musical? To show your little friends there in France? […] Nobody here wants to run a factory. We need something stable, money to eat, to pay the bills, the kids' school. No one here is going to be the historical subject that will overthrow capitalism. […] We are capitalism. […] The discourse of the left is the biggest shit there is. […] If you want to divide the world against each other, it is not between left and right. On the one hand, there are those who agree with this world, who accept it all, and on the other, those who are ready to give up comfort, cell phones, trips to the moon, Tupperware. And the sad news I have for you is that no one is willing to give that up. Nobody is on that side. And the less resources people have, the more they want to get to the other side as quickly as possible.”
In Zé's revolt against what he considers to be the strategies of the Italian militant, perhaps something can be learned of the resentment against a left that, in his view, wants to assign workers a revolutionary political role without taking into account their situation and their desires; adhered to the surplus value exploitation system, for reasons of survival, they want to participate in it as consumers. In Zé's speech, it is assumed that overcoming alienation would be an individual matter and, therefore, impossible (“nobody”, he says, wants to break with that).
Zé does not seem to understand that the possibility of an anti-systemic rupture is not the result of individual wills or acts,[xi] nor the result of a (traditional) “left-wing discourse”. The practice in which he is inserted – in the struggle for a job that results in the decision for self-management – does not seem to point to anything different from what already exists. Somehow Zé confirms what Jappe analyzed[xii]. Zé does not envision any possibility outside the universe of work as it is conceived in the system of producing and consuming goods, even though he is experiencing the suffering that stems from it.
In fact, the sequence of the conversation between Zé and the militant will confirm this. The Italian asks him: “Then what is left? Looking for happiness? Do you believe that? In love, in good food, worrying about one of us? our family?" Joe doesn't answer. They continue walking and arrive at the banks of the Tagus, in a ruinous scenario of abandoned factories. Zé shouts: “World, you have always done so much harm. But we love you.”
The Italian initiates a verbal game of free associations, and enumerates abstract nouns to create the image of a fuller life (“light, shadow, heat; joy, sadness, friendship, hope”); Zé retorts with verbs (“you are born, you grow, you fuck, you work, you die”) that naturalize the vital process, identifying it with subsumption in the capitalist system. In another game, Zé responds to the Italian nouns (“bread and wine”), indicators, in Christian symbology, of a life in which the land and human work are allied with “sausages, milk, goats, cows, pigs, rats”, which indicate a life outside the city, in which not everything is pleasant. The Italian says “disease, cure”; Zé retorts with “death, immortality, resurrection”.
Does Zé not realize that his desires and anxieties are the result of social relationships? Or do you have no hope of transformation? For him, “a collective adventure? now? In this spacetime? At the end of it all, is something seen?”. For Zé, social relations remain something hidden, and only on the supernatural level would there be full life (“resurrection”).
On the way back home, Zé has to leave his motorcycle on the road because it has run out of gas (there are months without a salary)[xiii]. Wait for the bus. The next day, in the morning, he enters the factory and clocks in.
The film ends with a song in defense of resistance in adverse times (“Neither the flight / Of the milhano / To the east wind / Nor the route / Of the seagull / To the north wind / Not all / The strength of the cloth / All year round / Break the bow / Of the strongest / Not even death”[xiv]) but what keeps resonating in our ears is not only the confidence in the victory of the oppressed, but the voice that, in off, even at the beginning of the factory of nothing, pointed out the need for the anti-systemic struggle to demand new paths in contemporary times: “The present crisis, permanent and omnilateral, is no longer the classic crisis, the decisive moment. On the contrary, it is an endless end, sustainable apocalypse, indefinite suspension, effective postponement of the collective sinking and, for all that, a permanent state of exception.”[xv].
In the film, although his point of view is not dogmatically defined, there seem to be affinities with the critique of value, of the group around Robert Kurz, but also at the same time – and somewhat paradoxically – the defense of the experience lived by the proletariat in struggle for survival. For the struggle to advance, the workers have to live and discover, in practice, whether it is possible to change the meaning of work, without reproducing the logic of producing goods and surplus value (as was somehow attempted at Fasinpa ). The construction of the cooperative is an open possibility in the struggle, and its results cannot be determined a priori. But the film does not open up to the unfolding of the initiative.
Although the film's point of view is ambiguous, what is put on stage are the workers' confrontations in the face of the crisis that, experienced in the factory, is the result of a worldwide crisis of the capitalist production system. This is the center around which discussions of the most advanced tendencies of the contemporary left orbit. The chasm between advanced leftist theory and the objective situation of workers' resistance still haunts us.
Before the sign that pays homage to these former workers who are organized in a cooperative in the self-managed factory, appears the entrance to work. In the characters' expressions, nothing seems to have changed in the alienating routine: punching the clock, going to the machine, producing. There is no joy on their faces.[xvi]
*Edu Teruki Otsuka He is a professor at the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at USP. Author of Marks of the catastrophe: urban experience and cultural industry in Rubem Fonseca, João Gilberto Noll and Chico Buarque (Studio).
*Ivone Daré Rabello is a senior professor at the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at USP. Author, among other books, of A song on the sidelines: a reading of Cruz e Sousa's poetics (Nankim).
Reference
the factory of nothing
Portugal, 2017, 117 minutes
Directed by: Pedro Pino
Screenplay: Pedro Pinho, Luisa Homem, Leonor Groom, Tiago Hespanha.
Cast: Carla Galvão, Dinis Gomes, Américo Silva, José Vargas, Daniele Incalcaterra, Anselm Jappe, Matilde Gago da Silva, Isabel do Carmo, Toni, Sara Pinto.
Notes
[I] In one of the film's scenes, the radical militant in the 1970s, father of one of the characters (Zé) who occupies the factory, takes him to unearth hidden weapons since the Carnation Revolution (1974). When the son sees them he says, indignant: “What do you want me to do with a machine gun that has been buried here for forty years?”. The scene, in addition to presenting the revolutionary militancy of the old combatants that contrasts with the political vision of contemporary workers, reveals that the action is set around 2014.
[ii] The character is a Brazilian, whose strategy, when she appears the morning after the machines are relocated, is well known to us: cordiality, which mixes the public and the private. In her affable face, the director asks a worker about her health; to another about her daughter's concert. Only afterwards does she announce the management's decision: there will be a reorganization of the company, and the workers understand that this means layoffs. In the verbal conflict that begins, the violent face of cordiality appears: the character threatens to call the police if they don't leave the factory. As can be seen, cordiality, which was once considered a Brazilian specificity, proves to be constitutive of capitalism as such and is aggravated in the contemporary situation.
[iii] Bóris (Bóris Martins Nunes), one of the workers who accepts the company's decision, seems to disbelieve the promises of liberal society. He tells Zé: “I'm leaving. I'm decided. […] I'm tired of this. Next year I'm in Asia. I'm having fun in Laos. I'll enjoy it now. What am I doing here? Pay rent, come to work every day, be here. And you, what are you going to do? Are you going to stay here and wait?" The rupture with the principle of security through work and with the belief in accumulation seems to signal the trajectory of part of a generation, which abandons the idea of success understood as a safe and stable career. This individual attitude is related to the logic of work flexibility. The disadvantage of insecurity becomes an illusory advantage of living in a supposedly free, “enjoying” way.
[iv] In one of the scenes, a worker, already 50 years old, reports that Póvoa, 20 years earlier, offered more than 40.000 jobs. Now, there are no investments. Only those who could do something, according to the testimony of another, are “they”, if they invested in bridges, airports, new refinery. The first, who has been working for more than 31 years, paying contributions to the State, will only be able to retire at the age of 67. There are 17 years left for that, and, he says, but then “I died some twenty ago”. It is important to point out that in this, as in other scenes, the film incorporates testimonials from cast members, made up mostly of workers, non-actors, who recount situations they experienced. The fictional plot, therefore, makes use of documentary elements, in order to, in this specific film, bear witness to the historical and social situation of the workers.
[v] Compensation ranges from 5 to 37 euros. Hermínio (Hermínio Amaro), the worker with the longest experience at the factory (32 years), is offered a compensation of 123 euros. Upon learning of this, the others question him why he had not told the group this, thus assuming that he will accept the offer. much larger than that of his companions. Angered, he emphatically states that he doesn't want the money; he wants to keep his job.
[vi] In this sense, it would be interesting to compare the factory of nothing com In war (2018, directed by Sthéphane Brizé), in which the working class is led by Laurent Amedeo (Vincent Lindon), leader of the CGT, despite the opposition of two other unions, SIPI (Independent Union of Perrin Industry) and CFTC (French Confederation of Christian Workers), both conservative. In Brizé's film, the struggle of the 1100 workers of the large company is staged in the traditional left-wing way (picketing, television reports, mass demonstrations). However, the dissident and retrograde forces of the working class, as well as, especially, the ineffectiveness of the Labor Court in judging Perrain's non-compliance with the laws (an agreement had been reached not to dismiss the workers as long as they accepted the reduction in wages) and the pusillanimity of the State before the multinational company, end up revealing that the known strategies of the strike led by unions do not lead to favorable results for the working class, within the framework of international capital versus localized fights. At the end, and in the traditional manner of left-wing mythmaking (which the film adheres to), Laurent Amedeo (a CGT trade unionist) immolates himself and becomes the sacrificial hero of the failed struggle.
[vii] In real life, Daniele Incalcaterra directed the documentary Fasinpat – Factory without a boss, from 2014, about the occupation of the former Zanon Factory, in Neuquén, Argentina. Zanon's undertakings were leveraged by the Argentine military dictatorship (1979) and by Carlos Menem (from 1989 to 1999). The factory goes bankrupt in 2001, with debts and no payment to employees. The workers occupied the factory in 2001 and began producing in March 2002. With the lawsuit filed by Zanon to regain possession of the factory, the court ruled in favor of the workers. To this day, Fasinpat is managed by them.
[viii] From this point of view, a figure on the side of the central plot is significant. Carla (Carla Galvão), Zé's wife, is a Brazilian who, like so many others, went to Europe to seek to improve her living conditions. In Portugal, she performs subordinate functions and probably outsourced (manicurist, chambermaid). When she decides to return, in 2014, her union with Zé is in crisis, Portugal is in crisis. The illusion of returning to the country of origin seems to be motivated by the favorable economic situation in Brazil under Dilma Rousseff, at a time when the official unemployment rate was the lowest since 2012.
[ix] Robert Kurz (1943 -2012) reinterpreted Marx's work, in a strand called Critique of Value. He analyzed the crisis of modernization. He participated in the group and magazine Krisis. He is one of the authors of the “Manifesto against work” (in 1999). Jappe develops the group's works (from The Adventures of the Commodity – Towards a New Critique of Value). With the split of the group Krisis, in 2004, Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz and Claus Peter Ortlieb create a new group around the magazine EXIT! – Critique and Crisis of the Commodity Society. About The collapse of modernization, of his authorship, see “The audacious book of Robert Kurz”, by Roberto Schwarz (in Brazilian sequences. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1999, pp. 182-187).
[X] In fact, Fasinpa started to work with the community. According to Henrique T. Novaes, in “From Neuquén to the world: brief history of the brave fighters of Fasinpat Zanón” (word of mouth, 4/12/2009), the cooperative members set up a medical center, donated tiles to hospitals close to the factory and to workers who lost their homes, used spaces in the factory to teach classes, started a policy of hiring women. The initiatives opposed neoliberal policies. They had the help of students to raise funds and restore the machines, optimize the quality of ceramics and reformulate the work process, including the rotation of strategic positions. Instead of profits, Fasinpat turns to the production of use values, community bonds, unification of workers' struggles, also seeking to articulate them to those of the unemployed.
[xi] Contrary to that, when Jappe warns of the ongoing barbarization in contemporary times, he wonders how people will react to it. He envisions as possible the collective micro-decisions that create ties of solidarity and mutual help, beyond individual reactions.
[xii] At a meeting with intellectuals, Jappe states that “there are people whose lives are rooted in a conception of happiness and the meaning of life that is completely dominated by money, work, leisure, vacations, consumerism, etc. want? They want money and work. And they are right because the principles of social life are based on this. They will decide that what they want most is money and a garage in their house. They will fight for it”. For Jappe, it is necessary to leave this system.
[xiii] It is not just material life that is affected by months without a salary. His wife and her son leave the house, as Zé, during the entire period of the action at the factory, is oblivious to what she wants from him. The affective dimension, therefore, is also represented as a tension between political struggle and private life.
[xiv] The song “Já o tempo se habitua”, of which only an excerpt is quoted, is written by Zeca Afonso (1929-1987), also author of Grandola, Vila Morena, which was used by the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement to confirm that the Carnation Revolution (April 25, 1974) was under way.
[xv] Cf. Invisible Committee, To our friends. Sl: Antipathic Editions, 2015, p. 20.
[xvi] This text partially resumes discussions carried out in the group “Contemporary Cultural and Social Forms”, whose members we thank for their contributions.
