By RENATO ORTIZ*
Marx spoke of a situation restricted to part of a country called England, the north of France, and perhaps a region that would form part of a future Germany.
The terms are often used as equivalents, even synonyms, but there is a subtle difference between the concept of a joke and an anecdote. A joke is a short story intended to make people laugh; it ends with the laughter it provokes, and that is where its end lies. Its life is brief, its brilliance is ephemeral.
The anecdote has a similar objective, however, it takes us beyond the explosion of laughter; it contains a dimension that transcends what is said at a given moment. The anecdote has the virtue of universalism, it is capable of escaping the meshes of the context that imprisons it. When I say “you agreed with the Russians”, I am not referring only to a football story (Garrincha was originally involved in it); it applies to different situations that evoke the same attitude: the fact that someone imagines it is possible to accomplish a feat without the active participation of others.
The maxim acts as the moral of a fable (“the grapes are sour”), it has an aspect that displaces it from the memory in which it was formulated. Stories are like this – of course, not all of them – they allude to a place that was not prefigured in the original statement. They do not need to be as long as a novel or even a short story; they can be brief, concise, phrases that take us out of the “here and now”, projecting us into something unexpected. In this sense, they function as metaphors.
I like stories, I collect several of them in my notebooks. Sometimes someone tells me something suggestive, other times I witness a scene and photograph it with a fountain pen; there are, however, times when I simply invent a plot of some sort. They are very short plots, just a few sentences that contain the potential to suspend reality.
Some time ago – myths are situated in an ineffable temporality – I was at college and I was introduced to an Italian colleague who came to visit us. He was at the café and we sat down at the table to talk. I don’t remember his name, but I remember well that he was a philosopher and a Marxist. He knew of my interest in the theme of globalization and was curious to understand my “theoretical position” on the subject.
The greatest difficulty at that time was in accepting the existence of the phenomenon; many thought it was just an ideology. As we talked, I noticed in his expression that my arguments were not convincing; they skimmed off the smooth surface of his face without penetrating his skin. That was when I resorted to the power of metaphor. I remembered that Jean-Paul Sartre, when he was among us, on his return from Havana, had gone to see the revolution up close, and had given his famous lecture in Araraquara. He was accompanied on his philosophical excursion by several Brazilian intellectuals, including Jorge Amado.
I thought, why not Marx? In the last century (the narrator was in the 1862th century) a great meeting of thinkers took place in the same city. The archives say, without much precision, that it would have been in August 63/XNUMX. At that time he had already written the two volumes of The capital and was preparing the third. His lecture was a success; the depth of his thought left the audience intoxicated. When he finished his speech, someone asked to speak and said: “Dr. Marx (he liked to be called that way), your presentation was magnificent, but here in Araraquara we don’t have anything like that.”
A Japanese man who had crossed the Asian seas and the Atlantic pondered: “Dr. Marx, in Japan the Meiji Revolution will be in 1868, for now, these things you mentioned do not exist.” Representatives from several countries then spoke up to say exactly the same thing: the thesis presented did not reflect the current world situation. Question: what was Marx talking about?
Answer: a situation restricted to part of a country called England, northern France, and perhaps a region that would be part of a future Germany. However, his certainty was based on one premise: it was a process. By grasping the logic of this process, he perceived something that had not yet been realized. My interlocutor looked at me attentively and in amazement, we shook hands, I finished my coffee, and we never saw each other again.
* Renato Ortiz He is a professor at the Department of Sociology at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of The universe of luxury (Mall). [https://amzn.to/3XopStv]
Originally published on BVPS blog.
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