By ALEXANDRE KUBRUSLY BORNSTEIN*
If it is true that neoliberalism establishes and generates specific forms of suffering, it is equally true that critical thinking can transform them into weapons.
“I want this crooked corner like a knife to cut your flesh”
(Belchior)
1.
It was precisely in 2013 that we thought it would be a good idea to set up a video production company. We were three Communications students in our final semesters at college, and we already had our first projects under our belts. freelancer. The three of us had been active participants in the demonstrations that marked this year. That the climate of indignation and protest, the atmosphere of pepper spray and tear gas, were the fertile ground where this idea germinated is, in my opinion, curious to say the least.
After all, wasn't it only after 1968 and its poignant critique of the disciplinary labor model that neoliberalism finally found the space to thrive? Part of this operation consisted of neoliberalism's appropriation of values that had previously been mobilized in the critique of the capitalist labor model. These appropriated concepts, in turn, formed the new neoliberal spirit and guided the way in which labor relations came to be reconfigured.
In this way, the critique of the alienation of work, the bureaucratization of life, and the discipline of offices found its answer in the formulation of the neoliberal subject: the entrepreneur of the self, who is flexible, creative, and meets demands. Through this operation, the neoliberal discourse assumes a tone of criticism in relation to the discourse of capitalism that preceded it. This is where much of its strength and cunning come from.
In this context, part of our energy of dissatisfaction and revolt was directed towards this endeavor: opening our own business. In a desire to not be submissive, to be autonomous. In a desire to create. The initial idea, truth be told, was not to have a company, but rather a cooperative, in which all decisions would be made jointly, by consensus, including, of course, those related to salaries, costs and other financial operations.
It is not worth going into the details of what happened in the following eight or ten years. Suffice it to say that, given the constant difficulty in obtaining sufficient income to sustain ourselves, we wallowed in entrepreneurial and marketing nonsense. After all, to manage a company, we have to be pragmatic, we have to understand how the market works, we have to be competitive, we have to make certain concessions.
From the simple massacre of everyday life, words are replaced. We have to incorporate terms like overdelivery or proactivity pretending that we do not realize its real meaning. We have to leave aside words like worker or exploitation. We must be very distracted not to realize that words have always brought worlds with them. That changing the word worker to entrepreneur has its consequences. We have to get used to increasingly shorter deadlines and increasingly longer working hours.
We must definitively blur the line that separates work time from the rest of our lives. We must see this precariousness as a gain in freedom. We must completely forget what this word means. We must get used to hearing it with its inverted meaning in the mouth of the enemy. We must not notice this operation through which words are stolen from us and, without them, we lose the ability to structure our thoughts.
The result, besides a lot of work and endless meetings, was nothing but a certain melancholy that gradually took root in me. At the exact moment when all the marketing and entrepreneurial cant finally convinced me that there was complete convergence between my desire and the interests of the “client”, at that exact moment I lacked the strength to get out of bed.
Discouragement, at that moment, was my most authentic side. An involuntary movement within me of refusal, of denial. Beyond any argument, beyond all visual and auditory resources: no. Melancholy was not self-sabotage: a way of masking the fear of failure in a competitive market, as my psychologist suggested. As if it were a kind of childish withdrawal in an austere world. No, melancholy was a symptom of a certain dimension of nonconformity, the refusal of this sick model of happiness, of freedom that they offer us.
The certainty of the poverty of our thought. The certainty of the pettiness of our capacity for enunciation, of our imagination. The certainty of the existence of ideas that have not yet been named. The certainty that others, which we have forgotten, still bring within themselves developments to come. The certainty that there is much more to be thought, there is much more to be lived.
2.
The turning point came around 2022, at the end of the pandemic, the year in which we decided once and for all to make the production company a functional company. It was the year in which we put the most energy into this project and precisely when, at least for me, the project finally ran out of steam.
Around this time, through some academic figures who have a certain presence on the internet – especially Vladimir Safatle and Christian Dunker – I came across an old acquaintance, whom I only vaguely remembered. A faded, dull figure, left aside, unimportant, partially forgotten, or left for later. It turns out that beneath all the dust and mold, I rediscovered an old acquaintance: critical thinking. This has always accompanied me since childhood (the son of left-wing professors), and was so present in 2013, but which had to be left aside in my entrepreneurial adventure.
At first, I found it very strange. In fact, my first reaction to this contact, back in 2020, was a vehement refusal. It was during the pandemic, I was stuck at home and the house was dirty, messy and poorly maintained. I came across, somehow, something Vladimir Safatle said on the internet about the recession of the left, our loss of critical capacity. He painted a picture of a kind of taming of our discourse, gradually transformed into a blunt, useless knife.
The force with which these ideas resonated within me can perhaps be explained, at least in part, by the enormous resonance with the story described here: the cooperative that becomes a company, the critique that gets lost in the current of the hegemonic flow. I wanted to listen more and more to that subject, who until then was unknown. The desire was so great that, curiously, I operated a real blockage in relation to the figure. I didn't want to know any more. Perhaps there is something to be thought about here.
That moment when I rediscovered something that was deeply dear to me, something that had – as it later became clear – the potential to transform my life, and my reaction was one of rejection. A bit like my cat who, having recently moved from a cramped apartment to a larger house with a yard, a tree and a roof, and against all expectations, shut himself in the closet. “Stones dreaming of jackhammers,” said the poet. Why on earth do we dream of jackhammers? It seemed to me, given the strength of the resonance of that encounter, that it went beyond what was reasonable. Hence my blockage.
But, there is always something that escapes.
Something that definitely shows that ideas cannot be ignored. Once they circulate, they have consequences, they think about us, they shape us. I was then able to see that important things, when forgotten, only come back with more force later. So that they come back with all the brutality that marked their gentle and silent oblivion, because violence is not always done with noise.
And it was through critical thinking that this same dimension of nonconformity, which was the cause of melancholy, was transformed into something else. Forgotten words were recovered, new ones were learned and others were rejected. The initial blockage gave way to intense investigation. For, if it is true that neoliberalism establishes and generates specific forms of suffering, it is equally true that critical thinking can transform them into weapons.
This is the image I have now: studying as if sharpening a knife. So that this dimension of nonconformity does not turn into melancholy or blind rage, but rather into a sharp, accurate knife that has direction and knows its enemies.
*Alexander Kubrusly Bornstein is a master's student in Social Communication at UFRJ.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
